Speaking of which, I've been wanting to learn more about scale dependence wrt social networks and institutions. Do you have any recommended reading on the topic? Is it possible to restrain growth in a principled way while maintaining liberty? Ellul's point (echoed by others) is that the internal logic of modernity is immune to restraint, and so growth and acceleration are necessary consequences of mechanization. The Malthusians on the other hand would artificially limit growth through top-down control (which is its own kind of mechanism). But is there a third option, in which culture regulates growth — directing it toward human flourishing rather than cancerous colonization and consolidation?
Discussion
Not sure it answers directly your question, but I am reading Graeber & Wnegrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, and one point is that the human experience has been way richer than commonly taught, and we have already reached high levels of cooperations in very different ways. One way to get the "right" balance seems to have been to embrace seasonal changes in semi nomadic peoples, like getting the institution for big/huge gathering (winter) and destroying it every summer, with different mechanisms such as rotating the winter ruling tribe...
But modernity is very different especially in that we have less and less individual space to split and are mainly settled... Anyway these experiences can be sources of inspiration to resolve our current paradox: alternating rulers (not the same as voting for them), alternating the very structure of society...
The cyclical growth/contraction point is very interesting, I'll have to think about that
A very good question to which I have no answer. There is no stable solution. Institutions will always tend toward capture, convivial tools will always face cultural erosion, and the best we can do is build things that make the cycle slower and less catastrophic.
I look at it little similar to "evil". How we can restrain people from being evil? We can't... it's structurally impossible. Only way is culture, moral education, shared values passed down through generations. But these also fail over time. I really don't think there is an answer to that, and I don't know if we need one.
Another way to put it is that there's no static solution to problems in a dynamic system. Which means we have to accept our role as temporary agents within that dynamic system, pushing in the direction that seems best to us, knowing our efforts or vision aren't determinative. Still, there have been other epochs in history in which mechanism wasn't in the driver's seat, and I'm sure there will be ones in the future that are qualitatively different. Letters from Lake Cuomo by Romano Guardini gives me some hope for this.