Collapse is a misunderstood word. Most people imagine fire and chaos, apocalypse!
But collapse, as Tainter showed, is rarely violent. It's what happens when a system becomes too expensive to maintain its own illusion.
In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Tainter defines collapse as a simplification of complexity: a process where a system, unable to sustain its own energetic cost, contracts into a more manageable form.
Collapse, in other words, is a reduction of organizational load, a systemic reset.
It's not the end of civilization.
It's a reconfiguration, and the end of ONE way of organizing civilization.
In a recent perception study I conducted, I asked a simple question:
“How do you define collapse?”
Hundreds of people answered: from Europe, the US, the Middle East, Asia.
And yet, almost EVERYONE got it wrong.
Only ONE person - a man from India - came close to the real definition: he described collapse as a "rebalancing of the human system".
It struck me because it reflects a worldview that sees history as cyclical, not linear, where endings are transformations.
The universal pattern of reconfiguration
In complexity theory, there is no "end".
There are only phase transitions - moments when a system becomes too rigid, too artificial, or too energy-hungry to sustain itself, and must reorganize to survive.
From the outside, that looks like chaos. And we can "live" it as such too.
From the inside, it's like a maintenance system at scale. The system is shedding its dead layers to restore coherence with reality. This principle applies everywhere:
- In physics, it's thermodynamic equilibrium.
- In biology, homeostasis.
- In economics, the return to real value.
- In politics, the fall of artificial narratives.
- In intelligence, the moment when illusions collide with ground truth.
The pattern is universal.
Case study: "fake it till you make it" 🤡
In every system, there is a moment when the fake seems to win. It captures attention, not by depth, but by repetition.
To illustrate this idea, I'd like to talk about the "fake AI experts", and the trends that we can all see online. I'm sure you remember: the sudden emergence on social medias of "AI experts", it started in 2022-2023 with the emergence of LLMs.
Some people that had no actual experience or depth in the field, started to use ChatGPT and prompts (like most of us), and suddenly changed their Linkedin tagline to... "AI [something/expert]".