The Fragility of Civilizations
Everything's just so-so, if you really think about it.
Hello Sapiens,
Every time I come back to write a post here, it feels like the world has shifted further towards a precipice, like one of those buses hanging on the edge of a bridge in Hollywood movies. Someone’s started bombing someone new or some piece of technology has arrived that makes you question whether humans have a purpose at all. It could be that we’re actually living in a singularity where decades worth of changes are now happening monthly or just that I have become that infrequent of a poster here. Perhaps its a bit of both.
My life has turned a bit too chaotic for my liking. As it is so often the case, it’s something I have gleefully put on myself, like an idiot participant in a gameshow agreeing to let the wild snake charmer drap a massive python around his neck. The python I am referring to is mostly freelance work. It’s slow-choking me with promises of income. I have decided that I will partake in this kink for a while until I put a stop to it again to do presumably more soulful things like watching YouTube and flaneuring around the city.
However, in addition to the self imposed claustrophobia of more clients, life, it seems is also in a bit of a churn-filled state. After a two week trip to India, I barely slept in my bed in Bangkok for a night or two before we had to pack up and move to a smaller 1-bhk house next door. The good news is that the fractured reminder of the earthquake from earlier this year on the walls of our condo is being repaired. The bad news is that we are now living in a slightly messy, temporary, small accommodation where we’ve not fully unpacked with noises of drilling and work from the house next door.
In the meantime, there is another upcoming trip to India in a couple of weeks and since my passport has run out of pages, I’ve had to make a run to renew that in this tiny gap. All in all, I’m feeling a bit restless and eager to discover a halcyon period of routine, known bed and a few weeks where I don’t go anywhere.
Anyway, all this is not to excuse myself for being lax here. In fact, the fact that I am not writing here is perhaps adding to my sense of disconnect. But this is how it goes. Given how I’ve been feeling perhaps it’s fitting that this post is about the fragility of civilization itself, as if I am assuring myself that there is nothing called stability anyway.
Weak links
Even as ChatGPT helps craft your update email, pause to smell the digital smog and think of the precarious choke points on which it all rests:
A single company (TSMC) on a contested island is making 90% of the world’s advanced chips. Those production lines churn out GPUs even as China’s jets test the defenses every hour to remind them who they belong to.
The lithography machines used to make these chips come from a single company in the Netherlands. ASML’s machines each cost over $150 million, contain thousands of precision parts and high-end parts, and take decades of research1.
The lenses needed for the above machine come from one company - Carl Zeiss of Germany
The house of cards is stacked even higher. More than 50% of all silicon wafers used to make these chips come from two companies in Japan
There’s more gas. In fact, 50% of the Neon gas needed to etch those wafers comes from two companies in Ukraine, a country that’s been having a tough time (to say the least).
I think you get the point. The future you’re plotting where AI cures cancer (or becomes Skynet) rests on a fragile bed of egos, geopolitical brinksmanship, and a handful of companies.
But it’s not just AI
The US Department of Defense runs the entirety of the world’s GPS.
95% of global internet traffic runs in a bunch of undersea cables controlled by a handful of companies.
Most cobalt used in Batteries comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with extremely suspect labor and human rights rules
>90% of global magnet production comes from China and so does >60% of global rare earth minerals
Three companies control 70% of global cloud infrastructure. The idea of “pulling the plug” on global Internet services would be funny if it weren’t a very real possibility.
The world of technology is full of these stories. Men with complicated names and even more complicated relationships with rules control this scavenger hunt of ingredients to power the modern world.
Reminds me of this XKCD classic
But it’s not just technology.
Take medicine, for instance. Eighty percent of the drug Heparin, a key blood thinner used in surgeries, comes from China. A disruption there can collapse this supply chain overnight.
A few geographical supply chain chokepoints could bring the world to its knees.
The Strait of Hormuz: 20% of global oil passes through it. At its narrowest, it is less than 40 kilometers wide.
The Malacca Strait holds the key to China’s oil lifeline. A blockade would cripple its economy.
We all know what happened when Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking global trade worth tens of billions of dollars.
The chokepoints don’t stop.
60% of the calories that all humanity consumes come from 4 crops: Wheat, Rice, Maize, and Soy. Imagine a drug-resistant infection affecting these crops, and you will have a global failure of human calories (a plot point in Interstellar where blight begins to affect each crop).
80% of global vanilla comes from Madagascar. Bananas may be gone because, due to monoculture farming, 99% of exported bananas are the Cavendish variety, which is under threat from fungal disease (TR4), and there’s no backup strain ready.
The supply chain of modern conveniences lies on fragile primaries.
Civilizations are fleeting
We all read about the great civilizations of the past. Romans, Greeks, and mysteries of the Indus Valley are good things to binge on a free afternoon. The evidence of past greatness, all gone to dust despite their self-assurance that it would last forever, is overwhelming.
Nothing ever lasts forever, but there isn’t anything more fragile than the facade of civilization that we make up. In fact, one of the fundamental truths of civilizations would be that the more complex and evolved it gets, the more fragile it becomes.
The great Harappan cities, once thriving centers of trade, learning, and the epitome of civilization, all turned to dust when the Palaeo river began to weaken due to poor monsoons and climate change. We’re building castles and aqueducts, but still reliant on this magical and mysteriously interconnected phenomenon of global climate, working with 99.99% precision day in and day out. When Earth sneezes a bit, civilizations perish.
In his book. Collapse of complex societies, Joseph Tainter lays down a core idea that captures this: when complexity increases, and the cost of solving the problems of the civilization is higher than the marginal utility you get from it, collapse is the inevitable choice.
This was partly the case with the ‘too big’ Roman Empire as they expanded territories and depended on a very distributed empire to handle the upkeep of an empire hungry for more.
When I visited Bagan in Myanmar many years back, I was blown away by the sheer number of stupas and temples dotting the landscape (it is quite a sight from the hot air balloons). Over an incredible area, thousands of temples lay, now completely abandoned. I tried to imagine what life would have looked like at the peak of this civilization, when life existed here and people roamed in these plains, assuming that this was a given, that the temples, the gods, and their way of life would persist for eternity.
Nothing ever does.
Every day, the world performs a quiet miracle.
Whenever I drive on the road, I think about how incredible it is that armed with hundred-ton weapons (vehicles), each capable of maiming and killing hundreds of people, things work mostly as expected.
It’s not a surprise that we hear about the occasional man stealing from a store, but the fact that thousands of other men don't should be something to wonder at.
We underestimate how wildly improbable all this is. How absurdly delicate the whole setup is. Not just the governments or markets or energy grids, but the emotional restraint of 8 billion people not flipping out and throwing it all out of the window. The fact that the man next to you on the train does not set fire to the seat and run out. That your neighbour doesn't throw stones at your house just for the fun of it.
We brush our teeth. We show up. We file our taxes. We smile and say “thank you” to strangers. We scream into pillows and walk it off.
Not because we’re saints. But because we have quietly, collectively agreed to believe in a story. We’ve decided “let’s not ruin it for all of us.”
Sometimes, when a man does walk in with the gun, a virus breaks down collective systems, or when a pilot doesn’t land a plane the way she’s supposed to, it strikes us that this system isn’t bulletproof. In fact, it’s more like tissue paper held together by duct tape and vibes.
And somehow, it holds.
That’s the beauty of the whole thing. While it doesn’t make sense to believe that civilizations would hold on forever, it is incredible that humans inevitably evolve systems to make things a bit nicer and easier. Even if today’s empires crumble to dust, new ones will emerge, and we will have another agreed set of stories to live by and not make too terrible a mess. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
Coincidentally, I met someone who works in ASML recently in Bangalore during a family function. I reeled off the four things I knew and threw in Lithography for good measure, and he was suitably impressed. Thankfully, the busy-ness of the situation prevented him from asking me any further questions thus revealing the shallow depths of my knowledge.
Brilliantly Written🙏
Good one!
Next time you stopping by Bangalore, give a shout pls. :)