Humans had long given up the veneer of caring about the environment, of conserving nature and protecting the vulnerable. The clamour of treaties and campaigns to ensure liveable conditions for everyone had continued for a while, before fading into obscurity.
In the early days, news of disasters that killed people in masses, and displaced even more, had grown with rapid frequency. Extreme weather events would set new records, only to be broken in a few months, often in a few days.
The people of that age, tired of the never-ending talks and unkept promises of their leaders, and distracted by the pull between new technologies and continuous streams of information and misinformation and disinformation, resorted to a kind of apathy that allowed them to tune out from the noise. Psychological concerns became sociological; a depressed society carried on living, waiting for the next bouts of anxiety.
National politics and well-choreographed international relations still continued for a while, so long as some in the rest of the world were willing to work for a powerful minority for money. This small and continuously shrinking minority were the only ones left who still cared about and participated in the affairs of the day. They included the traditional capitalists, the post-capitalist families who had “made it” before the crash, the well-established oligarchs, the autocrats with more political acumen than economic expertise, the military leaders and coup organisers, the doctors and scientists and engineers who let go of their morality and/or chose to serve the overlords, and the entrepreneurs who would hire those doctors and scientists and engineers and sell to these powerful groups for high profit. They ran the world’s systems.
Till money was useful. In the fight for political dominance and ensuring economic growth for a handful of people, humanity forgot that money was a shared belief. Solutions to macroscopic challenges continued to elude human societies. Progress was a forgotten concern. Policy continuity died as those at the top continued their skirmishes for power, with successive regimes upending the work of their immediate predecessors.
“The crash” was not a single-point trauma. It was not a sudden collapse of the global financial system as many researchers, authors, philosophers and economists had predicted, nor was it the much-hyped singularity. It was a name given in retrospect to the gradual erosion of trust in humanity and the systems and institutions it had created to support itself. No one agrees on how long it exactly was, except that it was long. Some scholars say it took decades, while the meticulous purveyors of the news-literature of yore put it at three and a half centuries to account for the superstructural collapse.
During this protracted period of human history, apathy replaced engagement. Ambivalence replaced trust. Instant gratification replaced justice. Micro-currencies issued by the members of the powerful minority gradually phased out the global financial order to the point of irrelevance where there simply wasn’t enough trade. Infrastructure fell into disrepair. Education was replaced by apprenticeships. Pedagogy was lost in old books, which in turn were lost in dysfunctional or discontinued or dismembered libraries. Rate of growth slowed over half a century, then reversed for another decade and a half, and then the economists stopped caring.
Extreme weather events, combined with economic and social hardships, disease outbreaks, and wars, continued to kill humans faster than anyone could keep track. The global human population was reduced to 1/5th during the crash. Eventually, the news of disasters died out too. There were not enough hungry and vulnerable people left in the world to subjugate and tokenise and make statistics out of. There were still enough survivors, but not the kind the powerful minority could rule over and build kingdoms or nations. Yet, the concentrated power and wealth had to be channelled.
The surviving elites, the successors of the erstwhile powerful minority, evolved into a new kind of anarchy. A grotesquely rich and flamboyant techno-anarchy, rising out of the ashes of now-dead democracies and autocracies of the world, embodying traditional forms of power projection without the responsibilities and restraints of governance, aided by the technological leaps in nanomaterials, optics, robotics, weaponry, nuclear power, quantum computing and artificial intelligence of the pre-crash centuries. Self-sufficient, nuclear-powered “estates” sprawling over many square kilometres forged unstable alliances with other estates, forming geographically diverse coalitions and private trade networks.