This talk comes to mind: Samo Burja: How Civilizations Collapse | Samo Burja
We need to seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society—not in a positive sense, but in the sense that the Industrial Revolution has stopped. Civilizational collapse in conditions of very advanced technology might very much look like something we have right now, where what was once the product of advanced rational systems, or at least self-catalyzing systems of production, has reverted to a more customary system. Where are things still run as they were 20 years ago, or 50 years ago? We still have the same bureaucratic and economic institutions, with only very marginal changes in a single domain of progress: CPUs, which very few of which are made in California.
A little provocative, no? People in a society tend to not acknowledge its collapse or decline. This, by the way, is true of the Roman Empire, which is the most popular example in our culture. You only find letters of people complaining that the roads are awfully unsafe this year, but mostly not thinking that some sort of fundamental change is apace. The collapse of the Roman Empire is much less about the burning cities and much more about GDP shrinking 1% a year, which means that on the books it looks pretty much the same. Right now, the market seems to be about the same or even better than it was a few months ago, yet common sense tells us production has fallen massively. Okay, so if such a huge change can be papered over with government intervention or with intervention of other private actor players, what about slower moving changes? How would we even know if GDP per capita had in fact been declining 1% a year for the last 20 years?