It’s a process.

Collapse-and-capture can be traced back from wartime telemetry and fire-control systems, through postwar reconstruction and Cold War logistics, into financial code and software infrastructure, finally converging in the platform era and coming fully online during the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump 1.0, but I want to keep this simple.

The thesis is this: collapse is a handoff. The human world/side of the system is breaking down, and the machine side of the system is accelerating and absorbing its functions. It’s a system upgrade that we’re only dimly aware of.

The hyphen in collapse-and-capture is there to force a kind of ontological unity our language usually splits. I’m not describing two events that happen to follow each other. I’m describing a singular process, where collapse isn’t simply followed by capture but is shaped by it. The hyphen glues them together so that it’s not as easy to abstract one from the other.

This might be the core contradiction of our time. We have a parasitic but cognitively disintegrating elite class embedded within a cybernetic, hyper-efficient system that no longer requires their full lucidity to function. 

Institutions were once legible, managed by people who could, more or less, read the world. Now, those same institutions are interfaces for systems of automation and capital flows operating beyond human comprehension. So it’s not “the system” that’s failing, but rather, human stewardship of it.

The real captain is the cybernetic fusion of technological and economic systems, which is algorithmic. The elites are cognitively overwhelmed because they’re no longer at the wheel. They’re middle managers to something inhuman. Elite dysfunction is a symptom of the collapse-and-capture cycle, not a cause.

What looks like collapse from one angle is cybernetic optimization from another. Take the stock market or supply chains, for example. From a human point of view, they’re volatile and fragile. But to the machines, they’re humming. Volatility is information. Fragility is adaptability. What we call collapse is dropping inefficient human oversight in favor of algorithmic governance. In other words, the system is shedding its skin.

This also means two temporalities are unfolding at once. Human institutions are degrading because humans can no longer process the scale or speed of technological society. Cybernetic systems are evolving precisely because they aren’t slowed by emotion or the need for narrative coherence. One decays in public, while the other refines in silence.

When you see me toggling back and forth between the terminal failure of the human layer and the terrifying elegance of cybernetic capitalism, I’m not contradicting myself. I’m showing the system from both sides. There’s the organic decay of the human layer and the cold efficiency of the machinic layer.

So, to summarize, I believe what we’re living through is collapse-and-capture, best defined as the systematic failure of human governance and its replacement by cybernetic infrastructure. The human layer, which is comprised of cognition, memory, deliberation, and symbolic power is collapsing under informational pressure it can no longer process. But that failure clears the way for something colder, algorithmic, autonomous, feedback-driven, self-optimizing, nonhuman, and indifferent to narrative or consent.

And so the devastating, apocalyptic-styled collapse with gunshots and mobs in the streets never arrives, because the process of collapse-and-capture cycles and repeats.