In the spring of 2019 I wrote 7,600 words defending liberal internationalism through the lens of Brexit. I was twenty-two. I had spent four years at UT Austin studying international relations, economics, European politics, and the structural logic of institutions — how they form, why they persist, what happens when they come under pressure. The capstone argument was declarative, stated on the first page: “the benefits created by modernization, integration, and the acceptance of a globalized world far outweigh the negatives associated with reverting to the reclusive nature produced by nationalism.” I defended it for thirty-two paragraphs with trade theory, regional bloc economics, biographical profiles of Cameron and Farage and May, a historical comparison between British colonial extraction and Roman integration, and an analysis of the urban-rural voting divide that I still think holds up. I got an A-minus. My professor noted it was the most complete deployment of my analytical toolkit.
The argument was right about almost everything that could be measured. And it was blind to the thing that mattered most.
What I diagnosed at twenty-two — without the vocabulary to name it — was institutional metabolization failure. The EU’s architecture was built for consensus. It could absorb a sovereign debt crisis, slowly. It could integrate new members, slowly. It could harmonize regulations across twenty-seven legal systems, slowly. What it could not do was absorb a populist rejection of the institution’s own legitimacy. Brexit was not a policy dispute the EU could adjudicate. It was a denial that the EU should exist. And the architecture had no mechanism for processing that kind of challenge — not because the architects were incompetent, but because no institution builds a mechanism for its own dissolution. That would be like building a house with a self-destruct button in the foyer. The omission is rational. It is also, under certain conditions, fatal.
I saw the pattern. I did not follow it to its conclusion. I argued that integration beats isolation — which the evidence confirms, brutally — and stopped there. I did not ask the harder question: what happens when the institution built to manage change becomes the thing that prevents change from being managed? What happens when the mechanism designed to absorb shocks is itself the shock?
Seven years later, that question applies to everything.
1. The Verdict Came In
Start with what the numbers actually say, because Austin-at-twenty-two staked his argument on the claim that integration produces prosperity and isolation destroys it. He was right.
The NBER’s 2025 working paper — Bloom, Bunn, Mizen, Smietanka, and Thwaites, Working Paper No. 34459, the most comprehensive accounting to date — delivers the verdict: Brexit reduced UK GDP by six to eight percent, investment by twelve to eighteen percent, employment by three to four percent, and productivity by three to four percent. By 2024, goods exports to the EU were eighteen percent below their 2019 level in real terms. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement will reduce long-run productivity by four percent relative to continued EU membership appears to be tracking. Buigut and Kapar (2023) confirmed the trade damage from the other side: EU trade volumes with the UK declined measurably, and the effects were not symmetric. The UK lost more than the EU did. The island economy that voted to reclaim its sovereignty discovered that sovereignty, absent the institutional framework that made its economy function, is an expensive thing to own.
The political cost was worse than the economic one, because it was recursive. The UK cycled through four Prime Ministers in six years. May promised “Brexit means Brexit” and couldn’t deliver a deal Parliament would accept. Johnson delivered a deal Parliament would accept and then violated it. Truss lasted forty-nine days — the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history — after a “mini-budget” so reckless it crashed the gilt market and required emergency Bank of England intervention. Sunak inherited the wreckage and ended his tenure with the worst approval scores since polling began. Starmer won in July 2024 — the first PM elected from opposition since 2010 — inheriting what the Political Quarterly described as the consequence of “botched exit from the EU, stark social and economic decline, institutional decay, a revolving door of ineffective leaders.”
Each Prime Minister was a product of the previous one’s failure. Each failure was a product of the same structural impossibility: Brexit demanded that the British government simultaneously honor the referendum result, maintain economic stability, preserve the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, and renegotiate the UK’s entire global trade position — and the institutional architecture was not built to do all four at once. It could do one. Maybe two. Not four. And so it cycled through leaders the way a machine cycles through parts that don’t fit, ejecting each one faster than the last.
I wrote in 2019 that “the fate of both the United Kingdoms and the European Union are certainly anything but certain.” The paradoxical phrasing — certainly anything but certain — reads better in 2026 than it did when I wrote it. What I could not see was that the uncertainty would express itself as institutional self-destruction: not the EU collapsing, but the British government consuming itself trying to execute a mandate its own architecture could not process.
2. What Nobody Was Looking At
Northern Ireland does not appear once in my 7,600-word capstone. Not a single mention. Zero.
This is the most instructive failure in the essay, because it is not a failure of analysis. It is a failure of imagination. I analyzed what was visible: trade theory, populist sentiment, far-right taxonomy, the Greece bailout, the urban-rural divide. These were the categories available to a twenty-two-year-old reading the literature in 2019. Northern Ireland was not in the literature I was reading. It was not in the op-eds. It was not in the TEDTalks. It was the legacy architecture — the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, twenty-one years before my capstone, the peace settlement that ended three decades of sectarian violence — and nobody was treating it as a variable in the Brexit equation. It was settled. It was background. It was the thing everyone assumed would just work.
It nearly collapsed everything.
The problem was structural and, in retrospect, obvious: the Good Friday Agreement required an open border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and the Republic of Ireland (an EU member state). Brexit required a customs border between the UK and the EU. These two requirements are mutually exclusive. You cannot have an open border and a customs border in the same place. The Northern Ireland Protocol attempted to solve this by putting the customs border in the Irish Sea — making Northern Ireland functionally part of the EU’s single market for goods while remaining politically part of the UK. This satisfied the Good Friday Agreement and violated the Act of Union. It satisfied trade law and inflamed unionist identity. It was, as Hayward and Komarova (2022) document, an institutional impossibility that institutions were nevertheless required to administer.
The Protocol became the Windsor Framework. The Windsor Framework became ongoing friction. The border that can’t exist because of one agreement and can’t not exist because of another agreement continues to exist as an administrative fiction maintained by the willingness of all parties to pretend the contradiction is manageable.
This is not a footnote to the Brexit story. This is the Brexit story. The thing that nearly collapsed the settlement was the thing nobody was looking at — not the trade barriers, not the immigration restrictions, not the far-right rhetoric, but the legacy architecture from a previous era colliding with a new reality it was never designed to accommodate.
Hold that thought.
3. The Diagnosis Generalizes
There is a name for what I was describing at twenty-two without knowing it. The name is Douglass North.
North won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 for his work on institutional theory. His framework, laid out most completely in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990), argues that institutions — the formal and informal rules that structure human interaction — create the incentive framework within which organizations operate. Organizations, in turn, evolve to take advantage of the institutional framework. And here is the critical move: those organizations then develop a vested interest in preserving the institutional framework that created them. The institutions produce the organizations. The organizations protect the institutions. The relationship is symbiotic, and over time, it becomes self-reinforcing. North called this path dependence. The more an institutional framework persists, the more organizational investment accumulates around it, the more costly it becomes to change, and the more resistant to change the entire system becomes — regardless of whether the framework is still serving the purpose it was designed for.
I described this dynamic in my capstone without citing it. The EU’s institutional architecture — the single market, the customs union, the free movement principles, the regulatory harmonization — had created organizations (the Commission, the Council, the Parliament, the ECB, thousands of lobbying and consulting firms, entire national bureaucracies dedicated to EU compliance) that were structurally invested in the framework’s continuation. Those organizations could process challenges that operated within the framework’s logic: a debt crisis, a new member’s accession, a trade dispute. What they could not process was a challenge to the framework’s existence. Brexit was not a dispute within the system. It was a rejection of the system. And the organizations built to maintain the system had no mechanism for accepting that rejection — because accepting it would mean dismantling the institutional structure that justified their own existence.
Beyer (2025), writing in the Review of Policy Research, maps the spectrum of path dependence in institutional life and identifies five distinct mechanisms by which institutions change incrementally: displacement, layering, drift, conversion, and exhaustion. Each operates within the existing framework. Each assumes the framework persists. None accounts for a challenge that arrives from outside the framework’s logic — a challenge that does not seek to modify the institution but to deny its legitimacy. Brexit was that challenge for the EU. The EU responded, as Laffan (2022) documents, by negotiating as a unified actor precisely because the exit threatened institutional coherence. The threat that could have fragmented the institution actually unified it — but the unity was defensive, not adaptive. The EU didn’t learn from Brexit. It survived Brexit. Those are different things.
Abrahamsen, Riddervold, and Trondal (2025) call this “institutional hubbing”: the tendency of crises to strengthen existing institutional designs rather than producing new ones. The mechanism is counterintuitive. You would expect crisis to produce reform. Instead, crisis produces consolidation — the institution doubles down on its existing architecture, because the organizations invested in that architecture mobilize to protect it. The EU’s response to Brexit proves the pattern. Rather than fragmenting, the EU deepened integration: joint debt issuance for the first time in history through the pandemic recovery fund, accelerated defense cooperation, the AI Act. It used Brexit as a cautionary tale. No other member state seriously pursued exit. Fabbrini and Zgaga (2023) document how right-wing nationalist parties across Europe shifted from “Frexit” and “Italexit” rhetoric to “sovereignism” — criticism from within, not calls for departure. The economic pain was the lesson.
But the consolidation was also a form of path dependence. The EU responded to a legitimacy crisis by becoming more of what it already was. This works when the crisis is external — when the threat comes from a defecting member, and the remaining members rally around the framework. It does not work when the crisis is internal — when the framework itself is the problem.
That is the diagnosis. And it generalizes.
4. The Fastest Failure
AI governance is the Brexit pattern at machine speed.
The EU spent years building the AI Act — the most ambitious regulatory framework for artificial intelligence anywhere on Earth. The legislation passed in 2024. It categorizes AI systems by risk level, imposes transparency obligations, restricts certain applications entirely, and creates enforcement mechanisms across all twenty-seven member states. It is, by any measure, a serious attempt to govern a serious technology. And by the time it passed, it was already falling behind.
The European Commission proposed delaying full implementation of high-risk AI provisions to 2027 — a year beyond the original deadline. Many member states missed the August 2025 deadline to designate competent authorities. Guidance on prohibited AI practices was released two days after those prohibitions took effect. Maydell (2025), writing in Contemporary European Politics, identifies the core challenge as “bridging uncertainty with evidence-informed policy making” — but the uncertainty is not a bug in the process. It is the defining condition. The technology changes faster than the evidence can accumulate, which means the evidence-informed policy is always governing yesterday’s technology.
Coglianese and Crum (2025), writing in Risk Analysis, argue that the regulatory metaphor itself needs to change: from “guardrails” to “leashes.” Guardrails assume a fixed path along which the technology must travel. Leashes acknowledge that the thing on the other end is moving in ways you cannot predict, and the best you can do is maintain a connection while it goes. The metaphor is honest. It is also an admission that the institutional architecture of regulation — the fixed-path, compliance-based, legislative framework that democracies have used to govern technology since the Industrial Revolution — cannot keep pace with a technology that does not develop along fixed paths.
Meanwhile, the United States revoked its own safety framework. Trump’s January 2025 executive order eliminated Biden-era AI safety reporting requirements and oversight mechanisms. By December 2025, a second order preempted state-level AI regulation entirely — the federal government claiming authority while simultaneously refusing to exercise it. The result: the most consequential technology since electrification is being deployed in the world’s largest economy with no functional regulatory architecture. Not because the architecture was overwhelmed. Because the architecture was dismantled.
Mokry and Gurol (2024), writing in Global Policy, map the “competing ambitions” of the US, EU, and China on AI governance and find no convergence. The US prioritizes innovation. The EU prioritizes rights. China prioritizes state control. No institution exists to reconcile these positions. The WTO’s mandate does not cover it. The UN’s capacity does not reach it. The OECD’s AI principles are voluntary. The G7 discussions are communiques that bind nobody. Suter et al. (2025) document how parliamentary debates about AI across Europe cluster into narrow issue-frames — employment, privacy, security — without ever addressing the systemic question: what institutional architecture is capable of governing a technology that develops faster than institutions deliberate?
This is the Northern Ireland problem in a different domain. The legacy institutional architecture — regulatory frameworks designed for pharmaceuticals, financial products, industrial chemicals, technologies that develop on human timescales — is colliding with a technology that does not fit any of the categories. The Good Friday Agreement assumed the border would never be a variable. Copyright law assumed creative work would be produced by humans. Labor protections assumed jobs would be displaced gradually. Safety regulations assumed the thing being regulated would hold still long enough to be inspected. None of these assumptions survive contact with AI. And the institutional response — delay implementation, miss deadlines, release guidance after the fact, revoke the framework entirely — is the same metabolization failure that produced four Prime Ministers in six years. The institution cycles through responses that don’t fit, ejecting each one faster than the last.
5. The Loop That Cannot Close
There is a purer example of institutional path dependence than Brexit or AI governance, and it operates in a domain most people do not associate with institutional theory at all.
AARO — the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — reached full operational capability in October 2024. It reported 757 new UAP cases in its fiscal year 2024 report to Congress. At least twenty-one of those cases remain categorized as “true anomalies” — objects or phenomena that do not match any known aircraft, drone, weather pattern, or sensor artifact. Congress has demanded increasing transparency: the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Pentagon to brief lawmakers on UAP intercepts by integrated military commands dating back to 2004.
The structural problem is the one I identified in Brexit without naming it. AARO is housed within the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense is the entity being accused of withholding information. Lawmakers have stated publicly that “existing and former U.S. Government officials have told Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing significant information about UAPs.” The entity that classifies is the entity that investigates. The investigation can never produce a finding that contradicts the classification, because the investigator and the classifier are the same institution.
This is North’s path dependence at its most structurally locked. The organizations created to take advantage of institutional opportunities — in this case, the classification and intelligence bureaucracies built to protect national security — evolve to protect those institutions, even when protection means obstruction. The institution does not need to conspire. It does not need to lie. It needs only to operate within its existing logic, which dictates that classified information remains classified until the classifying authority decides otherwise. And the classifying authority will never decide otherwise, because the institutional incentive is always to maintain the classification — the same way the EU’s institutional incentive is always to maintain the framework, the same way the regulatory apparatus’s institutional incentive is always to maintain the regulatory model. The pattern is identical. Only the domain changes.
6. Three Fronts, One Architecture
As of late February 2026, the United States is conducting or escalating military operations across three theaters simultaneously. Operation Southern Spear — the largest US military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis — targets Venezuelan drug trafficking networks and pressures the Maduro regime. Operation Epic Fury — joint US-Israeli strikes killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei, targeting IRGC command and control, air defenses, missile sites, and military airfields — constitutes the most significant American military action in the Middle East in decades. And in the Pacific, the “Davidson window” for potential Chinese military action against Taiwan approaches, with the 2025 DoD report assessing China’s readiness accelerating toward 2027, over one hundred ICBMs loaded across three silo fields near Mongolia.
NATO was built for one adversary on one front. The CENTCOM/SOUTHCOM/INDOPACOM division of labor was built for sequential operations — not because military planners were naive, but because the institutional architecture reflects the geopolitical reality it was designed for: the Cold War, where the adversary was singular and the theaters were prioritized. The current situation demands simultaneous force projection across three theaters against three different types of adversary — state collapse, theocratic regime, peer competitor — and the institutional architecture was not designed for it.
This is not a military argument. It is an institutional one. The architecture allocates resources through political processes that were designed for peacetime budgeting and single-theater wartime mobilization. Reallocation requires political will. Political will is consumed by the very crises it needs to adjudicate. The institution cycles — the same recursive failure that consumed four British Prime Ministers, the same delay loop that pushed AI regulation past its own deadlines, the same epistemological loop that prevents the Pentagon from investigating itself. The mechanism is always the same: the architecture was built for a world that no longer exists, the organizations invested in the architecture resist adaptation, and the gap between what the institution can process and what reality demands grows wider with each cycle.
7. One Paragraph on the Pattern at Its Worst
In December 2025, the DOJ began releasing files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The FBI possessed a 1996 criminal complaint. JP Morgan Chase processed over $1.1 million in payments to women, many with Eastern European surnames. Lead prosecutor Marie Villafana publicly identified “implicit institutional biases that prevented me and the FBI agents who worked diligently on this case from holding Mr. Epstein accountable.” The FBI concluded in July 2025 that “no evidence existed” of a client list. By December 2025, it had admitted uncovering over one million previously undisclosed files. The institutions that could not metabolize Brexit, cannot metabolize AI, cannot metabolize unidentified phenomena in restricted airspace — these overlap significantly with institutions that could not metabolize evidence of their own complicity. The institution does not need to conspire. It needs only to be structurally incapable of investigating itself honestly. The epistemological loop is the same. The stakes are not.
8. The Common Man in 2026
My capstone’s strongest move was identifying the common man as Brexit’s protagonist. Not hero, not villain — a person rationally responding to structural pressures they did not create. “Cries for help by the common man, a citizen who feels he has been left behind in the wake of a rapidly transforming globalized world which has brought about major changes in the socio-structural foundation of Europe.” I meant that. I still mean it. The Leave voter was not stupid. The Leave voter was processing information through a framework that made the costs of EU membership visible and the benefits invisible — because the benefits were diffuse (lower prices, larger markets, foreign direct investment flowing through London) and the costs were concentrated (immigrants in their town, regulations from Brussels, Greek debt on their tab).
That same person now lives in a country whose GDP is six to eight percent lower than it would have been, whose real wages have stagnated for seven years, whose government consumed itself in public and whose institutional credibility has not recovered. The economic argument I made at twenty-two was vindicated. The common man who voted Leave was proven empirically wrong about the costs and benefits. And none of that matters to the experience of being that person, because the institutional framework that was supposed to represent their interests failed them twice — once when it couldn’t address the pressures that made them vote Leave, and again when the departure made everything worse.
Auer and Tetlow (2022) document how Brexit uncertainty itself became a migration driver: EU nationals left the UK in significant numbers before and after the referendum, not because of policy changes but because of the signal the vote sent about belonging. The horticulture labor crisis I tracked in real time during Fall 2018 — “certain domestic industries such as horticulture have already begun to ‘feel the squeeze’ in terms of finding cheap labor consistently” — was the leading edge of this. The common man wanted immigration reduced. Immigration was reduced. And the industries the common man depended on collapsed for lack of labor. The institution gave the common man what he asked for, and it destroyed what he needed.
This is the individual inside the system. Not a statistic. A person whose rational response to institutional failure produced a different institutional failure, which produced consequences the original response was trying to prevent. The recursion is the point. The common man is not outside the institutional architecture. He is inside it, responding to its signals, and the signals are wrong — not because anyone is lying, but because the architecture was not built to transmit the information he needs to make the decision he faces.
And now the decision he faces is not about the EU. It is about AI eliminating the jobs that remained after Brexit eliminated the others. It is about institutions that cannot govern the technology restructuring his labor market. It is about three military theaters draining the budget that might have funded the transition. It is about phenomena in the sky that no institution can explain and no institution will investigate honestly. The common man in 2026 is the common man from my capstone, seven years deeper into the same structural failure, with fewer institutional resources and more institutional demands than he had when he walked into the voting booth in 2016.
9. What Austin Saw and What Austin Missed
Here is what I got right at twenty-two. Immigration as the binding agent of far-right populism — confirmed by every subsequent study. The UK’s diminished bargaining position after exit — confirmed spectacularly, in every trade negotiation I predicted would go badly. Hard Brexit as the likeliest outcome — correct. Far-right nationalism as a continental phenomenon, not a British anomaly — confirmed by the AfD’s rise, Meloni’s election, Orban’s consolidation, the three competing far-right blocs in the European Parliament documented by Baldini, Baracani, and Soare (2024).
Here is what I got wrong. I predicted the EU would struggle. The EU deepened integration. I omitted Northern Ireland entirely. Northern Ireland became the defining structural crisis. I framed the common man’s choice as irrational. The common man’s choice was rational within a framework that institutional failure had made incoherent. I treated the institution as the solution. The institution was both the solution and the problem — the thing that produces prosperity and the thing that, when it calcifies, prevents the prosperity from reaching the people who need it.
And here is the thing I could not have seen: the speed at which the pattern would replicate. Brexit took four years from referendum to departure and another six to reach the verdict. AI governance failed in real time — the regulation fell behind the technology before the regulation was even implemented. The Pentagon’s epistemological loop on UAP disclosure has been frozen for decades. Three military theaters arrived simultaneously. The Epstein files emerged twenty-nine years after the first complaint. The pattern operates at every speed. The mechanism is the same at every speed. Only the damage changes.
Hodson and Puetter (2025), revisiting the “new intergovernmentalism” framework a decade after it was proposed, find that the EU’s institutional evolution has been marked not by the grand constitutional moments that federalists hoped for, but by incremental changes that strengthen existing power centers without addressing underlying tensions. The institution evolves. But it evolves along its existing path. North’s lock-in holds. The organizations invested in the framework resist any change that would alter the framework, even when the framework is no longer adequate to the challenges it faces. Phinnemore (2022) documents how the UK, even after leaving, has struggled to develop an independent institutional posture — turning its back on influencing the EU without building an alternative architecture to replace what it left behind. Sowels (2024) describes the post-Brexit UK-EU relationship as “changing” but still fundamentally shaped by the gravitational pull of the rules-based order the UK chose to exit. Path dependence operates even on the departed. You can leave the institution. You cannot leave the institutional logic.
10. Bug or Feature
The question this series has been circling since the Comanche essay is whether the patterns we keep finding are failures of design or features of the design itself.
The Comanche essay argued that civilizational creation requires civilizational destruction — that the force that builds the new world is the force that annihilates the old one. The German Memory essay argued that the tools of memory and the tools of forgetting share a root system — that the same capabilities produce opposite outcomes depending on whether institutional commitment governs their use. This essay argues that institutions are civilization’s greatest invention and, when they calcify, civilization’s greatest obstacle to its own survival.
Each essay is a different face of the same paradox. The Comanche identified it in the domain of civilizational succession. Germany identified it in the domain of knowledge. Brexit identifies it in the domain of power. And the question — the one that cannot be answered, only held open — is whether institutional metabolization failure is a bug or a feature.
If it is a bug, then better institutional design could fix it. Build more adaptive institutions. Create mechanisms for self-correction. Design regulatory architectures that can keep pace with exponential change. The EU AI Act is an attempt at this. The NDAA transparency requirements for UAP disclosure are an attempt at this. Every institutional reform in history has been an attempt at this. And some of them work — for a time, until the organizations invested in the new architecture develop the same path-dependent resistance to change that afflicted the old one. Germany’s memory architecture worked for decades. It may not survive the algorithmic age. NATO worked for the Cold War. It was not designed for three simultaneous theaters against three different adversary types. The fix works until the conditions change faster than the fix can adapt.
If it is a feature — if institutional calcification is not a defect but an inherent property of institutions as such — then the question changes. It is no longer about building better institutions. It is about understanding what institutions are. They are structures designed to reduce uncertainty. They reduce uncertainty by stabilizing expectations. They stabilize expectations by resisting change. The resistance to change is not a failure mode. It is the function. An institution that changed as fast as its environment would not be an institution. It would be chaos with a logo. The very quality that makes institutions valuable — their stability, their predictability, their resistance to disruption — is the quality that makes them unable to metabolize disruption when it arrives at a speed or scale the architecture was not designed for.
North saw this. He described path dependence not as a pathology but as a structural feature of institutional life. The lock-in is the point. The lock-in is what makes institutions work. And the lock-in is what makes them fail.
I was twenty-two when I defended the institution. I was right. Integration beats isolation. The common market produces more prosperity than the closed border. The multilateral framework generates more stability than the unilateral posture. None of this has changed. What has changed is my understanding of what it means to be right about institutions. Being right about their benefits does not make you right about their capacity. An institution can be the best available solution and still be structurally incapable of processing the challenge in front of it. These are not contradictory claims. They are the same claim, stated completely.
My capstone ended: “the fate of both the United Kingdoms and the European Union are certainly anything but certain.” I was hedging. I am not hedging now. The institutions are necessary. They are also structurally incapable of absorbing certain kinds of change. Both statements are true. Neither cancels the other. The common man who voted Leave was responding to a real failure. The institution he voted to leave was providing real benefits. Both statements are true. Neither cancels the other. The pattern — institutional creation, institutional calcification, institutional failure, institutional replacement — is not a story about any single institution. It is a story about what institutions are. And the fact that we keep building them, keep defending them, keep depending on them, even knowing they will calcify and fail — that is not stupidity. That is the same paradox the Comanche essay identified at the civilizational level: we cannot build without the thing that will eventually need to be torn down. The architecture of stalling is the architecture of civilization itself.
The question is not whether it fails. It does. The question is what you build when it does — and whether the next architecture will be built with the knowledge of this pattern, or whether it will repeat the cycle with the same blindness that has accompanied every previous turn.
I was blind at twenty-two. I see more now. I would not claim to see enough.