Kari Freyr McKern — Complex Adaptive Humans
Dr Warwick Powell's Thermodynamics in a Time of Monsters arrives at a thesis that anyone working in complexity science will recognise instantly: human societies are dissipative structures. They survive by harnessing energy, exporting entropy, and maintaining the surplus flows that hold institutional complexity together. When the energetic returns decline, the structure doesn't politely negotiate its way to a softer arrangement. It fragments. It lashes out. It produces monsters.
This is not a peripheral claim. It is the load-bearing wall of Powell's entire framework, and it is also the ontological foundation of the Complex Adaptive Model of Societies. CAMS and thermoeconomics were developed independently, from different disciplinary starting points, using different methods. That they converge on the same structural conclusions is worth taking seriously — not as mutual congratulation, but as the kind of cross-validation that matters when you're claiming something real about how civilisations work.
Here is where we agree. And it is not a small list.
Powell frames civilisations as thermodynamic engines. CAMS frames them as far-from-equilibrium metabolic networks. The language differs; the physics is identical. Both reject the dominant mode of political analysis that treats societies as characters in a story — agents with intentions, values, and moral arcs — and replace it with something harder to sentimentalise: a system that must process energy and information at rates sufficient to maintain its own coordination, or lose coherence.
In CAMS, this is formalised through the Flow and Stewards nodes, which together constitute what we call the metabolic core. Flow handles energy throughput — trade, exchange, distribution. Stewards controls energy conversion efficiency through property and capital configuration. Together they determine the system's power output. Every major institutional crisis in our datasets — 2008, the Great Depression, the Russian Revolution — initiates at one of these two nodes before cascading outward. Powell's argument that declining energy return on investment (EROI) drives systemic instability is, in CAMS terms, a statement about chronic Flow-Stewards stress exceeding coupling capacity.
We arrived at the same conclusion from entirely different directions. Powell came through political economy and energy analysis. CAMS came through rate-separation mathematics and ensemble AI scoring of institutional dynamics across 18 societies. The convergence is not accidental. It is structural.
Powell's distinction between exchange value and use value — between the financial pricing system and the thermodynamic reality it claims to represent — maps precisely onto what CAMS measures through the Abstraction variable. In our framework, Abstraction captures the degree to which a node operates through symbolic, codified, or narrative mechanisms rather than direct material engagement. It is not inherently pathological. Abstraction is what allows a legal system to function through precedent rather than brute enforcement, what allows an economy to operate through credit rather than barter.
But Abstraction becomes dangerous when it decouples from the material variables it is supposed to represent. When financial instruments multiply far beyond the productive capacity they nominally price — when exchange value floats free of use value, in Powell's terms — the system is operating at high Abstraction with degraded Capacity and rising Stress. The gap between narrative and reality widens. The institutional bonds that translate between symbolic and material domains weaken.
Powell describes this as money becoming merely a claim on future energy that the system may no longer be able to deliver. CAMS quantifies it: when the Abstraction scores of Flow and Stewards rise while their Capacity scores fall and Stress scores climb, the system is entering a zone where coordination failure becomes structurally likely. The financial system is telling a story the metabolic core can no longer support.
This is not a conspiracy. It is not corruption in the ordinary sense. It is what happens when a complex adaptive system's symbolic layer loses its coupling to the substrate it evolved to coordinate.
Powell argues that war inherently increases entropy — it destroys productive capacity and consumes energy with zero productive output. Geopolitical conflicts, he suggests, can be understood as struggling systems attempting to violently secure remaining high-return energy sources as their own internal efficiency declines.
CAMS has tested this empirically and arrived at a sharper version of the same claim. Our Direct Influence Graph analysis finds that Shield — the security and defence node — consistently ranks seventh out of eight nodes in predicting societal coordination across every society we have tested: the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and others. If military capacity were the primary driver of civilisational stability, we would expect Shield to rank first or second. It does not. It ranks near last.
What we find instead is that Shield activates downstream of metabolic stress. When Stewards capacity collapses — when the rentier class exhausts its buffers and Lore-Archive coupling prevents internal recovery — the system exports stress through military expansion. Across 494 civilisation-years and four societies, rentier buffer collapse predicts a mean Shield activation increase of +0.468 over five years, with a 66.7% probability of escalation compared to 39.9% in normal periods. The worse the rentier crisis, the more violent the export: severe crises produce 492% more kinetic escalation than mild ones.
Powell's observation that wars in West Asia reflect declining domestic energetic efficiency is, in CAMS terms, an instance of the rentier-crisis-to-kinetic-export pathway. The system does not choose war in any meaningful sense. The thermodynamic pressure accumulates, the internal release valves fail, and the stress exits through the only remaining pathway with sufficient bandwidth. Shield is not a cause. It is a symptom.
Powell makes a point that cuts against the prevailing techno-optimism: information is not inherently productive. Misinformation, noise, and the enormous energy demands of AI data centres can consume surplus while yielding diminishing returns — the Ouroboros eating its own tail.
CAMS captures this through the Lore and Archive nodes. Lore represents the knowledge, education, and meaning-making institutions of a society. Archive represents memory, records, and institutional continuity. When these nodes are functioning well, they generate the symbolic coherence that allows the rest of the system to coordinate across different timescales and domains. When they malfunction — when Lore produces noise rather than signal, when Archive loses institutional memory — the system's capacity for self-correction degrades.
The empirical signature is clear: when Lore-Archive coupling weakens, the system loses its capacity to legitimate internal stress relief. Debt crises that could be resolved through institutional renegotiation instead metastasise into kinetic export, because the symbolic machinery that would facilitate a jubilee, a redistribution, or even a coherent narrative of shared sacrifice has broken down.
Powell's warning about the entropic cost of information systems is a warning about Lore dysfunction. When a society's knowledge institutions consume vast resources while producing fragmentation rather than coordination, the energetic cost is real. The thermodynamic accounting does not care whether the joules were spent on useful computation or on generating and combating disinformation. Energy spent is energy unavailable for maintaining coordination.
This is perhaps the deepest point of agreement, and the one most likely to be misunderstood. Both Powell and CAMS insist that civilisational crisis is not fundamentally a story about bad leaders, corrupt institutions, or ideological failure. It is a coordination phase transition driven by structural constraints.
In Powell's framework, the constraint is declining EROI — the diminishing energetic return on the work required to extract and process energy. In CAMS, it is rate dispersion exceeding coupling capacity — the institutional nodes of a society operating at such incompatible speeds that no achievable level of coupling can keep them synchronised.
The result is identical: a system that enters crisis not because anyone willed it, but because the structural conditions for coordination have been exceeded. The leader who presides over a civilisational phase transition is not the cause of that transition any more than the captain of a ship is the cause of the storm. They may respond well or badly, but the weather is not their doing.
This framing is politically inconvenient. It removes the satisfying possibility of blame. It makes it harder to construct the good-versus-evil narratives that drive political mobilisation. But it has the considerable advantage of being closer to what the data actually show.
Powell's work sits within a broader tradition that challenges the competitive geopolitical framing — the assumption that what is bad for China must be good for America, that Russian decline serves Western interests, that international relations is fundamentally zero-sum.
CAMS provides quantitative backing for this challenge. Our cross-society analysis shows that ideologically opposed societies face identical thermodynamic constraints. The DIG patterns — the structural influence rankings of institutional nodes — are remarkably consistent across the United States, China, Russia, and others. Flow and Stewards rank highest everywhere. Shield ranks seventh everywhere. The coordination physics do not vary with ideology.
More directly: when we test trade war dynamics, we find mutual metabolic harm. Sanctions and trade restrictions increase Flow stress in both societies simultaneously. Geopolitical competition, measured in CAMS terms, is thermodynamically self-destructive. Both participants damage their own metabolic cores while attempting to damage their rival's.
Powell's thermoeconomic framework implies the same conclusion from a different angle. If all industrial civilisations depend on the same energy gradient, and that gradient is declining for everyone, then the dominant strategic question is not how to outcompete rivals for a shrinking surplus. It is how to coordinate the management of shared constraints. The physics makes cooperation rational in a way that transcends ideology.
Powell's framework is, at this stage, primarily theoretical and discursive. Thermodynamics in a Time of Monsters makes its case through argument, historical analogy, and conceptual synthesis. This is legitimate intellectual work, and the argument is strong.
CAMS has taken a different path: derivation from first principles, followed by quantitative empirical testing across 18 societies, approximately 2,267 society-years, and 19,141 observation rows, scored independently by three AI assessors. The claims are falsifiable, and several have been falsified and retired. The framework is not a metaphor. It is an instrument.
This is not a criticism of Powell. It is a description of complementarity. His framework provides the macro-narrative and the political-economic grounding. CAMS provides the measurement architecture and the empirical test bed. The two approaches would be stronger in conversation than in isolation.
Powell's decision to self-publish — his critique of academic gatekeeping — also resonates. CAMS has been developed and published outside the traditional journal pipeline, for many of the same reasons. The knowledge should reach the people who need it, at prices they can pay, on timescales that matter. If the thermodynamic crisis is as real as both frameworks suggest, we do not have the luxury of waiting for peer review's stately pace to deliver the diagnosis.
Dr Warwick Powell and the CAMS project are working the same seam from different shafts. The ontology converges: societies are metabolic, not narrative. The diagnosis converges: crisis is structural, not moral. The prognosis converges: cooperation is thermodynamically rational; competition is thermodynamically ruinous. The political implication converges: Sinophobia and Russophobia are not strategic analysis — they are stress projection from systems whose own metabolic cores are under strain.
None of this makes the present situation less dangerous. Knowing the physics of a storm does not stop the wind. But it does change what counts as a rational response. And the rational response, both frameworks agree, begins with acknowledging that every complex society on Earth faces the same coordination problem — and that solving it together is not idealism. It is thermodynamics.
Kari Freyr McKern is the developer of the Complex Adaptive Model of Societies (CAMS) and publishes at neuralnations.org and the Complex Adaptive Humans newsletter on LinkedIn.