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