The machine we built to govern ourselves has seized on signaling rather than service, and it’s killing our capacity to act. When every civic interaction can be reduced to an Instagram moment—every vote to a hashtag, every petition to a retweet—our public life becomes a bank of empty gestures. We trade sweat equity for “engagement,” and end up owing the system more than it owes us. That’s why I say: pass the gasoline. Let the structures we’ve ceded to extractive elites collapse fast enough that they can’t rebuild their walls of rent‐seeking before the ashes cool. Rapid disruption breaks the chokehold of oligarchs, revives genuine community bonds and leaves us with a viable skeleton on which to erect a new civic order.
Three Broken Subsystems
The fault lines run through three interlocking subsystems—civic, informational and economic—that once reinforced one another but now amplify noise. In the civic sphere, formal institutions, private associations and faith groups have lost their glue: membership rolls may still swell, but genuine trust and cooperative muscle lie in tatters. On the information side, every platform algorithm favors outrage over deliberation, feeding a feedback loop where spikes in attention demand ever‐more extreme displays of virtue. Economically, we’re caught in a treadmill: work breeds dependency, and dependency breeds work, as novel fees and fees on fees morph necessity into perpetual rent. Together, these loops lock the system into self‐inflicted decline.
Measuring Resilience
We know what healthy resilience looks like: robust stocks of volunteer hours, institutional trust, real savings buffers, workforce alignment and accountable media. We can measure those pillars, set baselines and test them against shocks. But today, oligarchs hollow out each pillar while dangling trinkets of engagement. Market concentration, skyrocketing lobbying budgets, near‐monopolies in telecom, media, finance and healthcare all extract rents no matter which party holds power. Debt becomes the new sharecropper’s chain: student‐loan balances top $1.8 trillion, wages stagnate, and credentialing serves as a tax rather than a ticket to opportunity. Meanwhile education and news operate as extractive industries—tuition and subscription fees climb, content mills and pay-to-play models erode critical thought, and every essential service carries an extra surcharge for monopoly profits.
Signaling vs Sweat Equity
Signaling has replaced real civic labor. We’ve outsourced responsibility to clicktivism, where a hashtag counts for more than an hour of donated time or a dollar of contributions. Social‐psychology research shows that moral‐outrage clicks spike engagement but fail to translate into sustained offline organizing. Snap‐decision outrage doesn’t fix roads, staff homeless shelters or negotiate budgets. It merely inflates platform metrics, fattening the ad duopoly while starving local nonprofits of the volunteers they desperately need.
The Biological Brake
At the same time, our brains are wired to conserve energy. Complex deliberation carries a tiny metabolic premium, but enough to nudge us back toward reflexive shortcuts when hunger, fatigue or stress set in. Chronic stress—triggered by daily failures or the sense that no action matters—dulls executive function: cortisol chews up prefrontal circuitry, erodes working memory and turns us into automatons. Habit and reaction supplant choice, and we retreat into the lowest‐cost thinking: tribal signaling, clicktivism and complaint forums, all of them deeply unsatisfying and utterly ineffective at collective problem-solving.
Lessons from History
History teaches a hard lesson: slow decay lets entrenched interests recapture every reform, but rapid rupture can reset balance in favor of the many. After the Black Death, European peasants forced landlords to pay wages and drop feudal dues; when Parliament tried to freeze wages too slowly, revolt swept across England. In Revolutionary France, sweeping away seigneurial privileges overnight created a fluid land market and a new citizen basis. And during Japan’s Meiji Restoration, a one-year overhaul dismantled Tokugawa rent-extraction and propelled incomes skyward within two decades. These “punctuated equilibria” show that when change outruns elite counter-measures, commoners win more than they lose.
A Calibrated Conflagration
That is our model for today. We need a responsible call to burn down extractive levers before they smother any chance of renewal. First, we target monopoly structures: mass boycotts of rent-extracted services, coordinated refusal to accept outrageous tuition or insurance hikes, platform‐level pressure to break data monopolies. Second, we redirect those flames toward rebuilding local civic “skeletons”—mutual-aid networks, co-ops, faith-based charities and neighborhood leagues that still carry real costs and deliver shared benefits. Third, we rewire informational feedback: reconfigure social feeds to reward sustained offline action, embed deliberative forums into every digital town hall and collapse the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of fact-rooted discussion.
Building Better Foundations
Passing the gasoline doesn’t mean an anarchic bonfire. It means a calibrated conflagration that gut-renovates the system. We preserve mom-and-pop civic organs as the load-bearing beams of tomorrow’s architecture. We accelerate collapse where elites have built rent-pumping engines. We extinguish signaling, reignite sweat equity and replace empty gestures with the hard business of community repair. Because only after the old walls have burned can we lay new foundations rooted in reciprocity, accountability and shared sacrifice.