The Metabolic Theory of Social Change

I've noticed a fascinating parallel between biological metabolic rates and societal information processing speeds that offers a new framework for understanding social change and institutional stability. Just as organisms with different metabolic rates experience and interact with time differently, societies with varying information processing speeds appear to operate on fundamentally different temporal scales.

This connection is novel because it goes beyond simple analogies to suggest a deeper structural similarity between biological and social systems. While we've long understood that smaller organisms with faster metabolisms experience time differently than larger organisms with slower metabolisms, we haven't applied this principle to understand how societies' information processing speeds affect their experience of time and their stability.

The mechanism appears to work like this: Just as metabolic rate determines how quickly an organism must respond to environmental changes, a society's information processing speed determines how quickly it can – and must – respond to changes in its environment. Traditional societies, with slower information processing speeds, tend to have more stable institutions and longer-lasting cultural patterns, much like large mammals with slow metabolisms tend to have longer lifespans. In contrast, our current digital society, with its unprecedented information processing speed, experiences rapid cultural changes and institutional instability, similar to how small mammals with fast metabolisms experience more rapid life cycles.

This insight has significant implications for how we think about social change and institutional design. It suggests that the instability we're experiencing in modern institutions isn't necessarily a flaw, but rather a natural consequence of our society's increased information processing speed. Just as an ecosystem needs organisms with both fast and slow metabolic rates, a healthy global society might need to maintain institutions that operate at different information processing speeds – some optimized for rapid adaptation and others for long-term stability.

This framework could help us design more resilient social systems by consciously creating institutions that operate at different temporal scales, rather than trying to force all institutions to keep pace with our fastest information processing capabilities.