How Systems Evolve After Legitimacy Fails

We’re not losing institutions. We’re losing belief in them. That changes everything about how systems evolve.

Media still publishes. Science still tests hypotheses. Consultants still give advice. Universities still confer degrees. Doctors still diagnose.

But none of these institutions command authority like they used to.

Their outputs still circulate, but the performances that once legitimated those outputs—peer review, op-eds, credentials, protocols—no longer land with the same force. We use the infrastructure, but we’ve stopped believing in the ritual.

This is not a collapse of function. It’s a collapse of legitimacy. And it is reconfiguring our systems in profound ways.

Where old systems once relied on consensus to operate, new systems are emerging that coordinate without consensus. They metabolise what came before: preserving function, discarding performance, embedding authority as infrastructure rather than theatre.

This is the deep pattern of our time. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The Metabolisation Pattern

Marshall McLuhan’s famous line—“the medium is the message”^⁠¹—is often read as a perceptual claim: that new media change how we see the world. But the deeper, more structural insight is this: New systems don’t destroy old ones—they absorb them.

Each new system contains the bones of the last. But more than that, it metabolises the legitimacy requirements of the old system—repurposing its infrastructure while discarding the performances that once made it credible.

Television didn’t kill radio. It absorbed radio’s scheduling logic and turned it into visual programming. Streaming didn’t kill TV. It metabolised television’s production infrastructure while shedding its reliance on linear broadcast. AI hasn’t killed writing. It now generates competent text without needing the credentials, bylines, or authority rituals that once legitimised it.

The pattern repeats: the function remains, but the performance dissolves. Authority becomes infrastructural. The system works not because we agree on who’s in charge—but because it no longer needs us to.

Understanding Legitimacy Exhaustion

This transformation happens at a specific tipping point we can call legitimacy exhaustion: the moment when sustaining institutional authority costs more than the coordination it enables.

Think about what institutions spend their resources on:

Universities devoting more budget to administration than teaching
Media companies investing more in credibility signalling than content creation
Consulting firms maintaining hierarchies that slow delivery without improving outcomes
Healthcare systems running compliance theatres that protect against liability but don’t prevent actual harm

When the cost of maintaining legitimacy exceeds its coordination value, systems evolve to function without it. This isn’t disruption in the classic sense—where a new player topples the old. It’s containment. The old system becomes a subsystem within a new logic of coordination.

Case Study 1: Science and the End of Consensus

Robert Boyle’s 17th-century air-pump experiments weren’t just about discovering truths—they were about staging them.^⁠² Scientific legitimacy depended on ritual: live demonstrations, elite audiences, polite disagreement, royal sanction. The lab was theatre as much as inquiry.

That model—truth as consensus performed for elites—is experiencing legitimacy exhaustion.

Today, science operates in an environment of post-consensus truth, a term sociologist Gil Eyal uses to describe our world: where expert disagreement is permanent, trust in institutions is fractured, and each attempt to restore authority only deepens the crisis.^⁠³

The institution persists. But its claim to sovereignty is metabolised.

The lab remains, but it is one node among many: public dashboards, Twitter preprints, crowdsourced reviews, simulation models, patient forums. Scientific authority has been folded into distributed diagnostics. It no longer functions because we believe—it functions despite disbelief.

The legitimacy overhead of peer review, institutional gatekeeping, and credentialed expertise has become too expensive relative to the coordination value it provides. Science continues, but through systems that work regardless of whether you trust the scientists.

Case Study 2: Consulting and the Shrinking Firm

Consulting has three quiet metabolisations, each driven by legitimacy exhaustion:

Knowledge Asymmetry: “I know something you don’t”, which ended when information became abundant
Project Delivery: “Here’s a problem, here’s your solution”, strained as problems became more complex than projects
Ecosystem Coordination: “Let’s align despite disagreement”, now emerging as the new model

The shift is driven by economic reality. Firms today are “growing commercially while shrinking operationally.” They’ve moved complexity into ecosystems—partners, platforms, regulators, cloud providers. Project-based consulting, which scaled with internal complexity, now faces legitimacy exhaustion: the cost of maintaining expertise authority exceeds its coordination value.

So consulting is shifting toward embedded stewardship. The consultant becomes not a sovereign authority performing expertise, but part of a larger coordination system that spans firms, institutions, and technologies.

Expertise becomes infrastructural, not performative. The PowerPoint is no longer the product. The product is influence, alignment, resolution—without consensus.

Case Study 3: AI and the Collapse of Expertise Rituals

Consider the analyst, the writer, the designer. Each once relied on legitimacy rituals: degrees, job titles, prestigious bylines, trust in institutional process.

Now, a large language model can output functional equivalents of memos, reports, strategies, summaries, and poems. Not because it’s smarter, but because it bypasses the rituals entirely.

The AI doesn’t need you to believe it. It just needs to be useful.

This is legitimacy exhaustion in action. The cost of maintaining credentialed expertise—hiring, training, managing credentials, performing authority—often exceeds the coordination value it provides. LLMs metabolise the function of expertise while dissolving its performances.

This is the same shift that vinyl cutters brought to the signwriter. Once a skilled artisan whose authority came from precision craftsmanship, traditional signwriting became a subsystem in a design-and-print pipeline.^⁠⁴ The craft persisted. The authority vanished.

The same is happening to knowledge work. The function remains, but the legitimacy requirements are being absorbed by systems that work without institutional credibility.

Case Study 4: Globalisation—Contained, Not Collapsed

Pundits say globalisation is ending. But that’s not quite right. What’s ending is the ideology of globalisation—the belief in a coherent, liberal, rules-based system of trade.

Globalisation 1.0 required enormous legitimacy overhead:^⁠⁵ international institutions, ideological consensus about free trade, coordinated policy frameworks across nations. This authority structure is experiencing legitimacy exhaustion—the cost of maintaining global governance consensus exceeds its coordination value.

We’ve shifted to Globalisation 2.0:^⁠⁶ geopolitically hedged, resilience-focused, pragmatic rather than ideological.

The WTO still exists
Cross-border trade continues
But coordination happens through supply chain realism, algorithmic signals, and strategic blocs—not grand consensus

The infrastructure itself—container ports, payment rails, logistics networks, digital standards—persists. The global system didn’t collapse. It was demoted. Its legitimacy was metabolised into new logics of coordination that function despite permanent disagreement about authority.

Case Study 5: Education and the Unbundling of Authority

Degrees still exist. Universities still teach. But more employers hire from portfolios, GitHub commits, or short-course credentials. Students learn from YouTube, Stack Overflow, Discord communities. Teachers remain—but the stage has changed.

The lecture persists. The performance of the lecturer’s authority does not.

This is classic legitimacy exhaustion: the cost of maintaining university credibility—accreditation, campus infrastructure, administrative overhead, institutional prestige—often exceeds the coordination value for specific learning outcomes.

Learning becomes unbundled from schooling. What mattered was never the classroom—it was the credibility of the ritual. When that credibility erodes, learning adapts through systems that work regardless of institutional belief.

Recognising Legitimacy Exhaustion

You can spot legitimacy exhaustion by looking for these patterns:

Authority Overhead Indicators:

More resources spent on credibility signalling than functional delivery
Compliance systems that exist mainly to satisfy other compliance systems
Institutional rituals that slow coordination without improving outcomes
Stakeholders questioning whether authority approval adds actual value

The Economic Tipping Point: When organisations spend more energy proving they should be trusted than delivering the functions people need, metabolisation becomes inevitable. New systems emerge that preserve the infrastructure while discarding the legitimacy overhead.

Metabolisation Signals:

Competitors succeeding by offering the same function with less institutional credibility
Stakeholders finding ways to coordinate that bypass traditional authority structures
Technology enabling direct functional utility without institutional approval
Authority figures becoming components in larger systems rather than sovereign decision-makers

Where It’s Going

This pattern is accelerating. You can already see it in:

Healthcare: where diagnosis blends physician, AI, forums, and wearables
Media: where TikToks and Substacks shape reality more than newspapers
Government: where citizens coordinate mutual aid faster than policy responses

In each case, what vanishes isn’t the function. It’s the performance of consensus about who’s allowed to do the function.

The expert becomes part of a distributed diagnostic web. The consultant becomes a steward across ecosystem tensions. The writer becomes a node in someone else’s knowledge pipeline. The doctor becomes one input in a patient’s own health stack. The university becomes one of many signals in a complex hiring filter.

The roles persist. But their authority is metabolised.

The Strategic Question

So what does this mean for you?

It means asking hard questions about your role, your business, your institution:

What authority rituals do you perform that no longer land with stakeholders?
What legitimacy overhead could you eliminate without losing coordination effectiveness?
What parts of your function could persist without institutional belief?
What larger system might metabolise you—and can you shape the terms of that containment?
Where are you still performing sovereignty in a world that no longer waits for permission?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re strategic ones. The organisations that thrive will be those that recognise legitimacy exhaustion early and position themselves as the systems that do the metabolising rather than the ones that get metabolised.

The Metabolisation Advantage

Systems that successfully navigate legitimacy exhaustion gain significant advantages:

Reduced overhead from eliminating authority maintenance costs.
Increased agility from faster coordination without institutional approval bottlenecks.
Greater resilience through less vulnerability to credibility attacks.
Enhanced scale via coordination mechanisms that work across disagreeing stakeholders.

The revolution doesn’t overthrow the system. It repurposes it. It works in the dark—without needing anyone to agree who’s in charge of the lights.

Final Thought

McLuhan was right—but not in the way we usually think.

The message of the medium isn’t just perception. It’s the evolution of legitimacy. New systems don’t destroy the old. They metabolise them. They embed the function. They discard the performance.

You’ve already been metabolised. So has your profession. So has your industry.

The only question is: Are you the one doing the metabolising? Or are you waiting for your audience to believe in a ritual they no longer need?

The next wave of transformation belongs to those who understand that legitimacy exhaustion isn’t a crisis to be solved—it’s an economic reality to be navigated. The function will persist. The performance will not. The question is whether you’ll shape the terms of that transition or simply become a component in someone else’s system.

This essay was developed

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New American Library, 1964. ↩︎
Shapin, Steven, Simon Schaffer, and Steven Shapin. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life: With a New Introduction by the Authors. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2011. ↩︎
See Chapter 5: “Crisis Take 2” in Eyal, Gil. The Crisis of Expertise. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity, 2019. ↩︎
Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “LLMs Today ≈ Desktop Publishing + Vinyl Cutters Then.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), June 10, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/llms-today-desktop-publishing-vinyl. ↩︎
Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “The Great Unraveling.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), March 20, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/the-great-unraveling. ↩︎
Evans-Greenwood, Peter. “Why We Keep Misreading Disruption.” Substack newsletter. The Puzzle and Its Pieces (blog), May 27, 2025. https://thepuzzleanditspieces.substack.com/p/why-we-keep-misreading-disruption. ↩︎