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Unscarcity Research

Why Bronze Age Civilizations Collapsed in 50 Years (1200 BCE)

Mycenae, the Hittites, and Ugarit all fell within 50 years. The common flaw: palace economies with zero redundancy. What this teaches about AI centralization.

10 min read 2200 words /a/palace-economies

Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Palace Economies: When the Center Cannot Hold

Why the most sophisticated AI on Earth might repeat the same mistake that erased civilizations 3,200 years ago.

Sometime around 1200 BCE, the ancient world experienced what can only be described as a civilizational hard drive crash. Within about fifty years, every major Bronze Age power—the Mycenaeans, the Hittites, the Ugaritic city-states, even mighty Egypt (though she survived in weakened form)—collapsed like a row of very expensive dominoes. Cities that had stood for centuries burned. Writing systems vanished. Trade networks that once connected Babylon to Crete evaporated. The Mediterranean went dark for four hundred years.

What killed them? Not a single cause, but a perfect storm—earthquakes, droughts, invasions, internal revolts—all hammering societies that had one fatal flaw in common.

They had built brilliant, hyper-centralized palace economies. And when the palaces fell, everything fell with them.

This matters now because we’re building something eerily similar. We call it “the cloud.” We call it “AI infrastructure.” We call it progress. But the ghosts of Mycenae have a warning for us—if we’re smart enough to listen.

The Palace as Operating System

Here’s how the Bronze Age worked, and I mean this literally: clay tablets ran the economy.

The Mycenaean palace at Pylos employed scribes who scratched meticulous records in a script called Linear B—lists of sheep (one-third of all Knossos tablets are just sheep records), wool allocations, grain distributions, bronze inventories. We have over 6,000 of these tablets. They reveal an economy that would make a Soviet central planner weep with joy.

The palace didn’t just participate in the economy. The palace was the economy.

Everything flowed through it: raw materials came in (wool, flax, bronze), were assigned to workers through a system called tarasija (production targets with allocated resources), and finished goods came out. The palace collected mandatory contributions from the surrounding territories—grain, oil, livestock—and redistributed them as rations to specialists, officials, soldiers, and priests. No money changed hands. No markets set prices. The palace knew what you needed, gave you what you needed, and expected exactly what it demanded.

This was shockingly efficient. It organized agriculture across entire regions. It coordinated labor for monumental construction projects. It maintained trade networks stretching from Afghanistan (lapis lazuli) to Scandinavia (amber). The Hittites leveraged their centralized bureaucracy and highway system to build the first empire based in Anatolia.

And then it didn’t work anymore.

The Collapse: When One Node Goes Down, Everything Goes Down

Between roughly 1225 and 1175 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean experienced what archaeologist Eric Cline describes as “a cacophony of catastrophes.” In his book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Cline documents:

  • An earthquake storm: Geophysicist Amos Nur’s research revealed a rapid-fire series of major earthquakes striking the region over fifty years
  • Climate collapse: Tree-ring and isotope analysis now confirms a severe drought from around 1198-1196 BCE—three consecutive years of crop failure that shattered the Hittite tax base and starved their enormous army
  • The Sea Peoples: Mysterious invaders (possibly climate refugees themselves) who raided from Egypt to Anatolia
  • Systems collapse: What happens when you stack Jenga blocks too high

Here’s the crucial insight: any one of these catastrophes might have been survivable. Droughts happen. Earthquakes happen. Invasions happen. Civilizations that aren’t too brittle bend and recover.

But palace economies were architecturally incapable of bending.

As archaeologist Alan Greaves puts it: “A short, sharp drought would be enough to topple a very centralized state based heavily on grain and the gathering in and distribution of agricultural goods.” When the palace burned, there was no backup system. No alternative distribution network. No local capacity to coordinate without central direction. The scribes who knew how to read Linear B died or fled. The knowledge of how to manage the economy was the palace—and when the palace fell, the knowledge went with it.

The Late Bronze Age collapse wasn’t just an economic failure. It was a categorical failure—the kind that happens when a single point of control becomes a single point of failure.

The Cloud Looks a Lot Like a Palace

Fast forward 3,200 years. We’ve built something called “cloud computing.” Let’s examine what that actually means.

Three companies—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—control roughly two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure. If you’re reading this on the internet, traffic almost certainly passed through at least one of them. If you’re using AI, the model was probably trained on their servers.

On October 20, 2025, AWS experienced a cascade failure. A DNS race condition—a single technical glitch—rippled through dependent services. Binance and KuCoin users couldn’t access their cryptocurrency. Countless applications failed. And here’s the part that should make you nervous: many of AWS’s own back-end systems rely on the same services AWS provides to customers. DynamoDB, their database service, couldn’t route data properly, which prevented AWS from tracking virtual machines, which prevented them from managing virtual machines… you see where this goes.

In June 2025, Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) service failed—the gatekeeper system that authenticates users and enforces access policies. Over fifty services went down globally for seven hours. Cloudflare, Spotify, Snapchat, Discord—all affected by one internal failure in one centralized system.

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare itself experienced a global outage. ChatGPT, X (Twitter), Canva, and countless other platforms went down. Downdetector recorded over 11,000 outage reports at peak. The kicker? Affected organizations had no remediation options. They couldn’t fail over. They couldn’t route around. They couldn’t even diagnose the problem beyond “Cloudflare is down.” They were entirely dependent on Cloudflare’s engineers—just as Mycenaean towns were entirely dependent on palace scribes.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment explicitly warns about this: AI systems supporting critical infrastructure represent both a benefit and a catastrophic vulnerability. What happens when the thing managing your food distribution, your power grid, your healthcare logistics… crashes?

The “Earth OS” Fantasy and Its Fatal Flaw

There’s a seductive vision floating around techno-optimist circles: a single, benevolent, all-knowing AI that manages Earth’s resources with perfect efficiency. Call it Earth OS. Call it the World Computer. Call it whatever glossy name makes the pitch deck look good.

The argument goes like this: if one AI coordinates everything—energy, food, manufacturing, logistics—we eliminate waste, optimize globally, solve climate change, and enter post-scarcity. It’s the palace economy scaled to planetary dimensions, but run by something smarter than Bronze Age scribes.

This is exactly the architecture that killed the Mycenaeans.

It doesn’t matter how smart your coordinating system is. It matters how many of them you have. A single point of coordination is a single point of failure—period. The palace at Pylos was, by Bronze Age standards, astonishingly capable. It tracked thousands of sheep. It managed complex production quotas. It coordinated labor and trade across a region. It was brilliant right up until the moment it was burned, and then the civilization it coordinated went dark for four centuries.

There is no level of AI intelligence that eliminates the fragility of centralization. You can’t algorithm your way out of topology.

Polycentric Governance: Elinor Ostrom’s Antidote

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics—for research that would have made the palace scribes deeply uncomfortable.

Why does this matter? For decades, economists assumed that shared resources had only two possible fates: either private ownership (markets) or government control (central planning). Ostrom proved there was a third way that often worked better than either.

Her life’s work demonstrated something counterintuitive: decentralized, community-managed systems often outperform centralized bureaucracies. Fishing villages managing their own waters. Irrigation communities allocating their own water. Forests maintained by local users rather than distant ministries.

She called this polycentric governance—multiple overlapping centers of decision-making, each with some autonomy, coordinating through mutual adjustment rather than central command. Think less “one palace to rule them all” and more “federation of villages that talk to each other.”

Her key insight: redundancy isn’t waste. It’s resilience.

If one village’s fishing practices fail, neighboring villages can adapt. Knowledge isn’t concentrated in one palace that can burn. Authority isn’t vested in one system that can crash. The whole is robust because the parts are diverse and semi-independent.

This is the architectural principle Unscarcity builds on. The MOSAIC—Modular, Autonomous, Interconnected Communities—is essentially Ostrom’s polycentric governance applied to a post-labor economy. Thousands of Commons, each with local autonomy, coordinating through shared protocols (the Five Laws Axioms) rather than a central authority.

The key insight: When you have many semi-independent nodes that can talk to each other, the failure of any one node doesn’t bring down the whole system. The others adapt, compensate, and continue. When you have one central node that everything depends on, its failure is everyone’s failure.

The internet itself was designed this way. TCP/IP routes around damage. If one node fails, packets find another path. It’s the opposite of palace architecture—and it’s why a nuke hitting San Francisco doesn’t crash the global network.

What the Unscarcity Framework Gets Right

Let’s connect the historical lesson to the specific design choices in the Unscarcity blueprint:

The Commons instead of a single Palace: Each Commons manages its own Civic Layer—local resource allocation, local governance, local culture. If one Commons fails or makes bad decisions, others continue. Knowledge and coordination aren’t concentrated in one system that can crash.

The Diversity Guard: Major decisions require consensus across demonstrably different Commons. This isn’t just about politics—it’s about topology. A monoculture is fragile. Diversity creates redundancy. If everyone runs the same algorithm, everyone fails to the same bug.

Graceful Degradation: The framework explicitly designs for failure. If fusion delays, solar continues. If AI coordination fails, human Guilds maintain capacity. If one layer of the system crashes, others provide fallback. The Unscarcity book includes a detailed analysis of these degradation modes.

The Cognitive Field as Optional Infrastructure: Consciousness-sharing technology is offered as an enhancement, not a dependency. You can participate in Unscarcity civilization without ever connecting to the Field—because any single technological layer could fail.

Impact Points decay by design: The Five Laws Axiom IV (“Power Must Decay”) prevents any individual, community, or institution from accumulating permanent centralized authority. This isn’t just about fairness—it’s about preventing the concentration that makes systems brittle.

The Lesson for AI Builders

If you’re building AI systems for critical infrastructure—and increasingly, everything is critical infrastructure—the Bronze Age has a message:

Don’t build palaces. Build ecosystems.

This means:

  • Decentralized cloud infrastructure that distributes compute across independent nodes
  • Edge computing that reduces dependency on central services
  • Multi-cloud strategies that don’t bet everything on one provider
  • Local caching and offline functionality for essential services
  • Human-in-the-loop fallbacks for AI coordination systems

It means designing systems that assume something will fail—because something always does. Earthquakes happen. Droughts happen. Cyberattacks happen. Solar flares happen. And when they do, you want a federation, not a palace.

The Hittites had highways, trained bureaucracy, extensive diplomatic networks. They were, by Bronze Age standards, highly advanced. And they were catastrophically vulnerable when multiple crises converged, because every capability depended on the same centralized core.

Conclusion: The Palace Always Falls

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes—and right now, our cloud architecture is rhyming with Mycenae, our AI centralization rhyming with Hattusa, our dependence on three hyperscalers rhyming with the trade networks that collapsed when the palace scribes died.

We’re building, with the most advanced technology ever created, the same fundamental mistake that erased civilizations 3,200 years ago: putting everything under one roof (or one data center, or one AI system) and calling it efficiency.

Efficiency isn’t the same as resilience. Optimization isn’t the same as robustness. The most optimized system often has the least margin for error.

The Unscarcity framework—with its federated Commons, its polycentric MOSAIC, its explicit design for graceful degradation—isn’t just a political or economic philosophy. It’s an engineering decision informed by 3,200 years of evidence about what happens when centralization meets catastrophe.

Maria’s grandchildren will live in a world of AI and automation and abundance. The question is whether that world looks like a thousand interconnected villages—robust, diverse, resilient—or like a single gleaming palace waiting for the earthquake that always comes.

Build ecosystems. Not palaces.

References

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