Inversion and Decay in Modern Systems
Every system begins with a story: it exists to serve people. To make life easier, better, more meaningful. Over time, many of these systems flip. The story remains, but the function reverses. The individual now serves the system.
This inversion is structural, not accidental. It shows up in bureaucracies, workplaces, economies, and digital platforms. The institution that once answered to human needs becomes the thing to which humans must adapt. What was built to serve life becomes something life is spent maintaining.
This phenomenon can be called Human Inversion.
Human Inversion is the process by which systems originally designed to serve human needs gradually reverse their polarity—repurposing human lives to serve the system’s internal logic. It’s not a failure of design, but the consequence of systemic inertia, feedback loops, and growth pressures.
The inversion unfolds in predictable stages.
The Four Stages of Human Inversion
- Service – The system fulfills a human purpose.
- Stabilization – The system develops rules and structure.
- Reversal – The individual adapts to system logic.
- Extraction – Human life is mined to maintain system momentum.
When a system begins asking, “What can you give?” instead of “What do you need?”—it has inverted.
Bullshit Jobs
A bullshit job is one that feels pointless even to the person doing it. David Graeber identified these roles as a symptom of bureaucratic self-preservation. They include middle managers with nothing to manage, compliance officers checking boxes no one reads, and flunkies whose main task is to make others feel important.
These jobs exist not to meet real needs, but to simulate relevance. They serve the image of a functioning system. Once work becomes untethered from necessity, appearance becomes the product. The job isn’t to do anything meaningful—it’s to justify the machine’s continued operation.
This is a core expression of Human Inversion: the job no longer serves life; life is reorganized to preserve the job.
Enshittification
Enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow, is the process by which digital platforms degrade. It begins with value creation. Users are courted with utility, access, and freedom. As the platform scales, it begins to serve business clients—advertisers, sellers, data brokers. Eventually, it turns inward. The platform begins extracting from both groups, warping the user experience to sustain profit.
What was once clean becomes crowded. What was once intuitive becomes manipulative. Metrics replace meaning. The system optimizes not for users, but for itself. Its core becomes extraction dressed as innovation.
This is Human Inversion in digital form: platforms no longer empower users—they extract from them to sustain system logic.
Embedded Growth Obligations
Growth becomes mandatory. Eric Weinstein’s Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO) describes how institutions internalize the need for continuous expansion. They can’t stay still. Their structure depends on forward motion—revenue, headcount, engagement, GDP. Without it, they destabilize.
When organic growth dries up, simulation takes its place. Bullshit jobs multiply. Platforms enshittify. The system begins to consume itself in order to appear alive. What began as a tool for coordination becomes a trap of momentum. It must keep moving, even if it’s no longer going anywhere.
This is where the mechanics meet perception. What looks like institutional decay is often the system following its internal rules under constraint. To see it clearly, the lens has to widen. The structure isn’t just what the system does—it’s how it sees, when it moves, and who it answers to.
Timing as Systemic Intelligence
A system’s intelligence is revealed in its timing. Not just what it mediates—but when. Some tensions require immediate adjustment. Others need patience, friction, delay. Systems that misread tempo become fragile. They force solutions where none are ready. They wait too long where intervention is urgent.
When timing fails, urgency tends to win—urgency in defense of the system, not in service of the individual. Mediation becomes reflex, not rhythm. Healthy systems know how to sequence, how to absorb, how to hold competing needs without collapsing.
A system that cannot regulate timing has lost its responsiveness—another marker of Human Inversion.
Perception and Blind Spots
Systems can only act on what they perceive. What isn’t seen doesn’t exist, structurally. Blind spots are inevitable, but when they become embedded, they shape outcomes. Suffering persists. Dysfunction persists. But the machine doesn’t register it.
Narrow perception leads to narrow mediation. The system begins to interpret everything through its own logic, seeing only its own inputs and outputs. It doesn’t just miss the signals—it stops believing there’s anything outside the frame worth seeing.
This is how Human Inversion sustains itself: by shrinking perception to what reinforces the system’s logic.
Power Shapes the Frame
Every act of mediation happens under asymmetry. Power decides what becomes visible, which tensions rise to the surface, and how they get named. Not everyone gets to frame the problem. Some voices shape the field. Others are never heard at all.
Systems built under growth pressure concentrate this power. Those who manage expansion gain control over narrative, attention, and tempo. They decide when a conflict is real, when it’s inconvenient, and when it should be buried. The question of individual versus system doesn’t arise neutrally—it’s shaped by whoever owns the lens.
In inverted systems, power doesn’t just speak—it defines reality.
Language as Diagnosis
What isn’t named can’t be resisted. Systems that control perception often control language—or try to. But some language escapes.
Bullshit jobs and enshittification aren’t casual terms. They’re precise. Vulgar because the reality is vulgar. These words bypass euphemism. They strip off the professional gloss. They say clearly what softer language can’t: that something once human has become inverted and absurd.
The words are a form of clarity. They’re not just descriptive. They’re a refusal to play along.
They are acts of resistance against Human Inversion itself.
Recognizing the Threshold
Systems invert quietly. They don’t collapse when they fail to serve people—they adapt. They harden. They simulate. The glow remains, but the core is gone. Jobs keep going. Platforms keep loading. But the logic has flipped.
There’s a threshold: the moment when a system crosses from life-serving to life-consuming. Past this point, the individual becomes a unit of extraction. The system no longer asks, “What do you need?” It asks, “What can you give?” And if the answer is nothing, you’re in the way.
Recognition is the first act of agency. Not repair. Not reform. Just seeing it clearly, without softening the edges. Once seen, the terms change. Language loosens. Possibilities open. Not immediately—but eventually.
This is the first break in the spell of Human Inversion.
The Need for Complementarity
The individual and the system are not inherently at odds. They are interdependent, but often unevenly so. The inversion occurs when this relationship hardens—when adaptation gives way to obedience, and flexibility is replaced by extraction.
When systems are healthy, mediation flows both ways. The individual corrects the system. The system supports the individual. Sometimes one must yield. Sometimes the other must resist. The balance is never static. It has to be felt, worked, contested.
This struggle isn’t a failure of design. It is the design. Intelligence lives in the tension—knowing when to serve, when to lead, and when to step back. Not perfectly. Not once and for all. But well enough to keep the whole thing alive.
And that’s the real threshold. Not whether the system has inverted—but whether anyone is still paying attention to what it was for.
