An Idea's Lifecycle
It's ever reaching immediacy: the latency between an event and the world knowing about it has collapsed
This speed up always occurs in the Winter of a civilisation. We are living through the decline of the West.
Oswald Spengler, born 1880, was a German polymath, most famous for his organic theory of history written in his 1918 book: The Decline of the West.
In his book, he argued that civilisations are not linear but cyclical and can be likened to the seasons of a year.
Spring and Summer are times of ramp up and peak creativity, while Autumn and Winter represent the spiritual death, the domination of intellect and the end of creativity. All that’s left is giant cities and Caesarism - or in other words, the world is overcome with Bureaucracy, before it snaps and the next cycle begins.
He saw this throughout history; for example in the Post-Alexander the Great world (323 BC – 31 BC), libraries synthesized thousands of years of knowledge but original ideas vanished. New Comedy, rose as a retreat into the private, sensory life - a greater focus on trifles and sex rather than grand political themes.
In the Late Imperial Period of the Roman Empire (200 AD – 476 AD), the Roman idea collapsed - as communication networks spread across the Mediterranean, cult religions rose and fell rapidly while the elite engaged in new levels of decadence.
After the Golden Age of Islamic science and philosophy in the 10th–13th Centuries, trade routes allowed for the intellectual saturation: ideas became commodities. Poetry was dedicated to pleasure, and became disconnected from the majority’s reality.
Today, just as Spengler predicted, the world’s language is money.
Secularism has birthed a new, subconscious theology: Money is God, and its sacraments are nihilism and hedonism.
Spengler saw the Faustian soul as the Spring of Western civilisation - the reach for the infinite. Unlike the Greeks, it was no longer enough to Be, the idea was you must Become. Despite Man being finite, not infinite, you can see these ideas reflected in the DON’T DIE movement by Bryan Johnson who dedicates his life to living long enough for immortality for be figured out.
In Winter the acceleration of ideas isn’t gradual anymore; only 13 years ago TV shows were released each weekend, now they get released an all at once in a morning and have a professional-grade YouTube breakdown already made by the evening.
Acceleration is right now.
And Spengler predicted it.
Information Latency Through History
The gap between an event happening and a person on the other side of the world seeing a high-definition reconstruction of it has collapsed.
In a WWI trench, soldiers wrote home up to 3 times a week. There were estimated to be over 12 million letters being delivered every day. But once the soldier wrote it, he had to give it to an officer who would censor information about their location, future operations, or specific details about the weather that might reveal their position to the enemy. When the family received it weeks later, they didn’t see the atrocities of war, they were seeing an approved version of it.
When I was a kid, news sources came from BBC news or the radio in the car. In 2026 the theatrics of the world’s giants play out on social media and are then reported about and analysed down to the last detail on the same platforms. Anyone can now to chat to an AI about a breaking news event in real time. The value of information lies in the gist - meaning the core subject, without details. It’s got to be short and straight to the point. Which is why news channels are now on tiktok.
Spengler saw the compression of ideas into gists as the death of the Great Books - where philosophy is no longer read from the source (the original writer) but consumed via the reteller.
The Meme
Only 10 years ago, the lifecycle of an idea would take months. AI has supercharged every stage: creation, distribution, remixing, and rumination.
2016: a meme like Harambe was culturally relevant for months.
2021: The Boat in the Suez Canal was only talked about for weeks despite some economic models estimating the total net negative impact of the event on the world's annual GDP to be around $80 billion.
2026: we are now in the era of micro-memes.
A video goes viral in the morning, by lunch there are 5,000 AI-remixed versions of it, and by dinner, people are already posting about their meme fatigue.
In 2026, if someone shows off an impressive skill or work of art that took them a long time to create, on social media, the hype only lasts as long as the algorithm pushes the content.
The art no longer holds weight because enjoyment must be contained inside 5 seconds.
Pablo Picasso created the Guernica in 1937 and since then it has been appreciated ever since, with people taking time to travel and see it in person.
Spengler talked about how in the final stage, art is no longer made to create ideas. When movies are repeats under the guise of a much anticipated sequel and AI art is a regurgitation of creativity without soul - the only way to make money is to exploit rather than explore.
This is exactly the new social media strategy.
Niching down has always been key for success but accounts now take it to the extreme. People now watch influencers for such a rigid niche that it’s almost repeatedly watching the same thing. Range is punished in lack of attention and therefore income. This is why content like doing something for every follower is such a popular form of entertainment - because they’re repeating the same act.
From 0 on day 1 to 296k followers by day 36.
Or running a 5K in unusual places - he does on top of the fridge, under the sofa, etc.
Velocity as Authority
When information was slow, it could be controlled by traditional authority. As with the war letters, key pieces of information were blacked out and kept secret. A TV network had the choice on what footage aired and how they framed a narrative in a direction.
Now that information is both fast and spreads to anyone with a phone i.e. the whole world, the person to jump on a trend faster than the other wins the authority.
If you spend anytime on the internet these days you will see every possible opinion to an event, whether a government chooses a side or not.
Knowledge is commodity and is why AI has spread across the world quicker than governments can put restraints on it. Why no individual can have control anymore. If one government bans AI, another integrates it into their economy and gets years ahead.
5th Generation Warfare
Wars have historically been seen as a form of shaping a society as well as a mirror to its values - as an idea’s lifecycle gets shorter, the ways war is fought has evolved by it’s frontlines getting ever closer to the general public. The wars we see from our screens are a new generation of warfare that naturally occurs as attention becomes Economy.
Pre-Napoleon, wars were fought by the Warrior archetype and somewhere far off from home.
But in the early 19th century, he introduced the idea of the civilian soldier, killing the Warrior archetype and aura that went along with it. Now anyone could be a soldier. This was the 1st - 3rd Generation of warfare: when you win by amassing the most manpower. He famously said
“What are the lives of half a million men to one such as I?”
4th Gen was asymmetric, where the front lines are blurred, moving from fields to public spaces and outside your home.
5th is now: the war on your perception. When phones are soldiers and can manipulate the enemy’s reality, why fire any shots?
When news of battle is dissected by all internet celebrities an hour after it occurs, when the screen is covered in noise and panic - it becomes impossible to see what’s at play behind the curtain.
The Singularity
In Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005), the book takes the reader on the path of human civilisation from being biological to purely digital - where new religions, corporate structures, and scientific breakthroughs are born and discarded before a biological human can blink. Where ideas like art and war are just streams of data - indistinguishable from noise.
The Singularity is an increasingly popularised idea in the media - that the speed up we’re seeing will only increase toward the end of history.
The prediction is that we cannot slow down and that whatever comes next, after Winter, will be an even faster time of change.
How to live in Winter
I think the black pill is the natural reaction to this.
As Art Chad states in his youtube video Why Gen-Z took the Black Pill
“The internet and my appearance is in competition with all appearances on the internet.
If I’m not near the top then I’m at the bottom.
The black pill isn’t just futility of originality in the individual, the black pill is futility of originality in all aspects of life.
An ideology that could only exist under late capitalism.
Be the best or die.”
While mainstream regards black pill adjacent influencers like Clavicular as fringe or something to be made fun of, I think he’s a good example of people we are already seeing more of - mogging an area of life.
There is an undeniable truth that having a face card in your hand in life’s deal gives you a bias to be liked more and to be more successful. The Greek philosophers understood this, that’s why they were ripped.
The Greek ideal was called Kalokagathia - the beautiful and the good.
In this time, the gymnasion was where you went for both physical training and philosophical debate.
Take the philosopher Plato, that wasn’t even his real name - that was his nickname for having such broad shoulders and chest from his days as a wrestler.
The philosophers believed a neglected body was a sign of a neglected mind.
You live out Winter by becoming the person needed to bring forth the next Spring.
When you ignore all the noise and shift focus to your immediate surrounding, your outputs and being Human.
While this piece focuses on the negative aspects of AI in the speed up of an idea’s lifecycle, only seeing the negatives will prevent you to joining the coming renaissance - because when you bring down the wait to see if an idea works you can get it out into the world quicker. When medicine is tested in years rather than decades, more lives are saved; when you can systemise the logistics of getting everyone a healthy meal, people feel better.
Our next Spring will be an abundance of Creativity because you’ll be able to craft ideas like clay.