Metabolic Power

Modern power does not stabilise disorder. It metabolises it.

At planetary scale, technological systems no longer merely respond to uncertainty; they generate the specific forms of instability that make their own interventions appear necessary. Chaos is not an unfortunate by-product of progress. It functions more like waste heat in an engine: not something to be eliminated, but something the system must continually produce in order to keep operating. Control, coordination, and capital act through this heat. The more turbulence a system can induce, the more justification it acquires to intervene, optimise, regulate, and extract. This is not a moral failure layered onto technology. It is a general property of distributed systems maintaining local order under constraint.

Holism is the starting point. There is no outside to the system. Every description, intervention, and correction is internal to the field in which it operates. Power, ideology, technology, and subjectivity do not act on one another from separate domains; they co-emerge as aspects of the same adaptive surface. Causation is not linear but reciprocal. Effects fold back into conditions. Systems persist not by resolving tension but by redistributing it.

Within this space of possible configurations, autocratic and authoritarian arrangements are not destiny. They are simply those configurations that, in particular contexts, maximise self-replication. They compress uncertainty while suppressing corrective feedback. They produce environments in which volatility is high but correction is slow, where decisions propagate rapidly while consequences diffuse. From outside, such systems appear pathological. From within, they appear efficient. Fear, urgency, and dependency form steep gradients that can be rapidly leveraged.

The instability generated then becomes its own justification. Turbulence is cited as evidence that further intervention is required. The system feeds on the chaos it produces and points to that chaos as proof of its own necessity. Platforms, security architectures, financial mechanisms, and media systems thrive under these conditions not because they resolve instability, but because they are structured to circulate it. This is a self-reinforcing loop, not a conspiracy.

What is often missed is that those who appear to benefit most from such arrangements are themselves constrained by them. Alignment with authoritarian dynamics is not simply a preference for domination. It is adaptive behaviour inside a field that rewards instability production and punishes restraint. At sufficient scale, power does not confer freedom of action; it imposes obligation to role. The more capital, visibility, and infrastructural centrality an actor accumulates, the less latitude they retain to deviate. Wealth does not provide exit. It deepens structural coupling.

These configurations are therefore powerful but fragile. Their fragility does not arise from weakness, but from self-reference. Coherence is generated internally. Correction does not arrive from outside; it folds back into the system’s own operations, reinforcing the very dynamics that produced the instability in the first place. There is no longer a meaningful external vantage point from which the system can be evaluated. Only more throughput, more scale, more mediation. The system becomes a closed circulatory loop, efficient at motion yet increasingly blind to what it consumes.

Tyranny, understood in this way, is not robust. It is brittle. It is prone to self-accelerating cascades of internal interference, where amplification overwhelms regulation and feedback suppression erodes adaptive capacity. Historically, such regimes are short-lived unless sustained by a broader stabilising field: economic surplus, technological advantage, externalised cost, or imperial reach. When those supports fail, the configuration collapses under its own harmonic interference.

Scale changes everything. For most of human history, systemic costs could be displaced. Disorder could be exported across geography, deferred across generations, absorbed by marginal populations, or dissolved into environments treated as effectively infinite. That displacement created the appearance of sustainability. At planetary scale, this option disappears. The field closes. What was once elsewhere becomes internal. Entropy does not dissipate outward; it circulates inward.
This is what makes the present moment existential rather than merely political or economic.

The failure at work is both cybernetic and philosophical. These systems confuse amplification with control and acceleration with intelligence. They assume that increasing mediation can substitute for understanding, and that complexity can be outrun rather than inhabited. Human beings remain cognitively bounded, emotionally contagious, and socially patterned. At small scales, these traits are survivable. At global scale, when deliberately stimulated and exploited, they become structurally dangerous.

The system rewards precisely those behaviours that destabilise collective coherence because those behaviours maximise throughput. This is not because people are uniquely gullible, but because complex adaptive systems select for whatever reproduces them fastest under given constraints. Blame placed solely on psychology misses the deeper dynamics of self-organisation at work.

We are all inside this machinery. There is no clean exit, no pure standpoint, no untouched observer. Technology is not something used from outside; it is the relational field in which contemporary subjectivity, power, and meaning now form. The error is not entrapment itself, but denial of it. Treating the configuration as optional or temporary only deepens the orbit.

Acknowledgement does not mean surrender. It clarifies the design problem. Entropy, conflict, and uncertainty cannot be eliminated; they can only be routed. The critical questions are where disorder accumulates, how quickly it compounds, and who is forced to absorb its cost. Systems that depend on permanent crisis to justify themselves cannot stabilise without destroying their own conditions of survival.

The future will not be decided by who can generate the most chaos, but by which configurations can metabolise instability without amplifying it, distribute its costs without concealment, and allow coherence to emerge without converting disorder into fuel. Until that distinction becomes structurally legible, the system will continue to consume its own turbulence and call the process growth.