The fragility we've engineered

How do we build anti-fragile systems in a world designed for extraction?

Everyone claims to value family, environment and community. Yet we have created economic systems that extract from all three.

And the results are telling. Parents commute further for jobs that demand longer hours. Communities fracture along algorithmically-determined lines. The environment lurches towards collapse whilst we argue about whether it’s happening. The systems we say matter most are becoming as fragile as the technological infrastructure we’ve built to replace them. Technology is designed for speed, efficiency and extraction. Humans are organic, messy, interdependent. Our economic systems don’t care about the difference - they only care about yield.

This acceleration is historically unprecedented. “If the world’s history was translated into the time span of a single year, the Industrial Revolution would have occurred at roughly one and a half seconds to midnight” - Greta Thunberg

We’re building systems faster than we can test them, with no requirement for consent from the people who’ll live with the consequences. The pattern repeats everywhere: when one data storage system fails, it takes hundreds of businesses down with it. When one world leader threatens tariffs by tweet, markets shudder. When one social media platform changes its algorithm, thousands of businesses lose their income overnight. Everything optimised for speed and extraction becomes fragile. 

Last night I attended a lecture on climate justice featuring two Sámi descendants. They kept returning to one framework: Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC). Nothing happens on the land without full understanding and agreement from the people who live there.

We could apply FPIC beyond land - to technology rollouts, resource extraction, platform changes that affect millions. But we don’t, because consent is slow and extraction is fast. FPIC would be terrible for GDP. It would probably be good for everything else.

How do we build anti-fragile systems (family, business, community) inside a world that we have re-engineered for extraction and fragility? And more importantly - who gets to decide?