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The emerging scholarship in Britain may be of use to law enforcement, academics and advocacy organizations in the U.S. In November, the FBI announced it had seen a rise in hate crimes in 2015 over the previous year. The police in New York City saw a similar pattern during 2016 as the country experienced a divisive vote with jobs and immigration among the lightning rod issues. And civil-rights groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have noted both an uptick in incidents and a direct relation to the 2016 presidential election.

A distributed process can be messy and not fully predictable, yet can provide greater resilience and robustness. Such distributed processes might not be ideal as one of the ‘major instruments of social stability’, in the words of the Director of Hatcheries in Brave New World, but they work beautifully in nature, from brains to ant colonies and, increasingly, in our own engineered networks

Today, the company is announcing a new milestone: Since 2015, it has installed a worldwide total of a gigawatt-hour of energy storage–technology that is critical for using renewable energy at scale. For comparison, that’s nearly half of the entire amount of energy storage installed globally last year.

The cost of battery storage keeps falling; between 2010 and 2016, the price across the industry fell 73%, from $1,000 a kilowatt-hour to $273 a kilowatt-hour. By 2020, it may drop to $145 a kilowatt-hour, and by 2025, to $69.5 a kilowatt-hour.

The growth is only a fraction of what’s needed to transform energy. In 2015, when Elon Musk talked about the company’s new energy division, he estimated that it would take 2 billion Powerpacks to fulfill the world’s energy needs. “Even at 300%, we’ll need to grow it this way for decades, frankly, to really solve the problem,” says Straubel. “And not just us, but other companies need to get involved, too.”

There is scope, in better delivery of work support, to challenge the atomisation and isolation of workers and the loss of social capital and networks of new working models. The precarity of insecure work needs to be addressed, rather than exacerbated, by the systems set up to support people through their working lives. In roles where working hours are flexible or unpredictable, the division between private and public lives can be complex. The interaction between the individual and the state needs to understand that complexity and support people to navigate through their working lives rather than leaving them without a compass or adequate map.