Are We Living Through Collapse? Complexity, Digital Technology, and the Future Beyond Capitalism

The word “collapse” usually conjures images of sudden catastrophe: cities abandoned, empires falling overnight, institutions crumbling in chaos. But collapse can also look much slower — a gradual unraveling where the signs are everywhere but hard to pin to a single moment. More and more scholars are beginning to argue that this is where we are today: global society is in the midst of collapse.

This doesn’t mean the world will end tomorrow. It means that the institutions and economic logics that sustained industrial modernity — capitalism, liberal democracy, and even state socialism — are increasingly unable to cope with the world they have helped create.

The Case for Collapse

The idea that we are living through collapse is not new, but it has gained momentum. In The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism (2024), William Robinson describes a multidimensional breakdown: economic stagnation, political disillusionment, deepening inequality, ecological tipping points, and rising geopolitical conflict. For Robinson, this is not just another downturn — it’s an epochal crisis, one that capitalism cannot resolve within its own logic.

Beyond the Ledger: Why Blockchain and DAOs Fall Short for Complex Economic Organizations, and How OVNs Point the Way Forward

The Global Economic Transition

We are witnessing a profound transformation in the architecture of global economic activity. The traditional capitalist system, rooted in firm hierarchies, proprietary assets, and market-based transactions, is giving way to a networked economy. This emergent configuration is typified by commons-based peer production (CBPP), open source collaboration, distributed knowledge networks, and peer-to-peer (p2p) collaboration. Examples abound: permissionless blockchains, distributed scientific research initiatives, decentralized media platforms, and open educational resources.

In parallel, the digital infrastructures enabling these formations are evolving. Initially celebrated as a breakthrough in decentralized coordination, blockchain technologies and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are revealing inherent limitations when tasked with modeling complex economic processes and sustaining full-fledged economic organizations. In contrast, newer agent-centric approaches—such as the Open Value Network (OVN) model built on Resource-Event-Agent (REA) accounting, the Valueflows vocabulary, hREA logic, and Holochain as a distributed substrate—are showing greater promise.

This blog post draws from the experience of real-world p2p production networks such as Sensorica, and analyzes the foundational limitations of blockchain/DAO-based systems while advocating for a hybrid architecture of economic coordination.

Integrating Holochain, Mattereum and OVN: A Framework for Peer Production

From Happenings Community: 

Sacha Pignot has kindly shared the latest blog from his own Alternef Digital Garden with us at hAppenings.community this week! Sacha introduces one of his visionary projects: a revolutionary convergence of decentralizing technologies; Holochain, hREA, and Mattereum. He walks us through the key elements of his integration, exploring how these complementary tools empower resilient, sustainable economic models that prioritise cooperation and equitable value distribution. Sacha is a full-stack developer with a deep knowledge of decentralizing tech, peer-to-peer networks and a passion for education and travel. Amongst the projects he’s contributing his talents to is hAppenings.community’s Requests & Offers HC/MVP. We’ll be sharing more about our progress in the coming months.

Read more here... 

How Sensorica OVN handles material resources

 

See more on the Greens for Good venture. 

Dive into Sensorica's OVN model

 

The OVN model is documented on the OVN wiki. 

Next generation food machines and how Sensorica approaches food crisis

 This is still a draft (third version). Come back for the final version, you'll probably be surprised.

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The irony is that when the proverbial S&!# hits the fan, supply chains are disrupted and some people die of starvation, while being surrounded by an abundance of local food sources. Our current economy is very well organized to maximize wealth generation, which means a balance between fulfilling desires and needs of the population, while making money. But at the same time, our economy is unsustainable and fragile. It relies on a web of centralized systems, designed during the industrial era, which are themselves fragile. If one of them fails, the others follow. For example, during the 2008 financial crisis people still needed to eat and farmers still possessed the land and the machines to produce food, but the global food market was greatly disrupted. In capitalism, the market is supposed to readjust to fulfill a new need, but that cannot happen fast enough when the economic infrastructure is affected by a crisis. In socialism, or planned economies, the Government is not well suited to deal with complex situations. Food supply chains can be disrupted because of a regional armed conflict, oil price fluctuations, financial system collapse, bad weather conditions, pandemic, to name just a few, without digressing into nuclear and asteroid collisions. The best way to deal with these situations is a mix of button-up and top-down approaches within a commons-based peer production framework.

Store in Venezuela, country with the largest oil reserves.

In normal times, entire populations depended on staples produced by the industrial agriculture. These products are designed to concentrate a lot of nutrients and, in normal times, it makes economic sense to consume them. The paradox is that when access to these products is disrupted, people can starve while being surrounded by an abundance of food. Many indigenous eatable plants grow around us but we have forgotten how to prepare them. I live in Canada and the great majority of food products that are available in groceries are not indigenous. In times of crisis we eat what we find. Are we prepared to process local food sources?

Delicious Romanian nettle soup

Modern technology allows us to more efficiently extract and concentrate nutrients from indigenous plants that are not part of our diet in normal times, as they compete with modern agriculture products.

If one day nettles are the only remaining thing that we can eat we'll need time to learn how to prepare them. To get the equivalent in protein of a steak, one needs to eat a 25Kg stack of nettles. Obviously no one can have that in a single serving. In times of crisis, knowing how to make nettle soup is not enough. We need to learn how to extract and concentrate the protein, and how to cook a delicious meal much like a filly tofu dish. That requires learning time and specialized tools. If it is not in our culture to eat nettles, in normal times it is hard to convince people to learn how to prepare them or to invest in equipment to process them.

How to tap into the latent food capacity and be always prepared for rough times? The solution proposed by Greens for Good, an open venture nurtures within the Sensorica OVN, is a versatile food processor that in normal times can mill corn, extract oil from seeds, make tofu, make noodles and all sorts of other tings, while also being able to process eatable indigenous plants. On top of guaranteeing food security, this technology also makes food more sustainable by expanding our food sources, and by encouraging consumption of plant-based proteins instead of animal protein. This seams like a very ambitious plan, but we are not in uncharted territory.

In recent years, 3D printing has revolutionized fabrication. A 3D printer is a versatile technology that can come in the form of a desktop machine able to make toys, and can be easily scaled to a larger rig that can build an entire house in a single day. Almost anything that we can imagine, of any shape and practically of any type of material can be 3D printed. Sensoricans' plan for food processing is similar to what what 3D printing has done to fabrication.

3D printing was invented in the 80'. The Fused Deposit Modeling (FDM) patent expired in 2009, and marked the beginning of the 3D revolution, with the open source hardware community swarming this technology. Sensorica's economic model builds on the open source mode of innovation, inheriting the same properties of rapid development and viral dissemination. But it adds an economic layer on top of the innovation model to ensure proper dissemination, cultural appropriation and adoption of the new technology, this increasing its impact.

The food processing equivalent of the 3D printer is an extruder. The most familiar representation is the meat grinder. The same design pattern is also used to mince meat, extract juice, extract oil, pattern (make pasta), grinde, and more recently to produce textured vegetableprotein for plant-based meat analogous.

The project was proposed by Joshua Pearce from Michigan Tech University. It is now composed of a diverse group of individuals and organizations (such as academic labs, NGOs, food processing equipment manufacturers, food producers and innovation intermediaries), spanning 5 continents. You can join them on Discord.

 

The idea of the extruder came from the work of Bruce Merlo, who made the connection between a green leaves protein extractor and the equipment used in textured vegetable protein (TVP). Unai Gaztelu from SMART Center Tanzania became very instrumental in guiding the development process close to the need of local communities in developing countries. Alexis Alonso helps conceptualizing the project. Sebastian Klemm from Proofing Future is wordsmithing the project and leads our outreach efforts. Make sure you talk to Mayssam Daaboul if you desire to join us and formalize a partnership.  

In the middle of May 2002, the project entered the design phase of the extruder, where open source hardware was remixed with scaled-down industrial solutions to build a device capable of executing two or three labor-intensive and repetitive food processing activities (grinding, oil extraction, etc.), and at the same time be capable of extracting and concentrating proteins from indigenous leafy biomass.  

Sketch of a generic extruder

 

In September 2022 the network focuses on the prototyping and testing of an open source decanter centrifuge, a critical component of the extruder, responsible for separating fluids and solids according to their density differentiation. 

Have an idea about how to improve this post? Please leave comments blow.

eco2FEST – Week 2: Building Society from the Ground Up

It was an ambitious second week of eco2FEST with workshops and conferences revolving around four different themes: Public Policies, Governance, Habitation, and Urban Agriculture. A lot of important questions were raised as citizens, entrepreneurs, and government officials worked through them all to find collaborative solutions.

Even when no concrete solutions were proposed though, the discussions set the stage for a more focused framing of these themes in the future.

Public Policies

At their most basic, public policies are the intersection between what citizens ask for and what governments can provide. It is this constant flux from one side to the other that creates the common ground of how society is run. Finding a common ground that’s truly for the benefit of the greater good, however, is a different story. This has been the root cause for countless of political struggles since the dawn of civilization.

For any equilibrium to be achieved, there has to be a balance of energy or power on all sides. And that starts with trust and a willingness to collaborate. Governments need to make a greater effort to seek input from citizens impacted by proposed policies while citizens need to take initiative to engage in constructive dialogue with government officials. Only then can innovative public policies take shape.

During the Public Policies segment of eco2FEST, Guillaume Lavoie – professor at ENAP and former city councillor of Montreal – observed that citizens have been asking their elected officials the wrong question about innovation. Instead of just seeking their support for innovation, elected officials should be asked, “What is your level of tolerance for disruption?”

Historically, governments often favour stability while businesses mostly thrive on disruption. But for overall progress to happen in society, it depends on government’s ability to stomach change.

Businesses have always been a step ahead of governments not only because they embrace change, but also because they actively seek out public opinion. If governments want to keep up, they have to do the same and go a step further by establishing units or processes that provide future projections based on current socio-economic trends.

This will allow governments to at least proactively prepare for future growth rather than reacting too late to realities on the ground. It will result in more opportunities for governments to engage in timely discussions with the public.

Besides examining the role of government, eco2FEST participants also considered the other side of the equation: how can we empower citizens with the notion that they have the right to express their opinions on how society is run?

Participatory democracy was brought up several times as a potential way for people to get in the habit of working together with the government. Of course, it means that the government has to transition to that concept and introduce how it works early in the education system.

Once citizens start to participate more and governments have a better pulse on what the needs are, what’s the best way to use crowdsourced data effectively to implement public policies? This was another sticky point in the workshop discussions last week.

For example, there’s a massive amount of urban traffic data out there compiled by both public and private sectors. But it’s been difficult to design mobility models and transportation systems based on that data because every source wants to protect its data for different purposes. On top of all that, there are privacy issues that people are rightfully concerned about.

The question then turned to regulation, which is sometimes a waypoint of implementation. For that, Guillaume Lavoie recommended not to jump straight to regulations before the subject is fully understood – that would be worse than not regulating at all. “The goal is to have the least possible, to access as much as possible,” he said.

Governance

Public Policies naturally lead to Governance. How do you build the consensus and the principles everyone has agreed on during the development of public policies into a long-term governance system? In short, as Agathe Lehel – Projects Promoter of OuiShare Québec – so succinctly put it, “How do you make sure that [governance] culture persists over time?”

Technology was consistently proposed as a possible solution. Technology can facilitate the processing of governance processes because of its dynamic ability to provide real-time information and instantaneous feedback.

One of the most promising technological applications in governance comes in the form of smart contracts in blockchain. The potential of blockchain as a governance tool is so strong that it has been adopted by businesses and even governments such as Estonia’s digital republic.

Blockchain platforms are designed to evenly distribute the power of governance and direction that decisions take. In that sense, members of the platform are simultaneously users, investors, and stakeholders. All these members are brought together from different cultures and values. The issue is how we make it work and achieve consensus.

Another concern raised in the discussion was maintaining decentralization. What we want to avoid is the consolidation of power in any extreme and not knowing who actually holds the power.

In response to the governance concerns of blockchain, Pascal Ngo Chu – co-founder of EOS/Steem Québec – pointed to EOSIO as an example. It is a blockchain platform that introduces a governance model. A constitution can be created first, which all other application systems must follow. From there, a democratic system can be established with voting tools for people to make decisions.

At the end of the day though, it’s the individuals who form the hub of a blockchain network. Yes, government needs to be involved in supporting the system, but the grassroots level needs to first demonstrate that it works even in a rapidly evolving society. However the platform is designed, governance has to be ingrained yet remain flexible enough for new directions.

We also have to remember that the platform is not the solution – it is a tool for governance and transparency that works so long as the human connection is stable.

Habitation

For all the talk about progress in society, it can’t go very far if the basic needs of the people aren’t met. That brings us to the theme of Habitation.

We’ve seen the steady rise of housing costs for years and it’s time we come up with creative solutions to combat that issue.

Many ideas were pitched at the eco2FEST workshops, including transitional use of vacant spaces. So rather than leaving undeveloped lots sitting empty, is there a way we can make use of them? The same goes for unoccupied buildings or infrastructure. What would a system that temporarily repurposes vacant spaces look like?

Housing cooperatives were also mentioned as proven working models, although everyone acknowledged that they do have some hurdles to overcome. These include setting up reliable conflict resolution systems as well as systems properly recognizing everyone’s specialties and contributions.

The most significant hurdle has to do with the public image of housing cooperatives. They are neither social housing nor places where everyone is expected to scrub the common floors together. Housing cooperatives are all about lowering the housing costs for their members. If that is what everyone ultimately wants, why is participation still so low?

It seems that housing cooperatives could do with more support from governments and more rebranding campaigns from the private sector.

Urban Agriculture and Food Sovereignty

Food is another basic need that needs to be addressed. And in an urban environment, it’s even more important that sustainable approaches are used.

It was fitting that communal food was served throughout eco2FEST, but especially so during the urban agriculture workshops. It ties in with the fact that it really does not require massive infrastructure to feed people.

What emerged from the discussions was the need for us to completely change our way of thinking when it comes to urban agriculture and food sovereignty. In a sense, we need to think big in small systems.

For instance, we can first change our concept of food consumption. Instead of consuming what we want, we can start by consuming what we want among what’s locally available. That would cut down on infrastructure being used to produce food for distant locations, along with all the transportation costs that come with it.

Douglas Jack, a sustainable community development expert, gave a presentation advocating people to take a 3D approach to agriculture. That involves considering the collaborative effect of plants occupying all height levels – from trees to fungi – that contribute to a healthier ecosystem. He also talked about various indigenous techniques for sustainable livelihood, the details of which he catalogued online for open-source sharing.

From his example as well as that of Jack SoRelle – who created the Plenty4All organization from scratch – there was a consensus that open-source sharing of agricultural techniques is an economically feasible way to establish grassroots-oriented solutions for communities all over the world.

As the second week of eco2FEST came to a close, it was apparent that there is a common thread that ran through these four themes: it all comes down to education.

It’s about learning how to let your voice be heard; it’s about teaching how to run an equitable society. It’s about learning how to live affordably together; it’s about teaching how to feed the world sustainably.

What inspired you the most from the conversations you’ve had last week at eco2FEST? What would you like to accomplish by the final week?

Winluck Wong is a freelance writer helping companies grow their businesses through blogging, web content writing, copywriting, and social media management. He gets excited about an eclectic mix of topics from business strategies and sustainable development to personal finance and life hacks. Follow his cheeky musings on Twitter and imagine how he can fit in your story on his website.