The First to Fall

Tag: technology

  • Where does the real control begin? (How did we get from egalitarianism to building permits and marriage licenses?)

    Let’s start with scarcity.

    When resources are abundant and accessible, individuals and small groups can meet their needs independently…there’s little to no incentive for hierarchy or some kind of enforced coordination. Scarcity (whether it’s real or engineered) creates conditions where access might need to be regulated. Control systems (chiefs, priests, bureaucrats) emerge to decide who gets what, when, and how. This doesn’t just apply to food…think of land, water, labor, and information. The more scarce these things are, the more power seems to concentrate in the people who manage distribution.

    As populations grow and density increases, resource demand outpaces availability in a given area. This creates a new kind of scarcity, call it structural scarcity…resources aren’t always “gone,” they might just be stretched or hoarded. Anthropologists (James C. Scott, Mark Nathan Cohen) argue that the rise of agriculture wasn’t a leap forward. It was a trap…higher population density leads to soil depletion, which leads to periodic famine, which leads to tighter and tighter social controls. Scarcity and density rise together, since density both consumes more and makes groups easier to control (rationing).

    Think of control as a feedback loop or a vicious cycle. Scarcity leads to control…and the more “successful” that control is, the more scarcity results. In irrigation states like Mesopotamia, drought and a high population necessitated a sort of irrigation bureaucracy. But irrigation caused the salinization of soils, which led to even more scarcity, when led to even stronger central control. Once a system of control exists, it doesn’t go away when scarcity disappears…it invents new scarcities (taxes, debts, borders, artificial shortages) to keep power. This happens regardless of the ideology or political system. This isn’t a fascism or capitalism story.

    Let’s look at this from a predictive processing angle. Scarcity increases prediction errors (will I eat tomorrow?). Control systems offer social priors (“obey the priest, follow the ration schedule”) that reduce uncertainty at the cost of autonomy. People trade independence for predictability. The control system becomes what guarantees your survival.

    Can you guess what peaks with resource scarcity and population density? You got it…human domestication (and domestication in general).

    After the last glacial maximum (12,000-20,000 years ago), we saw mass megafauna extinctions and human population growth. In other words, serious local scarcity. During the early holocene (10,000-12,000 years ago), human population density rose in fertile regions (Levant, Yangtze, Andes).

    And this is where we really see scarcity management become chronic.

    The average human brain shrank by ~10-15% beginning ~30,000 years ago, with the sharpest decline between 10,000-20,000 years ago…exactly the same window when density/settlement intensified. Bones became lighter and less robust ~15,000 years ago (this is linked to sedentism/reduced mobility). Male and female skeletal differences narrowed in the same timeframe. And signs of hierarchy and control systems all emerge right as density and scarcity peak.

    The feedback loop is hard to miss. Density produces scarcity (real and perceived), scarcity drives new control systems, control systems select for predictability/attenuation (flattening diversity of responses to it), domestication traits become more pronounced, and those traits, in turn, make populations more compatible with density and hierarchy…accelerating the cycle.

    The loop shapes landscapes, plants, animals and people. What thrives under high-density scarcity-control systems is predictable, compliant, and attenuated. And across millennia, this produces the domesticated phenotype…flatter, more manageable humans. The loop is called civilization. It entrenches domestication traits and expands until it collapses.

    (Christopher Ryan and some archaeologists have an abundance-first model…but it leads to the same loop…once the abundance is gone, you have a sedentary group of people living in scarcity…I think this probably happened in certain places at certain times.)

  • Is technology to blame?

    We know that as worldview fidelity decreases, time to collapse shortens. But what bends the line? What actually introduces feedback distortion or delay.

    Let’s look at technology, because it complicates things. It doesn’t break the above model, but it introduces time lags and feedback insulation.

    At its core, technology is a buffer. It extends capacity, softens consequences, and postpones the return of feedback. Irrigation lets you farm longer before drought matters. Antibiotics let you survive behaviors that used to kill you. Fossil fuels let you scale production far beyond ecological yield. The pain that wouldn’t corrected your behavior is deferred.

    So low-fidelity worldviews survive longer if backed by high-powered technology. Collapse is delayed, not avoided. The worldview says, “We’re right.” The tech says, “We’ll make it look that way…until we can’t.”

    But tech doesn’t just delay feedback…it also creates false signals. GPS replaces intimate knowledge of land. Social media simulates community. Processed food simulates nutrition. Air conditioning simulates a habitable climate. This builds confidence in the system, even as it drifts further away from reality. “Look how well it’s working!” (Says the thermostat on a house with a collapsing foundation.) It enables deeper detachment from feedback, which enables more elaborate simulation.

    But is technology neutral? Clearly its effects depend on the worldview using it.

    In high-fidelity cultures, technology extends sensitivity, preserves balance, and enhances feedback clarity (e.g. indigenous fire-stick farming, soil renewal techniques, wind-based navigation).

    In low-fidelity cultures, technology conceals damage, extracts faster, delays correction (e.g. industrial agriculture, geoengineering, financial modeling). Tech isn’t a villain…but in hands of a distorted worldview, it’s something of a sorcerer’s apprentice.

    Here’s the twist: tech amplifies either trajectory. It’s an amplifier, not a course corrector. It can scale either sustainability or simulation / collapse. It gives a low-fidelity culture (like the one we’re part of) more time and reach, but also makes the eventual collapse larger and more system-wide.

  • Is civilization inevitable?

    Civilizations don’t collapse the same way they start, but the seeds of collapse are there from the beginning.

    A group finds a way to defer natural consequences by storing surplus, centralizing control, pushing ecological costs elsewhere, and inventing narratives that justify it all. There’s a perceived solution (to scarcity, conflict, unpredictability). But that solution involves suppressing or overriding immediate feedback from the environment or community.

    What begins as a trickle becomes a system. Civilization grows through abstraction (money, law, religion, bureaucracy), extraction (from land, people, animals, future), and simulation (symbolic authority replaces direct experience). These allow expansion…but only by removing consequences from perception. The forest is gone, but we import lumber. The soil is dead, but we buy fertilizer. The people are angry, but we broadcast unity.

    Eventually, the deferred feedback piles up. The buffers and simulations fail. Aquifers dry up, crops fail, and the dominant narrative becomes even more performative than usual. Collapse isn’t the reversal of civilization’s birth. It’s the reassertion all at once of real conditions that had been suppressed for generations. What was delayed arrives, compounded.

    So it begins with the severing of feedback loops and ends when those same loops snap back into place…violently, suddenly, and usually too late to adapt. You might ignore the soil for 300 years…but not for 301.

    And whereas the rise of a civilization is cumulative and self-congratulatory, its collapse is rapid, cascading, and disorienting. Because civilized systems depend on delayed feedback, they can’t detect failure until it’s already terminal. The signals that might have saved the group were suppressed by the system. Not incidentally…the civilizing process IS suppression. It can’t be tweaked or repurposed.

    The conventional view is that civilizations rise because of progress (agriculture, technology, governance, and trade). They bring order to chaos, domesticate nature, and elevate humanity. They fall due to external shocks (invasion, drought, plague) or internal corruption (moral decay, bad leadership, inequality). Their collapse is usually portrayed as a breakdown of order, requiring some sort of reform. This is a linear, human-centric narrative…civilization as a heroic ascent occasionally interrupted by tragedy.

    But civilization clearly doesn’t emerge from progress. It emerges from disconnection…a break from ecological and social feedback loops. It thrives by delaying, distorting, or outsourcing consequences. It doesn’t solve problems. It manages perception and concentrates control. And collapse isn’t a fluke…it’s the logical outcome of the system’s internal logic reaching its thermodynamic and informational limits. Not bad luck or bad people, but a system that treats feedback as an externality.

    What do you believe? That the most advanced societies in history collapsed by accident? That despite their power, intelligence, and complexity, they simply had some unfortunate lapse in judgment? In mismanaging resources? By ignoring obvious problems? By overreaching a little? And, oops!, collapsed? And that we’re smarter now? More self aware and made better by the lessons of history? Let’s think about that.

    The idea that civilizations “accidentally” overshoot, centralize too much power, or destroy their ecologies…every…single…time…is absurd, unless that pattern is intrinsic. If every plan crashes after 300 kilometers, you don’t need better pilots, you need a new kind of plane. But the civilizational narrative blames the pilot. Every time.

    Blaming barbarians, climate, disease, natural disaster, or Donald Trump ignores that systems capable of adaptation should adapt. Resilient systems bend…only brittle ones break. So if collapse keeps happening, the system simply isn’t resilient. It’s designed to avoid adaptation until it’s too late. We use our intelligence to formulate brilliant ways of resisting feedback. But resisting feedback is suicidal.

    The conventional story of civilization is weirdly moralistic. Rome fell because of decadence. Egypt succumbed to opportunistic invaders. But we’re exceptional and immune? It’s a childish blurring of causality with character, turning collapse into some sort of cautionary tale rather than a systems failure. They bad / we good.

    If collapse is a repeated outcome across cultures, time periods, continents, and resource bases, it’s not an exception. It’s a rule. Look at actual system, this process we call “civilization”…not the environment. Not leaders. Not outliers. Not comforting nonsense.

    Forget you even know the word “civilization” for a moment. You just have a pattern. What is that pattern?

    A group discovers how to buffer feedback. They find a way to delay or distort the natural consequences of their actions. Storing food beyond the season. Building structures to insulate from climate. Using tools or fire to override bodily limits. Creating language or ritual to manage fear and uncertainty. It feels like control and progress.

    Then they scale the buffer. More buffering means more predictability. Population growth, specialization, hierarchy. But the buffers aren’t neutral…they begin to shape the system. Authority centralizes, roles solidify, and the environment is seen as raw material instead of relationship.

    Symbolic structures replace direct experience. Land is replaced by maps, relationships by law, patterns by gods, and functionality by performance and titles. People start responding to the simulation rather than the world.

    People who remain sensitive to real feedback are suppressed. If you can’t ignore real signals, question too much, or resist simulation, you’re sidelined (at best). Deviant. Sick. Subversive. Disposable. A system of feedback suppression enforces coherence by silencing signal. Sensitivity is a threat to its structure.

    Consequences accumulate outside awareness. The environment is sucked dry and so is social cohesion. But warning signs are noise. Reaction is blamed. If you suffer, the problem is you.

    Reality reasserts itself when accumulated feedback overwhelms the civilized system’s capacity to manage it. And that’s all collapse is…it’s the return of feedback.

    Is this pattern inevitable? This particular (and exceptional) form of human stupidity? Maybe not, but it’s highly probably under certain conditions.

    The impulse to buffer feedback is natural…all organisms buffer. A bear builds fat before winter. A bird builds a nest. A human puts on a raincoat. That’s adaptive buffering. That’s survival in a fluctuating world. But buffering becomes dangerous when it’s no longer a response to feedback, but a way to avoid it. Less “how do I stay warm?” and more “how do I avoid ever feeling cold again?”

    Once buffering becomes centralized and scaled, surplus becomes status, control becomes virtue, symbols become sacred, and feedback becomes a threat. At that point, the system protects itself instead of life. Any signal that challenges its narrative is neutralized, pathologized, or hidden.

    But there are cultures, both historical and current, that didn’t follow this path. Where feedback is revered (through ecology, ritual, and story), where people live with limits, and where lifeways use buffering as a temporary strategy, not an overarching structure. It’s about constant relationship with feedback and avoiding permanent insulation.

    But in what we call modern systems, the pattern is inevitable. Because now we’ve added fossil fuels (infinite buffering, for a while), digital simulation (infinite symbol manipulation), globalization (outsourcing all consequences), institutions that treat feedback as failure, and a cultural narrative that equates comfort with success. At this level of complexity and detachment, feedback has no way in except collapse.