The Uncivilize method is designed to gain clarity, imagine ways for personal and systemic change and explore how to make them real

How do we break free?

The change we need is deep, and all-encompassing. Many of us grew up as consumers in our capitalistic culture. It shaped the way we look at the world. We live and breathe its values, and reinforce them everyday in the way we eat, learn, care, rest, create, and work together.

How can we possibly change a global system, that is so deeply engrained in us?

Where do we even begin? Where do we find the energy, in a system that is designed to exhaust? That makes us believe our only power lies in our role as consumers? And that creates the illusion that we need to solve it all on our own?

Why Uncivilize

We are living through a polycrisis.

Climate change. Biodiversity loss. Pollution. Social fragmentation. Burnout. A quiet but growing sense that, despite all our advances, life is not getting better in the ways that matter.

These crises are usually treated as separate problems, each waiting for its own technical solution. Uncivilize believes they share a common root, and at the heart of it lies distance.

Distance between everyday life and the things that sustain it; food, energy, materials, land, care, community, meaning. What was once close, visible, and shared has been stretched across long chains of production, logistics, finance, and control.

This distance is not accidental. It is a defining feature of what we call Global Mode: industrial society organized around scale, abstraction, and growth.

Uncivilize feels this mode of organizing life has reached its limits, but there are other modes available to us, even when we don't always acknowledge them, to help imagine better ways of being.

Why the story of progress is breaking down

The modern story of progress rests on two foundations.

The first is material: a one-time energy surplus. Fossil fuels gave industrial society access to extraordinary amounts of cheap energy in a very short period of time. This allowed work, production, transport, and coordination to scale far beyond what human and ecological systems could normally support. Expansion felt natural. Growth felt inevitable.

The second is cultural: a worldview shaped by the Enlightenment. Nature became something to exploit. Society and labor something to optimize. Distance, abstraction, and control became markers of advancement.

Together, these forces produced what we now recognize as Global Mode, a way of living that separates production from consumption, decisions from consequences, and value from lived experience.

For decades, the returns were undeniable. More energy and scale produced more food, more goods, longer lives, and unprecedented material comfort.

That dynamic is now reversing.

As resources become harder to extract and ecosystems degrade, each additional layer of energy, infrastructure, and coordination delivers less benefit than the last. More effort is spent maintaining systems than improving life. Costs that were once hidden like; climate damage, pollution, health impacts, biodiversity loss, are becoming unavoidable.

Even if energy were clean, cheap, and abundant, it would still be used to fuel more growth: more production, more systems, more infrastructure, and more coordination. That means more mining, more land use, more geopolitical tension, and more pressure on people to keep up, produce, and consume.

More energy (even green energy) doesn’t remove limits, it accelerates how fast we run into them.

At the same time, decades of wellbeing and public health research show a clear pattern: economic growth improves life up to a point. Beyond that point, its returns on health, satisfaction, and social trust weaken, while environmental and social costs accelerate.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one, pointing to something deeper in our systems, not temporary setbacks, but underlying conditions shaping the crises we live in.

Global Mode; industrial society organized around distance and perpetual growth, sits at the root of the polycrisis.

Four modes of living

Across history, humans have organized life through four modes. These are not identities or ideologies. They are distinct ways of living, modes that shape how food, energy, care, work, and meaning are produced and shared.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

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Continuity, Not Stages

These modes are not historical stages that disappeared.

They continue to be practiced today; as complete ways of life by Indigenous and tribal communities, off-grid and rural homesteaders, and intentional communities around the world.

They also persist within modern life in quieter ways: They are baked into our bodies and memories, in folklore and traditions, childhood experiences, in play and hobbies, in acts of making and caring, or in moments when life felt more grounded, shared, and meaningful.

Uncivilize begins from the assumption that we are not inventing something new, but relearning how different ways of living feel, and how they might coexist again.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

Steps to consumption

To understand how Modes operates, and why Global Mode today produces diminishing returns, Uncivilize introduces a central concept: steps to consumption.

Steps to consumption describe how many transformations lie between a natural resource and everyday use: material processing, energy input, transport, coordination, finance, regulation, and control.

They also describe how far everyday life is separated from the acts that sustain it.

In Wild Mode, steps approach zero. Consumption is immediate or lightly prepared and the exchange with nature is respectful and reciprocal.

In Domestic Mode, steps increase through cultivation, storage, and preparation, but remain human-scaled and legible.

In Local Mode, steps expand through specialization and trade, yet remain traceable within a place or bioregion.

In Global Mode, steps multiply beyond comprehension. Simple actions depend on vast, opaque systems like global supply-chains, financial markets and artificial intelligence.

Each additional step increases material throughput, but it also increases abstraction. As steps multiply, everyday life becomes further removed from the sources of sustenance, effort, and consequence. Participation gives way to consumption. Understanding to convenience.

As long as energy was cheap and abundant, adding steps produced extraordinary gains. But steps compound. Over time, more energy and effort are required not to improve life, but to sustain complexity itself. Risk grows faster than resilience. Skills are outsourced. Agency thins out.

BUT ENERGY IS NO LONGER CHEAP, RESOURCES ARE FINITE, AND PEOPLE DON'T THRIVE UNDER INCREASING PRESSURE AND POLARIZATION

This is where the idea of civilization begins to invert.

More steps do not automatically produce more wellbeing. While fewer steps mean less energy, fewer materials, and less strain on the living world, fewer steps bring everyday life back into contact with effort, care, and consequence.

Reducing distance is the means. Rebuilding connection is the end.

Three vital spaces

To understand where this inversion takes hold, and where change is possible, Uncivilize distinguishes between three vital spaces: the arenas where life is shaped and power operates.

Inner Space: Your personal notions, stories, beliefs and ideas, the things that define and motivate you.

Living Space: Daily life: homes, tools, habits, skills, rituals, care, social practices.

Environmental Space: The landscapes we inhabit and depend on: ecosystems, neighborhoods, commons, infrastructure, built environments.

System Space: The abstract structures that organize society: finance, law, policy, standards, institutions, cultural norms.

With access to cheap energy (fossil fuels) and the enlightenment mindset, Global Mode came to dominate all three spaces, through four mechanisms:

Indoctrination: by replacing religion with the scientific method (nihilistic worldview) and individualism (is this rooted in the individual/humanitary rights) and later by advertisement, we created a self centered narrative where the individual has 'the right' to happiness that's satisfied by material wealth…

Commodification: In living space, care became a service, food a commodity, skill something outsourced. This commodification has displaced Domestic Mode.
Extraction: In environmental space, land became an asset, ecosystems a resource, extraction the norm. Natural systems in Wild Mode have largely been exhausted.
Industrialization: In system space, growth became the overriding goal shaping rules, investment, and success. The place based economies and businesses in Local Mode could simply not compete.

Other modes were not eliminated, they were pushed to the margins, informalized, or made invisible.

Yet they persist wherever people shorten distance and reclaim participation: in community gardens, neighborhood energy cooperatives, repair cafés, shared workshops, craft revival, and countless everyday practices.

“If this is where our systems have taken us, we need a way to see what a different path looks like, that’s what the Method does.”

The Uncivilize method

Uncivilize is a method for seeing differently, and for carefully reshaping how different ways of living relate to one another.

It does not begin with fixed solutions or abstract ideals. It works through practice, comparison, and synthesis, moving from lived experience to systems, and back again.

The method unfolds in three movements.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

1. Loosen the Grip

The first step is to loosen the hold of assumptions that feel normal or inevitable.

We use the four modes as ways of seeing, as lenses that help us see our current reality for what it is and to reveal alternatives hidden in plain sight.

We ask questions like:

  • What would this look like if Domestic Mode shaped it?

  • What if Local Mode organised this instead?

  • What becomes possible when Wild Mode has room again?

  • Where has Global Mode overreached?

This helps us prepare our inner space, to let go of the dominant story and open our minds to a much larger pool of wisdom and ideas. These questions create distance from business-as-usual thinking. They help designers, institutions, and communities recognize where convenience has replaced participation, or where scale has come at the cost of care.

Loosening the grip is not about critique for its own sake. It is about reopening imagination — especially for those working deep inside dominant systems.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

2. Start Where Life Is

Rather than beginning with policy or strategy, Uncivilize starts in living space — where life is actually experienced.

Change is explored through concrete practices: tools, skills, products, services, rituals, infrastructures, and everyday habits. This makes alternatives tangible and testable before they become ideological.

From there, the work expands outward:

  • How would this function in a specific place, landscape, or community?
    (environmental space)

  • What rules, investments, or institutions would need to shift to support it?
    (system space)

This sequence — life → environment → system — grounds change in reality. It allows ideas to gain legitimacy through use, adaptation, and shared experience, rather than through abstract persuasion.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

3. Synthesize, Don’t Replace

Uncivilize does not advocate returning to the past or replacing one mode with another.

The goal is synthesis.

After exploring different modes, we look closely at what works in practice — what feels manageable, what creates value, what reduces harm, and what resonates in lived experience. From this, we consciously select elements worth carrying forward.

Each mode offers distinct strengths:

  • Wild Mode brings limits, reciprocity, and ecological attunement

  • Domestic Mode offers care, skill, rhythm, and autonomy

  • Local Mode creates shared infrastructure, trust, and collective meaning

  • Global Mode excels at coordination, knowledge-sharing, organisation, and support at scale

Synthesis brings these strengths into relationship. When modes are connected, new synergies emerge — ways of living that are materially lighter, socially richer, and more resilient than any single mode could produce on its own.

In this role, Global Mode shifts from dominating and extracting to enabling and supporting — providing coordination, research, branding, and legal and financial scaffolding in service of life at smaller scales.

The result is not a single solution, but many context-specific compositions — capable of generating multiple forms of value and evolving over time.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

What this is

The Uncivilize Method is used by:

  • Designers and makers questioning what, and who, their work serves

  • Communities rebuilding local capacity and shared infrastructure

  • Institutions and funders seeking credible pathways beyond extractive growth

  • Journalists and researchers looking for language for what is emerging

Uncivilize sits upstream of existing tools and frameworks. Where other methods optimize within a given logic, Uncivilize helps ask which logic should apply in the first place.

It can be combined with other approaches, including:

  • Doughnut Economics, when working in system space

  • Design and engineering methods, when prototyping in living space

  • Permaculture, ecological tools, and spatial planning, when working in environmental space

  • Transition frameworks, to pair top-down and bottom-up approaches

In practice, Uncivilize is explored through guided explorations and labs; spaces for surfacing assumptions, applying the modes, and carrying insights forward into prototypes, initiatives, and real-world experiments.

Together, this forms a method not for prescribing futures, but for creating the conditions in which better ways of living can emerge.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

Invitation

Uncivilize is a shared practice of paying attention, shortening distance, and rebuilding participation, in daily life, in communities, in nature and in the systems that shape them.

It does not claim a single future. It offers ways to explore viable ones.

If you sense that business-as-usual no longer makes sense, but don’t believe the answer is more of the same, then this work is for you.

The future will not be designed only in boardrooms or policy papers.

It will be grown, made, repaired, and practiced back into being.

Let’s get uncivilized.

Humanity’s story holds incredible wisdom — alternative ways of living that prioritize balance, fulfillment, and sustainability. Our ancestors — whether hunters, herders, or farmers — lived closer to their communities, their bodies, and the land, cultivating interdependent and reciprocal relationships.

These ways of life haven’t disappeared. They’re preserved in stories, museums, traditions, and hobbies. They continue to evolve in the lives of people outside the Global North — and in the growing movement of people reclaiming alternative lifestyles today.

We call these alternative ways of being “modes” — and we’ve identified four that offer a framework for imagining new paths forward. Each mode carries its own values, technologies, and rhythms: ways to step outside the logic of the global industrial system.

For many in the Global North, it’s extremely hard to acknowledge these alternatives because they are overshadowed by the dominant Global Mode — a system that thrives on displacing these alternatives through commodification.

More on Human Biology

Let's get Uncivilized!

We’re just getting started, and we’re looking for the right allies to shape this journey. If you’re a business at the edge of transformation, wondering how to grow without giving up what made your work meaningful—let’s talk. If you’re curious to test the Uncivilize framework in practice, we want to learn with you.

This is an open invitation to anyone ready to explore what comes after business-as-usual.

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Let's get Uncivilized!

We’re just getting started, and we’re looking for the right allies to shape this journey. If you’re a business at the edge of transformation, wondering how to grow without giving up what made your work meaningful—let’s talk. If you’re curious to test the Uncivilize framework in practice, we want to learn with you.

This is an open invitation to anyone ready to explore what comes after business-as-usual.

Let's get Uncivilized!

We’re just getting started, and we’re looking for the right allies to shape this journey. If you’re a business at the edge of transformation, wondering how to grow without giving up what made your work meaningful—let’s talk. If you’re curious to test the Uncivilize framework in practice, we want to learn with you.

This is an open invitation to anyone ready to explore what comes after business-as-usual.