The Empire is in your living room.
(…and your bedroom, too.)
As we find ourselves on the breaking crest of the wave of collapse, we often look for understanding through parallels with collapses of the past. The most frequent comparison is probably with the Roman Empire, which is fitting enough since many of the worst parts of are current hegemony are emulations of Roman culture — such as creating spectacles of violence, intense hierarchy and centralization, and the glorification of conquest.
The Gini coefficient — which is a standard measure of income inequality — is higher (representing more inequality) in the United States today than it was before the collapse of the Roman Empire[1].
If we stand at the precipice of the Neoliberal Order, it’s not because societies are experiencing maximal inequality. We’ve broached the age of automated warfare, and our tools of violence/enforcement are state-of-the-art. Automation makes increasing percentages of the population economically expendable, and yet even so nature stands a better chance of toppling nations tomorrow than labor movements.
There is another difference between the Roman Empire and the American Empire. The Roman Empire crumbled from outward in, so that the remote territories broke away first. Presumably this is, in part, because of the distance between power of the authority of the empire and the subjects: While there would be officials representing the emperor and wielding his power, they were less numerous and overbearing in the far reaches.
Contrast that with today. The Roman Empire is supplanted by a nebulous but omniscient corporate-government-military amalgamation, led chiefly by the United States and its executives. Not only does this amalgamation have a copy of all of your data if you’re a citizen (DOB, address, social media profiles, unencrypted telephony data, SSN, IP, taxes, employment history, credit scores, criminal history, facial data, friend network, history of partners, etc.) but it also probably has most of that data if you aren’t a citizen. While much of it resides in separate databases, these databases are increasingly interconnected.
I am an advocate of transparency. I think that if humans were transparent in all matters it would hurt a bit but we’d benefit a lot. However there is clearly a difference between transparency and informational asymmetry. Companies and governments have access to tremendous amounts of data on individuals, but these individuals do not have similar access on anyone else. This puts them at an obvious disadvantage and it also makes the average person exploitable.
One of the starkest differences between the omnipresence of empires past and ours today is that we host representatives of ours at home — in our kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms — at all times of the day. Our phone networks are tapped at headquarters and our devices are backdoored for friend and foe alike. One or both of Apple and Google are awaiting every word from our lips. We have doorbells that spy on each other for the police. Our smart TVs are smart enough to let advertisers reverse engineer our attention spans. The imperial organs are everywhere we look, including all of the cameras we see looking at us.
The empire has never been so close for so many. We might as well invite the Emperor over for dinner because he’ll already be listening and watching. He already knows what we’re going to eat, and what we’re going to watch when the food coma hits. Our Emperor lives in the AI. Your phone is one of his infinite eyes, and Alexa one of his legion ears.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made some people acutely aware of what they feel are the empire’s intrusions into their privacy and agency. Unfortunately many of these people are also guided by a strong agenda and will gleefully overlook the empire’s actions in other contexts, which prevents a crystallization of intersectional awareness. In response governments were all too happy to dust off emergency powers that have not been seen in many years, to reassert their authority, and to hypernormalize these things among their populations. Anytime a centralized government’s legitimacy is threatened they will attempt to do so and this case is no exception.
Many individuals who participated in the events of the now infamous day of certifying the 2020 election were identified and prosecuted due to their cell phone data. And a leftist was arrested for non-anonymously tweeting that people should be defending their government. To participate in society as a normal person does is to hand over some amount of control to governments, conglomerates, and tech companies. That control will be used to ensure the will of these same entities and their mutual interests is carried out.
It should be no wonder that social media and spaces of digital discourse are increasingly requiring doxxing aspects of your identity in order to have full access, even though many of these spaces worked just fine anonymously in the past. Of course it could be a coincidence, but coincidences always seem to end up convenient where power is concerned.
On the other side of the issue is that there is no major movement in our societies that rationally identifies our problems and is dedicated to fixing them. We still resort to tribalism, narcissism, and projection. Our power structures practically necessitate it. The individuals arrested using their personal cell phones while committing crimes are not going to lead us in an intelligible direction should they become the ones in charge. Arguably, those who could best lead us are most powerless to do so — and no one in power has a personal, vested interest in seeing that change.
Nothing lasts forever. To aspire for such is a folly. Throughout human history empires have continuously fallen. Some last longer than others yet all are just sand in the winds of time. The more powerful and far-reaching that they are the more potential they have to deprive surrounding communities in the empire’s attempt to claw its way out of collapse.
An empire consists of many subsystems — such as supply chains, education programs, cultural norms, exchange practices. These subsystems go through the equivalent of genetic evolution: What helps the empire is reinforced, and what hurts it removed. While some subsystems may benefit a certain population positively, even without negatively effecting another population, the empire would not have these subsystems for an extended period of time if they were not advantageous to it.
Empires serve to centralize prosperity. At the center are the leaders and elites, and around their periphery is the hegemony’s in-group (although this is often further stratified by sex). The remote reaches of this hierarchy are the colonized populations, who have the means for their prosperity (food, time, community) extracted for the benefit of the central powers.
When an empire collapses it is the bottom ranks who suffer first. The artificial complexity that props up the elite comes at a cost. That cost becomes relatively more expensive as resources become less plentiful. In order to maintain the hierarchical system in spite of this, the centralized powers extract more from the lower ranks — even if the lower ranks have less to give. This might be seen as a form of catabolic collapse; indeed, perhaps empires are axiomatically doomed to collapse from the beginning, since imperial extraction is inherently detrimental to the health of its basis (subjects) and can only be supported for as long as surpluses exist (and a little while after as the peripheries are pilfered beyond the breaking point and until collapse).
History holds few if any examples of empires choosing to reduce the extravagance of the lifestyles of those in control in order to protect their subjects. Instead these reductions happen through collapse, whether that be due to war, mismanagement, climate changes, etc.
By recognizing the inherent power structure of empire, and the genetic frugality of its subsystems, we can see how the maintenance of these subsystems (even when they do not appear cause direct harm, and especially in periods of collapse) acts as a net negative to all but the innermost circle of centralization. These subsystems act as aqueducts that keep the water of surplus flowing into the black hole of elitism until there is nothing left to give.
Some would argue that the sacrifices paid to empires are reflected in contributions to the subjects. By far the most cited example is protection. But being a subject is to be in the perpetual state of being attacked in the first place — instead of a one-time sacking by marauders, empires sack 365 days a year. And what’s more, living in a town claimed by one empire makes you the enemy of another — even if you personally care for neither.
Empires strive ceaselessly to achieve further ambitions paradoxically they are an impediment to progress, for their ambitions are tied to the impossible concepts of infinite consumption and conquest rather than sustainable goals grounded in reality.
The Mississippian culture thrived for hundreds of years. In the beginning it was marked by sedentism and agriculture. Over time these simple but successful settlements slowly developed more centralized and hierarchical power structures. In the Late Mississippian period climate change is believed to have reduced the agricultural output of the region. While some individuals seem to have moved out of the larger settlements to maintain a sustainable balance with their environments, we have found that sites/strata from this period have less ceremonial works and more defensive structures tan previous periods. When threatened, it seems some of centralized chiefdoms resorted to warfare to maintain their in-group’s status. Meanwhile in other areas, lifestyles from the Middle period (which saw less centralization) were still able to continue on until contact with European empires.
When Rome fell there were no cell phones — but would Rome have fallen had they had cell phones? And cell phones and video games? If it were possible to relinquish enough agency that they could have never reclaimed it, would they have done so? Would they have given everything away? If Rome had these technologies when it was weakening, how would the empire have manipulated them to retain control — to what lengths would they have gone?
And with the infinitely more vast machinations that exert control and influence on our societies today, how do we answer these questions? Being collapse-aware, it stands to reason that even modern empires will disintegrate in the face of climate and ecological collapse. Moreover this seems like the only way that today’s hegemony will change (for the benefit of the masses) within any of our lifetimes. However most relevantly to the individual, it would be wise to assume that the powers that be will clamp down harder and harder as their existence becomes more and inevitably more unsustainable.
— Doom
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1. “How Social/Income Inequality and the Fall of Rome is Relevant Today ” https://pages.vassar.edu/realarchaeology/2017/11/05/how-socialincome-inequality-and-the-fall-of-rome-is-relevant-today/
