How history teaches us to deal with Societal collapse
Face what's coming.
Abstract
Drawing on Benedict Anderson's concept of nations as "imagined communities"—socially constructed groups where members, though strangers, perceive deep horizontal comradeship through shared rituals and media—this talk reimagines communities in the age of social media and information overload. Just as the printing press shattered medieval unified Christendom, enabling vernacular print capitalism and daily newspaper rituals to forge national identities over generations, today's fragmented digital feeds and scrolling habits represent a new shared ritual. Though we lack words for emerging forms—beyond traditional nation-states—these may birth novel solidarities based on shared concerns, attention, and meaning-making rather than geography or ethnicity. The talk urges moving beyond mourning lost shared truths to nurturing positive new communities amid inevitable change, much like unseen nation-building in the 16th–19th centuries.
In 1940, the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin was trying to escape Nazi-occupied France. He carried very few things with him, but one was a painting, Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. Benjamin had owned it for many years. He called this figure the angel of history. The way he described it was that the angel's face is turned towards the past. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open. And where we see the chain of events, the angel sees just one continuous catastrophe. The wreckage piling upon wreckage. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and mend what's being smashed. But he cannot close his wings because there's a storm blowing into them from paradise, bringing him back forward to the future, while the debris in front of him grows skyward.
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Benjamin wrote that in spring 1940, back when he was in Paris as the Nazis were closing in. In September of the same year, he made a beeline towards the Spanish border. Once he got there, he discovered that the border was closed and, realizing that it was impossible for him to escape, … .
That storm that Benjamin described—this feeling of being caught in forces beyond your own control—we know something about it, don't we?
There's once again war in Europe Ukraine versus Russia.
There's political polarization everywhere Dems vs Republicans.
Trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
Democratic norms are eroding.
Authoritarian rulers are rising everywhere.
There are different crises around climate,
around AI, that we find no solution for.
It feels like everything is breaking apart.
But it's not the first time that everything is breaking apart.
I want to take you back 500 years. Imagine it's 1517 and you're somewhere in mines in Nuremberg, in Wittenberg, in Basel—somewhere in the Holy Roman Empire, in the big cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Everyone around you would tell you that times are changing. The printing press has been around for decades already, but now it's suddenly everywhere. The streets are flooded with pamphlets. The printed broadsides are nailed to the church doors. There are books being published not in Latin anymore but in vernacular languages—in German, in Dutch, in French.
Luther has just recently put out his 95 theses, and within weeks they were copied and spread throughout Europe like wildfire. What used to take years and years now happens in days, and people are freaking out. They're freaking out because the gatekeepers that had been around for centuries—monasteries, mostly universities, who could determine what is worthy being passed down, what gets copied, what gets preserved, but also what gets hidden away, what gets suppressed, what gets deleted—no longer have that position. So the monks and bishops are looking in horror at how anyone who has access to a printing press can put out their ideas and spread them freely without them having any say over it.
There's a complete overload of information: too many books, too many pamphlets, too many conflicting claims. The contemporary—and actually good friend of Martin Luther and one of the most prominent scholars of the age, Erasmus—wrote in a letter to another friend of his how worried he was about what's happening. He said that in his opinion most of that which gets printed is stupid, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious, or seditious. And that was while he was actually one of the main beneficiaries of the new printing revolution, as his ideas were also those that got spread around the empire and around the continent.
The institutional authority was collapsing. The role of the pope as an arbiter of how to interpret the scripture was challenged. The role of the church as a mediator between God and men was openly questioned. The universities who could determine what is the orthodoxy and what's the heresy were completely sidelined in the new discussions and debates. And that of course led to the disintegration of the political system as people knew it at that time—the Holy Roman Empire—that became crumble as the local princes were carving out their own sovereign spaces, establishing their own rules, setting their own standards of truth.
And this means that the unified Christendom, the age-old dream of the one political and spiritual order across the whole continent started to come apart at the seams. The elites of course panicked—not just because they were afraid of losing their power, though there was definitely also this. But the main reason was that what the people were worried about was how could any kind of social order or political order be maintained under these new circumstances where anyone could put forth their own truth and there was no common point to determine and decide what everyone should follow.
And as it turned out they were right to worry. The religious wars that ensued for the next century at least killed millions across Europe.
The Thirty Years' War alone wiped out about one-third of the population in many regions in Europe.
Christendom as a unified civilization under one spiritual and political roof really did crumble. The pessimists were right about what's being lost. But while they were staring at ruins, there was something else taking root.
As I said before, the books were being published in vernacular. The pamphlets spread around. The newspapers emerged in the languages that the ordinary people could understand without anyone else having to represent it to them or being a mediator. And slowly over time new organizing principles emerged. Sovereignty shifted from the universal church and empire to local territorial states. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia established the contours of what became the new political order in Europe. And this happens to be basically the world we live in right now—the nation state, the constitutional government, religious tolerance, rights of conscience—all these things were slowly emerging. But in 1517, in 1550, in 1600, all that people could see were ruins.
The printing press really did shatter the medieval world. And it took about 150 years, multiple generations for new order and structures to emerge.
And now this is something where I want to take a pause and think. We're just 20 years into our social media revolution. Right now, centuries later, a scholar named Benedict Anderson was preoccupied with the question—looking back at the things that I just described—how did it come to pass that nations emerged out of all this chaos? How did it come to pass that people who had no chance of meeting each other face-to-face, who had really no family ties or anything else to bind them together, slowly started feeling that they actually did belong together? Anderson called these things imagined communities. Imagined not because they're fake—they were very real for the people who belonged to them—but because they existed in the collective imagination of people who did belong into them.
And the question how? Anderson had a really interesting answer to this. He said that it was a ritual that bound these people together. Every morning a clerk in Amsterdam had his morning coffee and opened up a newspaper. In Rotterdam, a merchant did the exact same. A teacher in Utrecht opened the same paper and read about the same news, had the same concerns and felt perhaps the same pride as the previous two. It was at the same time a private ritual done by a single person in private space but yet it was shared because all these people knew that there are thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people doing the exact same thing at the same time, and again slowly over time they started feeling that they are being part of the same community and the same story.
But here's the crucial detail: nobody designed this. Nobody in the middle of the 18th century thought that let's start printing newspapers so that we can create nations or let's have people reading them so that nations could emerge. The shared meaning had to come first and the political order only crystallized around it later. You cannot build a nation state and then fill it with a meaning. The meaning has to come first because the political form presupposes it.
Times have changed. We no longer read the same newspapers. There's no single trusted evening broadcast. People still watch that, but new generations—no. And even we are doing it less and less. The shared ritual, the feeling that we're all processing the same reality together has fractured, and we mourn it. We should. There's something of real value being lost.
However, every morning we wake up and if you're anything like me, the first thing you do is you take up the phone. Before you brush your teeth, before you go and take a shower, you open it and you start scrolling. And sure, there are different apps, there are different feeds that we follow, the different algorithms that feed information into these feeds that we follow. But it's the same gesture. It's the same ritual. It's likewise being done in private. But at the same time we know that there are thousands of people doing the exact same thing at the exact same moment. We're consuming information. We are reacting. We're feeling connected to the events far away.
We get angry at the same things.
We laugh at the same things.
We get mobilized.
It's the same pattern.
It's just a new medium, a new ritual.
We do not yet know what sort of communities form around this new shared ritual. We can't see them clearly because we don't have yet the words for them. Just like people in the 16th century had no words for nation states, for sovereignty, for the Habermasian public sphere. All these things were yet to emerge. 500 years ago,
people could not see the nation state emerging.
All they saw was the disintegration of the whole Roman Empire
and Christendom falling apart,
the world they knew and kept dear.
But what if we're making the same mistake? What if we're not watching communities die but new ones being born? Communities that are not organized by ethnicity or geographical borders rather than shared concerns, shared attention, shared ways of making meaning. Some of these new communities certainly terrify us and they should. There are
conspiracy networks,
there are extremist groups,
there are echo chambers,
all sorts around.
But the others might just be exactly the thing that we need. Be it climate movements that coordinate globally faster than any state could.
Be it human rights networks that circumvent or bypass the control by authoritarian governments.
Be it communities of care around chronic illness, shared grief,
be it parenting networks that are unbound by geography—
new forms of solidarity that transcend the accidents of having been born into a certain place.
They are not nations, not now, maybe ever, but they are something. And like in 1550, we do not have yet words to describe them.
So remember this angel, the Benjamin angel of history, face toward past, being propelled into future, fixated on what's being destroyed—the loss of shared truth or fragmentation in communities. And all these losses are real. I just want to return it. We can't pretend otherwise. But we also cannot pretend that we can turn back. So the angel of history, that's us.
But there's no turning back to the world before the social media as there was no turning back to the world of manuscripts once the printing press had emerged.
There's no return to the public sphere and its free trusted TV networks.
The storm is blowing and we are being propelled to the future, do we like it or not?
So we have a choice. We can keep staring at the ruins or we can turn our heads, not to forget the past, but
actually see what's coming
and help it grow. We can join communities of care. We can support global justice networks, build spaces for listening across difference, do all those sorts of things. But the thing to keep in mind there is that we are not architects with a blueprint. We're much more akin to a gardener tending something that is growing. Some of it is weeds and we can't uproot them all. But we can nurture that which we want to see flourish over generations.
New forms of social and political organization will emerge, will crystallize. They will crystallize around the meanings that we nurture now. The nation state was not inevitable. It was built by people who did not see what's coming. People who indeed established newspapers in the 18th century or those who read them in the 19th did not think that what they're doing is forging new ways of belonging. They could not know that this is building the social and political structures that will enable people to be free and flourish in the 20th century. Yet that is exactly what they were doing without realizing it themselves. They were building the new world not just for Europe but also something that became the blueprint for the independence movements in post-colonial Africa, Asia—places that these 18th and 17th century people could possibly not have imagined that they could ever reach. It happened and it could not have happened without these people taking part of these rituals, these generations meaning and nurturing the change that they would like to see.
So we are at the same moment now. What we do does matter not just for us but also for those that come after. The storm is still blowing. We can't stop it. We can't stop ourselves. We are being blown back forward to the future. But what we can do is turn our face and
face what's coming.