The system (economic political, social) is falling apart. Too many small connections and a culture of Just-in time minimalist (cut corners) management means there are no redundancies.. Institutions and people are densely yet weakly interconnected, more like a ball of short threads of cotton than a woven tapestry. Each person looks for the minimal connections to get by or exercise an ambition. A significant part of the population of individuals now come with individualized ambitions, and each looks for the minimum number of ways to tie together a structure that can extract money from the whole system. This is a weak system, less autocratic but more anarchic than democratic.

Given that the system is also buffeted by increasing population, increasing inequality and increasing climate warming, the structure probably cannot hold, though the amount of effort people put in to trying to hold it together should not be underestimated. If it breaks it breaks into pieces that are desperately looking for new connections with other pieces (people, groups) to allow survival at a minimum and with new hopes beyond mere survival.

Among those hopes is one that many of the people, alone and in groups, have already started modest experiments in new ways. It will be the quality and number of unseen projects already in play, in fact or imagination, that will determine the future. Many will fail and many will inadvertently make old problems worse. We will need to be tolerant of other people’s experiments, because all are trying and we do not know which will emerge from the chaos.