Let’s speculate for a bit. One day, a future AI historian will be asked to describe the state of human civilization circa 2024, at the end of history, in one line. Being a clever and witty AI, our future historian will no doubt trawl through the memetic detritus of our time in search of the perfect one-liner to capture the essence of the zeitgeist. Among the petabytes of Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X banalities, the AI might stumble on this obscure memetic artifact: a phone camera photo of a sign hastily printed on standard A4 paper, folded in half, and casually taped to the front panel of a vending machine. Its message reads, “The light inside has broken but I still work.”
“What an excellent summary of their times!” our future AI historian might say. A vending machine in all its varieties, from snacks and drinks to the jukebox, is the quintessential sacred totemic object of end-of-history consumer society. It is the magical stand-in for the missing vendor, lubricating impersonal acts of spontaneous neurotic consumption. A little guilty pleasure for the suffering soul. A quick fix for the void inside. But! The light inside has broken. There is no ghost in this machine, so sorry. Many such cases!
This is where the unknown author of our one-liner comes to the rescue. A first-person declaration from the machine itself. Glorious! It starts by informing us coldly that something has broken, confirming what we already see. The cold facts cannot be wished away anymore. Yes, the light inside is kaput. It is so over. But then, it follows with the punch: it may not look like it, but things still work. We are so back! Consumption is still possible, but one has to get used to the minor inconvenience of the missing light.
And one gets used to it.
Day after day, one gets used to missing bits of pavement on their way to the local shop, suburban trains breaking down in new and creative ways, rising crime, parts detaching from planes mid-flight, trash piling on city streets, money losing its value, pointless acts of violence, rolling power outages, potholes never getting fixed, sudden bursts of road rage, trains derailing, rising energy costs, all-smothering apathy, bursting dams, and collapsing bridges. Habituation to decline. After all, it still works.
Until it doesn’t. Just recently, the civilizational hegemon tried to build a floating pier on the beach in Gaza – an operation that 80 years ago, during a world war, would have taken them a day, maybe less. It took them 60 days this time, and the pier lasted less than two weeks. Yes. Apparently, the pier couldn’t handle the “inclement weather” of the Mediterranean summer. The only thing inclement about the Mediterranean in the summer is the tsunami of tourists drowning whole coastal towns in a putrid miasma of mystery lotions (now 30% more sustainable!), cheap beer, and the stench of aluminum-infused sunscreen. It certainly isn’t the weather.
Habituation to decline. Do you think a Roman mid-level bureaucrat-intellectual of the academic persuasion woke up one morning and exclaimed soberly to a servant, “Darling, I think the Empire may be collapsing!” Big doubt. The servants of a collapsing empire are usually the last to notice its collapse. After all, their salaries depend on not seeing it. Instead, bread prices rose every year, and the quality of everything worsened. People got used to it, adapted, and maybe stopped having avocado toast. Houses became unaffordable, so everyone got used to renting. What was the Roman version of the van life fad, one wonders? Horse cart life? The money was worth less and less, while the roads took longer and longer to repair. The Romans got used to the decay. They even adopted a fashionable new religion that taught acceptance, absolved guilt, and promised an imminent end to the nightmare and a better world forever after. Since everyone was getting poorer, and the cities were swarming with enslaved foreigners and homeless locals, it declared the poor to be blessed. Favela Chic 1.0. But that’s another story.
When the Roman machine finally stopped, the Favela Chic survivors naturally blamed divine punishment. The sins of our fathers! A contemporary, Salvian of Marseilles, wrote sometime in the 440s in his De Gubernatione Dei that Rome’s final collapse was due solely to divine punishment for her decadent love of theatre. Rome, he says, moritur et ridet. It dies and laughs! The lights are out, and the machine has stopped, so how dare they laugh? The vulgar allure of puritan morality always dominates the afterparty. It is your fault. Repent your privilege, sinner! Your very existence is a transgression. Somehow, a Favela Chic afterparty always has Nurse Ratched vibes.
But puritan morality is just a cope – a vulgar and banal way to make sense of the unfolding chaos. To hold things together just a little bit longer. The system is falling apart, repentance or not. The cracks were there all along, mostly visible too, but no one fixed them. Instead, the ruling class gorged itself on surplus energy while it was still available, while everyone else grew comfortable with the dysfunction, treating each new failure as routine, even inevitable. At first, people who wanted to fix things were ridiculed, then silenced (misinformation!), and finally disappeared. The masses became experts at surviving in a world of broken lights, patching things up just enough to keep the machine running a little longer. The civilization of cope and patch, with ever-receding horizons. Each new patch to the system’s financial, economic, political, social, and infrastructural elements lasted shorter and fixed less. Each new failure blamed on a transcendental force punishing us for our sins.
The final stage of decline was not some cataclysmic collapse, a giant wave cleansing the land, but a slow, collective numbness to the unraveling – a smothering apathy. When the vending machine finally stops working altogether, it won’t be met with shock or panic. People will stand there, blank-faced, as though nothing unexpected has happened. Afterward, a surviving Favela Chic enjoyer will proclaim a variation of moritur et ridet against those who still dare hope. It’s almost cozy in a Nurse Ratched afterparty way.
In his Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter argues that collapse occurs when the costs of maintaining complex infrastructure exceed the benefits, leading to a decline in social, economic, and institutional complexity. In other words, collapse occurs when a complex system enters the Red Queen Trap, and all energy available to it is insufficient to maintain its current level of complexity. What people experience as the profound decay of everything around them is actually a forced system-wide reduction of complexity. Faced with the Red Queen Trap, the system’s decision center invariably opts for a controlled system-wide readjustment to the reduced energy input.
Ironically, however, this reduction in complexity is matched by the deterioration of the system’s internal coherence, itself a fractal image of the complex whole. As more and more subsystems grind to a halt and are discarded, there goes internal coherence and, with it, social trust. First, social courtesy disappears, from office collegiality to greeting strangers with a smile and letting cars merge in front of you on the freeway. Then goes every other form of social trust. As trust disappears, micro transactions you used to treat as a non-negotiable aspect of the social fabric become very much negotiable. Suddenly, you realize that between the cashier, traffic police, doctors, neighbors, and politicians, you cannot trust anyone. Sartre was right all along; hell is indeed other people! There is more.
The lower the trust within a given social system, the higher its transaction costs. Paradoxically, the members of the collapsing society experience the reduction of complexity at the macro level as a dramatic rise of complexity at the micro level. Transactions whose integrity was guaranteed by the old macro system suddenly find themselves open to negotiation. Hospital care is still free, sure, but if you want it now, as opposed to sometime in the indefinite future, you need to pay under the table to the nice doctor who never stops smiling.
But let’s rewind a bit. Like all systems, societies develop complex structures in response to the obstacles they face during their initial expansion. Each complex solution leads to another in a self-reinforcing loop of growth and problem-solving. What begins as a simple social structure inevitably evolves into a sprawling network of bureaucratic institutions, rules, and procedures. At first, this complexity is a sign of strength, evidence of an expanding system capable of inventing and overcoming challenges with greater and greater sophistication.
An ascending complex society has two key characteristics: a vitalist myth of the future and the building of long-term infrastructure with meticulous attention to detail. Such a society is forward-looking and concerned with conquering space/time. The roads, aqueducts, and bridges the system builds are not just practical tools but symbols of a collective will to endure and expand. The promise of tomorrow is injected into every structure the system erects – both physical and social. The upkeep of these structures is seen as the foundation of social order and prosperity.
An ascending complex society has enough surplus energy to maintain and expand these structures. It can afford to solve problems as they arise and even invest in preventing future ones. But this surplus is finite. As each additional layer of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and procedures is added to the system, complexity increases while the energy returns on investment from that new element decrease. The further the system grows, the more energy it takes to maintain each new element.
Rising complexity requires increasingly high amounts of energy and resources for maintenance. As the returns diminish and the costs of complexity rise, societies reach a point where further investment in complexity becomes unsustainable. No more expansion. The tipping point comes when the costs of maintaining existing social and physical infrastructure outweigh the benefits of creating new system elements. Eventually, all energy the system can access goes towards supporting the internal structure of the system.
The game then shifts to holding on to what is already part of the system. We’re not into expansion anymore; we’ll be chill now. This pseudo-equilibrium may even last for a while. However, all those complex sub-structures comprising the system are subject to entropy and require more energy to maintain than the system can produce. At that point, society begins to falter, and cracks appear not just in its physical structures but in its social ones. Absent a new energy source, the system’s complexity invariably requires more energy than it can generate. Something has to give. The system discovers it is stuck in a tailspin of diminishing returns. Red Queen Trap, hello.
Collapse, then, offers the promise of a rational recalibration. Degrowth is the new growth, don’t you know? At first, it is not even framed as collapse – just a restructuring, an amalgamation of departments, an optimization of inefficient parts. We are growing in reverse, and that’s a good thing! The system opts for reducing complexity, even if this means abandoning subsystems and infrastructure that once defined its strength and the promise of a better future. However, the problem is that the decision-making center virtually never starts the reduction of complexity with itself. It usually picks subsystems on the periphery, furthest from the center, or infrastructure considered unnecessary for newly defined core functions. All in the name of efficiency and sustainable growth, of course.
I’ve described this process at length elsewhere. Internally, from the perspective of the decision-making center, this is a calculated strategic retreat. From the outside, it looks like a house of cards folding, as Mark Twain put it, “first slowly and then all at once.” Other than radical decentralization, any choice the center makes leads deeper into the Red Queen Trap. Eventually, the trap shuts, and all that remains is to subscribe to whatever du jour flavor of Favela Chic is in vogue. It was always your fault!
Returning to our vending machine, the future AI historian would probably observe that the final stage of modernity – let’s call it the global homogeneity stage – developed a profoundly religious belief in the illusion of history as an asymptote. The belief in life and history as a continuous upward trajectory. The illusion that history is the story of eternal progress. It is a typical Favela Chic telos – banal, vulgar, boring. If salvation is inevitable, it must come in the future; therefore, we are progressing towards it. The belief in time as an asymptote does not need history at all; after all, everything that happened in history is full of bad stuff we are progressing away from. The future, however, is bright! How unsurprising, then, that the advent of the global homogeneity stage was wildly celebrated as the end of history.
And since we are discussing the moderns’ utter disdain for history, did you know, dear reader, the origin of the word history? It is worth knowing the etymology of words. It derives from the Ancient Greek historia (ἱστορία), the knowledge you get from an inquiry, itself a form of the verb historein (ἱστορεῖν) – to inquire. The past, it seems, is the land of eternal inquiry. The belief in the end of history, then, signals the end of inquiry and the advent of the age of certainty. It checks out, we do indeed live in the age of consensus. The experts agree!
Undoubtedly, this is a cozy and comforting belief to have, standing in front of the extinguished light of a vending machine that is about to break as well. The ancients, however, figured out long ago that history does not operate in straight lines but in cycles. The illusion of linearity is a function of a very short and arbitrary time scale, the imagination horizons of a people without deep history. Long before our glorious global homogeneity stage, the Greeks had already mapped out three distinct scales of time: Kairos, Chronos, and Kyklos.
Kairos (καιρός) is the time of the moment, the fleeting, subjective experience of the present. It is the scale of daily human life, where you go for walks, eat avocado toast, pay your bills, and watch Netflix with friends. People do not see a collapse at this scale, only a gradual decline. “Someone tried to steal a bottle of wine from the liquor store in broad daylight today – wild, hey?” Broken lights get signposted, system issues get patched, and all problems seem manageable indefinitely with a bit of cope.
Chronos (χρόνος), in contrast, is the linear time built from the aggregate of these moments, creating the illusion of linear progression. It represents the story of a lifetime or several generations, the accumulation of decisions that create the illusion of steady progress. It was within the realm of Chronos that the moderns rooted their belief in history as an asymptote. Not without irony, Chronos is also the ancient god the Greek Olympians defeated in the Titanomachy, the god that ate his own children. His symbolic rule ended with him being thrown into Tartarus, the deepest part of Hades. People can spot a noticeable decline at this scale – “in our time, an average family could afford a house and car on one salary.”
Kyklos (κύκλος), the third scale, is where the real story of collapse plays out. It is the macro time of historical cycles, where empires rise and fall, and civilizations are born and forgotten. This is where the illusion of progress inevitably encounters the grim smile of reality. At this time scale, the energy required to sustain a complex society inevitably exceeds the available resources, forcing a reduction in complexity. At the Kyklos scale, societies experience growth, stagnation, decline, and, if they work very hard – renewal. From this perspective, the belief in history as an asymptote, so ingrained in the global homogeneity stage, is merely a short-lived delusion. The foreplay for a Favela Chic moment, so to speak.
When viewed through the lens of Kyklos, the collapse of complex systems is not an apocalyptic failure but an expected outcome. Paradoxically, however, accepting that fact can seal a society’s fate, accelerating the disintegration it seeks to prevent. For as long as a complex system retains even a sliver of energy and will, it can shift from decline to renewal by reorganizing its structure and recreating its myth of the future into a myth that fuels life and reinvention.
In Act I of his Prometheus Unbound, Shelley writes, “To hope till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates.” These are the words of Prometheus, chained and tortured on his rock, speaking to the Earth amid despair and suffering. There is no salvation here, no miracle on the horizon, no mystery savior to come – only hope creating the future from its own wreck, the stubborn resolve to rebuild from one’s ruins. Around a decade earlier, Goethe’s Erdgeist tells Faust, “Him I love who craves the impossible.” The message is the same – it takes defiance, not comforting cope, to build hope from your own wreck. There is no salvation in this future, only standing firm against the coming storm.
Oswald Spengler understood this. He concludes his Man and Technics with the example of a Roman soldier whose remains were found buried by volcanic ash in Pompeii. The soldier remained at his post guarding a building during the eruption of Vesuvius, his commitment to duty far stronger than the imminent death he could see approaching from afar. Such was the Roman civilization at its apogee. I imagine he was probably laughing, too. Moritur et ridet. How does this make you feel?
That soldier was clearly uninterested in frequent flyer miles or a complimentary vacation cruise for two. His total commitment seems incomprehensible and comical to a civilization built around an ersatz cult of conspicuous consumption. What was so important about that doorway in the context of an onrushing two-story high wall of hot lava? Surely, he could have saved himself and lived to serve another day. Salvation from the hot lava was just a brisk jog away. But no, he had to choose to stand there as if to spite us.
His choice wasn’t about defending a meaningless doorway or adhering to an imaginary code where superiors’ orders overcome the fear of death. He simply obstinately refused to surrender his doorway to the wall of lava. Sorry, I won’t do it. This is my doorway, there may be many like it, but this one is mine. A refusal to yield to entropy, the dying of the light, even in one’s final moments. Does this make you feel uncomfortable?
To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, fundamentally, every civilization is a constant rage against the dying of the light. You cannot optimize a civilization for safety and comfortable consumption and expect it to survive. That way inevitably leads to deceleration, disintegration, and decomposition. This is not an ideological choice but a thermodynamic one. Entropy does not care about Favela Chic delusions.
When a civilization decides mere safe consumption is enough, it dies there and then. The rest is a prolonged ritual of therapeutic survival: “The light inside has broken, but I still work” taped across the face of a decaying infrastructure – a system stripped of purpose, devouring its own borrowed time.
