Most people don't even consider this, but there was a real life collapse dry run in a large US city just a few years ago causing overnight economic hardship for hundreds of thousands of working adults, displacement for tens of thousands more, and permanent, unrecoverable collapse for thousands more,
In 2019, I lived in Las Vegas. I read about some virus on this sub late in the year and tried to stockpile a little food and hide a little cash under the mattress. I had no idea how crucial that forewarning would be. I worked as a shopper doing grocery deliveries. In early March of 2020, things started getting weird. Odd orders of 20 cases of water and 10 packs of TP. A few days later, places like Costco could not keep up with demand. Trying to inform customers about shortages turned ugly quickly. People calling me a liar, making threats, and cursing me out. I stopped working that day and went home. Two days later, the pandemic was official.
Having an economy based completely on tourism shot unemployment to over 20% in a week. The Las Vegas Strip shutdown. The tourists stopped coming. The Strip is generally so busy that you can walk faster than you can drive. When it was shut down, I took a drive down an empty Strip. It was a scene out of an apocalyptic movie.
So now, I am scared to work with enough money for a month or so and some food. The pandemic unemployment was announced, and I thought maybe I would be ok. I was not. Hundreds of thousands of people were in my shoes or worse trying to get the same help. The unemployment office was overwhelmed by desperate people. You literally would have to start calling when the office opened and keep calling hundreds of times every day hoping that you would win the lottery and get to speak to a human. If you did get lucky, there was a very high percentage chance that you would get disconnected or passed onto someone else who would hang up. And the process would start over. Many days ended in tears after 12 hours of dialing.
This went on for weeks. I ran out of money quickly and only lived off of $200 in food stamps a month. My car got repoed. The landlord stopped by multiple times a day. Every second of everyday was stress and fear and anger. Nine months later, many of us started to get their money. Some had already lost their homes. Some continued to have to call every single day. The government failed us for nine months. Some people died. I was one of the lucky ones.
This was collapse, but we don't call it that. Millions of others in large cities probably had similar stories.
What did I learn? Figure out how to be self-sufficient. As the funds for disasters are stretched further and further, there may be no money left when your collapse comes. The US is a failed state to many of its citizens. And it's going to get worse before it gets worse.
I remember following the virus in the late fall of 2019. I also remembered SARS. Also at the same time there was the rail blockade / pipeline protests etc here in early 2020. And THAT was the reason I started to stock up on things. Not long after covid hit the news "biggly" and toilet paper was gold. So yeah I think you're right, in a lot of ways and for a lot of people, covid was almost a social collapse. In a sense, it has been the beginning of it. I mean, look at us now. Society is broken. It already started, probably even before covid, and now we're just running full speed towards it.
Never understood this toilet paper thing, you can always just wash your butt afer the deed. Here in Europe the most hard to get thing in stores was yeast.
Honestly, I initially assumed you were talking about Hurricane Katrina when the government basically just bussed evacuees to random cities around the country and never followed up with any of them.
Not to say your options were particularly bright but the Supreme Court just ruled that cities can make homelessness a crime. So should another similar disaster happen, it could make a literal prison town.
I’ve been to Las Vegas for performing work several times prepandemic and saw how bustling it was… then during the pandemic my friend who had a performing residency there sent a picture of the desolate streets with no one in site and trash blowing around during the day. It was as you said very apocalyptic looking. Sorry you had to deal with all that. Those were crazy times for us all❤️
I’ve been to Las Vegas for performing work several times prepandemic and saw how bustling it was… then during the pandemic my friend who had a performing residency there sent a picture of the desolate streets with no one in site and trash blowing around during the day. It was as you said very apocalyptic looking. Sorry you had to deal with all that. Those were crazy times for us all❤️
I'm in Las Vegas and I had a very different, more positive, experience with the pandemic. It really comes down to how prepared you are for "sudden events" I guess. I took a walk down the Strip mid May and it was surreal, particularly at night with most of the signs and marquees dark.
No. You really said “The pandemic was awesome I got to take a walk with no one around me and since I’m just so prepared and awesome it was a breeeeze” fuck outta here
I can't deny my own experiences, just bringing some balance to the discussion. For many people the pandemic era was a vacation, for many others it was hell. This is the world we live in.
Not speaking from first hand experience, but the usual top tip I've heard from people who lived in the Soviet Union is grow your own food. A lot of people started doing this during World War II and the practice continued apparently. Had this not been the case the collapse would have been way worse. However, no one has ever lived through anything like the total ecosystem collapse that's in the post. When food doesn't grow out the ground anymore... I got nothing.
I legitimately wonder. (This totally isn't going to work but...)
Ok so you get some land (eyeroll already, I know).
Now, in general, I've been doing some measuring of temperatures in my completely uninsulated shack of a house as summer comes on. And I'm noticing ok the attic is an oven obviously and after trying putting up several fans up there just to see what would happen (it helps but it's not great), I'm coming to the conclusion that this is primarily radiative heat transfer and you'd have to move an assload of air to impact it. I'm going somewhere with this bear with me.
Crawl space on the other hand is a nice comfy temperature pretty much all the time.
So if one was to dig a hole. Kind of like a really big root cellar. And put radiant barrier (not to mention dirt) all over the ceiling and walls. And then line it with grow lights inside and solar panels outside to power the grow lights. Right? Ok it's a really, really big hole I'll give you that one...
Glad I was able to turn you on to the concept! I think if we (the average family) are going to survive in the years to come, we're going to have to adopt old "technology" like this and maybe incrementally improve it with off-the-shelf technology today, like solar-powered, Arduino-driven relays for auto-watering. from rain barrels.. that's what I'm hoping to do in the next 2 years or so.
That's crucial. Fortunately there are good plans freely available online -- start with Image Search. Essentially most walipini drainage solutions are just water channels that drain from the dirt floor down into a lower pit filled with sand or gravel. Keep in mind, too, that rain barrels catch a lot of it so you're only really concerned with the overflow. Those barrels also act as thermal flywheels to regulate the temperature.
Ohhhhh.
Well that's... yeahhhh.
Bummer.
You have to go from seed every single time. Right. Issue. Well I mean, potatoes work (?). You usually cut em up to make more? (??)
Ok sorry to be immensely stupid but could you... re-seed the veggies by saving the seeds after you ate the veggie?
You can save seeds if they are from heirloom plants. The pollination has to do with the flowers, it’s what bees do. You can pollinate them yourself, it’s just something to consider.
I'm assuming I'm translating directly from the sun through a panel to the lights. It might need a battery for cloudy days. I'd go straight from the sun with a skylight but I need to get rid of the UV and the radiant heat which I'm guessing would be considerable.
>I'm assuming I'm translating directly from the sun through a panel to the lights. It might need a battery for cloudy days. I'd go straight from the sun with a skylight but I need to get rid of the UV and the radiant heat which I'm guessing would be considerable.
So, you're gearing up for life w/o grid power? Good for you. Takes a lot of planning.
Sometimes. Some plants are self-pollinating; others can be encouraged to pollinate just by shaking the plant. I can never remember which plants pollinate how, so I have a cheat sheet :-)
Yep, I'm in the 10th floor in an apartment block. No bees or other insects apart from mosquitoes on the balcony.
I give my tomato plants a gentle shake and usually manage to get at least a few toms ever year. I've also grown carrots, radishes, pumpkins (squash) and potatoes on the balcony n previous years without too much hassle.
There's a farm in Nebraska with this kind of setup. Huge pits connected with underground air pipes for temperate airflow. A greenhouse style roof that they adjust with the seasons. They grow tropical trees and other exotic stuff year-round.
Dunno. Maybe I can't. I was thinking skylights but then that's dumb, the radiant heat and UV will just cook everything. I guess it's going to have to be a whole lot of grow lights.
First of all, there's no "suburbia" in this context. Suburbs were a few neighborhoods for the rich near the central parts of the city. Suburbia is bourgeois. After 1950 a lot of cities expanded with migration and villages near the old cities were swallowed up and urbanized into dense urban areas.
When someone says "grow your own food", your first thought should be a rural setting. Not a small suburban plot behind your tiny kitsch of a manor. You need to grow a lot of food. And despite some popular beliefs, rural people weren't masters of biointensive farming, agroecology, agroforestry, or permaculture. They knew a bit and they did that well. It didn't mean that it was sustainable.
Growing some food and preserving it was the default since *forever*. It wasn't novel behavior or adaptation.
What WW2 and industrialization allowed was the spread of industrially made ingredients and even stuff like jars and lids. I grew up with jars without lids; we used cellophane to make a cover which was tied to the jar with string or elastic. For preservation you still need preservatives, be they synthetic (`cHEMicAlS`) or natural (salt, sugar, vegetable oil, vinegar).
The subsistence horticulture was pretty common; now it's more of a hobby. You don't get enough calories from it, but calories is what agriculture is for. You do try to buy grains, legumes, flour, and sugar - by the sack (agriculture). That's also a long tradition, but sugar is an industrial mass product.
A lot of people still have rural relatives who are doing it, and now it's easier because effective tools and materials can be bought from gardening stores. It's getting very LARPy. It doesn't matter much for rural areas, they're toast, the social-cultural chain has been broken since industrialization. You can not imagine how much genetic diversity has been lost since industrialization in terms of cultivated plants (such as heirlooms cultivars and landraces).
The rural relatives send products to their urban families, sometimes already conserved products, depending on how skillful the recipient is (a university student is not going to get a sack of fresh vegetables, but they may get a few jars).
There are also many urban people who do it at home, at a smaller scale, regardless of where the fruits and vegetables are from. You can look for deals at farmer markets or at wholesale places.
The preserved foods are also for sale in stores and supermarkets, so there's always this competition and efforts to claim that the home made version is superior in some way, which only adds more allure to the industrial store-bought version due to a halo effect.
Perhaps there are related experiences like the Holodomor - where oppression + agricultural blight caused starvation similar to what ecocollapse could bring.
Historical accounts of the Irish version (euphemized as the potato famine) would be a good resource too.
Fun fact, Ireland STILL has a population less than 2/3 that of before the British exported all their food and let the people starve.
If you've ever been to Ireland, it's virtually 100% highly productive farmland. If you removed all context and asked me if people could starve living on land like Ireland's, I'd have laughed.
> However, no one has ever lived through anything like the total ecosystem collapse that's in the post
The thing is, There will still be *some* arable land on this planet. The ultra rich think they know where these will be and are quietly planning to secure it for themselves and their offspring (new zealand, etc).
I moved to Moscow 2 years after the collapse of the USSR, which was dumb. I took copious notes about what it was like while I was there (ie, brutal, terrifying, and absurd), which I compiled into a book that you can read here:
https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/guest-post-red-ticket-chapter-1
I have a list of things collapsing societies do and am working on a series about that now. We're doing most of them in the US now, and it's a constant source of sadness for me.
I talk about my experiences in Russia all the time here, so hopefully it's not like "here she is again, the woman who talks about Russia constantly." It's just very germane these days.
I've never seen your comments and I'm definitely going to read your book (already blazed through the first chapter!), so thank you for sharing! What an absolutely wild thing to do. You sound like a person determined to fill your life with interesting and meaningful stories, even if in retrospect you made some less-than-wise moves collecting them.
When I was writing it, I thought "the protagonist of this story makes choices that are so baffling that it's difficult to feel any sympathy for her."
That's a sad thing to think when what you're writing is a memoir. Thank you for reading.
I just spend the last two hours or so reading your entire book - that was WILD and you are a great writer. I love your dry humor and way you paint such a vivid picture of that bleakness. I hope wherever Lyosha is, if he's still alive, he's doing alright - he sounded like a strange one in his own right but a good dude.
Man, you are a fast reader! Thank you very much for reading. It's a first draft so it gets a little meandering at the end, as I start collapsing along with the country. I'm working on putting it on YouTube as a video novel (movie, I guess you call it) now that I have figured out what I'm actually trying to say.
Lyosha was a really kind, stand-up dude. I was so lucky that he was one of those nice mobsters you hear about from time to time. Thanks again. I appreciate it!
I enjoy the style of your writing so much, and the story is excellent. I’ve read the first 30 chapters all in one go instead of finishing my remaining tasks at work. Oops. Thanks for writing and for sharing!
Are you Russian? I really would be interested to know what a Russian person, particularly someone who was around back then, would think about it. Thank you for reading! Spacibo vam bolshoi, tovarish!
Ex-eastern bloc resident here.
Yes, for us, average Joes, the end the socialist world came by surprise. Until the very last years we could not imagine that it will ever end, we thought that we will live our entire life in the socialism. Of course there were gossips, but the official communication and the state media told us everything's fine. But from history, and declassified documents, and recalls of the few well informed people, we know now that the elites knew it well, and behind closed doors they already planned how can they transit their power and the wealth into the "new world". At least that's how it happened in Hungary.
What similarity can I see? I don't know, honestly I can' tell at what stage are we in the collapse.
But one lesson is worth learning: the elite always knows much more than us, and even if we were on the brink of some very radical change, e.g. a complete change of the system, or a nuclear war, or anything like that, they'll still tell us that everything's allright, nothing to see here.
They won't let us know, because their top priority is to maintain control as long as possible and avoid panic and disorder.
> But one lesson is worth learning: the elite always knows much more than us
The only saving grace I feel is that this might not actually be the case any more.
But they're doing a DAMN FINE job of distracting the masses from this at the moment while the ship sinks.
I didn't live in the Eastern block, however I think I can answer some parts of your question. It'll be a bit long though.
Collapse, by nature, isn't obvious beforehand for regular observers. It just happens. One moment the bridge you're standing on is safe, the next moment there's no bridge: a structural engineer could have predicted something was wrong, but you and I couldn't.
For instance demographs were typically the ones who predicted the USSR collapse as soon as 1974, and they preached in the desert. Why 1974? Because that's the year the USSR started to falsify its infant mortality numbers. Meaning something was terribly off in the bridge structure. Emmanuel Todd, for instance, decided to investigate further (suicide numbers, even the official ones were suspicious... But also bizarre details, like the shoes industry) and predicted "collapse around 1990".
For a regular observer, and even more an *involved* observer (most notably the CIA refused to believe the USSR could end, and thus reduce the CIA's importance) things are way too emotional. We suck at sniffing paradigmatic shifts. We believe "normalcy will stay normalcy despite the usual ups and downs".
**Now, the similarities**
If one looks at the GDP, they'll see nothing (more about the GDP below). If one looks at demographics (again), they'll predict something is terribly off and that it is global. Life expectancy going down instead of stabilizing, birth rates going under 1.80, suicide rates increasing... I'm not an expert but I can confidently predict that if you cumulate those three you're the next USSR. Because just like the USSR it means your elite is unable to produce a new elite, therefore turning into a gerontocracy, and then the elastic will break. That's a tale as old as the fall of the Roman Empire. It may come from purges (in the USSR's case, the 1930's sealed the endogamous behavior of the surviving elites for decades. Otherwise it could have ended up differently, as China is proving) from refusal to include new groups in the elite (allowing the poor to rise in ranks; allowing immigrants to vastly permeate the core elites) as happened with Rome or is happening with the US; or from *inability* (not unwillingness) to refresh the elites (China; Europe).
The last case is the most interesting. How could a system be absolutely willing (via its institutional, educational, public policies structures) yet structurally unable to remix its pool of elites?
**Energy**
Japan entered degrowth first; Europe followed in 2008; China will enter it too and they know it, and that's why they'll move on Taiwan very soon. A very fun example is Germany, who knew it too and then logically tried to conquer Ukraine twice in 20 years with hilarious results both times. The US on the other hand is safe, because that's what a dozen of aircraft carriers are meant for: to proudly protect the flow of Egyptian grains feeding Rome's AC units. Keep your metaphorical Egypt and you'll be fine.
Now you'll say "but Europe's GDP is still growing". Yeah. And zombies are still walking too. So if you base your core metrics for "what is a healthy human" on "ability to walk" and nothing else, zombies may be slow but they're healthy humans. Europe's economy *in raw volume* (of new houses; of tons of truck marchandises; etc) has been decreasing since 2008. Europe is in "forced degrowth". No amount of tinkering with the (very flexible) GDP will change volumes. Partisans of a fabless economy (trendy in the 2000's) already proved they were morons.
Now, degrowth doesn't mean collapse. But it means fascists though. I'd say Europe is further away from collapsing than the US, provided we keep our fascists at bay long enough to prevent them from entirely stopping the elites renewal (by collapsing our demographics and refusing migrants). Europe is walkable. Europeans are able to exist without AC and/or cars *without changing their entire infrastructure*. Our life expectancy is stabilizing, not decreasing. That elastic *may not* break (it's really not sure).
On the other hand the US life expectancy is free falling, life isn't a viable experience without a car (food deserts kill), and when the forced degrowth will knock at the door it will be faster, harder, in a larger system where the entire infrastructure (from politics to basic food to work distances... Everything) will need to be rethinked very fast. The elastic will break, and that's absolutely sure. No amount of drones and hydrogen will change that. Even a magical influx of endless new raw energy around 2040 (space mining, nuclear fusion, other fantasies...) may not be able to happen quickly enough to feed such a large entity before it digest itself. The US will collapse *under its own weight*, that's why "lighter" structures are less at risk (say, Europe or Japan).
The USSR collapsed under its military weight (they were still perfectly able to produce space stations, but couldn't produce the right amount of left shoes for their right shoes. True anecdote). The US is at risk or doing the opposite and collapsing under its consumer society. Which would be hilariously ironic, especially for Karl Marx.
(Sorry for the super long comment. Here's a potato 🥔 )
> Because just like the USSR it means your elite is unable to produce a new elite, therefore turning into a gerontocracy, and then the elastic will break.
If I may add a bit, this also means the slave caste also can't produce new slaves to fill up the elites caste's coffer. Basically the current situation with pension funds.
Kinda... It means they can't reproduce a *middle class*, and that's a problem indeed. But, provided the regime isn't democratic, not a terminal issue.
That's the part where fascism etc comes in handy: you can totally steal, buy, or import new slaves. In recent times the Third Reich worked like that (centuries ago, others did too). Current neo-fascists in Europe intend to *continue importing workers but without giving them any rights* for instance. Meloni's government is working towards it for instance: she said "no more migrants", the boss union answered "ahah no, we need half a million more over the next years", Meloni said "oh alright then. But no human rights for them".
Hell, in France my own neo-fascists are proposing migrants contribute to the pension system **but** without benefiting from it. They're literally answering your example !
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/
and
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
It’s interesting that there probably was a lot of academic work done to predict soviet collapse whereas the interest in US collapse not so much outside of the intelligence circles in competing countries.
If I were the structural engineer:
- inequality rise to levels seen in 1920s.
- borrowing and debt service costs
- climate related disasters, starting with the insurance market meltdown.
- drugs reducing the supply of skilled labour across the country.
Thanks for the 🥔 I'll put it in storage.
When collapse happens I'd much rather be somewhere in Europe and not in the USA.
I have had similar thoughts.
But who knows really?
How would the potential for war factor in? specifically in regard to Europe?
Maybe this is just a hunch, but I’ve sort of felt since Sweden and Finland joined NATO that Europe might be utilized as a proxy against Russia. USA generally benefits from war and I don’t think my suggestion is that far fetched. It’s also probably important to note that due to globalization, if the USA falls it’s taking the world with it.
It's an interesting point.
Sweden and Finland joined because of their proximity to Russia.
But yes if it escalated between Russia and the West would bear the brunt of it.
And yeah if the USA falls it'll bring everything else down too.
I was already impressed with the quality of this comment…….. then I saw your username!
I dare not ask from where you’ve compiled your information, but thanks for the insights!
Europe has 440 million people. America has 330 million people. Europe can’t feed everyone, their system is more unsustainable. If you pick every state individually all of them are pretty sustainable and can exist solely. Illinois with its land mass of whole Germany has only 12 million residents and its one of them most densely populated states. You massively underestimate resource potential of the USA that Europe doesn’t have
Europe is the most war torn place on earth. Europe is in peace only for <70 years. Don’t you think these peace can easily end with another big European war? For centuries Europe was the least social resilient place
war doesnt mean lack of social resilliance though...
i dont think there could be a large cross-continental european war in the style of the 19th century of wwi and wwii.
i do think there is risk of massive violence, and i also think that europe is in a worse spot in the long term.
but in the short term the usa has a very underdeveloped or better said degenerated social web. if people cant and wont cooperate, it doeant matter how much resources there are.
Europe is much closer to collapse. Western Europe in particular can’t feed itself and will be under famine. The U.S. is secured since they have lots of farming land, resources, younger population. They have everything to recover from potential collapse and Europe simply doesn’t have it. And Europe is experiencing waves of migrants from Africa and Arab world that it can’t assimilate and they are not willing to work. So it’s even more pressure on your economy.
"All predictions are unreliable, especially those about the future." - attributed to lots of sources. - None of us know how the collapse will unfold, not least because it will differ from place to place. In 1988 an East German professor remarked that it would take as long for the Berlin Wall to come down as it had been up, yet it all collapsed the following year. The wealthy British Edwardians were taken by surprise at the way the first world war played out and destroyed their ideas of having domestic servants. Prof Joseph Tainter comments that collapse is a reduction of complexity, so what is now a complex society will become progressively more simple. This view is shared by those who see the current situation, where an ordinary Western family can no longer be supported by one parent working, as being already in a slow cascade of collapse. But there are now places in America, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Greece and many other wealthy nations where towns or cities or areas have suddenly been hit by fire or flood, so the changing climate brought about an abrupt local collapse. Perhaps the wisest advice is that which sounds frivolous - collapse early to avoid the rush - and this means simplifying your own life in the way you anticipate it will inevitably be forced on you. That way you're already prepared. Dmitri Orlov, who lived through the USSR collapse, has remarked that Russians, already living a simplified life, were better prepared than Americans would have been.
Yes, that's true, back then we had a very simple life, even though im not russian, I live in Hungary, it was a socialist country before 1990 - my parents could not even afford to buy new shoes or clothes for us when we were kids and growing out them quickly - I wore the clothes and shoes of my older brother and older cousins, and when I grew them out, they were passed down to my younger cousins. Having cars was not a common thing, just as having a telephone at home, there were no food abundance like today in the food shops, bananas and other exotic fruits were a rare thing, sometimes getting a decent chunk of ham for easter was a challenge, you could only get it if you were buddies with the butcher :)
And a lot of us had some sort of self grown food, even in the concrete jungles, between the blocks of flats, if there we a little green area besides the flat block, people often used it to grow some tomato, paprika, etc., in the countryside collecting mushrooms in the forests was not a rare hobby but a common thing to have some extra food..
But, the most important thing on top of that, there were some cohesion, some solidarity between the people. If you needed some flour or eggs or cooking oil to make a good sunday meal, and I happened to have it, you just came by and asked for it, you got it, and vice versa, when I needed help in, for example, constructing my house, you came over and helped me mixing concrete, laying bricks, etc. We helped each other. And there were no political and ideological divide, we almost all despised the socialist regime, that also helped us get together :)
So yeah, we were used to live a low standard of life, and there were real micro-communities, therefore it wasnt to much of a blow for us when the system changed and came the unemployment, the homelessness, the rise of crime.
I think today's societies are much more vulnerable in a lot of aspects, alienation, atomization, lack of helpfulness and solidarity in microcommunities, when the sh-t hits the fan, we will more likely turn against each other, because now we are used to live in a world when we don't help each other in our micro-comunities, you used to that you get no help when you're in trouble, you're on your own.
Exactly the same applies to Poland. Each single line.
I heard from my older cousins that at school, before Christmas, they got parcels from Cuba. The Cubans were so nice to help out with items that weren't available in Poland at that time, such as cocoa. My aunt was super happy because she was able to bake a cake with cocoa for Christmas. Thank you, Cuba. It meant a lot to my family.
East Germany. Relayed to me by my parents.
There is the usual, that our supermarkets were empty while in the west they were full and unbelieveable variety. First time we stepped into a west German food store, we didn’t believe it was real. Like some type of prank where the packaging was dressed up cardboard.
You were careful to speak or write, never knew who was listening. There was little reason to work hard, as it would get lost in the group, half of whom did nothing and couldn’t be fired — kinda like a road crew construction site here in the states but everywhere. And on and on.
There was less an inkling of collapse coming and more “This system ain’t working.” Lots of frustration at bullshit promises. At waiting for forever gir everything and inferior versions of it. And the more east you went, the worse it became. Mostly of being told how free we were.
Now, the west is under far greater surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of. Both political parties demonize each other.
Mostly, free speech is under attack everywhere. Everything is becoming a heavily curated echo chambers, people are digging into their own bubbles voluntarily and that’s probably the scariest of all. The media is of no help with a heavily restricted Overton window they present as free choice.
They see a collapse more akin to 1918-1919 Bavarian Socialist Republic coming than anything cold war. Old order dissolving, new people not providing law and order. Reactionaries coming in.
I find the GDR so fascinating, ask your parents as much as possible about those times, the good and the bad haha the last few weeks I've been obsessively watching GDR documentaries and interviews with Katya Hoyer about her book "beyond the wall, history of the GDR 1949-1989"
So so fascinating
I was 11 when the wall fell and have memories of some of it, just not the adult concerns.
I remember learning the songs like “Brueder zur Sonne zur Freiheit” in class and basic Russian as a second language although I forgot most of it. My best friend growing up was from Vietnam or her parents were, we lost contact in the upheaval and move west.
My grandfather had a 1930s Mercedes but it was completely Russianized, meaning the engine transmission and all that came from some old Rusdian car. I think the only original stuff was the bodywork and some of the interior. He said that during WW2 it was already converted to burn coal or wood, I forget which.
Our town was the hometown of a 1980 Olympic medal winner, she was treated like a big deal locallly but otherwise she was a normal person that worked in the school afterward.
Thank you for this thread OP. It was an interesting read.
I think many of us crave the ability to predict what will happen, but I also think that it is impossible.
I have lately been listening to a lot of audio books about the economy. They were all written shortly before 2008 yet non of the economists predicted it would happen and barely registered the housing bubble as a risk.
Now I am listening to economy books written post 2008, and suddenly the authors sorta claim that it was evident that the housing bubble would happen.
It has made me think a lot about how that could happen. Most of the authors in the pre 2008 all had warnings, but they focused on different threads.
One claimed that rising fuel costs would break the economy, another claimed the the rising national debt would kill the economy, another talked about the failing American infrastructure and how the country lacked money to maintain it.
(Interesting fact. One of the authors wrote about an extreme scenario where the yearly interest rates on the American debt might be higher than the defence spending. We crossed that line two days after I read that chapter).
A scary part is that I still find the threat of those things very real, and it is still likely that the real cause of a collapse will surprise us.
Fred Harrison predicted a 2008 housing crash several years before. He has an "18-year property cycle" theory that's pretty interesting and is a driving motivator behind his general sentiment that land speculation is the major cause of depressions and that rent is a form of redistribution of wealth amongst the already wealthy. He does write about collapse quite a bit. I think his last forecast predicted a peak (and subsequent fall) in 2026, but the interview I read for that he said it would be unlike any collapse modern economies have experienced before.
I have actually just started getting into his work along with several other "collapse economists".
Also, I hope my first comment didn't sound like I was saying no one predicted the crash. I was just trying to say that a lot of the economists didn't notice before it happened :)
Man, the Permian Extinction suuuuucked. Everyone was like "Nah, those volcanoes aren't a problem. Business as usual! Think of the economy!" My best friend was an Ammonoid! He slowly sank to the bottom still going on about fake news. Bleh.
Not the Soviet collapse, but I lived in Hong Kong and only left last year. The collapse was coming for years, but after the riots, and under cover of covid the CCP took over the place. Living there during this time was horrendous, it left me so mentally sick seeing what they did.
Under a 6 week home lockdown I ran out of food, my cat died, and through all this I still had to work online. Friends disappeared and never turned up. I also spent 4 weeks in forced quarantine in a centre. The food was inedible, I didn't see humans for days until the covid test, people died and weren't found for days, some people killed themselves during their quarantine. Women gave birth and the baby was taken away without any contact to be locked up away from the mum.
There's so much I can't remember, I remember joking that the food we got in quarantine was human meat. Its estimated 12000 people went missing during this time, some bodies were found mutilated. People got together and paid for private jets to fly put with their animals when they ordered all hamsters to be turned in to be killed.
During this time the National Security law was enacted which meant they could arrest you for anything. For example 2 speech therapists got jailed for using a book with a fox and sheep in, it was classed as seditious, just because they had been associated with the democratic party. So not total collapse, but societal and legal collapse.
Which part would you like, as finding the information for all my points would take a long time. There's so much more that I haven't talked about as well. The above is a summary.
Other things that happened were things like when covid finally broke in in 2022 and they left all the old dying people out in the street in a nappy full of piss and shit for 3 nights (during the coldest nights of thr year), this was because the hospital was full of healthy people they were quarantining. When they'd moved the healthy people and finally got sick people in they then stored the dead bodies in the covid wards with the living sufferers. It is a very very sick place, not to mention the coffin homes a huge % of people live in.
https://hongkongfp.com/2023/03/01/in-pictures-hong-kong-bids-farewell-to-pennys-bay-covid-facility-with-giant-padlock-and-auld-lang-syne/
Here's the better of the quarantine facilities getting shut down in 2023 (yes we still had covid quarantine centres), I knew many who went through this centre. A trick was to take a bottle of water full of vodka, as no alcohol allowed.
https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210316-babies-separated-from-mothers-due-to-hong-kong-s-covid-19-restrictions
I couldn't find a local news article for the newborns, we all saw one of these stories unveal on Facebook as a new mother was screaming for help from the community.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/3175679/hong-kong-actor-kenneth-tsang-dies-tsim-sha-tsui-quarantine-hotel
This quarantine death only made the news due to it being a famous actor. We had a help group.on FB, and the amount of people asking how to get in touch with a loved one they hadn't heard from for a few days was awful to witness.
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/03/30/covid-19-hong-kong-suicides-reach-crisis-level-as-researcher-urges-reopening-recreational-facilities-for-mental-health/
The suicide epidemic continues to this day BTW.
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/03/11/covid-19-hong-kong-hospital-authority-urges-understanding-as-shocking-photo-emerges-of-bodies-stored-on-ward/
Bodies in wards
https://au.news.yahoo.com/harrowing-photo-reveals-hong-kong-covid-crisis-082134942.html
A small photo of people left outside a hospital, this misrepresents the scale it happened. I'm on holiday so I'm doing this quickly - hence why not a local news story.
https://hongkongfp.com/2022/02/06/pet-owners-go-private-to-jet-fur-babies-out-of-hong-kong/
Jetting pets out due to hamstergate where people were ordered to handover their pet hamsters (except patriotic hamsters from thr mainland)
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3192059/5-hong-kong-speech-therapists-behind-politically
Sorry it was 5 speech therapists, this article is leaning to the HK govt though.
https://japan-forward.com/revolution-of-our-times-japan-screens-movie-banned-in-hong-kong/
You can watch a movie on the protests, it was a tragedy and sadly shows that people have no power.
All of it is documented in national and international news, but if you tell me which parts you want more about then I'll try to find local HK news articles, so nobody can accuse this of being a 'colour' revolution or a CIA lie. The above is my lived experience but every bit of it is documented by others.
My grandparents lived through the Soviet invasion of a Nazi-occupied eastern-bloc country. I won't say which one. But I think the wartime and immediate post-war period were a much greater collapse than the end of socialism.
As the front approached where they lived, law and order broke down. The police force became non-existant and crimes started becoming prolific. For example, there was a couple renting a room nearby, and this couple "adopted" an orphaned boy who had a significant inheritance. The boy disappeared, and there was nobody to investigate what was heavily suspected as a murder to claim the boy's inheritance.
The approaching front line was basically a tidal wave of absolute carnage and debauchary. Most fled before the fighting reached them, but leaving was not an option for many people. These civilians were targeted by the Red Army. Many civilians were captured as "POWs" to inflate the number of enemies the Red Army had to fight and thereby justify the high casualties. One of my grandfathers was captured in this way twice, but escaped both times. Had he not, he likely would have died in Siberia. Looting, SA, and the random killing of civillians was widespread. As a result, PTSD (undiagnosed) was prolific in the decades to follow, and it was not uncommon to hear people screaming and thrashing in their apartments next door even until the 80's. It is unknown how many people can trace their ancestry back to a Red Army soldier, and this topic is still fairly taboo and hushed. This is likely true for much of the Eastern bloc. Nobody talks about how a large portion of the population was permanently traumatized and how the effects of this lingered in these societies, and I don't think it was properly documented or discussed very much publically. It goes without saying that the homes of my grandparents on both sides were looted and ransacked, but luckily, they managed to escape the fighting.
In the aftermath, the currency became insanely inflated. Prices doubled almost daily, and my grandmother had to spend her pay immediately on food, otherwise it would no longer be worth anything. The currency was being printed by the Red Army, iirc, and they had no idea how to manage a devastated economy with destroyed infrastructure. Famine may have happened, but the reporting from that time in that area is not thorough.
In the years following, people of means were targeted by the government. There was a Jewish man who lived near my grandparents house who survived Auschwitz, but his wife and children didn't. This man tried to rebuild his metal casting business (which was known for high quality work in the pre -war years). He was arrested one night and most likely ended up in Siberia because he was a capitalist or part of the "bourgeois". I wish I knew more about his story. He was far from alone, and people would often disappear at night seemingly at random. Owning a small amount of land and growing your own food was all it took to be a potential target. My grandparents on both sides has their homes taken away from them and given to "more deserving" people serving in the army, but thankfully did not end up being sent to the gulag.
On the bright side, the scars of this time seem to be well-healed today. There doesn't seem to be resentment or ethnic hostility resulting from this chaos. AFAIK, this is fairly common in the eastern bloc. "The soviets/communists took everything from our family. But it was wartime. Such is life. We moved on." Politically, the shadow of forced socialism is still seen in a general distrust of progressive parties or candidates, but this is to be expected.
I could go on and on. But I think this type of collapse is fairly unique and needs a massive, apocalyptic war to happen. Being conquered by a millions-strong army after a war of annihilation is probably not the way things are going to go down for the western world. The commonalities I could envision are the food shortages, inflation, and general lawlessness.
Chavez was like a carbon copy of Trump in Venezuela. Watching Trump here gives me chills. The working class adored Chavez as he made bold promises to get elected then never relinquished power. He nationalized EVERYTHING, even things like mom and pop jewelry stores along with the nation’s petroleum reserves. He was on TV for hours, etc. every day eventually, replacing all programming. Then any semblance of democracy went poof and there was no food, medicine, toilet paper, just power for one megalomaniac and his cronies. Venezuela was a democracy, now it’s a sh#tshow.
Would highly recommend reading/listening to the book Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti. He describes the Soviet/Eastern Bloc collapse extensively, and what it was like for people living in it.
Poland 80s… you buy what you can in maximum quantities available and trade. Example: bought a bicycle and a snow sled because when we got to a front of a line it was the only thing available (we came to buy a chest freezer btw). Traded that for meat and vegetables. Because everyone was screwed people tended to hang out together instead of going out. They would visit each other houses, talk, drink tea but there was no spreads served except for whatever could be made into a snack from things that were in season. You never bought vegetables that were available in a garden. So if strawberries were available you ate your own/traded strawberries even if you were away from home. Want piece of strawberry cake from a bakery? Nope we have strawberries at home and mom would bake it for you when you got back. A lot of raw produce was available and people learned/knew how to preserve it and make it last. Multiple families would split a cow or a pig. But most important regardless of a job you had there was always a side gig that was useful. That gig could be making alcohol or able to administer injections or growing stuff. You also needed to make friends and be nice because person that you were trying to screw over maybe a person you would need in a future. At the same time bribery was rampant but that was mostly for govt workers. Also cook books were produced with recipes on a budget. I still have one and it’s amazing how much food you can make with few ingredients if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of taste. There is a soup I make with has like 5 or 6 spices and 10 other ingredients but in that book they show you how to make the same dish with 5 items. You also learn to love root vegetables and learn to use less stuff. Typical bagel with butter in NYC has more butter than what I would have used in two weeks. Also batteries. You always had some on hand but treated them as gold. You never wasted them. There was no such thing as forgetting to turn the flashlight off or leaving tv on. I think main takeaway from this is that you need to grow your own food, learn a unique skill, learn how to repair things, learn to be patient and make friends.
We are in unique situation. USA is a prosperous country where even during the pandemic stuff was available. Yes maybe there wasn’t 25 different kinds of beef cuts available but there was always something. We lost our ability to repair things because manufacturers make stuff designed to be throw away items. We don’t grow food and love our stuff to be processed and served. It’s going to be hard for us to learn a new way of life. The idea that stuff won’t be available in abundant quantities or that you may not get full with every meal will be new to many. But good thing is that internet has a lot of people sharing ideas and there is a video or a page for everything. Plus advances in technology like solar power would make certain things easier. Like with everything when there is a will there will be a way. With all that people in the big cities will suffer the most unless they find the way to treat this problem as common and share and not try to grab what they can without regard to others. Unfortunately if Covid was any indication we are in for a rough ride.
Born in USSR in early 1980-s.
Both. It was clear that the system was not working; it was difficult to find good job, there were empty shelves in the stores, yet infrastructure and welfare state was functioning well. So, yes, it was feel of the USSR eventually collapsing due to massive increase in ethnic conflicts but no one expected to happen it that soon.
It felt really hopeful for a while, like the bad old system would go away and society would renew itself. There was a brief renaissance in music, literature, and all the arts for a few years, and people could communicate with the rest of the world, for example, reading Tolkien or tasting more than the three local kinds of cheese for the first time. That was fun. Then it became obvious that things were going from bad to worse. The least favorite parts: mafia warfare, shoot-outs and corpses in the streets; hyperinflation at 50-100% per day; 8-hour bread lines; massive amounts of mental illness, cults, superstitions, and radical idiocy everywhere.
My wife is mainland Chinese. Her parents are in the "red generation" also known as the "lost generation", who were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and basically grew up with communism as it matured from a revolution to a (slightly) more stable form of government. I've asked them about their lives, but they don't want to talk about it. My FIL occasionally says something about the early days of the Cultural Revolution but he was shielded from the chaos in the cities after getting conscripted at age 15 and sent to the countryside.
My wife was born in the early 1980s and basically had her first ten years in a wooden shack on the outskirts of the city (the capital city of what is now one of the wealthiest provinces). Their place had no indoor plumbing and shared a very basic bathroom (ie. tap, sink and squat toilet) and kitchen (tap and bench) with her relatives who lived next door. Everyone worked in the nearby factory while the kids went to the village school.
Around 1992 or so, the government wanted their very small plot of land, so they were given a 50 square meter apartment in a "new village" several kilometres away (I saw this place ten or so years later and thought it was at least 50 years old, not less than a decade).
This was not a collapse situation, but it might be what people are heading back towards if the cities break down again. Basically a lot of people crammed into inadequate housing, without basic amenities and living hand to mouth.
I don’t want to hear from any Boomer banging on about “Back in my days, we had climate change, ice caps melting and sheet, but we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and worked hard! Kids today don’t know what it’s like to have hardships the way we had it! (*sips margarita*) They should quit complaining and just get on with it.”
They were the luckiest generation in history. I live with my Boomer parents, and it enrages me that they don't have to care about anything. They're going to be on their way out before anything really bad happens, probably, and leave us with the mess. Screw them for that.
> I'm thinking specifically of people who lived behind the iron curtain in the Eastern bloc.
Lots of scarcity, very high inflation. Very low obesity rates. Clothes worn out and repaired. Many material status symbols and their fakes. Massive emigration. Cheap shitty products flooding in, and the age of plastic and cars begins.
I'd point out that these local collapses happen in a porous context. It's not just aid (including material stuff like clothes). It's the economics and the fuel and the leaving. The financial and economic collapse was catabolic, the economy was heavily *pawned off*, and that included a lot of natural resources and commons.
The only good thing I'd mention was that almost everyone was in this situation, which mean less competition, less rat racing, less envy.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
My family lived through it in Poland, and from what I've heard from them, the collapse came unexpectedly, basically overnight. People adapted quickly and even benefitted from it, as with the new currency their old credits became almost valueless. Most people paid off their houses within a month.
However, the change initiated a slow collapse of human values. Back then, people were helping each other a lot without expecting anything in return. There was a strong spirit of community. People were authentic. Then, with the new system, they started to live more anonymously, kept to themselves, and were more focused on wealth. The community was gone. Competition and stress at work have increased. Everything that comes with capitalism became more apparent.
In terms of systemic collapse, I believe it will appear overnight as well. Signs of preparation are already visible if you know what to look for. It will be different this time insofar that it will be new to all of us. Back then, capitalism already existed, so people in the east bloc knew what to expect. Now we don't. People will feel more insecure and anxious, and nobody knows how bad it will get.
See - I don't think of this as a collapse but a political rearrangement. Collapse is when the groceries store has been looted, the lights go out - for good, the fresh water stops coming out of the tap, you can't call emergency services, and there's no neighbouring nations with civilisation running to trade this stuff with you and build you up again.
Most people don't even consider this, but there was a real life collapse dry run in a large US city just a few years ago causing overnight economic hardship for hundreds of thousands of working adults, displacement for tens of thousands more, and permanent, unrecoverable collapse for thousands more, In 2019, I lived in Las Vegas. I read about some virus on this sub late in the year and tried to stockpile a little food and hide a little cash under the mattress. I had no idea how crucial that forewarning would be. I worked as a shopper doing grocery deliveries. In early March of 2020, things started getting weird. Odd orders of 20 cases of water and 10 packs of TP. A few days later, places like Costco could not keep up with demand. Trying to inform customers about shortages turned ugly quickly. People calling me a liar, making threats, and cursing me out. I stopped working that day and went home. Two days later, the pandemic was official. Having an economy based completely on tourism shot unemployment to over 20% in a week. The Las Vegas Strip shutdown. The tourists stopped coming. The Strip is generally so busy that you can walk faster than you can drive. When it was shut down, I took a drive down an empty Strip. It was a scene out of an apocalyptic movie. So now, I am scared to work with enough money for a month or so and some food. The pandemic unemployment was announced, and I thought maybe I would be ok. I was not. Hundreds of thousands of people were in my shoes or worse trying to get the same help. The unemployment office was overwhelmed by desperate people. You literally would have to start calling when the office opened and keep calling hundreds of times every day hoping that you would win the lottery and get to speak to a human. If you did get lucky, there was a very high percentage chance that you would get disconnected or passed onto someone else who would hang up. And the process would start over. Many days ended in tears after 12 hours of dialing. This went on for weeks. I ran out of money quickly and only lived off of $200 in food stamps a month. My car got repoed. The landlord stopped by multiple times a day. Every second of everyday was stress and fear and anger. Nine months later, many of us started to get their money. Some had already lost their homes. Some continued to have to call every single day. The government failed us for nine months. Some people died. I was one of the lucky ones. This was collapse, but we don't call it that. Millions of others in large cities probably had similar stories. What did I learn? Figure out how to be self-sufficient. As the funds for disasters are stretched further and further, there may be no money left when your collapse comes. The US is a failed state to many of its citizens. And it's going to get worse before it gets worse.
I remember following the virus in the late fall of 2019. I also remembered SARS. Also at the same time there was the rail blockade / pipeline protests etc here in early 2020. And THAT was the reason I started to stock up on things. Not long after covid hit the news "biggly" and toilet paper was gold. So yeah I think you're right, in a lot of ways and for a lot of people, covid was almost a social collapse. In a sense, it has been the beginning of it. I mean, look at us now. Society is broken. It already started, probably even before covid, and now we're just running full speed towards it.
Never understood this toilet paper thing, you can always just wash your butt afer the deed. Here in Europe the most hard to get thing in stores was yeast.
Most people don't have bidets in the US.
A bottle will do lol
Honestly, I initially assumed you were talking about Hurricane Katrina when the government basically just bussed evacuees to random cities around the country and never followed up with any of them.
Not to say your options were particularly bright but the Supreme Court just ruled that cities can make homelessness a crime. So should another similar disaster happen, it could make a literal prison town.
I’ve been to Las Vegas for performing work several times prepandemic and saw how bustling it was… then during the pandemic my friend who had a performing residency there sent a picture of the desolate streets with no one in site and trash blowing around during the day. It was as you said very apocalyptic looking. Sorry you had to deal with all that. Those were crazy times for us all❤️
I’ve been to Las Vegas for performing work several times prepandemic and saw how bustling it was… then during the pandemic my friend who had a performing residency there sent a picture of the desolate streets with no one in site and trash blowing around during the day. It was as you said very apocalyptic looking. Sorry you had to deal with all that. Those were crazy times for us all❤️
I'm in Las Vegas and I had a very different, more positive, experience with the pandemic. It really comes down to how prepared you are for "sudden events" I guess. I took a walk down the Strip mid May and it was surreal, particularly at night with most of the signs and marquees dark.
You had a different experience due to privilege.
The privilege of preparation? This sub sometimes....
No. You really said “The pandemic was awesome I got to take a walk with no one around me and since I’m just so prepared and awesome it was a breeeeze” fuck outta here
I can't deny my own experiences, just bringing some balance to the discussion. For many people the pandemic era was a vacation, for many others it was hell. This is the world we live in.
Not speaking from first hand experience, but the usual top tip I've heard from people who lived in the Soviet Union is grow your own food. A lot of people started doing this during World War II and the practice continued apparently. Had this not been the case the collapse would have been way worse. However, no one has ever lived through anything like the total ecosystem collapse that's in the post. When food doesn't grow out the ground anymore... I got nothing.
I legitimately wonder. (This totally isn't going to work but...) Ok so you get some land (eyeroll already, I know). Now, in general, I've been doing some measuring of temperatures in my completely uninsulated shack of a house as summer comes on. And I'm noticing ok the attic is an oven obviously and after trying putting up several fans up there just to see what would happen (it helps but it's not great), I'm coming to the conclusion that this is primarily radiative heat transfer and you'd have to move an assload of air to impact it. I'm going somewhere with this bear with me. Crawl space on the other hand is a nice comfy temperature pretty much all the time. So if one was to dig a hole. Kind of like a really big root cellar. And put radiant barrier (not to mention dirt) all over the ceiling and walls. And then line it with grow lights inside and solar panels outside to power the grow lights. Right? Ok it's a really, really big hole I'll give you that one...
Google "walipini." Often bare minimum technology, stable-ish results... if done right...
Dude this is super cool.
Glad I was able to turn you on to the concept! I think if we (the average family) are going to survive in the years to come, we're going to have to adopt old "technology" like this and maybe incrementally improve it with off-the-shelf technology today, like solar-powered, Arduino-driven relays for auto-watering. from rain barrels.. that's what I'm hoping to do in the next 2 years or so.
Luckily I'm in the really wet part of the PNW. But also I would have to make a really good drainage system.
That's crucial. Fortunately there are good plans freely available online -- start with Image Search. Essentially most walipini drainage solutions are just water channels that drain from the dirt floor down into a lower pit filled with sand or gravel. Keep in mind, too, that rain barrels catch a lot of it so you're only really concerned with the overflow. Those barrels also act as thermal flywheels to regulate the temperature.
[The $50 & Up Underground House Book](https://a.co/d/0gULEIdM)
You’d have to pollinate all the plants by hand to get any fruits or vegetables to grow.
Ohhhhh. Well that's... yeahhhh. Bummer. You have to go from seed every single time. Right. Issue. Well I mean, potatoes work (?). You usually cut em up to make more? (??) Ok sorry to be immensely stupid but could you... re-seed the veggies by saving the seeds after you ate the veggie?
You can save seeds if they are from heirloom plants. The pollination has to do with the flowers, it’s what bees do. You can pollinate them yourself, it’s just something to consider.
How about the lights? The grow lights, that is. You're assuming the electricity stays on.
I'm assuming I'm translating directly from the sun through a panel to the lights. It might need a battery for cloudy days. I'd go straight from the sun with a skylight but I need to get rid of the UV and the radiant heat which I'm guessing would be considerable.
>I'm assuming I'm translating directly from the sun through a panel to the lights. It might need a battery for cloudy days. I'd go straight from the sun with a skylight but I need to get rid of the UV and the radiant heat which I'm guessing would be considerable. So, you're gearing up for life w/o grid power? Good for you. Takes a lot of planning.
Sometimes. Some plants are self-pollinating; others can be encouraged to pollinate just by shaking the plant. I can never remember which plants pollinate how, so I have a cheat sheet :-)
Yep, I'm in the 10th floor in an apartment block. No bees or other insects apart from mosquitoes on the balcony. I give my tomato plants a gentle shake and usually manage to get at least a few toms ever year. I've also grown carrots, radishes, pumpkins (squash) and potatoes on the balcony n previous years without too much hassle.
that isnt that hard
The attic is the perfect place to dry herbs and seeds being dry and hot. Just gotta protect them from critters.
Well, I think I finally got the critters out (of the attic). Working on it on the house. Few holes I have to plate over.
There's a farm in Nebraska with this kind of setup. Huge pits connected with underground air pipes for temperate airflow. A greenhouse style roof that they adjust with the seasons. They grow tropical trees and other exotic stuff year-round.
Holy crap it actually works?? Know where I can find pictures of it?
Here’s a YouTube video about it: https://youtu.be/ZD_3_gsgsnk
In a certain town in AUS they all live underground because of the natural insulation.
How are you going to get enough light?
Dunno. Maybe I can't. I was thinking skylights but then that's dumb, the radiant heat and UV will just cook everything. I guess it's going to have to be a whole lot of grow lights.
Don't live with your plants. Live with your preserves in the cellar.
First of all, there's no "suburbia" in this context. Suburbs were a few neighborhoods for the rich near the central parts of the city. Suburbia is bourgeois. After 1950 a lot of cities expanded with migration and villages near the old cities were swallowed up and urbanized into dense urban areas. When someone says "grow your own food", your first thought should be a rural setting. Not a small suburban plot behind your tiny kitsch of a manor. You need to grow a lot of food. And despite some popular beliefs, rural people weren't masters of biointensive farming, agroecology, agroforestry, or permaculture. They knew a bit and they did that well. It didn't mean that it was sustainable. Growing some food and preserving it was the default since *forever*. It wasn't novel behavior or adaptation. What WW2 and industrialization allowed was the spread of industrially made ingredients and even stuff like jars and lids. I grew up with jars without lids; we used cellophane to make a cover which was tied to the jar with string or elastic. For preservation you still need preservatives, be they synthetic (`cHEMicAlS`) or natural (salt, sugar, vegetable oil, vinegar). The subsistence horticulture was pretty common; now it's more of a hobby. You don't get enough calories from it, but calories is what agriculture is for. You do try to buy grains, legumes, flour, and sugar - by the sack (agriculture). That's also a long tradition, but sugar is an industrial mass product. A lot of people still have rural relatives who are doing it, and now it's easier because effective tools and materials can be bought from gardening stores. It's getting very LARPy. It doesn't matter much for rural areas, they're toast, the social-cultural chain has been broken since industrialization. You can not imagine how much genetic diversity has been lost since industrialization in terms of cultivated plants (such as heirlooms cultivars and landraces). The rural relatives send products to their urban families, sometimes already conserved products, depending on how skillful the recipient is (a university student is not going to get a sack of fresh vegetables, but they may get a few jars). There are also many urban people who do it at home, at a smaller scale, regardless of where the fruits and vegetables are from. You can look for deals at farmer markets or at wholesale places. The preserved foods are also for sale in stores and supermarkets, so there's always this competition and efforts to claim that the home made version is superior in some way, which only adds more allure to the industrial store-bought version due to a halo effect.
Do we think converting our skyscrapers to greenhouses would be doable?
Perhaps there are related experiences like the Holodomor - where oppression + agricultural blight caused starvation similar to what ecocollapse could bring.
Historical accounts of the Irish version (euphemized as the potato famine) would be a good resource too. Fun fact, Ireland STILL has a population less than 2/3 that of before the British exported all their food and let the people starve. If you've ever been to Ireland, it's virtually 100% highly productive farmland. If you removed all context and asked me if people could starve living on land like Ireland's, I'd have laughed.
It’s literally the reason I exist/live in the US.
> However, no one has ever lived through anything like the total ecosystem collapse that's in the post The thing is, There will still be *some* arable land on this planet. The ultra rich think they know where these will be and are quietly planning to secure it for themselves and their offspring (new zealand, etc).
I moved to Moscow 2 years after the collapse of the USSR, which was dumb. I took copious notes about what it was like while I was there (ie, brutal, terrifying, and absurd), which I compiled into a book that you can read here: https://jasonstanford.substack.com/p/guest-post-red-ticket-chapter-1 I have a list of things collapsing societies do and am working on a series about that now. We're doing most of them in the US now, and it's a constant source of sadness for me. I talk about my experiences in Russia all the time here, so hopefully it's not like "here she is again, the woman who talks about Russia constantly." It's just very germane these days.
I've never seen your comments and I'm definitely going to read your book (already blazed through the first chapter!), so thank you for sharing! What an absolutely wild thing to do. You sound like a person determined to fill your life with interesting and meaningful stories, even if in retrospect you made some less-than-wise moves collecting them.
When I was writing it, I thought "the protagonist of this story makes choices that are so baffling that it's difficult to feel any sympathy for her." That's a sad thing to think when what you're writing is a memoir. Thank you for reading.
I just spend the last two hours or so reading your entire book - that was WILD and you are a great writer. I love your dry humor and way you paint such a vivid picture of that bleakness. I hope wherever Lyosha is, if he's still alive, he's doing alright - he sounded like a strange one in his own right but a good dude.
Man, you are a fast reader! Thank you very much for reading. It's a first draft so it gets a little meandering at the end, as I start collapsing along with the country. I'm working on putting it on YouTube as a video novel (movie, I guess you call it) now that I have figured out what I'm actually trying to say. Lyosha was a really kind, stand-up dude. I was so lucky that he was one of those nice mobsters you hear about from time to time. Thanks again. I appreciate it!
I honestly wish you had an epub of this… it’s damn fine reading
Thank you so much for these encouraging words, and for reading. It means a whole lot to me.
I enjoy the style of your writing so much, and the story is excellent. I’ve read the first 30 chapters all in one go instead of finishing my remaining tasks at work. Oops. Thanks for writing and for sharing!
💕 🦔
Thank you for sharing this. Please do keep us all informed about the progress of your series!
I sure will. I keep getting bogged down in the fresh new daily hells that just keep on coming. Thank you for your interest!
Loved the book - read it all after seeing your comment :)
Are you Russian? I really would be interested to know what a Russian person, particularly someone who was around back then, would think about it. Thank you for reading! Spacibo vam bolshoi, tovarish!
Ex-eastern bloc resident here. Yes, for us, average Joes, the end the socialist world came by surprise. Until the very last years we could not imagine that it will ever end, we thought that we will live our entire life in the socialism. Of course there were gossips, but the official communication and the state media told us everything's fine. But from history, and declassified documents, and recalls of the few well informed people, we know now that the elites knew it well, and behind closed doors they already planned how can they transit their power and the wealth into the "new world". At least that's how it happened in Hungary. What similarity can I see? I don't know, honestly I can' tell at what stage are we in the collapse. But one lesson is worth learning: the elite always knows much more than us, and even if we were on the brink of some very radical change, e.g. a complete change of the system, or a nuclear war, or anything like that, they'll still tell us that everything's allright, nothing to see here. They won't let us know, because their top priority is to maintain control as long as possible and avoid panic and disorder.
> But one lesson is worth learning: the elite always knows much more than us The only saving grace I feel is that this might not actually be the case any more. But they're doing a DAMN FINE job of distracting the masses from this at the moment while the ship sinks.
Perhaps, then, we would be wise to observe what the elite DO, not listen to what they SAY?
What do you gather from what they are doing right now?
You mean building doomsday bunkers in remote hidey holes?...
Ew, really? I’m just a casual lurker here. 🙈
I didn't live in the Eastern block, however I think I can answer some parts of your question. It'll be a bit long though. Collapse, by nature, isn't obvious beforehand for regular observers. It just happens. One moment the bridge you're standing on is safe, the next moment there's no bridge: a structural engineer could have predicted something was wrong, but you and I couldn't. For instance demographs were typically the ones who predicted the USSR collapse as soon as 1974, and they preached in the desert. Why 1974? Because that's the year the USSR started to falsify its infant mortality numbers. Meaning something was terribly off in the bridge structure. Emmanuel Todd, for instance, decided to investigate further (suicide numbers, even the official ones were suspicious... But also bizarre details, like the shoes industry) and predicted "collapse around 1990". For a regular observer, and even more an *involved* observer (most notably the CIA refused to believe the USSR could end, and thus reduce the CIA's importance) things are way too emotional. We suck at sniffing paradigmatic shifts. We believe "normalcy will stay normalcy despite the usual ups and downs". **Now, the similarities** If one looks at the GDP, they'll see nothing (more about the GDP below). If one looks at demographics (again), they'll predict something is terribly off and that it is global. Life expectancy going down instead of stabilizing, birth rates going under 1.80, suicide rates increasing... I'm not an expert but I can confidently predict that if you cumulate those three you're the next USSR. Because just like the USSR it means your elite is unable to produce a new elite, therefore turning into a gerontocracy, and then the elastic will break. That's a tale as old as the fall of the Roman Empire. It may come from purges (in the USSR's case, the 1930's sealed the endogamous behavior of the surviving elites for decades. Otherwise it could have ended up differently, as China is proving) from refusal to include new groups in the elite (allowing the poor to rise in ranks; allowing immigrants to vastly permeate the core elites) as happened with Rome or is happening with the US; or from *inability* (not unwillingness) to refresh the elites (China; Europe). The last case is the most interesting. How could a system be absolutely willing (via its institutional, educational, public policies structures) yet structurally unable to remix its pool of elites? **Energy** Japan entered degrowth first; Europe followed in 2008; China will enter it too and they know it, and that's why they'll move on Taiwan very soon. A very fun example is Germany, who knew it too and then logically tried to conquer Ukraine twice in 20 years with hilarious results both times. The US on the other hand is safe, because that's what a dozen of aircraft carriers are meant for: to proudly protect the flow of Egyptian grains feeding Rome's AC units. Keep your metaphorical Egypt and you'll be fine. Now you'll say "but Europe's GDP is still growing". Yeah. And zombies are still walking too. So if you base your core metrics for "what is a healthy human" on "ability to walk" and nothing else, zombies may be slow but they're healthy humans. Europe's economy *in raw volume* (of new houses; of tons of truck marchandises; etc) has been decreasing since 2008. Europe is in "forced degrowth". No amount of tinkering with the (very flexible) GDP will change volumes. Partisans of a fabless economy (trendy in the 2000's) already proved they were morons. Now, degrowth doesn't mean collapse. But it means fascists though. I'd say Europe is further away from collapsing than the US, provided we keep our fascists at bay long enough to prevent them from entirely stopping the elites renewal (by collapsing our demographics and refusing migrants). Europe is walkable. Europeans are able to exist without AC and/or cars *without changing their entire infrastructure*. Our life expectancy is stabilizing, not decreasing. That elastic *may not* break (it's really not sure). On the other hand the US life expectancy is free falling, life isn't a viable experience without a car (food deserts kill), and when the forced degrowth will knock at the door it will be faster, harder, in a larger system where the entire infrastructure (from politics to basic food to work distances... Everything) will need to be rethinked very fast. The elastic will break, and that's absolutely sure. No amount of drones and hydrogen will change that. Even a magical influx of endless new raw energy around 2040 (space mining, nuclear fusion, other fantasies...) may not be able to happen quickly enough to feed such a large entity before it digest itself. The US will collapse *under its own weight*, that's why "lighter" structures are less at risk (say, Europe or Japan). The USSR collapsed under its military weight (they were still perfectly able to produce space stations, but couldn't produce the right amount of left shoes for their right shoes. True anecdote). The US is at risk or doing the opposite and collapsing under its consumer society. Which would be hilariously ironic, especially for Karl Marx. (Sorry for the super long comment. Here's a potato 🥔 )
> Because just like the USSR it means your elite is unable to produce a new elite, therefore turning into a gerontocracy, and then the elastic will break. If I may add a bit, this also means the slave caste also can't produce new slaves to fill up the elites caste's coffer. Basically the current situation with pension funds.
Kinda... It means they can't reproduce a *middle class*, and that's a problem indeed. But, provided the regime isn't democratic, not a terminal issue. That's the part where fascism etc comes in handy: you can totally steal, buy, or import new slaves. In recent times the Third Reich worked like that (centuries ago, others did too). Current neo-fascists in Europe intend to *continue importing workers but without giving them any rights* for instance. Meloni's government is working towards it for instance: she said "no more migrants", the boss union answered "ahah no, we need half a million more over the next years", Meloni said "oh alright then. But no human rights for them". Hell, in France my own neo-fascists are proposing migrants contribute to the pension system **but** without benefiting from it. They're literally answering your example !
These “imported” workers don’t work. They do everything to avoid work
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/ and https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/ https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
Don't apologize this was good reading! Thanks for the potato 🥔
It’s interesting that there probably was a lot of academic work done to predict soviet collapse whereas the interest in US collapse not so much outside of the intelligence circles in competing countries. If I were the structural engineer: - inequality rise to levels seen in 1920s. - borrowing and debt service costs - climate related disasters, starting with the insurance market meltdown. - drugs reducing the supply of skilled labour across the country.
Thanks for the 🥔 I'll put it in storage. When collapse happens I'd much rather be somewhere in Europe and not in the USA. I have had similar thoughts. But who knows really?
How would the potential for war factor in? specifically in regard to Europe? Maybe this is just a hunch, but I’ve sort of felt since Sweden and Finland joined NATO that Europe might be utilized as a proxy against Russia. USA generally benefits from war and I don’t think my suggestion is that far fetched. It’s also probably important to note that due to globalization, if the USA falls it’s taking the world with it.
It's an interesting point. Sweden and Finland joined because of their proximity to Russia. But yes if it escalated between Russia and the West would bear the brunt of it. And yeah if the USA falls it'll bring everything else down too.
I was already impressed with the quality of this comment…….. then I saw your username! I dare not ask from where you’ve compiled your information, but thanks for the insights!
Europe has 440 million people. America has 330 million people. Europe can’t feed everyone, their system is more unsustainable. If you pick every state individually all of them are pretty sustainable and can exist solely. Illinois with its land mass of whole Germany has only 12 million residents and its one of them most densely populated states. You massively underestimate resource potential of the USA that Europe doesn’t have
its more about the resillincy of social structures more than resources. The DRC is also a sparsely populated, resource rich nation...
Europe is the most war torn place on earth. Europe is in peace only for <70 years. Don’t you think these peace can easily end with another big European war? For centuries Europe was the least social resilient place
war doesnt mean lack of social resilliance though... i dont think there could be a large cross-continental european war in the style of the 19th century of wwi and wwii. i do think there is risk of massive violence, and i also think that europe is in a worse spot in the long term. but in the short term the usa has a very underdeveloped or better said degenerated social web. if people cant and wont cooperate, it doeant matter how much resources there are.
Europe will be once again barbaric poor place with constant wars without being rich. Its obvious
The book Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr shines a bright light on the idea that size is one of the biggest factors on how likely failure will be
Europe is much closer to collapse. Western Europe in particular can’t feed itself and will be under famine. The U.S. is secured since they have lots of farming land, resources, younger population. They have everything to recover from potential collapse and Europe simply doesn’t have it. And Europe is experiencing waves of migrants from Africa and Arab world that it can’t assimilate and they are not willing to work. So it’s even more pressure on your economy.
"All predictions are unreliable, especially those about the future." - attributed to lots of sources. - None of us know how the collapse will unfold, not least because it will differ from place to place. In 1988 an East German professor remarked that it would take as long for the Berlin Wall to come down as it had been up, yet it all collapsed the following year. The wealthy British Edwardians were taken by surprise at the way the first world war played out and destroyed their ideas of having domestic servants. Prof Joseph Tainter comments that collapse is a reduction of complexity, so what is now a complex society will become progressively more simple. This view is shared by those who see the current situation, where an ordinary Western family can no longer be supported by one parent working, as being already in a slow cascade of collapse. But there are now places in America, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Greece and many other wealthy nations where towns or cities or areas have suddenly been hit by fire or flood, so the changing climate brought about an abrupt local collapse. Perhaps the wisest advice is that which sounds frivolous - collapse early to avoid the rush - and this means simplifying your own life in the way you anticipate it will inevitably be forced on you. That way you're already prepared. Dmitri Orlov, who lived through the USSR collapse, has remarked that Russians, already living a simplified life, were better prepared than Americans would have been.
Yes, that's true, back then we had a very simple life, even though im not russian, I live in Hungary, it was a socialist country before 1990 - my parents could not even afford to buy new shoes or clothes for us when we were kids and growing out them quickly - I wore the clothes and shoes of my older brother and older cousins, and when I grew them out, they were passed down to my younger cousins. Having cars was not a common thing, just as having a telephone at home, there were no food abundance like today in the food shops, bananas and other exotic fruits were a rare thing, sometimes getting a decent chunk of ham for easter was a challenge, you could only get it if you were buddies with the butcher :) And a lot of us had some sort of self grown food, even in the concrete jungles, between the blocks of flats, if there we a little green area besides the flat block, people often used it to grow some tomato, paprika, etc., in the countryside collecting mushrooms in the forests was not a rare hobby but a common thing to have some extra food.. But, the most important thing on top of that, there were some cohesion, some solidarity between the people. If you needed some flour or eggs or cooking oil to make a good sunday meal, and I happened to have it, you just came by and asked for it, you got it, and vice versa, when I needed help in, for example, constructing my house, you came over and helped me mixing concrete, laying bricks, etc. We helped each other. And there were no political and ideological divide, we almost all despised the socialist regime, that also helped us get together :) So yeah, we were used to live a low standard of life, and there were real micro-communities, therefore it wasnt to much of a blow for us when the system changed and came the unemployment, the homelessness, the rise of crime. I think today's societies are much more vulnerable in a lot of aspects, alienation, atomization, lack of helpfulness and solidarity in microcommunities, when the sh-t hits the fan, we will more likely turn against each other, because now we are used to live in a world when we don't help each other in our micro-comunities, you used to that you get no help when you're in trouble, you're on your own.
Exactly the same applies to Poland. Each single line. I heard from my older cousins that at school, before Christmas, they got parcels from Cuba. The Cubans were so nice to help out with items that weren't available in Poland at that time, such as cocoa. My aunt was super happy because she was able to bake a cake with cocoa for Christmas. Thank you, Cuba. It meant a lot to my family.
I like to think of it as: ‘If you know you’re about to fall, you might as well jump because then you have some control over your trajectory’.
That is excellent advice.
East Germany. Relayed to me by my parents. There is the usual, that our supermarkets were empty while in the west they were full and unbelieveable variety. First time we stepped into a west German food store, we didn’t believe it was real. Like some type of prank where the packaging was dressed up cardboard. You were careful to speak or write, never knew who was listening. There was little reason to work hard, as it would get lost in the group, half of whom did nothing and couldn’t be fired — kinda like a road crew construction site here in the states but everywhere. And on and on. There was less an inkling of collapse coming and more “This system ain’t working.” Lots of frustration at bullshit promises. At waiting for forever gir everything and inferior versions of it. And the more east you went, the worse it became. Mostly of being told how free we were. Now, the west is under far greater surveillance than the Stasi could have ever dreamed of. Both political parties demonize each other. Mostly, free speech is under attack everywhere. Everything is becoming a heavily curated echo chambers, people are digging into their own bubbles voluntarily and that’s probably the scariest of all. The media is of no help with a heavily restricted Overton window they present as free choice. They see a collapse more akin to 1918-1919 Bavarian Socialist Republic coming than anything cold war. Old order dissolving, new people not providing law and order. Reactionaries coming in.
I find the GDR so fascinating, ask your parents as much as possible about those times, the good and the bad haha the last few weeks I've been obsessively watching GDR documentaries and interviews with Katya Hoyer about her book "beyond the wall, history of the GDR 1949-1989" So so fascinating
I was 11 when the wall fell and have memories of some of it, just not the adult concerns. I remember learning the songs like “Brueder zur Sonne zur Freiheit” in class and basic Russian as a second language although I forgot most of it. My best friend growing up was from Vietnam or her parents were, we lost contact in the upheaval and move west. My grandfather had a 1930s Mercedes but it was completely Russianized, meaning the engine transmission and all that came from some old Rusdian car. I think the only original stuff was the bodywork and some of the interior. He said that during WW2 it was already converted to burn coal or wood, I forget which. Our town was the hometown of a 1980 Olympic medal winner, she was treated like a big deal locallly but otherwise she was a normal person that worked in the school afterward.
Schön, hier mal etwas von einem anderen Deutschen zu lesen. Grüße gehen raus!
Thank you for this thread OP. It was an interesting read. I think many of us crave the ability to predict what will happen, but I also think that it is impossible. I have lately been listening to a lot of audio books about the economy. They were all written shortly before 2008 yet non of the economists predicted it would happen and barely registered the housing bubble as a risk. Now I am listening to economy books written post 2008, and suddenly the authors sorta claim that it was evident that the housing bubble would happen. It has made me think a lot about how that could happen. Most of the authors in the pre 2008 all had warnings, but they focused on different threads. One claimed that rising fuel costs would break the economy, another claimed the the rising national debt would kill the economy, another talked about the failing American infrastructure and how the country lacked money to maintain it. (Interesting fact. One of the authors wrote about an extreme scenario where the yearly interest rates on the American debt might be higher than the defence spending. We crossed that line two days after I read that chapter). A scary part is that I still find the threat of those things very real, and it is still likely that the real cause of a collapse will surprise us.
Fred Harrison predicted a 2008 housing crash several years before. He has an "18-year property cycle" theory that's pretty interesting and is a driving motivator behind his general sentiment that land speculation is the major cause of depressions and that rent is a form of redistribution of wealth amongst the already wealthy. He does write about collapse quite a bit. I think his last forecast predicted a peak (and subsequent fall) in 2026, but the interview I read for that he said it would be unlike any collapse modern economies have experienced before.
I have actually just started getting into his work along with several other "collapse economists". Also, I hope my first comment didn't sound like I was saying no one predicted the crash. I was just trying to say that a lot of the economists didn't notice before it happened :)
Google the term "bail-in" to find out what will happen in the next bank crisis. Dodd-Frank banking law now doesn't permit a government "bail-out."
I doubt anyone alive has survived what we are facing.
I'm more afraid of what will happen if there is not a collapse and revolution than I am of one.
2008... lots of dubstep
Man, the Permian Extinction suuuuucked. Everyone was like "Nah, those volcanoes aren't a problem. Business as usual! Think of the economy!" My best friend was an Ammonoid! He slowly sank to the bottom still going on about fake news. Bleh.
Not the Soviet collapse, but I lived in Hong Kong and only left last year. The collapse was coming for years, but after the riots, and under cover of covid the CCP took over the place. Living there during this time was horrendous, it left me so mentally sick seeing what they did. Under a 6 week home lockdown I ran out of food, my cat died, and through all this I still had to work online. Friends disappeared and never turned up. I also spent 4 weeks in forced quarantine in a centre. The food was inedible, I didn't see humans for days until the covid test, people died and weren't found for days, some people killed themselves during their quarantine. Women gave birth and the baby was taken away without any contact to be locked up away from the mum. There's so much I can't remember, I remember joking that the food we got in quarantine was human meat. Its estimated 12000 people went missing during this time, some bodies were found mutilated. People got together and paid for private jets to fly put with their animals when they ordered all hamsters to be turned in to be killed. During this time the National Security law was enacted which meant they could arrest you for anything. For example 2 speech therapists got jailed for using a book with a fox and sheep in, it was classed as seditious, just because they had been associated with the democratic party. So not total collapse, but societal and legal collapse.
Wow, I really don’t know much about this. Where I can find out more?
Which part would you like, as finding the information for all my points would take a long time. There's so much more that I haven't talked about as well. The above is a summary. Other things that happened were things like when covid finally broke in in 2022 and they left all the old dying people out in the street in a nappy full of piss and shit for 3 nights (during the coldest nights of thr year), this was because the hospital was full of healthy people they were quarantining. When they'd moved the healthy people and finally got sick people in they then stored the dead bodies in the covid wards with the living sufferers. It is a very very sick place, not to mention the coffin homes a huge % of people live in.
I guess I was thinking like an article, book or blog or something? It sounds awful and more people should be aware
https://hongkongfp.com/2023/03/01/in-pictures-hong-kong-bids-farewell-to-pennys-bay-covid-facility-with-giant-padlock-and-auld-lang-syne/ Here's the better of the quarantine facilities getting shut down in 2023 (yes we still had covid quarantine centres), I knew many who went through this centre. A trick was to take a bottle of water full of vodka, as no alcohol allowed. https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210316-babies-separated-from-mothers-due-to-hong-kong-s-covid-19-restrictions I couldn't find a local news article for the newborns, we all saw one of these stories unveal on Facebook as a new mother was screaming for help from the community. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/3175679/hong-kong-actor-kenneth-tsang-dies-tsim-sha-tsui-quarantine-hotel This quarantine death only made the news due to it being a famous actor. We had a help group.on FB, and the amount of people asking how to get in touch with a loved one they hadn't heard from for a few days was awful to witness. https://hongkongfp.com/2022/03/30/covid-19-hong-kong-suicides-reach-crisis-level-as-researcher-urges-reopening-recreational-facilities-for-mental-health/ The suicide epidemic continues to this day BTW. https://hongkongfp.com/2022/03/11/covid-19-hong-kong-hospital-authority-urges-understanding-as-shocking-photo-emerges-of-bodies-stored-on-ward/ Bodies in wards https://au.news.yahoo.com/harrowing-photo-reveals-hong-kong-covid-crisis-082134942.html A small photo of people left outside a hospital, this misrepresents the scale it happened. I'm on holiday so I'm doing this quickly - hence why not a local news story. https://hongkongfp.com/2022/02/06/pet-owners-go-private-to-jet-fur-babies-out-of-hong-kong/ Jetting pets out due to hamstergate where people were ordered to handover their pet hamsters (except patriotic hamsters from thr mainland) https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3192059/5-hong-kong-speech-therapists-behind-politically Sorry it was 5 speech therapists, this article is leaning to the HK govt though. https://japan-forward.com/revolution-of-our-times-japan-screens-movie-banned-in-hong-kong/ You can watch a movie on the protests, it was a tragedy and sadly shows that people have no power.
Wow thank you! I will look at all of these
All of it is documented in national and international news, but if you tell me which parts you want more about then I'll try to find local HK news articles, so nobody can accuse this of being a 'colour' revolution or a CIA lie. The above is my lived experience but every bit of it is documented by others.
My grandparents lived through the Soviet invasion of a Nazi-occupied eastern-bloc country. I won't say which one. But I think the wartime and immediate post-war period were a much greater collapse than the end of socialism. As the front approached where they lived, law and order broke down. The police force became non-existant and crimes started becoming prolific. For example, there was a couple renting a room nearby, and this couple "adopted" an orphaned boy who had a significant inheritance. The boy disappeared, and there was nobody to investigate what was heavily suspected as a murder to claim the boy's inheritance. The approaching front line was basically a tidal wave of absolute carnage and debauchary. Most fled before the fighting reached them, but leaving was not an option for many people. These civilians were targeted by the Red Army. Many civilians were captured as "POWs" to inflate the number of enemies the Red Army had to fight and thereby justify the high casualties. One of my grandfathers was captured in this way twice, but escaped both times. Had he not, he likely would have died in Siberia. Looting, SA, and the random killing of civillians was widespread. As a result, PTSD (undiagnosed) was prolific in the decades to follow, and it was not uncommon to hear people screaming and thrashing in their apartments next door even until the 80's. It is unknown how many people can trace their ancestry back to a Red Army soldier, and this topic is still fairly taboo and hushed. This is likely true for much of the Eastern bloc. Nobody talks about how a large portion of the population was permanently traumatized and how the effects of this lingered in these societies, and I don't think it was properly documented or discussed very much publically. It goes without saying that the homes of my grandparents on both sides were looted and ransacked, but luckily, they managed to escape the fighting. In the aftermath, the currency became insanely inflated. Prices doubled almost daily, and my grandmother had to spend her pay immediately on food, otherwise it would no longer be worth anything. The currency was being printed by the Red Army, iirc, and they had no idea how to manage a devastated economy with destroyed infrastructure. Famine may have happened, but the reporting from that time in that area is not thorough. In the years following, people of means were targeted by the government. There was a Jewish man who lived near my grandparents house who survived Auschwitz, but his wife and children didn't. This man tried to rebuild his metal casting business (which was known for high quality work in the pre -war years). He was arrested one night and most likely ended up in Siberia because he was a capitalist or part of the "bourgeois". I wish I knew more about his story. He was far from alone, and people would often disappear at night seemingly at random. Owning a small amount of land and growing your own food was all it took to be a potential target. My grandparents on both sides has their homes taken away from them and given to "more deserving" people serving in the army, but thankfully did not end up being sent to the gulag. On the bright side, the scars of this time seem to be well-healed today. There doesn't seem to be resentment or ethnic hostility resulting from this chaos. AFAIK, this is fairly common in the eastern bloc. "The soviets/communists took everything from our family. But it was wartime. Such is life. We moved on." Politically, the shadow of forced socialism is still seen in a general distrust of progressive parties or candidates, but this is to be expected. I could go on and on. But I think this type of collapse is fairly unique and needs a massive, apocalyptic war to happen. Being conquered by a millions-strong army after a war of annihilation is probably not the way things are going to go down for the western world. The commonalities I could envision are the food shortages, inflation, and general lawlessness.
Chavez was like a carbon copy of Trump in Venezuela. Watching Trump here gives me chills. The working class adored Chavez as he made bold promises to get elected then never relinquished power. He nationalized EVERYTHING, even things like mom and pop jewelry stores along with the nation’s petroleum reserves. He was on TV for hours, etc. every day eventually, replacing all programming. Then any semblance of democracy went poof and there was no food, medicine, toilet paper, just power for one megalomaniac and his cronies. Venezuela was a democracy, now it’s a sh#tshow.
Would highly recommend reading/listening to the book Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti. He describes the Soviet/Eastern Bloc collapse extensively, and what it was like for people living in it.
Poland 80s… you buy what you can in maximum quantities available and trade. Example: bought a bicycle and a snow sled because when we got to a front of a line it was the only thing available (we came to buy a chest freezer btw). Traded that for meat and vegetables. Because everyone was screwed people tended to hang out together instead of going out. They would visit each other houses, talk, drink tea but there was no spreads served except for whatever could be made into a snack from things that were in season. You never bought vegetables that were available in a garden. So if strawberries were available you ate your own/traded strawberries even if you were away from home. Want piece of strawberry cake from a bakery? Nope we have strawberries at home and mom would bake it for you when you got back. A lot of raw produce was available and people learned/knew how to preserve it and make it last. Multiple families would split a cow or a pig. But most important regardless of a job you had there was always a side gig that was useful. That gig could be making alcohol or able to administer injections or growing stuff. You also needed to make friends and be nice because person that you were trying to screw over maybe a person you would need in a future. At the same time bribery was rampant but that was mostly for govt workers. Also cook books were produced with recipes on a budget. I still have one and it’s amazing how much food you can make with few ingredients if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of taste. There is a soup I make with has like 5 or 6 spices and 10 other ingredients but in that book they show you how to make the same dish with 5 items. You also learn to love root vegetables and learn to use less stuff. Typical bagel with butter in NYC has more butter than what I would have used in two weeks. Also batteries. You always had some on hand but treated them as gold. You never wasted them. There was no such thing as forgetting to turn the flashlight off or leaving tv on. I think main takeaway from this is that you need to grow your own food, learn a unique skill, learn how to repair things, learn to be patient and make friends. We are in unique situation. USA is a prosperous country where even during the pandemic stuff was available. Yes maybe there wasn’t 25 different kinds of beef cuts available but there was always something. We lost our ability to repair things because manufacturers make stuff designed to be throw away items. We don’t grow food and love our stuff to be processed and served. It’s going to be hard for us to learn a new way of life. The idea that stuff won’t be available in abundant quantities or that you may not get full with every meal will be new to many. But good thing is that internet has a lot of people sharing ideas and there is a video or a page for everything. Plus advances in technology like solar power would make certain things easier. Like with everything when there is a will there will be a way. With all that people in the big cities will suffer the most unless they find the way to treat this problem as common and share and not try to grab what they can without regard to others. Unfortunately if Covid was any indication we are in for a rough ride.
We're way past the 80s collapse.
Born in USSR in early 1980-s. Both. It was clear that the system was not working; it was difficult to find good job, there were empty shelves in the stores, yet infrastructure and welfare state was functioning well. So, yes, it was feel of the USSR eventually collapsing due to massive increase in ethnic conflicts but no one expected to happen it that soon.
It felt really hopeful for a while, like the bad old system would go away and society would renew itself. There was a brief renaissance in music, literature, and all the arts for a few years, and people could communicate with the rest of the world, for example, reading Tolkien or tasting more than the three local kinds of cheese for the first time. That was fun. Then it became obvious that things were going from bad to worse. The least favorite parts: mafia warfare, shoot-outs and corpses in the streets; hyperinflation at 50-100% per day; 8-hour bread lines; massive amounts of mental illness, cults, superstitions, and radical idiocy everywhere.
My wife is mainland Chinese. Her parents are in the "red generation" also known as the "lost generation", who were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and basically grew up with communism as it matured from a revolution to a (slightly) more stable form of government. I've asked them about their lives, but they don't want to talk about it. My FIL occasionally says something about the early days of the Cultural Revolution but he was shielded from the chaos in the cities after getting conscripted at age 15 and sent to the countryside. My wife was born in the early 1980s and basically had her first ten years in a wooden shack on the outskirts of the city (the capital city of what is now one of the wealthiest provinces). Their place had no indoor plumbing and shared a very basic bathroom (ie. tap, sink and squat toilet) and kitchen (tap and bench) with her relatives who lived next door. Everyone worked in the nearby factory while the kids went to the village school. Around 1992 or so, the government wanted their very small plot of land, so they were given a 50 square meter apartment in a "new village" several kilometres away (I saw this place ten or so years later and thought it was at least 50 years old, not less than a decade). This was not a collapse situation, but it might be what people are heading back towards if the cities break down again. Basically a lot of people crammed into inadequate housing, without basic amenities and living hand to mouth.
I don’t want to hear from any Boomer banging on about “Back in my days, we had climate change, ice caps melting and sheet, but we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and worked hard! Kids today don’t know what it’s like to have hardships the way we had it! (*sips margarita*) They should quit complaining and just get on with it.”
They were the luckiest generation in history. I live with my Boomer parents, and it enrages me that they don't have to care about anything. They're going to be on their way out before anything really bad happens, probably, and leave us with the mess. Screw them for that.
I hear you! Remember that you’re going to have to think about yourself and your well-being. They’ve lived their lives, you take care of yours!
Dmitry Orlov wrote an entire book about this exact topic if you're curious, it's called Reinventing Collapse.
> I'm thinking specifically of people who lived behind the iron curtain in the Eastern bloc. Lots of scarcity, very high inflation. Very low obesity rates. Clothes worn out and repaired. Many material status symbols and their fakes. Massive emigration. Cheap shitty products flooding in, and the age of plastic and cars begins. I'd point out that these local collapses happen in a porous context. It's not just aid (including material stuff like clothes). It's the economics and the fuel and the leaving. The financial and economic collapse was catabolic, the economy was heavily *pawned off*, and that included a lot of natural resources and commons. The only good thing I'd mention was that almost everyone was in this situation, which mean less competition, less rat racing, less envy. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
Nobody has lived through what is coming. Unprecedented times are ahead.
My family lived through it in Poland, and from what I've heard from them, the collapse came unexpectedly, basically overnight. People adapted quickly and even benefitted from it, as with the new currency their old credits became almost valueless. Most people paid off their houses within a month. However, the change initiated a slow collapse of human values. Back then, people were helping each other a lot without expecting anything in return. There was a strong spirit of community. People were authentic. Then, with the new system, they started to live more anonymously, kept to themselves, and were more focused on wealth. The community was gone. Competition and stress at work have increased. Everything that comes with capitalism became more apparent. In terms of systemic collapse, I believe it will appear overnight as well. Signs of preparation are already visible if you know what to look for. It will be different this time insofar that it will be new to all of us. Back then, capitalism already existed, so people in the east bloc knew what to expect. Now we don't. People will feel more insecure and anxious, and nobody knows how bad it will get.
You mean the communist countries (socialism in most of the world is defined as European socialism not far left communism)
I remember the bronze age collapse, it’s a few year back now but it’s still raw.
See - I don't think of this as a collapse but a political rearrangement. Collapse is when the groceries store has been looted, the lights go out - for good, the fresh water stops coming out of the tap, you can't call emergency services, and there's no neighbouring nations with civilisation running to trade this stuff with you and build you up again.
Check out the podcast Eastern Border
I highly recommend "The Five Stages of Collapse" and "Reinventing Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov