Globalisation
A brief anomaly arising from cheap transport and communications: the modular structure of self-reliant, diverse political economies breaks down into a scale-free network of production, consumption and exchange, working to common principles and standards. The outcome is an unstable social order, without the firewalls and diversity needed to prevent problems (and recoveries) sluicing throughout it without containment or limit.
This smoothed-out, deconstructed pathology is seen as a virtue, and as the defining goal of the competitive, commercial ideal. It has freed itself from the bounded cultures of an earlier time which, though not wholly independent, had maintained their own distinctive political and economic orders, adapted to particular places and changing conditions.
This short-lived model of connectedness and incoherence will not outlive the conditions of cheap and abundant energy on which it depends.
Related entries:
Localisation, Lean Economics, Population, Resilience.
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