The Hidden Engineering of Identity

I’ve been working lately on a piece that led me to a strange realization about identity.

We tend to think of identities like race, gender, religion, sexuality, and class as cultural categories — things societies invent to describe people. Sometimes we think of them as prejudices, sometimes as traditions, sometimes as political constructions.

But what if they’re doing something much more mechanical than that?

What if they’re stabilizers in an extraction system?

In my Social Thermodynamics framework, I look at society the way physics looks at natural systems: as a set of flows. Capital flows. Labor flows. Resources, power, and surplus all moving through institutions.

When those flows become large — as they did during colonial expansion — the system faces a problem. Extraction is volatile. Labor can resist. Populations move. Enforcement is expensive.

So the system evolves ways to stabilize the flow.

That’s where identities come in.

Race can stabilize the labor force by determining who does which work and at what wage. Gender stabilizes the reproduction and care of the labor force. Religion can legitimize hierarchy and obedience. Sexual norms help regulate private behavior so populations remain predictable. And class organizes the distribution of surplus at the top.

Each identity solves a different engineering problem for the extraction system.

Individually they matter, but their real power appears when they lock together. When race, gender, religion, sexuality, and class reinforce one another, they reduce friction and uncertainty. Instead of constant coercion, the system runs largely on expectation, belief, and routine.

In other words, identities can function like flow stabilizers.

They make a highly unequal system run smoothly.

Seeing identity this way doesn’t mean those identities were invented solely for extraction. Most of them existed long before capitalism. But once large-scale extraction systems appeared, they were recruited, hardened, and articulated together because they made the flows more stable.

Which explains something important.

If identities are stabilizers for extractive flows, then dismantling injustice isn’t just about changing attitudes or culture.

It’s about changing the flows themselves.

If you're curious about the full argument, you can read the paper here:

Colonial Identities: Articulation as Stabilizers of Extractive Flows
by Shara Merrill