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I spent the last few days creating The Archive in order to help shape a series of thoughts and feelings that I was struggling to parse. A few disparate conversations with different people on unrelated topics had triggered a strange shift in worldview, but in such a way that I wasn't sure exactly what my new understanding was, just that my old one wasn't sufficient. I was thinking primarily about society, civilization, and our place in the world. I laughed when people said 1990 was the "end of history", that politics had been solved, and that nothing would ever happen again. I laugh now when people say "nothing ever happens". I realized though, that deep down, I truly agreed with them. I've spoken for years about the collapse of the American empire, how tremendous and devastating change will happen over the next 100 years... But I've only just realized that in all my imagination of what the world might look like after, I never seemed to consider that society might look different. Really, truly different. This started when I was having a conversation about something unrelated with a few friends. One of them commented something about the Fall of the Roman Empire, metaphorically, in order to get across an idea of intensity, destruction, and rapid decay. The metaphor brought to mind a sacking, that the Roman Empire fell in a single night of fire, screams, and devastation. The other participant in the conversation corrected them by simply saying, "To the average person, the fall of the Roman Empire simply looked like the local bridge going out again, but this time no one showed up to fix it." Even in the moment, that throw-away line that elicited a laugh hit me unexpectedly hard, and it stuck in the back of my thoughts for days. The local bridge went out again, and one day no one showed up to fix it. That's how the so-called "Dark Ages" began. Not with cities being burned down, villages being razed, or population collapse. One day, no one showed up to fix the bridge. One day, no one showed up to maintain the library. One day, no one showed up to tend to the garden. Those simple facts, things people in the moment probably viewed as minor inconveniences or barely noticed, resulted in the loss of a tremendous amount of knowledge, the fracturing of cultures, and the breakup of a language into multiple language families. A language that had been used, in one form or another, across the western world for 1,000 years was already splitting into French within only 300 years. That's what I've been thinking about the last few days. It's easy for me to think that everything will stay the same, and that nothing ever happens. The whole world is connected now, it's simply more robust than it was 1500 years ago. Empires can't collapse now, and when they do, they don't result in the loss of knowledge, the splintering of societies, and the evolution of language. But why? Are we so different from the Romans? Are we so much more advanced, so much more intelligent, and so much better than them that we will notice the bridge isn't being fixed? I honestly feel like I must conclude that the answer is no. We won't notice. Because the bridges are already breaking, and no one has showed up to fix them. The libraries are already decaying, and no one is showing up to maintain them. We have actively watched our primary global connection, our digital road network that connects all of us, rot and decay over many decades. No one is coming to repair the road. And so, I made The Archive, a simple website where you can post what matters to you - poetry to express how you feel, prose to describe what you've experienced, confessions of love, confessions of hate, and whatever else you believe matters. Then you can watch how quickly those things that mattered so much to you and those around you rots and decays until it is unrecognizable. You can look back on things that mattered to someone else and wonder what it looked like - because it's now too late to experience. There's no real call to action within The Archive, I don't really view it as something political. I suppose the goal is simply to make people think about how the average Roman citizen probably thought, "This Empire has been around for 1,000 years, nothing ever happens" Only for their grandchildren to speak the beginnings of a new language, in a new country, at the beginning of what we now call "The Dark Ages."
