I am a British writer and policy advisor, working on the relationship between the state, society and the market – and how this relationship breaks apart through structural, systemic and political change.

Ideas about systemic change are nothing new. As the character Mike Campbell says in Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises (published in 1926), when asked how he went bankrupt Mike says that it happens in "two ways: gradually and then suddenly". What is new in today's world is the pace and the scale of the collapse. The "gradual" no longer exists. We have only the "sudden", all the time and everywhere – and driven by unfamiliar and endlessly-adapting forms of digital technology which accelerate and automate that change.

The pace and the scale of today's change has tectonic implications, equivalent to the ancient remaking of the earth's physical crust and continents. The systemic breakdown that we are witnessing today, accelerated by technology, means that the tectonic plates of our world are shifting in a way that we struggle to make sense of.

I have a word for this phenomenon: dystecia.

We are living in a dystecian age: a moment in history where the tectonic structures of human society are being rapidly pulled apart by the adverse effects of an increasingly inhuman technology.

Artificial intelligence. Automated drone warfare. Pandemic lockdowns. The collapse of public trust in politics. The decline of the institutions – including Nato, the UN and the World Bank – which shaped the post-1945 world. Surveillance capitalism. Social media-fuelled loneliness. Misinfomation. The global migration crisis. All of this defines our dystecian world.

Some background information about me: I grew up in Norfolk in the East of England. I went to Norwich School and then studied at the University of Cambridge, where I was both an undergraduate and doctoral student at Christ’s College. I taught for several years at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) in France, have held senior positions in London think tanks and have worked as a speech writer in the UK parliament. I am the author of several influential think tank reports, including work on soft power, tech regulation and online gambling reform, for which I was called to give expert evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee. My written output includes The Nanny and Night Watchman (2023), an essay on the tensions between state regulation and personal freedom in new digital markets, with a foreword written by the British journalist Dominic Lawson.

My interest in the collapse of cultural and political systems stems back to my first book on The Politics of Iconoclasm (2016), an account of state formation and the destruction of cultural heritage that was described by reviewers, including the Times Literary Supplement, as a “fearless narrative” and "landmark publication". In 2016, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Global Mayors Conference in Florence, Italy, to talk about this subject to some of the world's leading political figures.

I have written for a range of media outlets, including the New Statesman and the Guardian. Here are some of my articles:

• The Ghosts of Norwich (The Critic, 2023)

• France's Unfinished Civil War (The Critic, 2022)

• Only a New Entente Cordiale can Save the West (New Statesman, 2021)

• The UK's Gambling Review must be Free of Industry Influence (Guardian, 2020)

• Town Hall America (Prospect, 2017)

I am currently writing my second book.

To contact me, send an email to: noyes [at] dystecia [.org]

Updated 2026