Systems are breaking—And that’s our opportunity

Originally published in Shareable

A few months ago, I reconnected with a friend whom I had worked with on an initiative on ‘the sharing economy’. At the time, we were both ‘Young Global Leaders’ (YGLs) with the World Economic Forum. It was 2013, and we had volunteered our time to bring attention to how new technologies could be used to help everyone have a good life with less ecological impact.

Personally, we were imagining a future of peer-to-peer resource sharing, community-based production, and cooperative ownership.

Meeting up after years, we laughed that our work had oddly contributed to the World Economic Forum publishing the line that became infamous as a globalist’s dystopian injunction: “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Although we laughed, it was with a sense of ‘doomer humour’. My friend’s tone had shifted from a decade ago. She felt disappointment and defeat. “All we did,” she told me, “was write a love letter to the next wave of monopolists.”

Her disillusionment was not unique. Many working in alternative economics—whether cooperatives, commons networks, or solidarity enterprises—feel similarly deflated.

Despite huge efforts to get governments around the world to adopt policies to promote the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy’, the tide has been in the opposite direction. Monopoly capitalism has grown stronger, tightening its grip through unrestrained mergers and acquisitions, extractive digital platforms, and ‘techbro’ political interference.

Now, the big tech companies don’t compete in a free market, as they own the markets and can operate similarly to feudal lords. It’s why the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis labels this era ‘technofeudalism’.

It’s easy to feel like we failed. But that pain—of giving so much for so little change—is not a reflection of personal failure. It’s a sign of deeper structural shifts.

As I outlined in Breaking Together, these are not just difficult times—they are disintegrating systems. From obscene wealth concentration to mass precarity and the soaring cost of basic needs, the indicators are clear: the economic and political order we once tried to reform is already breaking down.

And the breakdown is accelerating.

Oxfam calculates that the world’s richest 1% now own more than 95% of humanity, while poverty is increasing in most parts of the world. In many countries, many households face impossible choices between rent, food, and energy bills.

Economist James Meadway concludes that inflation has become entrenched in the global system—not as a blip, but as a feature of a deeply imbalanced economy that faces the consequences of smashing against planetary boundaries. For a majority of the world’s population, the era of stability and progress has ended.

If those of us in the ‘alternative economics’ field keep trying to scale within this old system—as if it were still functional—we risk becoming demoralised, burnt out, or absorbed into the very structures we oppose.

Worse, the delay in acknowledging collapse means that we miss the chance to prepare for what’s coming next: not a utopia, but an era defined by decline, disruption, and disaster management. If we don’t act with new clarity and courage, our skills and models will be sidelined just when they’re most needed.

But here’s a different way to look at it: if the dominant systems are breaking, then the pressure to “compete” with them is over. We no longer need to validate ourselves by capitalist metrics of success.

Instead, we can position ourselves as the seeds of the next system, or more realistically, as the scaffolding of survival in a world of cascading crises.

Imagine cooperatives that aren’t just “alternatives,” but core providers of care, food, housing, and energy as state and market institutions fail. Picture mutual aid and commons initiatives not as fringe experiments, but as essential infrastructure for keeping communities afloat.

The history of the commons teaches us that this is not a naïve vision.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, has concluded that there is a “pulsation of the commons” where commons-based systems expand and contract in response to the rise and fall of dominant political-economic systems. He explains that these commons of land, and other resources, are often enclosed or co-opted by states and profit-seekers, only to re-emerge in new forms during subsequent crises. Therefore, Bauwens connects the current wave of commons-building efforts, such as open-source software, cooperative platforms, and community land trusts, to this larger pulsation.

Michel Bauwens’ historical analysis supports the view that there is no going back, but certainly a way forward—through shared capacities, collective stewardship, and distributed resilience.

That is the vision many in the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) already carry. What we need now is for more of us to speak it out loud, as currency innovation expert Stephen DeMeulenaere did in a previous article for Shareable.

If you work in the SSE, cooperative, or commons sectors, this is the time to speak clearly and publicly: we are not here to “fix” the current system. We are here to manage collapse with care and cooperation.

Share this framing with your networks, in your newsletters, and in your funding applications. Don’t pretend we’re building toward a global cooperative economy in 2050. Don’t maintain the illusion of working towards ‘sustainable development’.

Instead, explain that we’re helping people now, in the vacuum left by dysfunctional states and extractive corporations.

Convene conversations about what it means to operate as “disaster-responsive” economic actors. Map your community’s most vulnerable needs and match them with the resources your network can already provide—be it food, childcare, housing, or repair.

Strengthen regional alliances between SSE actors and push funders to drop their fixation on scale, and instead invest in redundancy, local relevance, and deep trust.

To do so could help advocates such as RIPESS persuade the international aid and development sectors to allocate more funds towards SSE and the commons. It could even help professionals in organisations like the World Bank and UNDP recognise a new role for themselves in helping soften the collapse.

Let’s also be honest with ourselves: this is emotionally tricky. But we can help each other move through the grief of a failed societal dream, into the resolve of people who are needed in the ruins.

This isn’t a fringe project anymore. It’s frontline work.

It is for this reason that I am engaging once again with people who truly believe in a ‘sharing economy’ rather than the exploitative and monopolistic tyranny that cloaked itself in our hopeful visions. It is why I will be speaking at the Festival of Commoning and joining the Reviving the Commons series, both in the UK in September.

Kaliya, my friend from our YGL days, has also found new energy—not by pretending things will get better soon, but by shifting her expectations. She is convening ‘unconferences’ to network together regenerative initiatives to co-create a thriving future in the San Francisco Bay Delta Bioregion. She leveraged my visit to the region to convene their first unconference, with a second occurring in May 2025, and more to come as part of this new initiative. She is also helping local community groups and ‘neighborsheds’ to deploy the open-source technologies and insights she developed over the previous 20 years.

She is still sad about how things are turning out, but is not hopeless. She feels part of something real that uses her skills and is rooted in where she lives.

For both of us, we have avoided cynicism – not because the world is improving, but because we’re seeking to make a concrete contribution where we can.

To those who feel disheartened: your disappointment is justified, but it’s also a clue.

The system didn’t bend to reform because it’s already broken. But that means your work—your network, your cooperative, your project—is more vital than ever. The collapse is here. So is our role in softening it. And if we act together now, we might not only soften the collapse, but start to shape what is to come.