@cstross Growing up, "if Rome had books, indoor plumbing, paved streets, tenement housing, retail bakeries... how could they just let everything fall apart so we didn't recreate that for a thousand years" was a hard question to answer.

Now? Not so much. Plutocracy+gerontrocracy. Rich bastards burning everything down for personal short-term gain, poor people sublimating envy into worship, "the status quo is too big to fail, it's been around forever, I literally can't imagine it collapsing"...