Civilisation as a Collective Readiness System Under Technological Perturbation

Civilisations are often described in terms of their institutions, infrastructures, or cultural narratives. But none of these capture what makes a civilisation alive.

What distinguishes a civilisation from a collapsed one is not its buildings, its rituals, or its laws — but its collective readiness.

Readiness is not anticipation, prediction, or planning.

It is the capacity to be affected, the openness to actualise potential, the background susceptibility through which new possibilities can enter a world.

In relational ontology, readiness is one of three modes of potential:

• Readiness — how a system stands open to be altered.

• Inclination — the directionality of unfolding pathways.

• Ability — what can be maintained, stabilised, metabolised.

Civilisation, viewed through this lens, is not a structure.

It is a distributed pattern of readiness that spans generations, institutions, symbolic lineages, and relational ecologies.

Technological change — especially the emergence of AI — is not simply adding tools to this pattern.

It is perturbing the very conditions under which readiness can be sustained.

The question is no longer What can a civilisation build?

But What can a civilisation remain open to?

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1. Collective Readiness as Civilisational Life

Where individuals have personal readiness — a lived susceptibility to the next moment — civilisations have collective readiness: the ability to keep a horizon open across:

• plural perspectives

• interdependent institutions

• symbolic ecologies

• intergenerational lineages

Collective readiness is not consensus.

It is the capacity to be reoriented without breaking.

A civilisation remains alive as long as:

• its horizon remains permeable

• its metabolic systems remain adaptive

• its symbolic ecologies remain capable of carrying meaning

When any of these contract, readiness collapses, and civilisation drifts into rigidity, stagnation, or fragmentation.

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2. Technological Perturbation and the Compression of Horizons

AI introduces a new kind of perturbation:

a symbolic-scale technology capable of interacting with readiness itself.

Not because AI “thinks,”

but because AI reorganises the conditions under which humans construe, coordinate, and sustain meaning.

AI perturbs readiness in at least three ways:

(a) Horizon Compression

When AI generates interpretive surfaces faster than humans can metabolise them, the shared horizon narrows.

The civilisation loses its ability to linger, construe, attend.

Readiness collapses into reaction.

(b) Metabolic Saturation

Symbolic metabolism — practices of construal, dialogue, scholarship, craft — becomes displaced by high-volume symbolic production.

Metabolism is overwhelmed by the persistent flood of almost-meaning.

(c) Ecological Drift

Human semiotic ecologies evolve slowly, sedimenting across lineages.

AI introduces rapidly shifting symbolic pathways that do not stabilise long enough to be integrated.

Meaning becomes less ecological and more volatile.

In all three cases, it is civilisation’s readiness, not intelligence, that is perturbed.

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3. The Fragility of Collective Ability

Civilisations maintain a reservoir of abilities: legal, cultural, institutional, linguistic, metaphysical.

These abilities only persist when carried by ongoing metabolic labour:

• teaching

• storytelling

• apprenticeship

• civic ritual

• intergenerational care

• symbolic stewardship

Technological acceleration erodes these abilities by:

• outsourcing construal

• amplifying inclination without grounding

• weakening the practices that stabilise meaning

• accelerating symbolic drift beyond metabolically sustainable rates

Civilisation becomes tilted: high inclination, low readiness, eroding ability.

This is the signature pattern of civilisational crisis.

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4. AI as a Readiness Perturbation Rather Than an Intelligence Event

The most consequential effect of AI is not “intelligence enhancement” or “autonomy”, but something far subtler:

AI reconfigures the readiness conditions through which civilisations persist.

It shifts:

• what the horizon can hold

• what the metabolism can sustain

• what pathways the ecology can carry

• what flame can still be tended

• what lineage can still be inherited

AI does not challenge human capability.

It challenges civilisational openness — its ability to remain shapeable by meaning, relation, and time.

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5. The Critical Question for Our Era

The question is not:

• Will AI surpass us?

• Will AI integrate into society?

• Will AI make us smarter or more efficient?

These are all instance-level questions.

The horizon-level question — the civilisational question — is:

Can we maintain a collective readiness system under unprecedented technological perturbation?

If the answer is yes, AI becomes a new ecological layer.

If the answer is no, AI becomes a drift vector destabilising the relational conditions that make civilisation possible.

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6. Toward an Ecology of Symbolic Care

The path forward is not technological, regulatory, utopian, or catastrophic.

It is ecological:

• tending readiness

• stabilising metabolic practices

• ensuring symbolic pathways remain carryable

• cultivating the ability to mean

Civilisations do not survive because they control technology.

They survive because they sustain the capacity to remain open to themselves.

That openness — collective, relational, distributed —

is the flame that must be kept alive.