The Inevitable Reckoning: Why “Tachyosis Civilizations” Must Crash, By Paul Walker and Brian Simpson
Mark Jeftovic's concept of "tachyosis," a state of recursively compounding acceleration where systems evolve faster than they can stabilise, captures something profound about our current moment. But his analysis, while brilliant in diagnosing our condition, stops short of confronting the logical endpoint of his own framework. The question isn't whether hyper-accelerated civilisations will face a reckoning, but what form that inevitable collapse will take.
Jeftovic borrows from physics to describe our accelerating world, moving through the kinematic spectrum from velocity to acceleration to "jerk" and beyond. But physics also teaches us about limits. No system can sustain infinite acceleration without eventually hitting fundamental constraints, energy limits, structural integrity, or simple thermodynamic impossibility.
Human civilisations operate under similar constraints, only more complex and less predictable. We have cognitive limits, resource boundaries, and social cohesion thresholds. The tachyosis state Jeftovic describes, where "civilizations cease to distinguish between signal and noise," isn't a sustainable equilibrium. It's a prelude to breakdown.
Consider the symptoms already manifesting around us: mass anxiety and depression, political fragmentation, economic volatility, social degradation, and the widespread sense that institutions can no longer keep pace with change. These aren't temporary growing pains of a hyper-accelerated world, they're early warning signs of a system approaching its breaking point.
The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to process information at a fundamentally different pace than what modern technology demands. We're asking Stone Age cognitive architecture to navigate an information environment that doubles in complexity every few years.
The results are predictable and already visible. Attention spans collapse. Decision-making deteriorates under information overload. People retreat into tribal echo chambers because the broader information ecosystem has become incomprehensible. Political discourse degrades into memes and slogans because nuanced analysis requires cognitive resources we no longer possess.
This isn't just individual burnout, it's civilizational cognitive overload. When societies can no longer process information faster than it's generated, when the rate of change exceeds the rate of adaptation, breakdown becomes inevitable. The question isn't whether this will happen, but whether the collapse will be gradual or sudden.
Jeftovic describes a world where AI serves as "decentralized, non-state intelligence," where every device can access and act on information from everything else. This sounds revolutionary until you consider the complexity implications.
Every connection in a network creates potential failure points. Every automated system introduces unpredictable interactions. Every AI agent operating autonomously adds another variable to an already chaotic equation. We're building systems so complex that no human, or group of humans, can understand their full behavior.
This is the complexity trap: the same technologies that promise to manage our accelerating world are themselves accelerating beyond our ability to manage them. We're creating systems that are simultaneously indispensable and incomprehensible, critical and uncontrollable.
When these systems inevitably fail, through cascade effects, emergent behaviours, or simple accumulated errors, the failure will be proportional to their complexity and integration. A hyper-connected world faces hyper-connected collapse.
Despite the digital economy's apparent weightlessness, the physical world still matters. Every server farm requires massive energy inputs. Every smartphone depends on rare earth minerals. Every AI model demands computational resources that translate to real-world power consumption and heat generation.
The tachyosis civilisation is energy-intensive in ways we're only beginning to understand. Bitcoin mining alone consumes more electricity than entire countries. AI training runs require power measured in gigawatts. The Internet of Things promises to connect billions of new devices, each requiring energy, materials, and manufacturing capacity.
Meanwhile, the environmental costs of this acceleration are mounting exponentially.You can't code your way out of thermodynamics.
Perhaps most critically, tachyosis appears to be fundamentally incompatible with social cohesion. Jeftovic notes the rise of tribalism as traditional institutions lose relevance, but this trend points toward civilisational fragmentation rather than evolution.
When shared institutions collapse, when common information sources disappear, when economic systems become incomprehensible to those they govern, societies lose the social glue that holds them together. The result isn't just political polarisation, it's the dissolution of the social contract itself.
The "Great Bifurcation" Jeftovic describes, where wealth concentrates among asset holders while the majority faces permanent unemployment, represents a recipe for social explosion, not social stability. History shows us what happens when inequality reaches extreme levels while institutions lose legitimacy. The outcome isn't neo-feudalism, it's revolution, collapse, or both.
The inevitable reckoning of tachyosis civilization will likely take one of several forms:
The Cascade Collapse: A single critical system failure triggers a domino effect across our hyper-connected infrastructure. Financial markets crash, power grids fail, supply chains break, and the complexity that seemed like strength reveals itself as fatal fragility.
The Cognitive Breakdown: Societies simply lose the ability to function as cognitive overload reaches critical mass. Political systems become completely dysfunctional, economic decision-making becomes erratic, and social coordination becomes impossible.
The Resource Crunch: Physical limits reassert themselves violently. Energy shortages, or material scarcities force a rapid downscaling of technological complexity whether we choose it or not.
The Social Explosion: Inequality and institutional failure reach levels that trigger widespread social breakdown. The bifurcated society Jeftovic describes proves unsustainable when the majority has nothing to lose.
The silver lining, if there is one, lies in what comes after. Civilisations have collapsed before and recovered, often emerging stronger and more sustainable. The question is whether we can learn from the inevitable reckoning rather than simply suffer through it.
The societies that survive tachyosis will likely be those that prioritise resilience over efficiency, sustainability over growth, and human-scale organisation over hyper-optimisation. They'll rediscover the value of redundancy, the importance of slack in systems, and the necessity of maintaining capabilities that don't depend on complex technological infrastructure.
This doesn't mean abandoning technology entirely, it means choosing technologies that enhance rather than replace human capabilities, that create resilience rather than fragility, and that operate at scales humans can understand and control.
The reckoning is coming whether we prepare for it or not. The only question is whether we'll be ready to build something better from the pieces, or whether we'll simply crash and burn in the accelerating complexity of our own making.
The choice, for now, is still ours. But tachyosis waits for no one, and the window for conscious adaptation is closing as quickly as everything else is accelerating.
Authored by Mark E. Jeftovic via bombthrower.com,
"In the future there will be only one occupation: managing one's wealth.
…and most people are going to be unemployed."
— Mark E. Jeftovic, 'The Great Bifurcation'
It's been a minute since I last wrote anything here, owing to a combination of a slightly heavier than usual travel schedule, and frankly, burnout, after that last Canadian election.
I've truly underestimated the gullibility of the Canadian public – after being predictably on-track for a massive pendulum swing to a Conservative super-majority from 10 years of Liberal policies demolishing Canada, the entire dynamic reversed and was nullified within a few short weeks by the entire "Elbows Up" mind-fuck.
The irony behind all this is that the public largely switched their vote for the candidate Donald Trump wanted to win because of their own Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Watching it from the outside was demoralizing.
(Steve Bannon told me before the election that Trump's "51st State" riffs were done on purpose to get the libs re-elected and Trump himself took a victory lap afterwards – Canadians were had. Why? Because the Americans want Alberta, and they think they'll get it through de facto economic or political integration within a few years after #WEXIT happens).
We'll see how long this administration lasts – nominally a minority, but functioning as a quasi-majority, and already introducing truly horrific legislation like Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act – which is more of a mass surveillance and war on cash bill than anything else.
The number of Canadians who now feel politically homeless is at an all-time high. The rapidly waning productive class of society watches, unable to intervene – as insular technocrats implement overtly destructive policies (i.e 865,000 new immigrants admitted YTD into an economy that squeaked out 8,800 new jobs) and seem to be intentionally cultivating divisiveness and polarization.
Why am I surprised?
When I look back on my own writings, and my overall theory that the era of nation state primacy is coming to an end, that the single most impactful phenomenon driving the world today is the accelerating rate of change, it was naive of me to expect anything different.
We're moving from the top-down, centralized model of a hierarchical Industrial Age and transitioning into an amorphous and mercurial, rapidly shifting, network topology that blurs the lines between sovereigns and systems, crowns and corporations, that serves as a super-conductor for data, information, and memetic constructs – not to mention: disinfo, bad news and mass formation psychosis.
Add to this mix, AI – the third major technological disruption of this century after the internet (decentralized non-state communications) and Bitcoin (decentralized non-state money).
Now we have decentralized, non-state intelligence and I mean intelligence in a number of ways, including:
access to the sum total of human knowledge, instantly and at effectively zero marginal cost.
each individual possessing the means, motive and opportunity to create their own personal think-tanks, advisory boards and even "spycraft"-style intelligence services using osint and agentic AI that can act strategically and agentically on anybody's behalf (servitor swarms, if you will).
every node, device, piece of software and network connected "thing" having the ability to access and act on information from everything else.
There's a sub-cult of Bitcoin maxis who actually welcome outcomes like the aforementioned Canadian election because they think having nations run by the most out-of-touch, behind the curve technocrats will hasten the collapse of the fiat money era and bring about a Bitcoin Standard. They are awaiting a kind of monetary eschaton – and they are called accelerationists.
I am not an accelerationist, but you may have noticed I have been writing a lot about this but find the word itself being inadequate to the task – what's happening now is beyond acceleration. In physics, there is a derivative order and their ascension forms a kind of kinematic spectrum:
I've been trying to come up with a word that captures this accelerating acceleration that's a bit sexier than "jerk" – and this exponentially intensifying derivative expansion beyond "snap", "crackle" and "pop" (oh those nerd physicists) – so far I can really only make something up (actually, it was the best chatGPT could think of): tachyosis (tachy- = fast, -osis = condition/process), to wit:
Tachyosis (n.)
A state of recursively compounding acceleration — where systems evolve faster than they can stabilize, perception fragments, and causality begins to blur. Considered the experiential threshold of the kinematic continuum.
"Civilizations in tachyosis cease to distinguish between signal and noise — they become pure velocity."
This seems to fit the bill, and I like it because the word is reminiscent of "psychosis", which is what a society undergoing this induces at a mass level.
What tachyosis does to society
While we know what happens during hyper-inflations, technological quantum leaps or breakdowns in the social contract – as separate phenomenons. If you follow Ray Dalio, he'll tell you that the USA is following a template outlined his own research putting squarely on the path to Civil War –
"That template led me to believe that there was a high chance of a convergent breakdown of the monetary order, the domestic political order, and the international geopolitical order. Unfortunately, events are transpiring consistent with that template. "
But with all due respect to Mr. Dali, his framework only covers two of the three drivers we're looking at here: it's missing compounding affects of technological overclocking, and there are no history books to describe all three of these forces hitting an inflection point at the same time and all over the world.
The Rise of Tribalism
As societal institutions break down the economy enters a state of perpetual disruption, people start forming associations with like-minded individuals and families, both in their own communities and remotely.
Tribes may overlap with geopolitical boundaries but their center of gravity is what it stands for, not the political unit they may (for a moment) intersect with.
Woke, MAGA, AnCaps, BLM, Proud Boys, MS-13, Bitcoin, and Scientology are all examples of tribes now, regardless of what they started out as. Some with more staying power than others. But they will all acquire more relevance and gravitas in their members' lives than their nation state citizenship. Why? Because no nation state can keep up with the process of tachyosis, while tribes are informed by it.
(To that end, there's a new tribe forming for politically homeless Canadians over at Ready.ca)
Neo-Feudalism & The Vise of Technology
By this, I mean the effect this technological hyper-acceleration is having at both ends of your own personal lifespan.
If you have kids under the age of 30, especially if they're under the age of 20 – their path forward will be very different from all those who came before.
Put bluntly: they probably won't have jobs, much less careers. The time for each generation accumulating their own wealth and building personal fortunes will be – for most participants – over.
Your kids, your grandchildren and beyond, (hold that thought) would do better to be raised in preparation for maintaining the wealth and managing any assets you leave to them. Anybody who doesn't inherit anything faces a real risk of being permanently priced out of the asset acquisition game in perpetuity.
Especially if they follow the path laid out in Industrial Age textbooks: go to school, then university, then go find a job with a big company and parlay that into a series of mid-management posts that culminate in a career and a payday. Most of those positions will have been automated away and the majority of younger generations are looking at UBI and endless leisure – so long as they spend most of their time confined to a metaverse-connected pod stacked somewhere in a 15-minute city and take up as little space and oxygen in the real world as possible.
Meanwhile, if you have managed to amass assets and a non-negative net worth, be prepared to live longer – a lot longer. 150, 160 will probably be normal for anybody under 60 or so now. That's how fast biotech – and soon nanotech – is moving.
A number of my peer group – mostly technology and business operators in their mid-50's to late-60's are looking to take their chips off the table, sell the businesses they founded and retire, assuming they'll need to clear enough money to last them another 20 or 30 years.
That could be a huge mistake because there's a real possibility they find themselves facing the prospect of heading into their 90's and early 100's having outlived their retirement funds.
The old model was (again, bluntly), "Die before your money runs out." Now, it's not just about planning for 30 years post-retirement. Plan for a century.
Meanwhile, you're kids won't have careers, neither will theirs – and you'll still probably be around to see your great- and great-great-grandchildren be born into the same post-bifurcation world.
This is the neo-Feudal aspect. Your fortune will have to be subdivided across each generation, like the fiefdoms of yore – and the only way to keep everybody living in the real world (instead of being tucked away in those pods, being intravenously fed liquid crickets and soy protein) will be to leave them with a vastly larger fortune than the one you thought was enough to get just you through retirement.
I wish I had better news than this, because the world we're headed into – while technologically fantastic – will also be economically bleak for too many people. It's not fair, it's not egalitarian and there is no stopping it – short of a Tower of Babel 2.0 type event, which will be a total buzzkill in even less preferable ways.
I've called this scenario "The Great Bifurcation" – where the world's middle class disintegrates and we head into a hellscape of mind-boggling wealth disparity.
Lately I've come to suspect that this will play out beyond the economic sphere and also occur at the level of mental abstraction (see my earlier notes about W R Clemens) – and by this I don't mean that the "haves" will have brain chips and poors won't (probably the other way around, if anything) – but that the underclass will be operating at a cognitive disadvantage that resembles a different species entirely.