Our Theory of Collapse

Beau-Caprice Vetch and Richard Hames:

The UN issues another dire warning on the fate of the planet. A bullet grazes the ear of one of the most powerful men in the world, narrowly forestalling an orgy of violence for another few months. Israel escalates its genocidal assault on Gaza, reasoning that only in obliteration is there safety. In the American state of North Carolina, a single factory producing most of the world’s high-quality quartz is inundated by Helene, an unprecedented hurricane that has made its way 500 miles inland, threatening to grind global semiconductor production to a halt. Cybersecurity software widely adopted as a box checking exercise breaks on a single update, rendering millions of computer systems worldwide unusable. The life expectancy in the richest country in the world drops by 3 years. The far right rises. Autonomous kill webs emerge as a military paradigm. Sperm counts plummet. A pandemic draws tens of millions into a Millenarian conspiratorial cult. The Sri Lankan economy rapidly collapses, triggered by an investor panic modelling a future collapse based on the military government’s hasty response to spiralling oil prices, itself triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The euphemism of a ‘cost of living crisis’ takes hold in the Global North. 1,300 pilgrims die of heat on Hajj. Nuclear doctrines ratchet. A technical compression of all of humanity’s accumulated text promises to render whole classes superfluous. The society whose expansion entailed global subjugation finds itself faced with the question of its own viability.

Not for the faint of heart.

This essay is about that disorientation of the future, about the prospect of collapse, and about the struggle to construct a meaningful response to that threat. What does it mean to live in a world that remains oriented around the future, and yet in which almost all the stories of a stable future increasingly feel like fantasies?