← ohfuck.nl · February 2026

The Conservative Case for Radical Action

Or: Why Doing Nothing Is the Most Dangerous Thing You Can Do

Let me explain something to you that your leaders won’t, because they are, to a man, parsing their pensions against the probability of collapse and finding the arithmetic comforting enough to sleep.

You think you are standing still. You are not standing still. You are running — Loss of Infrastructure Stability (LOIS), your engineers would call it if your engineers were honest, which they aren’t, because honest engineers don’t get renewed — you are running just to maintain the appearance of stillness. The appearance of normality. The thin membrane of “everything is fine” stretched across a substrate that hasn’t been fine since roughly 2007.

Consider the following conservative facts:

Your water infrastructure is Victorian. Not metaphorically. Literally. There are pipes under London older than the concept of germ theory. You are drinking water delivered through systems designed by people who thought cholera was caused by bad smells. This is not a metaphor for institutional decay. It is institutional decay, measured in lead parts per million.

Your energy grid was designed for centralised generation. You are now bolting distributed renewables onto a topology that assumes power flows one direction, from big stations to small houses, and you are surprised that it struggles. This is like being surprised that a river doesn’t work well as a fountain.

Your financial infrastructure runs on COBOL. I will repeat this because it hasn’t sunk in the first forty years anyone’s said it. The systems that move your money — the actual plumbing, not the app with the nice typeface — were written in a language that no one under sixty knows, by people who are now dead, and documented in comments that read like riddles because in 1974 storage was expensive and vowels were considered a luxury.

Your supply chains are optimised for a world with no shocks. Not “few shocks.” No shocks. Just-in-time delivery is a beautiful system right up until there’s a boat sideways in a canal and then you can’t get microchips for two years. You have built the most efficient fragile system in human history and you are proud of this.

Now.

Here is the part where I am supposed to tell you that everything must change. That we need a revolution. That the old world must be torn down.

I am not going to tell you that. I am a conservative. I want to conserve things. Specifically, I want to conserve:

These are — I hope you’ll agree — relatively modest ambitions. I am not asking for utopia. I am asking for Tuesday.

But to get Tuesday, we need to do something drastic.

Not drastic in the way your politicians mean it, which is “drastic but in ways that don’t affect my donors.” Actually drastic. In the way that victory gardens were drastic. In the way that Bletchley Park was drastic. In the way that a nation of shopkeepers looked at the actual situation and said, right then, and did the thing.

The thing, in this case, is digital gardening.

Not the twee kind. Not “I keep a nice wiki about books I’ve read.” I mean gardening in the way that a civilisation gardens: tending infrastructure. Composting the dead systems. Planting replacements before the old ones fail, which means — and this is the part that frightens people — planting them now, while the old ones still technically work, which makes the whole exercise look unnecessary to anyone not paying attention, which is everyone, because everyone is very busy using the old systems that are technically still working.

Here is the war effort. Here is your call to service:

We must rebuild the coordination layer of civilisation. Not because it would be nice. Not because it’s innovative. Because the current one is dying and there is no like-for-like replacement on the shelf. There is no factory churning out institutional trust. The warehouse is empty. We’ve been running on fumes and borrowed credibility since Lehman Brothers and we are now — I say this with the calm of someone reading an instrument panel — past the point where fumes suffice.

The victory garden this time isn’t cabbages. It’s trust infrastructure. It’s systems that let humans coordinate without requiring them to route every decision through institutions that have demonstrably lost the ability to coordinate anything more complex than a press release.

It’s provenance. It’s verification. It’s knowing who said what and why and being able to check. It’s not trusting the system — trust is what you do when you can’t verify, and we are rather past that — it’s building systems where trust is a conclusion rather than a premise.

This is not a progressive project. This is the most conservative project imaginable. We are trying to keep the lights on. We are trying to make sure food arrives. We are trying to ensure that when someone says “this water is safe to drink,” there exists a mechanism by which that statement can be checked.

The radicals are the ones saying we should keep going as we are. That is the experiment. That is the unprecedented, reckless, irresponsible gamble — the bet that systems built for a world of 2 billion will hold for 8 billion, that infrastructure designed before the internet will gracefully serve the internet, that institutions built on geographic proximity will function in a global economy.

The conservative position is: they won’t. They aren’t. Let’s fix it.

But — and here is the Trojan horse, and I am not even going to hide it inside the horse, I am going to show you the horse and explain that it is a horse and you will still accept it because the alternative is worse — the fix has to look like what we have now.

Not because deception is virtuous. Because humans don’t adopt things that look unfamiliar, and we do not have time to wait for a generation of humans who find this familiar. We have maybe twenty years of institutional coasting left. Maybe ten. The pipes are not getting younger.

So: you build the new thing. You make it look like the old thing. You make it work better than the old thing, trivially, observably, in ways that require no explanation. And then one morning someone notices that the infrastructure underneath has been replaced and everything still works — in fact it works better — and the fax machine is gone and nobody mourns it.

This is not idealism. This is engineering. This is what actually keeping things running looks like when the things were built for a world that no longer exists.

Dig for victory. The allotment is digital. The enemy is entropy.

And entropy, unlike the Germans, does not negotiate.

So here is what I ask of you. Not courage. Not sacrifice. Not even imagination, though that would help.

I ask you to maintain.

I ask you to look at the systems you depend on every single day — the water, the power, the food, the words moving between you and everyone you have ever trusted — and ask not whether they work today, but whether they work next.

Because “next” is coming. “Next” is always coming. And the question your grandchildren will ask is not “why didn’t they build something new?” It is the older question. The colder one. The one that haunts every fallen civilisation from Rome to the Aral Sea:

Why did they stop tending what they had?

We have not yet stopped. But we have sat down. And the garden does not care why you stopped weeding. It only knows that you did.

Stand up.

There is work to do and the light is fading and the soil is still good.