Between 2000 and 2020, private equity firms acquired roughly two-thirds of all large companies that later went bankrupt. By 2021, leveraged buyouts were running at over a trillion dollars a year. That sounds like a recent story, but it's just the newest chapter of an old pattern.

Under every extractive regime, across every era, one mechanism repeats: someone occupies a strategic position others do not. They possess not just superior knowledge, but the structural leverage and enforcement capacity to act on it. The names and tools change. The pattern does not. The first step in building anything better is to see that pattern clearly.

Call it what it is: extraction runs on strategic position asymmetry.

Strategic position asymmetry is not information asymmetry alone. It is a tensegrity structure composed of four interdependent poles:

Information Asymmetry: One party understands the system better than others.

Leverage Asymmetry: One party has the structural power (capital, legal standing, institutional position) to act on that knowledge.

Enforcement Asymmetry: One party can make their interests stick; others cannot.

Positional Asymmetry: One party's position in the network grants privileged access or timing advantage unavailable to others.

Information asymmetry alone proves insufficient. Imagine a peasant in a feudal system who somehow understands feudal economics better than the lords themselves—understands tithes, obligations, and power accumulation perfectly. That peasant still cannot exploit upward because they lack land, legal standing, and enforcement capacity. They might improve their own situation slightly, but they cannot invert the extraction dynamic without a change in strategic position. Knowledge without leverage is strategically sterile.

Or consider a military analogy: high ground provides superior observation of enemy movements. But observation alone is meaningless without the ability to act. High ground matters not because it reveals, but because that visibility is coupled with range, mobility, and the capacity to strike effectively. Information and leverage must combine.

Extraction requires the combination: superior information, structural leverage, enforcement capacity, and positional advantage. When these align, extraction becomes rational and sustainable. When they are dispersed, extraction becomes difficult and expensive.

Feudal lords possessed all four. Peasants possessed none. Industrial capitalists understood surplus value and capital structure; workers saw wages and prices. They had leverage (capital control), enforcement (legal systems), and position (market access). Financial engineers understood tranches, covenants, and leverage; pensioners saw quarterly returns. Again: information plus leverage plus enforcement plus position.

In Web3, protocol insiders understand tokenomics, governance mechanics, smart contract risks, and upgrade paths. Most users see yields, airdrops, and voting UIs. But information alone is not where extraction happens. It's where insiders can use that information to secure preferential token allocations, multisig control, validator positioning, or privileged transaction ordering. Knowledge becomes extractive only when coupled with structural advantage.

The pattern is this: if one side controls the combination of knowledge, leverage, enforcement, and position, while the other does not, the advantaged side can extract sustainably. If these are dispersed, extraction becomes expensive and visible. Every era's "innovation" in extraction is just a new way of maintaining that strategic position asymmetry when old methods stop working.

Premodern extraction relied on restricting knowledge itself. Literacy, numeracy, legal, and religious understanding were confined to priesthood and nobility. You didn't need complex systems. You needed people who could not read the rules. Knowledge scarcity plus legal authority equaled extraction.

Modern extraction, facing mass literacy and public education, shifted the game into the realm of system complexity. Legal codes, financial products, and corporate structures became so intricate that only specialists could navigate them. Information was technically available, but functionally opaque. Complexity became leverage. Specialization became authority. Knowledge scarcity persisted under a new name.

Postmodern extraction, facing expanded access and growing suspicion of institutions, directly attacked sensemaking itself. Trust in expertise eroded. Conspiracy and polarization became ambient. People were taught to distrust those who actually understood the systems they lived in. This is a clever move: if people distrust expertise, they become less likely to build the shared understanding needed to resist extraction. Knowledge asymmetry is maintained not through scarcity but through delegitimization.

Web3 arrived promising to break this cycle with transparency. Everything on-chain, nothing hidden. In theory, this should have destroyed strategic position asymmetry by making information universally accessible. In practice, transparency created a new form: transparent but incomprehensible systems.

Smart contracts are public, but most people cannot read Solidity or reason about contract interactions. Governance votes are visible, but the implications of each proposal require deep domain knowledge. Token distributions can be inspected, but understanding concentration patterns and their implications for future control requires specialized analysis.

Meanwhile, actors coming from traditional finance brought extraction playbooks honed across centuries. They know how to spot mispriced risk, arbitrage governance mechanisms, and quietly accumulate control over cash flows. They have research teams, analysts, and institutional experience reading complex systems.

On paper, everyone has the same access to information. In practice, only a few can interpret it at the necessary level. That's strategic position asymmetry in a new outfit: transparent data plus concentrated comprehension plus structural leverage (capital, institutional relationships, execution speed).

We need a term for this pattern—the full cycle that keeps extraction alive across eras and forms. Call it 'Devolution': the system-wide phenomenon in which extraction, backlash, and institutional disruption spiral into greater asymmetry, creating conditions for a new round of extraction.

Here's how it works.

Phase 1: Extraction Intensifies

A system develops extractive patterns. Insiders understand the game. Outsiders do not. Value flows to those with superior strategic position. For a time, the system appears to function. Growth happens. Infrastructure is built. Value is created. But value is also captured by those in strategic position.

When extraction intensifies enough—when the asymmetry becomes visible and the damage becomes widespread—people push back.

Phase 2: Backlash and Disruption

Sometimes backlash looks like regulation. Sometimes like revolution. Either way, the intention is to reduce abuse by checking or replacing those in power. But here's the critical move: revolutions throw out institutions, but also the accumulated knowledge of how those institutions worked. New elites come in with their own opaque methods and loyal experts. External shocks give cover for emergency powers and new authority. In the chaos, very few people understand what is really happening. That's precisely the environment in which extractors thrive.

Regulatory waves can have a similar effect. Complex new regimes get written by and for specialists. Those who can afford the best lawyers and lobbyists adapt quickly. The public hears "reform" and "protection." The reality is often a new layer of rules that only insiders can navigate effectively.

The disruption itself creates information gaps—larger ones than before. Actors who understand the post-disruption landscape move into position. They study the new rules faster, understand the new levers better, and begin to extract accordingly.

Phase 3: Extraction Resumes

Then extraction resumes, often more sophisticated than before. We end up back where we started, but with new methods, new extractors, and worse asymmetry than we had originally. The surface story changes. The strategic position gradient does not.

The result: we revolve and devolve instead of evolve.

'Devolution' is not just extraction. It's the entire cycle that keeps systems stuck in a repeating loop. We call it "devolution" because the net effect is that systems do not improve. They revolve through different forms and faces, but the underlying dynamic remains: power concentrates around those who control the strategic position asymmetry better than everyone else.

The cycle operates through multiple channels simultaneously. Those who benefit from extraction work to maintain advantage in several ways at once.

They keep knowledge concentrated and teach people to distrust those who understand. They create cultures where "only insiders really get this" becomes normal. They attack expertise itself. Meanwhile, complexity expands in ways that limit outsiders' ability to act meaningfully. Mechanisms become harder to decode. Participation is allowed, but is often performative; your vote happens, but you don't understand what you're voting on.

Stories shift to justify current arrangements. "Move fast and break things." "We need efficiency." "Only professionals can handle this." These narratives become so normal that people stop questioning whether extraction is even happening. The rules themselves consolidate in ways that benefit those who understand them. New layers of complexity get added. Barriers to meaningful participation harden into the system itself. What was once a choice becomes an inevitability.

Critically, these mechanisms work through violence, not protective force. In Nonviolent Communication framework, violence seeks to make others suffer, submit, or be punished. It operates through fear, shame, and the diminishment of autonomy. Protective force seeks only to prevent harm and protect life, without attempting to cause suffering or punish. Maintaining extraction through surveillance that creates fear, penalties that shame, and hierarchies maintained through domination—these are systemic violence. They degrade the substrate they act upon: each application breaks connection, erodes trust, and requires escalating force to maintain the same level of control.

When all these channels shift toward extraction and away from comprehension simultaneously, when systems default to violence rather than protective force, you have 'devolution' in motion. And when backlash comes, it often disrupts all of them at once, creating the chaos in which new extractors thrive.

When you strip away branding and era-specific jargon, extractors tend to follow a recognizable sequence.

First, they get ahead on understanding. Study the system until you understand its real levers better than almost anyone else. In Web3, that means deeply understanding protocol governance, incentives, and upgrade paths.

Then they keep that understanding scarce. Don't lie about how the system works. Just don't go out of your way to teach it. Let public documentation stay partial, highly technical, or marketing-driven. Encourage a culture where "only insiders really get this."

Next, they wrap it in a story. Frame your position as natural and beneficial: "providing liquidity," "professionalizing governance," "de-risking for users," "aligning incentives." The story doesn't have to be false. It just has to be incomplete in a way that justifies your advantage.

Then they influence the rules. Use your superior understanding to shape formal constraints: regulation, standards, protocol parameters. In Web3, that looks like governance proposals that simplify or centralize under the banner of efficiency, security, or compliance.

Finally, they scale the extraction. Once your position is encoded into the rules, extraction becomes routine. Fees, yield skims, governance capture, and preferential access become normal operations, not visible exceptions.

At no point is this primarily about hiding raw data. It's about staying ahead on comprehension, then solidifying that lead in code, law, and narrative.

If systems are going to escape 'devolution'—the extraction/backlash/disruption cycle—then they have to start here: no lasting change is possible if strategic position asymmetry remains structurally intact.

You can introduce new tokens, DAOs, municipal ownership models, and cooperatives. If a small group controls the strategic position (superior knowledge, leverage, enforcement, and positional advantage) while most participants do not, 'devolution' will repeat. Maybe with nicer branding. Maybe with better intentions. But structurally, the same cycle.

Breaking free of 'devolution' means no more pretending transparency alone is enough. No more assuming "community governance" is meaningful when only a handful understand the system's real mechanics. No more cycles of "innovate, extract, revolt, reset, repeat." It means treating shared understanding as a first-class design constraint, not an afterthought.

That's what Prevolution means: designing systems before the cycle needs to trigger, in a way that makes 'devolution' structurally more complex to activate. It means designing systems so that protective force replaces violence as the mode of defense, and so that each exercise of protection strengthens the system rather than depleting it.

The following article looks at four real systems: Gitcoin, Lido, Uniswap, and Octant. It asks a simple question: in each one, is the system evolving or devolving right now? How do you read the signals?

The third article lays out the Prevolutionary Architecture: the layers that, taken together, make it structurally more complex to maintain strategic position asymmetry and structurally easier to keep extraction tamed rather than dominant.

Between 2000 and 2020, private equity firms acquired roughly two-thirds of all large companies that later went bankrupt. By 2021, leveraged buyouts were running at over a trillion dollars a year. That sounds like a recent story, but it's just the newest chapter of an old pattern.

Under every extractive regime, across every era, one mechanism repeats: someone occupies a strategic position others do not. They possess not just superior knowledge, but the structural leverage and enforcement capacity to act on it. The names and tools change. The pattern does not. The first step in building anything better is to see that pattern clearly.

Call it what it is: extraction runs on strategic position asymmetry.

Strategic position asymmetry is not information asymmetry alone. It is a tensegrity structure composed of four interdependent poles:

Information Asymmetry: One party understands the system better than others.

Leverage Asymmetry: One party has the structural power (capital, legal standing, institutional position) to act on that knowledge.

Enforcement Asymmetry: One party can make their interests stick; others cannot.

Positional Asymmetry: One party's position in the network grants privileged access or timing advantage unavailable to others.

Information asymmetry alone proves insufficient. Imagine a peasant in a feudal system who somehow understands feudal economics better than the lords themselves—understands tithes, obligations, and power accumulation perfectly. That peasant still cannot exploit upward because they lack land, legal standing, and enforcement capacity. They might improve their own situation slightly, but they cannot invert the extraction dynamic without a change in strategic position. Knowledge without leverage is strategically sterile.

Or consider a military analogy: high ground provides superior observation of enemy movements. But observation alone is meaningless without the ability to act. High ground matters not because it reveals, but because that visibility is coupled with range, mobility, and the capacity to strike effectively. Information and leverage must combine.

Extraction requires the combination: superior information, structural leverage, enforcement capacity, and positional advantage. When these align, extraction becomes rational and sustainable. When they are dispersed, extraction becomes difficult and expensive.

Feudal lords possessed all four. Peasants possessed none. Industrial capitalists understood surplus value and capital structure; workers saw wages and prices. They had leverage (capital control), enforcement (legal systems), and position (market access). Financial engineers understood tranches, covenants, and leverage; pensioners saw quarterly returns. Again: information plus leverage plus enforcement plus position.

In Web3, protocol insiders understand tokenomics, governance mechanics, smart contract risks, and upgrade paths. Most users see yields, airdrops, and voting UIs. But information alone is not where extraction happens. It's where insiders can use that information to secure preferential token allocations, multisig control, validator positioning, or privileged transaction ordering. Knowledge becomes extractive only when coupled with structural advantage.

The pattern is this: if one side controls the combination of knowledge, leverage, enforcement, and position, while the other does not, the advantaged side can extract sustainably. If these are dispersed, extraction becomes expensive and visible. Every era's "innovation" in extraction is just a new way of maintaining that strategic position asymmetry when old methods stop working.

Premodern extraction relied on restricting knowledge itself. Literacy, numeracy, legal, and religious understanding were confined to priesthood and nobility. You didn't need complex systems. You needed people who could not read the rules. Knowledge scarcity plus legal authority equaled extraction.

Modern extraction, facing mass literacy and public education, shifted the game into the realm of system complexity. Legal codes, financial products, and corporate structures became so intricate that only specialists could navigate them. Information was technically available, but functionally opaque. Complexity became leverage. Specialization became authority. Knowledge scarcity persisted under a new name.

Postmodern extraction, facing expanded access and growing suspicion of institutions, directly attacked sensemaking itself. Trust in expertise eroded. Conspiracy and polarization became ambient. People were taught to distrust those who actually understood the systems they lived in. This is a clever move: if people distrust expertise, they become less likely to build the shared understanding needed to resist extraction. Knowledge asymmetry is maintained not through scarcity but through delegitimization.

Web3 arrived promising to break this cycle with transparency. Everything on-chain, nothing hidden. In theory, this should have destroyed strategic position asymmetry by making information universally accessible. In practice, transparency created a new form: transparent but incomprehensible systems.

Smart contracts are public, but most people cannot read Solidity or reason about contract interactions. Governance votes are visible, but the implications of each proposal require deep domain knowledge. Token distributions can be inspected, but understanding concentration patterns and their implications for future control requires specialized analysis.

Meanwhile, actors coming from traditional finance brought extraction playbooks honed across centuries. They know how to spot mispriced risk, arbitrage governance mechanisms, and quietly accumulate control over cash flows. They have research teams, analysts, and institutional experience reading complex systems.

On paper, everyone has the same access to information. In practice, only a few can interpret it at the necessary level. That's strategic position asymmetry in a new outfit: transparent data plus concentrated comprehension plus structural leverage (capital, institutional relationships, execution speed).

We need a term for this pattern—the full cycle that keeps extraction alive across eras and forms. Call it 'Devolution': the system-wide phenomenon in which extraction, backlash, and institutional disruption spiral into greater asymmetry, creating conditions for a new round of extraction.

Here's how it works.

Phase 1: Extraction Intensifies

A system develops extractive patterns. Insiders understand the game. Outsiders do not. Value flows to those with superior strategic position. For a time, the system appears to function. Growth happens. Infrastructure is built. Value is created. But value is also captured by those in strategic position.

When extraction intensifies enough—when the asymmetry becomes visible and the damage becomes widespread—people push back.

Phase 2: Backlash and Disruption

Sometimes backlash looks like regulation. Sometimes like revolution. Either way, the intention is to reduce abuse by checking or replacing those in power. But here's the critical move: revolutions throw out institutions, but also the accumulated knowledge of how those institutions worked. New elites come in with their own opaque methods and loyal experts. External shocks give cover for emergency powers and new authority. In the chaos, very few people understand what is really happening. That's precisely the environment in which extractors thrive.

Regulatory waves can have a similar effect. Complex new regimes get written by and for specialists. Those who can afford the best lawyers and lobbyists adapt quickly. The public hears "reform" and "protection." The reality is often a new layer of rules that only insiders can navigate effectively.

The disruption itself creates information gaps—larger ones than before. Actors who understand the post-disruption landscape move into position. They study the new rules faster, understand the new levers better, and begin to extract accordingly.

Phase 3: Extraction Resumes

Then extraction resumes, often more sophisticated than before. We end up back where we started, but with new methods, new extractors, and worse asymmetry than we had originally. The surface story changes. The strategic position gradient does not.

The result: we revolve and devolve instead of evolve.

'Devolution' is not just extraction. It's the entire cycle that keeps systems stuck in a repeating loop. We call it "devolution" because the net effect is that systems do not improve. They revolve through different forms and faces, but the underlying dynamic remains: power concentrates around those who control the strategic position asymmetry better than everyone else.

The cycle operates through multiple channels simultaneously. Those who benefit from extraction work to maintain advantage in several ways at once.

They keep knowledge concentrated and teach people to distrust those who understand. They create cultures where "only insiders really get this" becomes normal. They attack expertise itself. Meanwhile, complexity expands in ways that limit outsiders' ability to act meaningfully. Mechanisms become harder to decode. Participation is allowed, but is often performative; your vote happens, but you don't understand what you're voting on.

Stories shift to justify current arrangements. "Move fast and break things." "We need efficiency." "Only professionals can handle this." These narratives become so normal that people stop questioning whether extraction is even happening. The rules themselves consolidate in ways that benefit those who understand them. New layers of complexity get added. Barriers to meaningful participation harden into the system itself. What was once a choice becomes an inevitability.

Critically, these mechanisms work through violence, not protective force. In Nonviolent Communication framework, violence seeks to make others suffer, submit, or be punished. It operates through fear, shame, and the diminishment of autonomy. Protective force seeks only to prevent harm and protect life, without attempting to cause suffering or punish. Maintaining extraction through surveillance that creates fear, penalties that shame, and hierarchies maintained through domination—these are systemic violence. They degrade the substrate they act upon: each application breaks connection, erodes trust, and requires escalating force to maintain the same level of control.

When all these channels shift toward extraction and away from comprehension simultaneously, when systems default to violence rather than protective force, you have 'devolution' in motion. And when backlash comes, it often disrupts all of them at once, creating the chaos in which new extractors thrive.

When you strip away branding and era-specific jargon, extractors tend to follow a recognizable sequence.

First, they get ahead on understanding. Study the system until you understand its real levers better than almost anyone else. In Web3, that means deeply understanding protocol governance, incentives, and upgrade paths.

Then they keep that understanding scarce. Don't lie about how the system works. Just don't go out of your way to teach it. Let public documentation stay partial, highly technical, or marketing-driven. Encourage a culture where "only insiders really get this."

Next, they wrap it in a story. Frame your position as natural and beneficial: "providing liquidity," "professionalizing governance," "de-risking for users," "aligning incentives." The story doesn't have to be false. It just has to be incomplete in a way that justifies your advantage.

Then they influence the rules. Use your superior understanding to shape formal constraints: regulation, standards, protocol parameters. In Web3, that looks like governance proposals that simplify or centralize under the banner of efficiency, security, or compliance.

Finally, they scale the extraction. Once your position is encoded into the rules, extraction becomes routine. Fees, yield skims, governance capture, and preferential access become normal operations, not visible exceptions.

At no point is this primarily about hiding raw data. It's about staying ahead on comprehension, then solidifying that lead in code, law, and narrative.

If systems are going to escape 'devolution'—the extraction/backlash/disruption cycle—then they have to start here: no lasting change is possible if strategic position asymmetry remains structurally intact.

You can introduce new tokens, DAOs, municipal ownership models, and cooperatives. If a small group controls the strategic position (superior knowledge, leverage, enforcement, and positional advantage) while most participants do not, 'devolution' will repeat. Maybe with nicer branding. Maybe with better intentions. But structurally, the same cycle.

Breaking free of 'devolution' means no more pretending transparency alone is enough. No more assuming "community governance" is meaningful when only a handful understand the system's real mechanics. No more cycles of "innovate, extract, revolt, reset, repeat." It means treating shared understanding as a first-class design constraint, not an afterthought.

That's what Prevolution means: designing systems before the cycle needs to trigger, in a way that makes 'devolution' structurally more complex to activate. It means designing systems so that protective force replaces violence as the mode of defense, and so that each exercise of protection strengthens the system rather than depleting it.

The following article looks at four real systems: Gitcoin, Lido, Uniswap, and Octant. It asks a simple question: in each one, is the system evolving or devolving right now? How do you read the signals?

The third article lays out the Prevolutionary Architecture: the layers that, taken together, make it structurally more complex to maintain strategic position asymmetry and structurally easier to keep extraction tamed rather than dominant.