Human civilization has spent 3.3 million years moving disorder around rather than actually fixing it.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
3.3 million years distilled into one principle anthropy in the longue durée
SSRN · 6615059
The Takeaway
Social systems do not resolve chaos but instead displace it into different times, places, or groups. Every time a society creates order, it inevitably generates a corresponding amount of disorder elsewhere in the system. This universal law of organization suggests that progress is often just a shell game of shifting costs. We often view technological and social advances as ways to eliminate problems for good. In reality, we are simply pushing the mess into the future or onto the neighbors.
From the abstract
Existing frameworks for analysing social disorder-from world-systems theory to ecological economics-tend to treat spatial, temporal, and social externalities as separate phenomena. Anthropy proposes a unified mechanism: social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it. This paper offers a long-duration stylisation-from stone tools to data centres-to show that anthropy is a structural constant of human social organisation, observable over 3.3 million years. Applying a uniform analytical pr