The End of the Megamachine: A Seneca Cliff, by any Other Name, Would Still be so Steep.
Our civilization seems to be acutely aware of an impending decline that nowadays is rapidly taking the shape of a collapse. It is still officially denied, but the idea is there and it appears in those corners of the memesphere where it makes an long term imprint even though it doesn’t acquire the flashy and vacuous impression of the mainstream media.
An recent entry in this section of the memesphere is “The End of the Megamachine.” A book written originally in German by Fabian Scheidler, now translated into English. Not a small feat: Scheidler attempts to retrace the whole history of our civilization under the umbrella concept of the “megamachine.” A giant creature that’s in several ways equivalent to what another denizen of the collapse sphere, Nate Hagens, calls the “Superorganism.” Perhaps these are all new generation of a species which had as ancestor the “Leviathan” imagined by Thomas Hobbes and explicitly mentioned several times in Scheidler’s book.
We may call these creatures “technological holobionts.” They are complex systems formed of colonies of subsystems, holobionts in their turn, too. They are evolutionary creatures that grow by optimizing their capability of consuming food and transforming it into waste. It takes time for these entities to stabilize and, at the beginning of their evolutionary history, they may oscillate wildly, grow rapidly, and collapse rapidly. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said long ago, “the road to ruin is rapid” and it is a good description of the fate of young holobionts.
The book can be seen as a description of the life cycle of one of these giant creatures, leviathan, superorganism, or megamachine — as you like to call it…
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