We started by gathering.
Beneath civilization's visible face lies a material world, rebuilt every day.
We extract, process, transport, create value, accumulate - then set the accumulation moving again.
As the parts grow, the whole gets harder to see: resources turn into the economy, the economy into wealth, wealth into markets; each layer speaks its own language while the link between them fades.
We began by gathering food and materials to keep warm; today the entire value of a year's worth of what we pull from the planet changes hands in the financial markets in about 6 hours.
Civilization Dynamics traces that link as a single system, in numbers, and every figure on this site comes from published official data.
What is pulled from the planet?
How is what's extracted processed, hauled and turned into value?
How does created value accumulate, and in whose hands?
How do accumulated wealth and expectations about the future move again?
The cybernetic transformation running from the first grain store at Göbekli Tepe to the nanosecond fibre-optic order lines of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
Turn the four valves and watch which layer breaks first, find out for yourself that there is no simple fix.
The madness of creatures digging into the ground every day, melting metals in factories and spinning abstract numbers on screens, measured through an alien's eyes.