But, I worry, because I can see the cracks in the wall

Around the end of the year, I usually try to assess where I am – both personally and professionally – and reconsider my plans for the new year.

Sometimes this ends up being quite personal where I think about where I am in life.

Since I switched to being a freelancer and self-publisher, they’ve more often been about strategy and tactics.

• Which books and courses worked and which didn’t.
• Topics for the newsletter.
• Whether or not to go into video.
• Dealing with changes in the industry.
• Dealing with the impact that political changes might have on my business.

Last year, the political impact was an obvious focus. The US becoming even more authoritarian. It had already made the switch from “not authoritarian” to “authoritarian” with the Patriot Act – not that anybody listened to people’s warnings at the time – but the current executive has taken the infrastructure and machinery that was built in the early 2000s and is using it to clamp down on citizens.

Rampant deregulation, graft, possible looting, and a tariff war, means the overall financial and economic environment is largely inhospitable to most.

The ongoing clampdown on media – both traditional and online – and you have a situation that has gone from “unsafe for honest businesses” to one that is “unsafe, full stop.”

That, for many, circumstances have gone from being business concerns to personal safety concerns, does not reduce the need for planning ahead and thinking about your strategies and tactics in work and life. It increases it.

There’s a short window of opportunity over the next few years where people in the US can turn this around. There’s still hope for change, but if they miss their opportunity, we’re likely going to be stuck with an authoritarian US for at least a decade or two, which is bad for everybody, inside and outside of the US.

Seeing how the US administration has been continuously attacking its own infrastructure and institutions, there is now a very real third possibility that’s much harder to account for in your planning.

Collapse

Collapse, as viewed in the present work, is a political process. It may, and often does, have consequences in such areas as economics, art, and literature, but it is fundamentally a matter of the sociopolitical sphere. A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. [Emphasis original]

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies , p. 4.

A year ago, when I was worrying about how to deal with, well, things happening as a small business, I was mostly worried about some flavour of authoritarianism strengthening its hold of US society – including the international sphere of influence of the States – and the chaos that would ensue.

We, in the west, are dependent on US institutions and infrastructure for much of our computing, media, and finance, so a full authoritarian takeover inevitably leads to chaos and, after everything settles down, quite a few people will have been pushed out and kept out of institutions and economies.

The oligarch takeover of US media is a good example. They already owned much of it, but they’ve taken control over their ‘property’ – such as Bezos with the Washington Post and Musk turning X into a masks-off white supremacy platform – to a much greater extent than before the election.Trump allies such as Larry Ellison have been actively taking over major media institutions. Even though Netflix has won out over Ellison when it comes to taking over Warner Bros., CNN is not a part of that deal and could still be taken over by Ellison or similar allies. They use their control to actively push out minorities and anything that doesn’t follow their political convictions.

This much we expected and follows the modern populist-authoritarian playbook. Hungary is a recent example.

The tariff war, effectively an authoritarian attempt to disconnect the US from the global economy, has a similar effect. It increases control over the domestic economy by the state and the state’s allies.

All this is bad enough, both for people in and outside of the US, and that’s without getting into the actual violent authoritarianism being implemented with ICE and similar institutions.

An isolated, authoritarian US is bad news for all of us. It leaves European countries – who have in many ways been behaving as vassal countries of the US for years – in a vulnerable position both politically and economically. It disrupts economies by disconnecting supply chains and by removing, one way or another, those the authoritarians don’t approve of.

So far, not so good. But there’s hope that, given how incompetent many of those currently running the US seem to be, it’s still entirely possible they might not hold onto power for as long as many feared. I don’t know how likely, but it’s definitely possible and that matters.

A bigger problem is that the odds of a substantially worse scenario have increased over the past few months.

Due to a number of issues that are individually manageable but are now happening almost simultaneously, the odds of the United States collapsing entirely in the near term – 4-5 years – are no longer zero.

It may not be likely, but a couple of years ago it was outright impossible. The possibility of turmoil and unrest was always there, but never sociopolitical collapse. The US has been in steady decline as a global power for a couple of decades at least, but a Soviet-style collapse over a few short years was effectively impossible.

I don’t think that can be ruled out any more and that possibility changes a lot for our planning of the future.

It’s similar to the volcanic unrest around the Icelandic town Grindavík. Before the unrest began, “volcanic eruption could wipe out an entire town” wasn’t part of anybody’s list of macroeconomic near term possibilities. It’s never zero, this being Iceland, but given the fault lines we knew about and the geological history we were aware of, we thought the odds were pretty close to zero – at least in the near term.

The town hasn’t been destroyed, but now the Icelandic government and local businesses have to account for that possibility in their planning where before they didn’t.

Between the rapid dismantling of numerous federal institutions, the tariff wars and a major financial bubble distorting its own economy, the blatant looting by officials and the politically affiliated, the disconnect it’s created with major allies internationally – the same allies who are effectively propping up its currency because it suited them at the time – and the attacks on its own population, the cracks in the sociopolitical order of the United States could break it apart.

It’s now a meaningful possibility where before it was as good as impossible.

That sociopolitical order is being attacked on multiple levels:

• The destruction of higher education and scientific research, in terms of funding, censorship, and wholesale takeover by dysfunctional “AI” tools.
• Political control over media and generative models combining to weaken every knowledge, news, and information institution available.
• Deregulation increasing the odds of catastrophic events on every level and in every industry, each of which could break a cracked system.

And the list goes on and on and the longer this goes on the more likely it becomes that the system will fail outright.

If that happens, then we’re all in for a bad time, even those of us outside of the US as most European countries are still very beholden to American systems and infrastructure in finance, retail, and software, not to mention our reliance on US consumers continuing to buy our crap.

Internal conflicts in a weakened system

The US federal government is already at conflict with states and local authorities, which is a tension that can trigger more fundamental crises in sociopolitical stability.

Usually, when a state switches to overt authoritarianism, whether its fascism or some other flavour of authoritarianism, the state is strong enough to enforce it over the population, either through control over institutions and media or through force.

But the current US administration is creating internal conflicts while at the same time it’s undermining its own ability to resolve those conflicts through force or other kinds of overt control. Instead of asserting control over the economy, which would be the standard authoritarian playbook, it’s making the economy more chaotic and harder to control by anybody. It’s clamping down on media while at the same time strengthening opposing media – what happened to Jimmy Kimmel and even Stephen Colbert is more likely than not to raise their profile among the public.

This is both a window of opportunity – it means that resistance is meaningful and there is a real chance of turning things around – and a major risk. These compromised institutions are cracks in the existing sociopolitical order and cracks can lead to breaking.

There is, first and foremost, a breakdown of authority and central control. Prior to collapse, revolts and provincial breakaways signal the weakening of the center. Revenues to the government often decline. Foreign challengers become increasingly successful. With lower revenues the military may become ineffective. The populace becomes more and more disaffected as the hierarchy seeks to mobilize resources to meet the challenge.

With disintegration, central direction is no longer possible. The former political center undergoes a significant loss of prominence and power.

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies , p. 19.

This is why it’s reasonable to be worried about disasters and crises whose scope and impact are hard to foresee.

• Hurricanes and natural disasters often reveal previously unknown weaknesses in civil engineering that can have wide-ranging consequences.
• Financial bubbles popping, if mishandled, can throw entire economies into rapid decline.
• We’re much less prepared for a global pandemic today than we were when COVID hit over five years ago.
• Declining civil engineering and infrastructure can lead to outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid, and cholera.
• Nonexistent food and safety regulation can lead to widespread food poisoning.

Those are just the foreseeable crises and each one could add fractures to the bricks that build up the US sociopolitical order and each fracture risks breaking the whole.

Things fall apart

I’m genuinely at a loss as to how to properly account for this in my worldview, let alone planning.

I remember, as a teen, watching the news of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed – chaos that’s still affecting us now through the Ukraine war. I don’t know what it was like to live through, but I do know people who, for a variety of reasons, went to live in Russia for short periods after the collapse and what they described was simultaneously mundane – life carries on – and horrifying. Rampant crime and disease. No institution could be trusted. The only good currency was foreign currency. And it was filled with Americans and other foreigners out to loot what remained.

Life in a collapsing state is unpleasant.

The umbrella of law and protection erected over the population is eliminated.

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies , p. 19.

I’m left with the hope that the US is simply more robust than that. I have to hope that its institutions aren’t fragile after years of neglect.

The cracks probably aren’t that deep.

But, I worry.