The following article tries to answer a simple question. If state-corporate power now shapes so much of modern life, where do we begin to reclaim our sovereignty?  

This power increasingly relies on an emerging digital control grid.

This grid is built from cashless transactions, biometric ID and ubiquitous surveillance, fusing payment systems, identity systems and monitoring into a single architecture of compliance. It is sold to the public by turning convenience into fate.  

First, it offers speed. Then it offers ease. Then it makes those things feel indispensable. Before long, dependence passes for common sense. The environment reshapes the inhabitant until the habitat feels like the only reality.  

The answer lies not just in saying ‘no’ but in building a parallel way of living, already visible in fragments across allotments, co-operatives, farms, kitchens, village halls and local markets. It is already being lived wherever people still grow, share, repair and eat outside the scripts of the supermarket and the platform.  

Ivan Illich argued that tools must serve people. In Britain, allotments still carry that truth in the soil. They are working places of sovereignty where people grow, save, compost, swap and learn in public, with knowledge shared by word of mouth.  

The same spirit lives in seed swaps and seed libraries, where open-pollinated seed stays in circulation and the power to reproduce food remains with those who grow it. It lives in places such as Transition Town Totnes and in co-operatives like Suma, which have shown for decades that food distribution does not have to follow supermarket logic. Beyond Britain, similar principles appear wherever communities preserve local seed, rebuild soils or organise food production around cooperation rather than dependency.  

James C Scott understood what states and corporations dislike most: people who cannot be fully mapped. Cash still matters for that reason. In farmers’ markets, village shops, roadside stalls and countless everyday exchanges, it keeps trade direct and local. It allows producers and buyers to deal with one another without every transaction becoming another stream of data to be processed, monitored and controlled.  

Allotments demonstrate the point. Seed, advice, timing, pest control and experience circulate informally. There is power in that autonomy. It is an ordinary form of cooperation that, on the surface at least, does not even resemble resistance.  

Guy Debord wrote about the Spectacle, where people are trained to watch life instead of live it. Community-supported agriculture bucks the trend and is a practical form of refusal. Farms such as Tablehurst and Stroud Community Agriculture have built direct relationships between growers and eaters. Food becomes part of a living relationship. The same principle can be seen in buying groups, food co-operatives, farmers’ markets and neighbourhood veg-box schemes. You stop being a customer and become part of a food culture.  

A parallel system does not need a majority to survive. It only needs enough committed people to make it real. We see it in community-owned shops, repair cafés, tool libraries and local bakehouses, where competence is rebuilt simply by doing things together.  

At the biological level, the same principle holds. Heritage breeds, open-pollinated seed, local ferments, artisanal cheeses, traditional processing and microbial diversity all resist the standardisation on which corporate-controlled systems depend. They remind us that life is healthiest when diversity is allowed to flourish rather than be engineered into uniformity.  

There is a different reality in plain view, built from the ground up. Meanwhile, the emerging order promises convenience by eliminating the friction of existence while drawing us ever more deeply into systems that monitor, predict and control behaviour. We become users of a pre-scripted reality, encouraged to mistake efficiency or the trap of convenience for freedom.  

The new open access (free) book The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power traces how enclosure has evolved from the initial concept of enclosing common land to encompass almost every aspect of modern life. From land, food cultivation and culture to public space, digital infrastructure, data harvesting and biological resources, the push to enclose, homogenise (flatten) and commodify every aspect of life has become the defining political economy of our time.  

This is wrapped in an ideology of ‘there is no alternative’ whereby even thinking and the imagination become enclosed. But the response is not necessarily found in grand political gestures. It begins wherever people recover the capacity to grow food, repair tools, exchange knowledge, save seed, support local producers and organise collectively.  

These are not retreats from modern life, nor gestures of nostalgia. As the book shows, they are the living groundwork of sovereignty: practical, collective and already here in ordinary acts that refuse dependence. The question is not whether such forms can exist but whether enough of us will choose to strengthen them before the surrounding system makes itself feel totally inevitable.  

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s substack, https://substack.com/@colintodhunter.

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