Power is usually imagined as something someone has: authority, influence, resources, force. We look for decision-makers, elites, bad actors. We ask who is responsible, who benefits, who is pulling the strings.
At planetary scale, this picture collapses.
The most consequential power today is not exercised through intention, ideology, or command. It is exercised through structural asymmetry — durable differences in who can act, adapt, revise, or withdraw within a coordination field.
Power, in this sense, is not something wielded. It is something inhabited.
From Actors to Asymmetries
In small systems, power and agency roughly align. A person decides; others comply or resist. But as coordination scales, agency disperses while structure hardens. Decisions fragment across protocols, standards, defaults, interfaces, timelines.
What remains coherent is not intention, but constraint distribution.
Structural asymmetry names a simple but devastating fact:
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Some positions absorb risk; others externalise it.
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Some positions adapt quickly; others must remain stable.
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Some positions can exit; others cannot.
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Some positions are revised by feedback; others are insulated from it.
None of this requires malign intent.
It only requires asymmetry to persist.
Why Power No Longer Looks Like Power
This is why contemporary power is so hard to confront. It does not announce itself. It does not issue orders. It does not even need to be aware of itself as power.
Each may be locally rational, technically elegant, morally neutral. Yet together they generate coordination landscapes in which whole populations become:
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Predictable but fragile
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Visible but disposable
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Included but non-revisable
Power appears nowhere — and everywhere.
Asymmetry Without Conspiracy
It is tempting to respond with conspiracy theories, because at least conspiracies preserve the idea of agency. Someone is in charge. Someone could be stopped.
Structural asymmetry offers no such comfort.
Most asymmetries arise not from design, but from path dependence:
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Early standards become global defaults.
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Early advantages compound into infrastructural dominance.
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Early exclusions sediment into permanent invisibility.
Once in place, these asymmetries self-reinforce. Those who benefit gain the capacity to adapt further; those constrained lose even the ability to register harm in intelligible terms.
Scale as an Asymmetry Multiplier
At planetary scale, small differences in position produce massive differences in outcome. A one-second latency advantage in trading becomes systemic leverage. A minor regulatory exemption becomes a competitive moat. A subtle design choice becomes a behavioural funnel for millions.
Crucially, scale converts neutrality into dominance.
What would be harmless at small scale becomes coercive when globally imposed. What would be optional locally becomes unavoidable when infrastructural. Choice disappears not through prohibition, but through saturation.
Why Resistance So Often Misfires
Resistance typically targets visible actors: leaders, institutions, corporations. But structural asymmetry does not depend on their beliefs or intentions. Removing one actor often leaves the asymmetry intact — or even strengthens it by clarifying the structure that remains.
This is why:
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Revolutions reproduce hierarchies
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Reforms entrench systems
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Accountability rituals fail to redistribute power
The system does not collapse because the coordination advantage persists.
Without addressing asymmetry of revisability, resistance expends energy while the structure absorbs shock.
Reframing Power Relationally
A relational account reframes power as differential access to:
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Revision
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Exit
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Delay
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Abstraction
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Externalisation
Power lies where constraints can be offloaded and futures kept open.
Powerlessness lies where coordination demands immediacy, compliance, and irreversibility.
This reframing changes the ethical question from:
Who is abusing power?
to:
Where is asymmetry becoming irreversible?
The Ethical Pressure Point
At scale, ethics cannot aim at purity, intention, or even justice in the abstract. It must aim at symmetry restoration — not equality of outcome, but equality of revisability.
Ethical action seeks to:
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Reopen feedback channels
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Shorten coordination loops
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Re-localise consequences
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Make exit thinkable again
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Slow systems that benefit from speed alone
This is not moral heroism. It is structural care.
A Dangerous Misrecognition
The greatest danger is mistaking invisibility for inevitability. Structural asymmetries persist not because they are necessary, but because they have become unthinkable.
They feel like the world.
Our task is not to overthrow power, but to make asymmetry legible again, so that coordination can be reconfigured before collapse forces it to be.
In Post 4, we turn to the most misunderstood lever of all: why calls for unity, clarity, and simplification often accelerate authoritarian drift — and how complexity, carefully cultivated, becomes an ethical resource rather than a liability.
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