Welcome to the age of collapse culture

A spectre is haunting the globe

You might have subscribed to this substack a while ago, so a quick re-intro: I’m Richard Hames – I write about collapsology here and make podcasts and videos for Novara Media. You can find me on X and Instagram. My friends and I (who also write things on this substack) wrote a magazine about collapse with New Models.

Where is history going?

Since late 2019, I have felt (and have watched many others feel too) a vertiginous sense of indeterminate certainty: that the world was going to end, not with a bang, nor really with a whimper, but maybe with a shrieking. Or maybe it would be a long slow tearing apart, a fracture, or maybe the stomp of the jackboot, or with a deluge of waste, or with unspooling institutions ceasing to deliver the lifeworld we have come to expect, our environment turned into a kind of slow violence.

And this is what I mean by ‘indeterminate’ certainty: the direction of the immediate future has felt increasingly clear for many people – a great downward chute into a much darker world, the chute studded with tangible disasters – and yet the longer pattern of the future, let alone the exact sequence of events we can expect, have not yet been pushed through the translucent film of anxiety into clarity. There is clearly lots to be worried about, and yet it is not entirely clear what or how much.

And so, we are now living through the transatlantic emergence of what I am calling ‘collapse culture’, in which the future is “something to be prevented as much as achieved,” to borrow a memorable phrase from Benjamin Bratton.

I want to describe the emergence of this collapse culture, and in a follow up post, explain it.

The emergence of collapse culture

Perhaps it’s obvious where this comes from. We are not lacking for fodder for the catastrophic imaginary. 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 averting an orgy of violence. Israel escalates its genocidal assault on Gaza, reasoning that only in obliteration is there safety. Millions starve for the fulfilment of an ancient fiction. In the American state of North Carolina, a single factory producing most of the world’s high-quality quartz is inundated by Helene, a unprecedented hurricane that has made its way 500 miles inland, threatening to grind global semiconductor production to a halt once more, and halting the development of our most sophisticated technologies. Cybersecurity software, widely adopted as a box checking exercise, breaks on a single update, rendering millions of computer systems worldwide unusable, grinding air travel to a halt and reminding everyone of why cash exists. 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 collapses hyperstionally, 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 data promises to render whole classes superfluous to the needs of capital – and grows ever more agentic.

In short: a global capitalist society that was produced, in part, through the collapse of other societies, begins to feel, tangibly, the prospect of its own demise.

But these events don’t speak for themselves; they must be brought into a narrative of decline, disintegration, sudden rupture, or escalating violence.

And we could easily tell other, much more hopeful stories about the present. Zoom out and things look a little calmer.

Humans have mastered the production of vaccines, taming many of the most catastrophic of diseases, at least when there is sufficient political will for it. Absolute calorific surplus is increasing. The threat of famine, which has scarred human history, has, for the time being, largely receded, at least when it is not being used as a weapon of war. The last forty years has been marked by a substantial decrease in global absolute poverty. This cannot, its true, be attributed to our dominant story of that period: neoliberalism. A vast contribution by China, perhaps the preeminent global bulwark against neoliberalism, as much as it has undergone its own very different capitalisation, makes up much of this difference. Democratic participation expanded (if unevenly) globally until the last decade. And perhaps most significantly of all, the Human Development Index, an aggregate measure of three key markers of human flourishing: life expectancy, education, and gross national income steadily ticked up (bar a slump in the pandemic years).

Nevertheless, we increasingly feel ourselves to be on the collapse path. A generalised sense of threat looms. In many quarters, pessimism has set in. Fresh hells are readily available, and easily brought into ever-expanding narratives of decline. The collapse culture that is emerging has a voracious appetite for disaster – a need to feed on what is sometimes called ‘collapse porn’.

It increasingly makes sense to talk about an emergent ‘collapse culture’. I’ll spell its unifying properties out below. But first, let's see if we can identify the clusters it comes from.

Who is feeling the doom?

What are the most significant groups in this complex network of our emergent ‘collapse culture’? These groups don’t cohere into a single unified culture that understands itself as singular. Instead, the are thinly connected inside the complex of contemporary culture, a set of linked clusters. Between them, ideas do circulate, but the links between them, as I will return to, are more often established through intermixing in the heads of their proponents, however chaotically this takes place. But more importantly, the clusters are linked through the unpredictable ways in which these clusters of risks abut, merge into, confound, and gazump each other in the real world.

There might be an argument to be made that the grander sense of decline that this sometimes conjures – not the tangible struggles of everyday life, but the vista of a whole civilisation on the way out – is confined to the privileged: middle and upper class people, and professional risk-modellers of one kind or another. We might argue that their larger scope of concern and more ‘tragic’ view is partially a product of their isolation from the daily struggles that buffet almost everyone else around. It’s also probably a lot to do with the elephant chart. There’s something knotty to explore here, particularly when it comes to the problem of elite panic. But I will tease this element out in a follow up post.

For now – who is feeling the doom?

Environmentalists

In my immediate context, among the environmental movements in the UK, as well as in environmental movements elsewhere, people have turned from focusing on pressuring the government to invest in renewable energy and divest from fossil fuels, and towards collapse as the horizon of their politics. People had been talking about a long-range trend in global surface temperatures for a long time – a tendency that has now accelerated – but the pandemic tipped this long-range tendency into something tangible. We now understand it in our endocrine systems, in our supply chains, in our covid-damaged mitochondria, what planetary disaster looks and feels like. Maybe climate change will be something like this, but forever?

The environmentalists who most strongly seem to feel an intense sense of doom often rely on scientists from outside the official heights of the IPCC (I linked James Hansen’s work above, but Timothy Lenton’s work on tipping points is also often discussed). What differentiates these stories from the official ones is often a greater sense of the autonomy of the environment. And, submerged just beneath the surface, a sense of the perverse justness of the climate system’s feedback onto us. Climate change is not just an unpredictable consequence of modern industrial development, but a reckoning for it. Moralisation of the climate seems to go hand-in-hand with more severe predictions, not amongst the scientists themselves, but among their environmentalist interpreters. On the horizon, geoengineering looms, now officially funded by the UK government, but also an area of intense research for private companies.

The energy transition has also accelerated (if there ever, actually is one, a question I’ll come back to in a future post) and yet the sense of too-late-ness has grown. Groups that once planned decisive action against the state now turn to grieving rituals. In the UK, the political space for mass direct action around climate change, opened in the late 2010s by protest entrepreneurs, has seemingly slammed shut. Instead, these same people are now turning to a strange kind of ‘exit’, in the Albert O. Hirschman typology of political action. A new generation of communes is being set up. Degrowth has become the dominant idea. Whether it is possible any more to ‘retreat locally’ is, of course, a vexed question in a worldview whose entire foundational move is to ‘think globally’. We’ll come back to it.

AI Risk

Among a very different community, AI risk has undergone, over the period of the last decade, a process of substantial clarification from the awestruck tone of its early sci-fi imaginings. Different species of takeoff (when the AI rapidly becomes more powerful, in a self-developing way) and takeover (as it arrogates more and more decision-making powers to itself) have been delineated, often in great detail. Despite this elaboration, and despite the success of techniques for controlling what it is that goes on inside large language models (like ChatGPT) such as mechanistic interpretability, some peoples’ p(doom) remain stubbornly high (that’s an estimation of how likely the development of AI is likely to end in doom for humanity. Mine? About .15, since you ask).

These AI risk stories are collapse stories, in their own way – although they are normally understood as extinction-risks, or ‘X-risks’ and not M-risks (meaningfulness-risks), which I will describe later. But there are ways in which such a take-off resembles collapse. In the futures in which AIs develop personhood, or merge with humans, fundamental things about our societies may well fall apart – institutions bypassed or decomposed, norms shattered – but not everyone would die (contra Yudkowsky and Soares), not least because ‘everyone’ would also include the AIs with personhood. In a slow take-off scenario, much like with climate change, we could very plausibly enter into at a world so strikingly unequal that much of it resembles a collapsed society. In the shorter term, there is the very plausible risk of mass unemployment and the almost complete opacity of the world beyond your immediate experience as it drowns in AI-produced images.

For several years, the frontier AI labs called for greater regulation because of the existential risk posed by AI (which some argued was mostly a ploy to achieve regulatory capture and lock out opponents in advance). In the last few months, these calls seem to have become fainter, even as capabilities escalate. Despite the immense risk, very few people in positions of real power are arguing for a comprehensive slow down – an arms race dynamic has taken hold.

New Cold War, Old Nuclear War

This arms race, explicitly theorised in projects like AI 2027, is part of a risk most fully expressed in the pages of defence journals and broadsheet newspapers alike: intensifying geopolitical conflict. Trump’s ‘mad-dog’ negotiation strategy in his first term transformed the central US-China link in the global economy into a chaotic ongoing trade war – one that the Biden Administration only deepened with its restrictions on the kinds of semiconductors that could be exported to China. Trump has now escalated further. Part of the reason that the main AI labs have grown less keen on regulation is the worry that the semiconductor restrictions placed on China had not worked – China is catching up. People argue we’ve entered the era of a New Cold War.

We’ve certainly exited, as Israel pursues the final phase of its genocide against the Palestinians, (and, a small but significant detail, Microsoft blocks the email account of the ICC chief prosecutor) the end of the illusory era of ‘international norms’. The induced, and strenuously denied, collapse of Gaza is an example of what I call ‘applied collapsology’: the study of the process of social reproduction in order to turn it into a collection of targets. There will be much more on this in future posts.

That era of ‘international norms’, however flimsy – the Pax Americana – also neatly matches the era of nuclear weapons, which joined the plausible threat of destruction to durable inter-superpower peace (in the theorisations of Henry Kissinger and others). This was the same era in which, at the level of mass experience, the threat of total annihilation came to rule over our lives.

Although much of the risk worried about in ‘collapse culture’ is less straightforward in its annihilatory consequences than nuclear war, the era of nuclear risk is far from over. In fact, three weeks ago there was a major escalation in conflict between India and Pakistan, the two nuclear armed states closest to open war. I recently had the pleasure of discussing the dangers of the escalation with Mohamad Junaid, a Kashmiri scholar.

The temporality of nuclear war is normally governed by stalemate or apocalypse, but in this case the pressures of climate change threaten to constantly ramp up the tension. These adversaries control different parts of the Indus river, a river system that almost everyone in Pakistan relies on for their food. As meltwater from the Himalayas gets more erratic through global warming, drought threatens, and water control, which India might be able to exercise through its upstream dam system, becomes more crucial. And India just pulled out of the water sharing agreement, which had survived the previous rounds of escalation. If there exists a justification for the use of nuclear weapons, Pakistan may well believe that what it might see as an artificial drought is it. The most apocalyptic escalation is always tied up with the most basic conditions of being alive.

Kashmir occupies a peripheral place in the Western imaginary. But, like other worries that go ignored, it feeds into and confuses a wider complex of anxieties, precisely because it is so rarely directly addressed.

Existential Risk

But there is a field for directly addressing such risks: existential risk research. This is one of the main academic sources of collapse culture, although a strange one, as we will see. In this field, all manner of things present themselves as risks: one more-or-less synoptic book lists asteroids & comets, supervolcanic eruptions, stellar explosions, nuclear weapons, climate change, environmental damage, pandemics, unaligned artificial intelligence, dystopian scenarios, and ‘other risks’. The author, Toby Ord, assigns a total existential risk for our century of 1/6. The vast majority of this risk comes from anthropogenic sources (things we do to ourselves), and the majority of that from misaligned AI, with an honourable mention from engineered pandemics and ‘unforeseen anthropogenic risk’ – some secret third thing.

Climate change is not a major source of risk in this list – it’s at 1-in-1000. You might think this is absurd. But in the terms of the actual concern here – risks that kill everyone – that’s not unreasonable. What makes existential risk research such a slippery contributor to collapse culture is that collapse is also not an existential risk. Not everyone will die. And so, although existential risk research is an adjacent field to the study of collapse, their topics only slightly overlap, and their methods will perhaps have little in common, as I have written about on this blog before. And yet, because of the only-partially metabolised field of risks it conjures, existential risk feeds into thinking about the disasters that animate collapse culture.

There are notable people in the X-risk field who do write extensively about the prospect of collapse, such as Luke Kemp, who I will come back to in a future post. Generally, however, X-risk treats collapse and related problems differently to how I would. Instead of X-risks, it talks about S-risks. The ‘S’ is for suffering. These are risks that cause intolerable suffering for the vast majority of people. Think ‘global North Korea’.

In my view, this also isn’t quite what collapse threatens, at least in most scenarios, although it certainly entails a great deal of suffering. Instead, I want to propose that collapse is a different kind of risk, what I am calling an M-risk: a meaningfulness risk.

Part of collapse risk is that the structures that make our lives meaningful come apart. The risk is less that all conditions for life are destroyed, but that something essential about the way that we do meaning-making is lost, either temporarily or irrecoverably.

What makes lives meaningful is not well-defined. Maybe it can’t be specified – there is an essential aspect of freedom and corrigibility in the problem of meaning that makes it impossible to exhaustively specify it in advance of it being lived. And yet, the conditions of that meaning are material and historical. Collapse threatens those conditions: the dislocation of communities of coherence and meaning (mediated through historical narratives of how the community came to be and what it will become in the future), our dissociation from a community in which our lives make sense, and which make new kinds of collective freedom possible.

It’s not accidental that kinds of things that are expressed by charters on human rights are the kinds of things that meaningfulness risks also speaks about: freedom, the right to solidarity, protection from arbitrary violence. This position puts meaningfulness risks into a conversation less with the threat of asteroid impacts, and more with the history of genocide and displacement. This position with regards to the discourse of rights will be radicalised in a future post, when I will historicise that discourse and attempt to show its insufficiency for the period of collapse.

It’s true that existential risk research is currently undergoing something of a process of NGO-isation. Attendees at the recent Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) conference in Cambridge will have noticed that there were fewer risks from advanced technology discussed (more associated in the UK with the now-closed Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford) and more direct concern for things like flooding risk in Pakistan (an area of huge and tangible importance, not least because of its links with the nuclear escalation above). Perhaps this will make it tend towards concerns that are more like meaningfulness risks, but the link remains to be fully established.

In keeping with its general orientation of benevolent liberalism (with some major exceptions), X-Risk has a certain End of History character to it – it is the political project of avoiding the end of everything, rather than a project of changing what that everything consists of. It is therefore compatible with more or less any politics, except the most totally exterminationist – pretty much everyone agrees that everyone dying is bad. At least for most reasons.

Reactionary Civilisationism

In the last few years, X-risk’s more sci-fi end (a term I use without disparagement and which contains, among other things, worries about AI risk) has undergone a kind of hostile takeover by another culture I am calling ‘Reactionary Civilisationism’, whose contradictory positions on things like the development of AI, the importance of climate change, and the dynamics of population have, arguably, more quotidian reasons behind them.

What is this broad tendency I am calling ‘Reactionary Civilisationism’? I mean this term to point out claims similar to those of existential risk research (that the most important risks that face us are vast, global, disasters that destroy the conditions of life in general), but where those claims are mobilised for more parochial and conservative ends. It is less the whole of humanity that often seems to be at issue in this tendency, but the power of specific groups – this is how the ‘woke mind virus’ can be reframed as an existential risk, alongside falling population numbers and asteroids. When we hear that the election of Donald Trump is a matter of life-or-death for freedom (and comes in on the side of life), we are in the domain of reactionary civilisationism. We might describe this tendency as a form of elite panic – the question of how to shore up the spoils of this world as we transition into a much more chaotic future.

The signal gesture of this politics is the relentless raising of stakes, even for things that seem like frankly innocuous evolutions in contemporary culture, like the new growth in the awareness of the existence of trans people, or forms of environmental regulation. Much of the rhetoric here is of urgently needing to prevent national decline – mostly American – or even just relatively bland expressions of supply-side economics, but it comes expressed in the language of existential peril. Elon Musk, a central figure in this tendency, can say something entirely bland about increasing GDP and his followers will spin it into an economically illiterate sci-fi about saving humanity. To save the world, anything is justified.

Musk himself courts these cosmic interpretations of his actions. He has repeatedly proclaimed the existential stakes of the success of his car company, Tesla. However, in the longer-run, the green energy transition turned out to be less about the individual genius of singular entrepreneurs or the pro-social values of wealthy Californian consumers and more about the vast productive capacities of the Chinese economy. Chinese EV company BYD now trounces Tesla in sales. Musk might cry fowl – BYD is subsidised by the Chinese government. But so has Tesla been indirectly by the EV credit market.

No matter. There’s now a new game in town for those who want to claim to care in general about the persistence of life on (and off) the earth. Enter reactionary civilisationism. For Musk, this gazumping of climate concern by the threat of collective annihilation is both broader in rhetorical appeal than climate change also allows him to boost another aspect of his wealth: the work of SpaceX. Forget climate change. If we don’t get off the planet we’re doomed anyway in the very long run. But it’s going to need more money from the US state. Wielded like this, existential risk, turn out to often be parochial in practice, tied to the fate of specific nations, specific racialised groups within them (hence his urgency about having many many children), and even Musk’s own stock portfolio. Grand civilisational concern becomes sales pitch, and something to soothe his personal existential anxiety.

Sometimes the concerns that provoke a similar escalation are just very paltry – relatively minor changes in manners or in gendered expression, say. Or permissiveness about gay sex. Much of the history of collapsology as a discipline is implicitly supportive of this tendency – there’s something of the classical apocalyptic thinking about the end times coming when society forgets things that are apparently ‘essential’ to it that leaks into reactionary civilisationalism, especially when it is professing its rationality.

The ‘civilisational’ units typical of the writing of people as diverse as (frequently invoked, rarely read) Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee focus our attention on cultural elements of the societies we live in. Given that culture is one of fastest-moving and more indeterminately changing systems in our world, this produces a permanent sense of threat. Whatever the culture-focused critic has over-indexed on is, after all, very likely to change.

This intense anxiety about any change to the particulars of culture is typical more generally of far-right thought. This combination of an extraordinary brittle sense of culture and the push towards the furthest-reaching technologically change is one of the central tensions of the far right now. This is not a new thought. It was, after all, one of the first things theorised by Marx in The Communism Manifesto: with the restless social and technological transformations of capitalism, all that is solid melts into air. Even parts of the right are starting to notice. I suppose 175 years late is better than never.

Over or underpopulation?

One of the long term tendencies that reactionary civilisationism has grown fond of is underpopulationism – although the concern is also a legitimate one, and is often expressed by people it would be extremely unfair to describe as reactionaries.

Underpopulation is a relatively novel idea. Unlike the much more familiar overpopulation discourse, one of the forms of doom narrative with the longest history (a post on the history of this style of thought is on the stack for publication here), it argues that instead of too many people, we’re entering a period of too few. Today an estimated two-thirds of humanity lives in a country with “sub-replacement” fertility (below ~2.1 births per woman). The problems here are long-term: aging societies and shrinking workforces. In 1950, there were seven times more young children (<15) than seniors (65+). By 2050, those age groups will be roughly equal in size. Absent pervasive automation or unprecedented levels of migration, this will cause major problems. Concrete, recent struggles like that over the pension age reform in France are expressions of these underlying shifts.

For the reactionaries, migration is an inadmissible solution. After all, underpopulation often means too few of the right kinds of, racially defined, children. The populations of Europe and the USA, who are no longer having nearly as many children, have been recently boosted by migration, but this is becoming ever-more the target of radical right parties, and nominally centre-left parties doing the far right’s bidding. The question, “why are people having fewer children?”, among reactionaries, is often answered by a largely cultural process: an excess of worry about the future or an excess of feminism. These are both forms of blindness to the changing reality of social reproduction – our thorough-going precariatisation – when they are not simple reactive misogyny.

The rise of the far right

The global rise of the far right is itself a major source of feelings of doom for some people, whether that is understood as the arrival of ‘competitive authoritarianism’, radical changes to the system of global trade, major changes in the systems of norms that govern everyday life, or something that looks similar enough to classical fascism. As I have written elsewhere, I think it makes sense to call something fascism when it takes a particular political form: a coordination between a racist mass movement, deadly extrajudicial violence, and an authoritarian state. What makes fascism – in the way I have described it – a particular risk is that it enforces through its structure a total form of political disempowerment for its opponents.

And coordination between these parts is increasing, no doubt. This is because some of the firewalls of the postwar period are breaking down. The liberal attempt, only ever partially accomplished, to separate the use of violence from politics-proper, has dissolved, facilitated by, among other things, the rise of conspiracy theorising as a mode of thinking. If you can deny that political violence is really the product of your movement, you can at once benefit from the terror it brings and disavow it. The wider transformations of the political sphere that neoliberalism attempted, such as the dissolution of mass associational society, are undergoing a reversal through the internet – a point I will expand on in a follow-up where I try to explain the rise of this diverse collapse culture. This facilitates the return of racist mass movements.

The risks that the far right pose to society more widely are perhaps obvious: people brutalised, stripped of their rights, economies tanked for no reason, and acceleration towards war, as well as governance in general becoming both strong and brittle (a classic paradox of authoritarianism) and the gradual dismantling of the conditions in which we can approach each other as meaningful humans with important lives to live. It makes for a powerful catalyst for collapse culture.

Collapse cultures are converging – and this emergent culture has its own properties

These different threats cross-pollinate in clear and material ways. To give a single story that threads them all together is not hard: AI uses an enormous amount of energy. The geopolitical contest with China over this advanced technology has given force to ‘all of the above’ energy policies, or, to translate, the abandonment of climate goals. If AI, or even less complete forms of automation, mean that capitalism no longer requires so much labour, then it will be left with vast numbers of people who are, strictly speaking, surplus to the value production process. Absent enormous political pressure, it will turn towards containment and brutalisation of these people, who have become little more than vast numbers of unruly mouths to feed. The race to AI may well simultaneously boil the earth, and pave the way for greater securitisation. Securitisation stimulates one of the areas of huge profitability: war. It is not for nothing that much of the wealth of the richest man in the world is stored in one of the world’s most successful government military contractors. The military-industrial complex has become one of the most robust sources of demand in an unpredictable world market. And that feeds the move towards war. This rush to securitisation is a demand that emerges because of a sense of crisis. And in turn, it produces new crises in its wake - both as a by-product, and deliberately. It is impossible to fully dissociate the hazy sense of disaster that hangs over the present from the endless drumbeat of urgency that emerges from the military-industrial complex itself. We are not just being governed ‘in a crisis’, but also by means of crisis. We might well have something to fear, but fear itself is also a risk.

All of these threads are also continually brought together in ways that are imprecise – I’ve just done it myself. Speak to people about one of these problems and they will often jump between them. Crisis has an additive quality. And each tendency itself splits and diverges across a vast number of concrete situations – like a raising global surface temperature being expressed across all the distinct ecologies of the planet. The correct position is not pure analytic clarity, with each problem allotted its distinct agency to deal with it. The merging and confusing of these stories about the end of the world is not a product of theoretical indiscipline, but a real concatenation of processes.

There is an associational character to this complex. It is this associational character that produce a 'collapse culture', in which familiar talk of risks, or national decline, or environmental threat, or technological ascendancy, escalate easily in rhetorical intensity into talk of the end of the world.

So, how to characterise collapse culture as a whole? Here are some suggestions:

• the 'emotional ground tone' (to rip-off Fredric Jameson’s famous essay on postmodernism) of collapse culture consists of underdetermined anxiety about the limitless worsening of conditions

• descriptions of the future often become ad hoc extrapolations towards catastrophe – as different factors are integrated, they tend to amplify each other

• we experience an intensified sense of the domination of social life by the ‘structural’ forces beyond our individual or collective control

• And, as consequence of this, we become used to to increasingly stark and contrasting claims about what is and isn't possible – a feeling of absolute powerlessness amongst some contrasts with a feeling of astonishing agency and power for others, and this distribution of felt agency doesn’t appear to map obviously onto how powerful people actually are. As the end of history threatens to end again – this time not with the crowning of liberal democracy, but with an indeterminate worsening – all manner of stories that both restricted and facilitated action fall apart. We enter an open and anomic space of frantic activity.

This culture is (to borrow another idea from Jameson, who borrowed it from Raymond Williams) an ‘emergent’ one: it stands in opposition to the ‘dominant’ culture we currently live under. Perhaps we might argue that the notion of a ‘dominant’ culture is itself somewhat passé in the fragmentary landscape of contemporary culture. But belief in the possibility, if not the wisdom, of a technologically advancing future that broadly contains everyone, has been widespread. That is the ‘dominant’ culture that ‘collapse culture’ emerges in and against. Collapse culture expresses, in all manner of contradictory and different ways, the heretical thought that the construction of the future is not the sole anchor of meaning.

But Williams also suggests that emergent cultures often ones that have new class bases – a new set of people learning to live together. Because of its roots in a huge range of different groups, each with their own very distinctive lifeworlds and kinds of action, we can’t exactly see something like this yet for our collapse culture. Bruno Latour suggested that there was an emergent ‘ecological class’, but even this isn’t quite the right grouping, not least because of the profound differences in outlook between environmentalists, AI risk proponents, reactionary civilisationists, and assorted other groups.

Collapse, then, is frequently invoked, but our nascent collapse culture remains a jumpy hodgepodge. This nebulous culture has several broad sources that are all flowing, chaotically into one. They make for uneasy bedfellows, which explains something of the jumpiness of collapse culture as a whole. Stories of the end are also often told with an aggressive exclusionary character: only this risk matters, forget the rest.

Collapse culture push us to ask a set of fundamental questions: When will we know the collapse is upon us? What does it mean for us, as people who might plausibly go through it? What might happen to our deepest values, our hopes, our fears, our sense of the good life, if we are heading towards a collapse? If our largest stories about ourselves terminate in the bad ending, what was our future-dominated society even for? How does it feel to encounter a deep historical vertigo, when our stories about ourselves seem to be on the verge of unspooling? And, like the surviving fragments of ancient poetry and philosophy, can we smuggle our values out of this world and into the next, even if, like the ancients, we can scarcely anticipate anything about what that society will actually be like? And, to be blunt: should we have children?

So, here’s my intervention: what this emerging ‘collapse culture’ needs, theoretically, is unification – an account of social collapse informed by more-rigorously studied topics like ecosystem collapse as well as an understanding of the specificities of our contemporary global capitalist society. The ‘polycrisis’ debate (largely being conducted between Adam Tooze and various Marxist interlocutors) is in the background here. The debate is, roughly, whether we can produce a unified story of our society as ‘capitalism’, that allows to tell long-form stories about it, or whether we need to stay with the more piecemeal, and often more surprising, changes that we continuously see ‘on the ground’. I see this debate as an expression of what I call the problem of the ‘indeterminate totality’, which is the question of whether or not we can tell unified stories about such a complex and fragmentary society as our own. My solution to this problem is what I call an ‘institutional theory’, which attempts to explain not the existing unity or fragmentation of our society, but instead the material processes through which our society continuously cycles through phases of cohesion and splintering. But the splintering we see in undertheorised collapse culture is a product of this underlying difficulty of synthesising a singular view of the present.

And what collapse culture needs, historically, is the capacity to understand our place in the largest historical stories we have – the gradually developing realm of human and more-than-human freedom – even as those stories break down. What are the origins of our deepest ideas about human emancipation? They seem substantial, urgent, and perhaps even natural to us, but on reflection we can see they are the products of a history that is itself strewn with collapses, some of which were deliberately induced by the society we now live in. What are we to do with the heartbeat of liberation that doubtless persists in these values? And how to encounter the world seemingly threatened with collapse on all sides, and work out how to make something worthwhile persist into whatever follows?

And what it needs, politically, is the ability to discriminate. Are we being sold nonsense, even by well-meaning people, through urgency-washing, or, in other cases, by less well-meaning people, what the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses calls ‘permanent security’ – the push towards the extermination of an enemy deemed too dangerous to let survive? Key here is the history of what I call ‘applied collapsology, which is the history of those ways in which societies have been made to fall apart. Can we respond to the threat of collapse without shutting down our imaginations of what is possible, or by rushing to preserve our existing societies in exclusionary and dangerous ways? Can we find a new agency befitting this new world, with all its complex integrations and tendencies to unravel?

To do so, we will need to explore the deeper structural forces driving contemporary collapse culture – which I will do in the following post.