\nHarper Collins<\/a> 2024
\nISBN 9781335013415<\/p>\n
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Iason Athanasiadis<\/h4>\n
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[Tunis] In the early 2010s, a typical American or European might still sip their morning coffee while scanning headlines reporting multiple conflicts simmering distantly, before hopping into a car and heading to an office job. Despite a previous decade of unintelligible foreign occupations bunched under the rubric of waging war on terror, life in the US remained mostly good and affordable. Citizens were sheltered from instability by over-the-horizon, seldom-analysed dynamics like the exorbitant privilege of the dollar as the global reserve currency. There was little apparent need to look under the hood.<\/p>\n Today, a spate of new books attempts to explain our suddenly destabilized world. Climate change and new trade tariffs have skyrocketed the price of that morning coffee, while the distant conflicts multiplied, edged closer and, in cases like Syria and Yemen, turned out to be proxy conflicts in a global struggle that, year on year, becomes more blatant. Professionally, the worker has had to adapt, learn new skills, perhaps even become freelance or a digital nomad, while glancing over his shoulder at the arrival of revolutionary, AI-enabled suites of office technologies marketed as complementary, but which are already displacing human labor.<\/p>\n This shift has produced profound anxiety as the great unspoken agreement between citizen and state splits apart. It also generated a new book genre, blending current affairs, history and an analytical catastrophology. Titles like The Sixth Extinction<\/a><\/em>, The Seneca Effect<\/a><\/em>, The Long Emergency<\/a><\/em> and End Times<\/a><\/em> purport to answer how we got to what historian Paul Cooper calls the \u201cpenumbral age,\u201d and how to negotiate societal collapse.<\/p>\n Led by a fascination with ruins and the effects of time, Cooper\u2019s Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline<\/em> seeks to divine how our civilization will end through examining the faltering of others.<\/p>\n It is also something of a publishing phenomenon. Cooper, who has authored two novels, managed to hack both academia and publishing by producing a book out of the demand generated by a giant social media audience: a series of viral tweets<\/a> built up a podcast<\/a> followed by tens of millions. Resisting conventional wisdom that attention spans are short and can only be captured by succinct content, Cooper\u2019s multi-hour podcasts consist of pensively voice-overed, multi-disciplinary narrations, which overlay archival material about the demise of great civilizations. In the book, he sets out to examine the causes behind the moment when \u201cthe future was cancelled.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA ruin is a paradox,\u201d Cooper writes at the start of his resolutely non western-centric narrative, which sweeps from Sumeria and Assyria through Byzantium and Vijayanagara, to conclude with civilizations in India and the Easter Islands. \u201cEach one shows us the fearsome power of time while simultaneously standing in defiance of it.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Fall](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Fall-of-Civilizations-Paul-Cooper-cover.jpg\")
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\n<\/strong>Empire eats empire<\/h4>\n
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