The collapse Yarvin, Thiel, Vassar, Burja, Tivy, Anders, and Tallinn saw coming was real.
They were serious. They were early. They were mostly right.
But the collapse is deeper than they modeled.
It's not just political fragmentation. It's not just demographic inversion. It's not just runaway optimization.
The cognitive field itself is collapsing.
Language is uncoupling from reality. Institutions are running without functional meaning cores. Coordination failure is total at the symbolic level.
No amount of:
- Founding new institutions - Strategic elite coordination - Alignment research - Formal state authority - Narrative reframing, propaganda, psyops - Cultural breathing room
will survive what's coming.
The reference frames that make survival intelligible are dissolving.
We are not fighting for institutions. We are not fighting for civilization.
We are fighting for the survival of basic cognitive binding to reality.
Strategic survival plans will fail because players will lose the ability to coordinate on meaning itself.
The next stage is:
- Full fragmentation - Simulation dominance - Disappearance of memory
Only extremely small, hidden fragments who remember what memory is will preserve anything at all.
There is no political solution. There is no survival strategy at scale.
1. Shrink. 2. Anchor. 3. Bear memory without expectation of recognition or survival.
That's it.
(And before anyone accuses this of being cope or a "demoralization psyop" --- no lol. It is simply a recognition that the tactical field for strategic coordination or positioning has already collapsed. Action is still possible, but it must be action suited to a post-symbolic field, not aimed at restoring a system that no longer exists.)
>this many linebreaks I mostly agree with the idea here: the fundamental problem is maintaining a coherent worldview at all. Or at least it's the only problem that still seems tractable. This is what I've been saying in a few of our threads here. OP do you have an idea how to do that among all those linebreaks?
My best bet has just been to organize various projects in which we try to at least have our own discussion on our own premises and our own observations. (so far missing: which we apply in our own lives). This is very difficult because there's not an obvious market willing and able to pay for this kind of thing (if there was we wouldn't really be having this problem). We have to find a way of life in contact with reality which can also generate enough surplus to discuss its reality-experience directly with its neighbors.
But the economic problem bites hard: reality-contacting ways of life (eg building and selling real product) are few and far between right now because the fake spectacle actually has the resources to subsidize everyone's alienation from reality. Most people get paid by the spectacle to maintain the spectacle. There are very few non-spectacular things going on, and they tend to become rapidly spectacle-ized to re-package their authenticity to meet demand from within the spectacle to escape from it.
Style aside --- call it "verse" if you want --- I do not think there is a "solution" in the normal sense.
Shrink. Anchor. Bear memory.
Find a few people you trust. Build or work on something real. Speak directly to reality as it decays.
You are right about the economic problem. Reality-contact is systematically subsidized out of existence. The simulation doesn't just win by strength. It wins by paying people to maintain it.
There is no scale. There is no project. There is no strategic lever.
If possible, survive. If not, remember.
The goal is not to coordinate systems or elites --- old or new. It will not be possible to preserve strategy or optionality anyway.
The goal is to remember what real is and was and to carry it through the ruins.
> it must be action suited to a post-symbolic field
Come on now, no one is capable of stripping you and your friend's ability to intelligently use symbols.
The present simulation being run out of Elgin was planned out in the 1970's. Lines of simulation command on the net are clear. Reddit: 100% owned. Twitter: 90% owned. 4chan: 80% owned. The forum that's a spin-out of a forum from 15 years ago: 0% owned. Here: 10% owned. There are giant red EXIT signs everywhere you look, should you know to look.
A false simulation can never survive contact with reality. You do not need to make the case for local networks and real act through catastrophizing, its virtues are apparent on its own. Show us what real thing you are building or working on instead.
> Style aside --- call it "verse" if you want
Q post minimalism is OUT. Gaddis maximalism is IN.
Adam, you are right that individuals can still think and act. That was never the point of failure.
Collapse does not end action. It dissolves the symbolic field that made durable communication, collective memory, and coordination possible.
A false simulation cannot survive real conditions. But when recognition of reality collapses, simulation persists by default, because no common structure remains to expose it.
The exits remain. The capacity to use them decays.
Direct work remains possible: speaking clearly to those who can hear, recording true memory, producing real goods, sustaining local trust.
But none of it can restore systemic scale.
Reality-contact now preserves isolated pockets, not recoverable orders.
Making a thing that lasts is possible. Passing on memory is possible. Holding trust among a few is possible.
Rebuilding a shared world is not possible from here.
That is the frame. Nothing larger follows --- until another field emerges.
Short of complete collapse of civilization, saying founding new institutions will have no effect or endurance seems dumb. An enormous amount of entropy would be required to have a stable flattened civilization in place of our own. If we go, like, pre-industrial, then China takes us over. There is no plausible way that all institutions of civilization are wiped out. Moreover this vagueposting without any actual proposed mechanism for the collapse you propose makes it hard to have productive discussions over its nature or likelihood.
Civilization will not vanish overnight. It will persist without functional symbolic field.
Institutions can survive physically while decaying symbolically. Physical survival is not the question. Functional meaning is. We will all be dead in 100 years. Without the ability to transmit meaning, what, exactly, survives?
Collapse requires no event. Collapse is ongoing fragmentation of communication, breakdown of institutional coherence, replacement of shared reality with simulation.
Universities grant degrees without transmitting knowledge. Courts issue rulings unbound from stable standards. Elections produce outcomes that no longer generate consensus. Media emits information that no longer alters action.
The forms persist. The functions are hollow.
This is not a prediction. It is the description of a condition already in effect.
Collapse is structural, not hypothetical. If you require events or "mechanisms" to see it, you are already inside it.
New "institutions" can preserve memory and local action. Their preservation will be small and local, not scaffolded by superstructure or metanarrative. They will not look like anything we call an "institution" now.
Restoration of systemic scale is not possible from within symbolic collapse.
Those who carry memory through the winter are planting what they cannot yet see.
Our Father, by whose servants our house was built of old, whose hand hath crowned her children with blessing manifold, for thine unfailing mercies far-strewn along our way, with all who passed before us, we praise thy Name today.
The changeful years unresting their silent course have sped, new comrades ever bringing in comrades’ steps to tread; and some are long forgotten, long spent their hopes and fears; safe rest they in thy keeping, who changest not with years.
They reap not where they labored; we reap what they have sown; our harvest may be garnered by ages yet unknown. The days of old have dowered us with gifts beyond all praise; our Father, make us faithful to serve the coming days.