We hear and talk a lot today about building new systems to replace our broken one. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” This statement, attributed to the brilliant inventor Buckminster Fuller, is often invoked. Many tend to understand this passage as an invitation to place oneself outside of the reality or system they are set to transform, working on the idea or innovation that will change things ‘in one piece’: the killer innovation, model or system, whether technical or ideological – a controllable one preferably – that will save the world or at least a portion of it by providing a viable alternative to opt into, thus opting out of the previous. And so we find, as alternative to the ‘Grand Soir’, visions of the future where man will have domesticated the challenges of nature and society – or which will provide means for a few to physically flee the existing reality (to better protect their own commons?). Along with revolutionaries on barricades, or utopian designs of perfectly ordered societies, one can easily imagine hubristic heroes – billionaires on a mission – unilaterally deploying geo-engineering solutions, once climate change becomes ‘reality’ – or leaving on spaceships to reach less crowded and resource rich galaxies. Hollywood abounds with such anticipations. All are not science fiction. Projects such as colonizing Mars to conquest new resources, or setting up whole mobile cities on oceans outside of the perimeter of any sovereign jurisdiction, are being designed and funded. But how about the legions who don’t or won’t have the power and means (resources, skills, courage, opportunity, etc.) to opt into the new, or out of the old?