We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our way of living is already passing into history.

Collapse is the transition away from a globalized, hyperconnected and materially-abundant society, toward a state of greater precariousness, lesser abundance, potentially reaching a stage of existential risk for our species.

At the peak of the Seneca Cliff, the curve that describes the rapid phase transitions of complex systems on the basis of the principle that "growth is sluggish, but ruin is rapid." We see a green valley in the distance, but the road down the cliff is so steep and rough that it is hard to say whether we will survive the descent.

Creeping normalcy is how gradual changes can be accepted as the normal situation if these changes happen slowly, or incrementally.

The monetary system would not likely collapse in a random fashion but [would] be triggered when a coalition of corporate and banking interests, both public and private, determine that they are ready to profit from that transformation.

Newer homes and furniture burn faster, giving you less time to escape a fire. Research shows that 30 years ago, you had about 17 minutes to escape a house fire. Today it's only 3 or 4 minutes.

Uncivilisation is to accept the world for what it is and to make our home here, rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars, or existing in a Man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all.

collapsology

• Dark Mountaineers: Artists who generally ascribe to the idea that climate collapse cannot be stopped or reversed, a forum in which one can be honest about their sense of dread and loss.
• Anthropocene: A proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.
• Simple pastoral: Merely another of our many vehicles of escape from reality, that doesn’t interrogate civilisation's main driving forces, but instead focuses on returning to rural simplicity.
• Freudian death drive: The hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.
• Fossil Capitalism: A theory suggesting the modern economy is actually just a system that runs on fossil fuel.
• Age of Salvage: When a civilization breaks down, the most efficient economies are most often those that use its remains as raw material.
• Cornucopianism: Crackpot optimism, hopium.
• Drawdown: Stealing resources from the future.
• Wishcycling: Where people are hoping that something is recyclable and therefore they put it in with their recycling.
• The Jackpot: The mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner.

• Collapse Compass
• Deep Adaptation
• Six ways to die
• Lands End
• Doom For Dummies

Imagine that software development becomes so complex and expensive that no software is being written anymore, only apps designed in devtools.

In mainstream computing, ease of use is usually implemented as superficial simplicity, as an additional layer of complexity that hides the underlying layers. Meanwhile, systems that are actually very simple and elegant are often presented in ways that make them look complex to laypeople.

Steve Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a bicycle for the mind — But what he really sold us was a train for the mind, which goes only between where rails and stations have been laid down by armies of laborers.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

The following text was found in a file in the DawnOS disk image, an operating system running on the Subleq virtual machine:

The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.

The debate had an interlude, in which Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem.

• The Thirty Million Line Problem
• Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
• Software Crisis
• Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
• No Formats, no Format Wars.

One of the harbingers of the coming digital age is the suspicion that we may lack the ability to make sense of our recorded ones and zeros in the future.

It was meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess, a digital Domesday Book. But 16 years after it was created, the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project is now unreadable.

By contrast, the original Domesday Book, an inventory of eleventh-century England compiled in 1086 by Norman monks, is in fine condition in the Public Record Office and can be accessed by anyone who can read and has the right credentials.

What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary. To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.

• Obsolescence of desirability: When designers change the styling of products so customers will purchase products more frequently due to the decrease in the perceived desirability of unfashionable items.
• Obsolescence of function: When an item is produced to break down or otherwise become non-functional in an abnormally short period of time.
• Obsolescence of compatibility: When a product becomes obsolete by altering the system in which it is used in such a way as to make its continued use difficult. Common examples of planned systemic obsolescence include not accommodating forward compatibility in software.
• Pseudo-obsolescence of desirability: When planned obsolescence appears to introduce innovative changes into a product, but in reality does not, often forcibly outfashioning an otherwise-useful product.

Paper Internet

incoming uxn devlog adaptation solarpunk collapse computing technocracy simulacra