monday_

Where the hell are Google and Facebook on this? The idea that they'll profit from the repeal is simply naive - without net neutrality Comcast et al will be able to extort whatever they want from SV. I realize that this is unethical, but Alphabet alone can match ISP donations and then some. Alphabet plus Facebook can probably buy post Citizens United Congress fifty times over.

The author's position seems to be that the very notion of civilizational collapse is flawed because people often come up with reductionist, poorly supported ways of explaining it. The unspoken implication here is that whoever brings up a threat of collapse in a political argument hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Stephen Bannon referencing Gibbons work comes to mind, and, come think of it, that's probably what prompted the author to write this piece.

Denying a historical phenomenon for political gain is as bad as selectively citing a two century old book to justify xenophobia. It is revealing that the author mentions Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies", and then dismisses it's meticulous definition of collapse as "jargon". Before coming up with this definition Tainter spent a whole chapter describing many, many examples of social collapse including the ones mentioned in the article. The definition arises from these examples and absolutely covers the collapse of Rome, Bronze Age and others.

As for how we define and study the social collapse without arbitrarily designating some cultures as superior to others - a good example would be collapse of ecosystems. In this case you can have a sensible definition of complexity and energy intake and the collapse would be a sharp decline in both. There is a whole framework for similar studies in social collapse - see this talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI