In our opening chapter, we introduced Towards an Open Civics as an invitation to reimagine civic systems through participatory design. We established that this work draws inspiration from movements around the world — from Taiwan’s g0v to Rojava’s Democratic Autonomy — and positions itself as protopian rather than utopian: concerned with incremental, collective progress rather than impossible perfection.
Now we turn to a foundational question: what actually is a civilization? Before we can transform our systems, we need to see them clearly — including the often invisible agreements that shape every aspect of our lives.
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What is a Civilization
Source: Wiki
A civilization is a collectively and dynamically composed construct. Put simply, our society is the product of the often unconscious and implicit cultural and systemic agreements that we enter into in order to participate. These agreements are shaped by our culture, formalized through our infrastructures, incentives and institutions and enacted through our interactions, which all coalesce to reinforce the particular patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction we call “society” or “civilization.”
Infrastructures can be understood as underlying resource mechanisms like money, energy, supply chains or law that mediate or enable specific types of interactions. Incentives can be understood as reward mechanisms for taking particular actions. Institutions can be understood as the social mechanisms that govern the behavior of individuals within a community. Together, these foundations determine what we can create and what we will be rewarded for creating (production), what we are able to consume (consumption), and what kinds of agency we have to modify and perpetuate these systems (reproduction). The flows of resources, information, and currency move along the river banks created by these institutions which, in our current epoch, perpetually reinforce well worn patterns of rivalry, scarcity, and extraction.
Human civilization is, in effect, a decentralized metabolic process, moving energy around the planet while shifting its form. As a phenomenon, this is neutral. Ants create ant hills. Birds create nests. Foxes create burrows. Humans create civilizations. As fundamentally social, relational beings, hardwired by our evolutionary programming to form tribal groups, we are naturally inclined to reproduce the social constructs of our civilization within the space defined by our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions.
We collectively uphold and signal our alignment with these structures in order to belong to, and survive within, the human social organism into which we are born. As such, we are all responsible for participating in and maintaining the current epoch of human civilization which has produced a particular series of self-reinforcing effects and outcomes that could be called ecocide, technocracy, late-stage capitalism, or the meta-crisis. As a catch-all descriptor for our many concurrent crises, the meta-crisis describes an interconnected set of crises whose common feature is their systemic and self-reinforcing nature.
exponential feedback loops
Self-reinforcing cycles within a system where the output of the system amplifies its own input, leading to rapid and often exponential growth or decline. In these loops, a small change in the initial state can result in significant and accelerating effects over time. This type of feedback is common in various natural and technological systems, such as population growth, financial markets, and viral spread, where the rate of change increases proportionally to the current state of the system.
As Stafford Beer says, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” In our current times, it seems as though the purpose of our civilization is to concentrate wealth and power while externalizing costs to the commons, resulting in ecological and social collapse as centralized power and externalized costs exponentially accelerate. Despite the narratives of “progress” and “democracy,” a simple analysis of the outputs of our current civilization reveal that these narratives are, in fact, window dressing for a system that is failing to produce a healthy biosphere and a thriving quality of Life for humans.
metacrisis
The interconnected and overlapping global crises that collectively threaten the stability and sustainability of our world. It encompasses a wide range of issues, including ecological collapse, economic instability, social inequality, and political dysfunction. At its core, the meta-crisis highlights our systemic inability to address these challenges effectively due to underlying flaws in our perception, understanding, and governance structures. This concept urges us to recognize the interconnected nature of these crises and to seek holistic, integrative solutions that address the root causes rather than just the symptoms.
These self-destructive phenomena are not so fatalistically bound to human nature as “capitalist realism” would have us believe. They are merely emergent outcomes based on the underlying set of agreements that form our infrastructures, incentives, and institutions, all of which combine to create the enabling structures of ecocidal and anti-social behaviors. These agreements, and the systems they inform, can be modified and transformed. Our history is replete with examples of these shifts occurring, most notably in the formation of the United States of America, a phase transition of power from a monarchic empire into a relatively self-governed nation. The founders of the United States were neither mythic beings with superhuman powers nor evil supervillains. They were, in fact, humans just like you or I, products of their time with the audacity to leverage the power of the word and collective action to invoke a democratic and isonomic social contract.
capitalism
An economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, market-based allocation of resources, and the pursuit of profit. In the context of the meta-crisis and exponential feedback loops, capitalism can be seen as both a driver and a product of these interconnected global challenges.
To better understand how we might reform our social contract by fundamentally shifting the underlying agreements of our current epoch, it is critical to describe the often invisible structures that compose our current global order and that have failed to produce wellbeing for people and the planet.
For the last 250 years, the state and the corporation have been the foundations of our species’ first-ever globalized civilization. Implicit in both of these structures are the fundamental agreements of a rivalrous, zero-sum worldview in which hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions and extractive, capital-accumulating corporations govern the majority of human interactions and relationships. While this set of agreements or worldview seem “natural” or inherent to many humans today, prior civilizational agreements have been mediated by religious institutions, royal aristocracies, militaries, mercantile marketplaces, and feudal lords.
This abridged list of civilizational forms is offered merely to illustrate that civilizational forms are not fixed despite such an appearance to those who live within them. The Roman Empire likely seemed eternal to many Romans even as invaders were at the gate. The underlying agreements of our civilization are “like water” in that we are so subsumed by them that we take them for granted as intrinsic, barely even noticeable. But the cracks in the edifice of our current civilization are showing, reminding us that these are no more than collective agreements that can be changed. Shifting these agreements is an inter-generational phase transition, a challenging but necessary process that requires an ontological shift and deep cultural transformation.
emergent
Phenomena that arise from complex interactions and cannot be easily predicted or understood by simply analyzing their individual components. In various contexts, emergent properties or behaviors are those that manifest as a result of the collective dynamics of a system, rather than from any single part of it.
natural
The term “natural” as a culturally constructed concept refers to the idea that what is considered “natural” is shaped by cultural beliefs, practices, and norms. Natural law is a philosophical theory that posits the existence of a set of moral principles inherent in human nature and the natural world, which are discoverable through observation.
Understanding civilization as a collective construct — shaped by agreements that can be changed — opens a crucial door. But changing those agreements requires more than policy reform; it requires a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves in relationship to each other and the world. In our next chapter, we’ll explore the ontological shift that’s already underway, and why it’s essential to everything that follows.
Series:
Chapter 2: What is a Civilization ← This Chapter
Chapter 3: The Ontological Shift
Chapter 4: Civic Innovation & Open Civics
Chapter 5: Our Crisis is a Birth
Chapter 6: The Three Attractors
Chapter 7: A Post-Tragic Protopian Audacity
Chapter 8: Open Civic Culture
Chapter 9: Open Civic Systems — Architecture & Transformation
Chapter 10: Open Civic Systems — Design Principles & Living Systems
Chapter 11: Our Choice