“It doesn’t matter if a society is (capitalist,) socialist or communist, the industrial values they embody are fundamentally the same. And so there is no place to run. Industrialism — or the Machine, as someone like Paul Kingsnorth would call it — has taken over the world. You have to make a stand wherever you are.”
Wish more folks would realize this as they fight tribal politics of team blue versus team red versus team green and so on.
I'm probably rambled about this before, but I was curious what you thought of the documentary "Collapse" from 2009. For 20 years I've been telling anyone who will listen to me that what's happening to the US is similar to what happened to the Soviet Union, only it seems to be happening in slow motion. No one likes to hear that the future isn't bright. No one likes to hear that they are on the Titanic and it's only a matter of time before everybody is affected. Americans are blind to collapse because they didn't grow up with it and they refuse to recognize the signs. They just keep hoping that somehow everything will be okay again. You may not be rewarded for telling the truth but at least you might have some ability to try to navigate it.
May we all live in interesting times. I'm not convinced we're living in the collapse. If you talk to Boomers of a certain ilk, they thought they were living through collapse. The Vietnam War, political assassinations, cities burning literally and figuratively with civil rights violence. And yet America didn't collapse and powered through to a new sort of beast.
I found Richard Kreitner's "Break it Up" deeply impactful in realizing how America is just constantly a land of contradictions teetering on and occasionally erupting into violent chaos.
We're in a period of elite crisis to be sure, but will America collapse in the way the USSR did? I doubt it. And what did that collapse mean in terms of a national project of power? Russia under Putin rebuilt a modern war economy awfully quickly from a collapsed state.
All really good points. Of course we may not be living through a total collapse, but a period of changes. But I did think the Collapse documentary was a useful perspective, especially in contrast to the usual unbound optimism from most media. The view of history we mainly get is that everything is fine, and if it's not we just need to buy our way to a better tomorrow.
I agree with your point about boomers and their apocalyptic take on current events. It reminded me very much of something Adam Curtis said in a few interviews he gave after "Hypernormalization". I think it's here, but I haven't heard it in a while.
Just as late‑Soviet nomenklatura ran cultural output through directives from above, late‑capitalist studios run the imagination itself through budgets and quarterly reports. The only fundamental difference is the letterhead: one bureaucracy used Central Committee forms, the other uses investor slide decks.
In this respect Hollywood’s downfall does indeed resemble the death of the late-stage USSR. All decisions about what counts as “art” are made by people personally terrified of risk; the outcome is almost guaranteed: endless continuations, familiar, safe faces on screen, and the quiet extinction of surprise. Soviet officials at least openly called themselves censors. Today the flattening is attributed to disembodied “market analytics”.
“It doesn’t matter if a society is (capitalist,) socialist or communist, the industrial values they embody are fundamentally the same. And so there is no place to run. Industrialism — or the Machine, as someone like Paul Kingsnorth would call it — has taken over the world. You have to make a stand wherever you are.”
Wish more folks would realize this as they fight tribal politics of team blue versus team red versus team green and so on.
I'm probably rambled about this before, but I was curious what you thought of the documentary "Collapse" from 2009. For 20 years I've been telling anyone who will listen to me that what's happening to the US is similar to what happened to the Soviet Union, only it seems to be happening in slow motion. No one likes to hear that the future isn't bright. No one likes to hear that they are on the Titanic and it's only a matter of time before everybody is affected. Americans are blind to collapse because they didn't grow up with it and they refuse to recognize the signs. They just keep hoping that somehow everything will be okay again. You may not be rewarded for telling the truth but at least you might have some ability to try to navigate it.
yes I remember that film!
May we all live in interesting times. I'm not convinced we're living in the collapse. If you talk to Boomers of a certain ilk, they thought they were living through collapse. The Vietnam War, political assassinations, cities burning literally and figuratively with civil rights violence. And yet America didn't collapse and powered through to a new sort of beast.
I found Richard Kreitner's "Break it Up" deeply impactful in realizing how America is just constantly a land of contradictions teetering on and occasionally erupting into violent chaos.
We're in a period of elite crisis to be sure, but will America collapse in the way the USSR did? I doubt it. And what did that collapse mean in terms of a national project of power? Russia under Putin rebuilt a modern war economy awfully quickly from a collapsed state.
All really good points. Of course we may not be living through a total collapse, but a period of changes. But I did think the Collapse documentary was a useful perspective, especially in contrast to the usual unbound optimism from most media. The view of history we mainly get is that everything is fine, and if it's not we just need to buy our way to a better tomorrow.
I agree with your point about boomers and their apocalyptic take on current events. It reminded me very much of something Adam Curtis said in a few interviews he gave after "Hypernormalization". I think it's here, but I haven't heard it in a while.
https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat-adam-curtis-121216
Thank you for the book suggestion. I'll check it out.
Just as late‑Soviet nomenklatura ran cultural output through directives from above, late‑capitalist studios run the imagination itself through budgets and quarterly reports. The only fundamental difference is the letterhead: one bureaucracy used Central Committee forms, the other uses investor slide decks.
In this respect Hollywood’s downfall does indeed resemble the death of the late-stage USSR. All decisions about what counts as “art” are made by people personally terrified of risk; the outcome is almost guaranteed: endless continuations, familiar, safe faces on screen, and the quiet extinction of surprise. Soviet officials at least openly called themselves censors. Today the flattening is attributed to disembodied “market analytics”.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/05/captain-america-for-sale-72-billion/