Got a link? Sounds interesting.
Of course it’s fiction, and perhaps you can’t expect it to be seriously thought through…?
Right, it all depends on how severe the global collapse is. And maybe how much primer and propellant you have stored. Must admit it’s not something I stockpile…
Does industrialism recover within a decade or two, or are we in this for a longer term… like the Dark Ages, say?
Aye, there’s the rub. Without a central government, things would probably degenerate into a situation where ‘rule’ is by a patchwork of local warlords who have henchmen and weapons.
The AK47 as the ‘gangsters credit card’ as they say.
This seems to be borne out by the number of ‘failed states’ in the world.
EDIT: Ah. Missed the reply with the video identification. Haven’t had time to check it out yet.
Cannibalism is one thing I’m not actually worried about. I know it’s a common trope in apocalypse fiction that someone always starts a cannibal gang within weeks of a collapse, but in reality the inclination against cannibalism is pretty damn strong.
Sure, there have been examples of it, like the Donner party, or that plane crash in the Andes mountains, but those were sufficiently outside the norm that we still talk about them, even more than a century later. If people were so easy to turn to cannibalism, we’d have many more such stories to tell. Even in massive sustained famines like Ethiopia in the 80s and Somalia in the 90s, we didn’t see roving cannibal gangs hunting down and eating people.
In the larger picture it’s sort of irrelevent anyway. In a major technological collapse, most of the human population will die fairly quickly. What they eat for the short time they survive doesn’t matter much.
Ha Ha, we already have enshittification
The reality seems to be that we just don’t know how fragile, or otherwise, the global economy is.
It’s a complex system with so many positive and negative feedback loops that no-one really has a plausible model.
Maybe it’s a house of cards, and one critical failure could bring the whole thing down.
Or perhaps there are sufficient self-interest corrective factors which would stabilize it?
This is the premise for the sci-fi story The Postman (which was made into a terrible Kevin Costner movie). Survivalists, as well as not actually surviving for the most part, managed to destabilize society (which had been weakened by WW3 featuring biological warfare) so much that they tipped it over the edge into collapse.
If I stick strictly to this, IMHO, there won’t be a complete technological collapse. What will happen, is that the top of society (political and industrial elites, plus possible other categories depending on nation and culture) will continue to have and benefit from the best that technology can offer. There will probably be fewer if any advancements, and some things will suffer from economy of scale issues, but largely intact.
All other classes and castes will probably see a noticeable regression in available technology. Oh, it’ll be there, but either scarcity or price will mean it’s de facto a lost/unavailable technology. There will possibly be a few exceptions, especially if it enables entertainment (the “circus” part of bread and circus of course) or propaganda to keep said masses quiet or distracted.
Especially if we end up with some sort of functional smart operating system to enable production to continue to the limit of available resources - there’s going to be no need for the 99% to have much education, knowledge of how things work, or historical education.
I might even expect a degree of deliberate technological collapse to minimize knowledge of what they’re missing and discontent with the social structure.
Not actually possible. Our present economic and technological base isn’t sustainable, and requires far too many specialists to keep things running. We advance or we collapse to a much lower state; it’s outright impossible for us to stay where we are for too long before important things run out.
Between resources running out and everything falling apart because there aren’t enough educated people to maintain them your scenario just results in a “complete technological collapse”, caused by that parasitic elite.
Then we disagree, because I think keeping the 0.1% of the super elite at this level or this level x 10, along with say 1.9% kept in comparative “luxury” at our current level of tech, while the 98% remaining lives as early industrial or even earlier levels of techno-surf status, especially assuming further advancement of AI and automation.
Again, I don’t think there would be much advancement, likely little to no research would be done, but the change in resource use would certainly stretch things out for a long time.
That is, of course, assuming they avoid a popular revolt, which I wouldn’t bet on, but I’m not sure I’d bet the other way either in a world with easy, cheap(ish) drone production and expert automated systems.
That ignores just how much of a technological support structure is needed to support the lifestyle of the 1%, and the vast numbers of specialists. You can’t remove the bottom 99% of the pyramid and expect the 1% tip to just keep floating there.
Also, “advancement of AI and automation” isn’t “no further advancement”.
One more time, since I was not clear, I would assume that the advancement in AI, or more correctly, advanced pattern seeking and automation would enable such a group, and very possibly precipitate such a collapse. Remove the need for a vast amount of labor, and keeping said groups happy and content in a “reasonable” amount of comfort and care becomes unneeded, or in the works of our modern technocrats, a “parasite class”.
Strip them of any ability to compete via competition, or relegate them to scut tasks that aren’t profitable to make machines for (while machines get to monitor them), and you can keep them down while a tiny percentage continues to reap the benefits of technology you don’t bother to share.
Yes, there’s a lot of point failures there, but it could absolutely be maintained for quite a while by concentrating the remaining resources on said small percentage. I mean, I was basically assuming a near current population of 8 billion, meaning we’d keep roughly 160 million at, say, modern European levels of tech and comfort, and 8 million living a lifestyle on par with current multimillionaires or better. And everyone else gets to live as a serf. Granted, these are WAG numbers, and the percentage at the top could easily be much smaller, though I do think at least 100-200 million more-or-less educated and skilled workers would be needed to keep things running, but again, with near future technology, that could change.
Which, as far as I can tell, isn’t all that different from the way Elon Musk envisions the near future.
No, because you still need to us up nearly as much resources to maintain the worldwide system providing that elite with their lifestyles. It’s not the comfort of the general population that’s using up the resources of the planet.
I suppose it depends on the nature and speed of the collapse.
The limits are without modern energy, transportation, and telecom infrastructure to maintain global supply chains, society drops back a couple hundred years. So employees of places like Colonial Williamsburg and Olde Sturbridge Village will suddenly be in high demand for their knowledge of forging, smithing, and making clothes by hand.
Maybe some localized communities will have access to functioning hydroelectric dams or solar plants for awhile until they run out of spare parts.
Obviously those technology levels can’t support 10 billion people. So the trick is to survive the big dying off and hope society isn’t left with nothing by hair stylists, phone sanitisers, management consultants, and other "Arc " types with no practical survival or civilization-building skills.
Well that’s not true. There’s no way the resource consumption of the top 1% compares to the footprint of the remaining 99% of ten billion people.
But even that gets pretty ‘collapsed’ at some point. When “how many jobs do I need to afford the cheapest mortgage” becomes “how many jobs do I need for my family not to starve to death” that’s not that different to a cataclysmic collapse.
It’s not the people; it’s the industrial civilization. Creating and maintaining modern technology requires a vast, worldwide industrial infrastructure to build the tools that build the tools that build the tools. And that eats up a tremendous amount of resources.
Which is actually impossible given the requirements of technology of that period. In 1800, civilization was built on the muscles of horses. Yes, they used wind and water power, but those had limits as to what they could do. Every thing else ran on muscles, mainly those of horses. Those horses no longer exist, at least not in the numbers needed. Furthermore, the trained people to handle the horses don’t exist either. No way will civilization drop back only a couple hundred years. If civilization collapses, it’ll drop back way further than that.
I think a lot of it depends on the nature and timeline of the collapse. You’re talking about a slow global “enshitification”, which might be driven by something like climate change, dwindling resources, or population crash. Technology, infrastructure, markets, and political structures are still functional, but standard of living is getting steadily worse.
By “collapse” I picture some Jared Diamond-esq tipping point where society as we know it simply can’t function. Short of nuclear war, some sort of global EMP event (natural or man-made), or some “magical” scenario that changes the laws of physics, it’s hard to imagine what might cause such a sudden collapse on a global scale. Although some sort of outage in a global AI “smart operating system” that we have become over-reliant on might be a good candidate.
I got a brief taste of what something like that might feel like during Hurricane Sandy and the NYC blackout in 2003. Maybe to a lesser extent during COVID. It’s unsettling being in a large city full of people without power or internet with no idea when shelfs might get restocked. People by and large are actually very helpful and cooperative in those situations. But it gets very creepy very quickly. Long lines of people waiting for public transportation to go somewhere else. A mostly dark skyline save for the light of candles or flashlights in windows that are few and fewer every night as people leave the city or run out of candles/batteries. And a lot of crazy rumors start spreading as people’s imaginations run away with them.
And that’s after about a week where most of the impact is regional but everything is still mostly intact. Things would get shitty pretty quickly if most of the world was suddenly like that such that there was nowhere for people to actually go.
@dtilque - I was thinking more like 1700s level of technology. No electricity and most stuff made with wood or whatever metal you could scrounge and bang into crude tools. You make an excellent point that society would be severely limited by a lack of horses and other domesticated animals.
That was another plot point in the “Dies the Fire” series. The people who survived tended to be the ones just crazy enough to immediately nope out of the cities as soon as the SHTF. Those who stayed in place for a few days, expecting the situation to resolve itself were too late to escape when they finally tried to get out.
The recreational reenactors will get suspicious when they see that the medieval wooden wall around the village has a layer of concrete behind it with barbed wire on top. Also when they discover that the looming and ceramics workshop has a hidden door that leads to a 21st-century armoury with buzzing fluorescent lighting.
