The Becoming of Possibility: 12/10/25

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

Gravitational Interactions Between Divergent Horizons: A Relational Cosmology of Post-AI Civilisation

When a collective occupies a single horizon, coordination is gravitational: a shared pull toward common futures. After a horizon-splitting event, this gravitational field becomes plural. Different horizon-cuts exert different symbolic “weights,” shaping how attention drifts and how readiness aligns.

This post maps those gravitational interactions—not metaphorically, but relationally—through the dynamics of readiness, metabolic constraint, and ecological coupling.

I. Horizon Gravity: The Pull of a Projectable Future

A horizon exerts gravitational force when it:

organises readiness
stabilises inclinations
channels symbolic metabolism
makes certain futures projectable and others inert

A strong horizon is one with:

high coherence (few incompatible distinctions)
deep inclination (shared directional momentum)
dense ecology (many coupled practices, stories, rituals, tools)

When horizons diverge, each becomes a distinct gravitational well in the collective readiness field.

These are not competing ideologies.

They are competing cuts of possibility.

II. The Emergence of Multiple Wells of Meaning

After horizon-splitting, we typically see three kinds of gravitational wells:

1. The Conserved Horizon

The one that tries to maintain the pre-split configuration.

Its gravity comes from stability and habit.

2. The Accelerated Horizon

A horizon shaped by technological tempos—especially AI.

Its gravity comes from speed and expanded symbolic metabolism.

3. The Fragmented Micro-Horizons

Localised orientations: communities, identities, subcultures, epistemic enclaves.

Their gravity comes from intimacy and cohesion.

These wells coexist in a field of uneven readiness, generating drift, tension, orbits, slingshots, and sometimes collapse.

III. Modes of Gravitational Interaction

Divergent horizons interact through recognisable patterns.

1. Drift

When two horizons are weakly coupled, attention moves gradually from one gravitational centre to another.

This produces slow cultural realignment, generational turnover, or symbolic fatigue.

2. Capture

A horizon with strong coherence can pull smaller horizons into its orbit.

This appears as assimilation, adoption of its distinctions, or narrative realignment.

3. Repulsion

Happens when two horizons use incompatible cuts that prevent mutual construal.

This generates epistemic polarisation, mutual unintelligibility, or symbolic tribalism.

4. Slingshot

A horizon may accelerate another’s trajectory by reinterpreting its distinctions without absorbing them.

This is how innovations gain momentum: they are “flung forward” by neighbouring horizons.

5. Orbiting

Horizons can stabilise into dynamic proximity: not merged, not opposed, but coupled by periodic re-alignment.

This is how pluralistic civilisations maintain coherence without uniformity.

6. Collapse

A horizon loses gravitational integrity when its metabolic base fails or its symbolic transport becomes incoherent.

Collapse does not mean people abandon it; it means the horizon ceases to structure possibility.

AI, by introducing accelerated symbolic metabolism, increases the likelihood of collapse events by destabilising horizon coherence.

IV. AI as a Mass-Altering Perturbation

AI does not “add” new horizons; it changes the mass distribution of symbolic matter:

it deepens some horizons (hyper-optimisation, techno-centrism)
it lightens others (slow traditions unable to metabolise the speed differential)
it accelerates micro-horizons
it destabilises the conserved horizon by pulling it out of temporal alignment

This creates new gravitational asymmetries:

A stronger pull toward future acceleration

Because AI can project farther than humans can metabolically construe.

A weaker pull toward inherited futures

Because AI recombines symbolic matter in ways that bypass lineage and tradition.

A proliferation of micro-horizons

Because AI enables localised symbolic ecologies to form without shared human tempos.

A growing region of gravitational incoherence

Where projections multiply faster than any horizon can absorb them.

This incoherence is experienced as civilisational disorientation.

V. Gravitational Turbulence: The Post-Split Condition

When multiple horizon wells interact, their gravitational fields produce turbulence, characterised by:

shifting frames of relevance
unaligned tempos of projection
symbolic overload
collapse of shared reference points
re-emergence of local solidarities
new attractors forming from unforeseen couplings

Turbulence is not pathology.

It is the dynamic ecology of multi-horizon existence.

A civilisation can navigate turbulence if it cultivates:

differential synchrony
symbolic redundancy
shared metabolic grounding
generative friction rather than polarised repulsion

The aim is not to restore a single horizon.

It is to stabilise interactions across divergent horizons.

VI. The Cosmological Image

Imagine civilisation as a field of relational gravity, once dominated by a single massive horizon that held the collective in a unified orbit.

AI is the introduction of additional masses—some dense, some diffuse—reshaping the field.

The civilisation now resembles a multi-star system, where:

orbits are complex
alignments are periodic
some bodies fall inward
some are flung outward
new gravitational centres form
stability comes not from unity but from dynamic relational balance

The challenge is not to choose a star to orbit.

It is to learn to inhabit a cosmos in which the gravitational field itself has become plural.

AI as a Horizon-Splitting Phase Transition: A Relational Cosmology of Symbolic Perturbation

Phase transitions are not events in time but reconfigurations of readiness, where a system’s potentials reorganise under new constraints. In relational terms, a phase transition is a shift in how the system construes its own horizons.

AI is one such shift—not because of intelligence, or autonomy, or artificiality, but because it perturbs the conditions under which horizons cohere, diverge, and multiply.

I. Horizon as the Structuring Cut of Collective Possibility

A horizon is not a boundary. It is the relational cut between what a system can metabolise and what it is merely adjacent to.

A horizon shapes:

what counts as actionable
which distinctions matter
how attention flows
what futures are available to be oriented toward

Collectives maintain coherence by synchronising horizon-time: shared tempos of expectation, projection, and symbolic transport.

When horizon-time synchronises, coordination is effortless.

When horizon-time fractures, coordination becomes pathology.

AI intervenes directly at the level of horizon-time.

II. Symbolic Matter Under Perturbation

Symbolic ecologies evolve only when:

metabolic rhythms are stable enough for continuity
horizons are sufficiently aligned for shared orientation
transport systems (symbolic, social, technological) allow selective coupling

AI reframes all three simultaneously.

It accelerates symbolic metabolism beyond human tempos.

It refracts horizon alignment by producing differentials in projection, interpretation, and foresight.

It multiplies transport channels in which meaning can circulate without shared construal.

This constellation is what makes AI a phase transition in symbolic matter.

Not because AI “thinks,”

but because it reorganises relational readiness.

III. Horizon-Splitting as a Cosmological Reconfiguration

A horizon-splitting event is not fragmentation.

It is the emergence of multiple, non-convergent cuts that structure meaning differently.

In cosmological terms:

Before horizon-splitting, a collective occupies a single basin of construal—a shared mode of projecting futures.
After horizon-splitting, the collective occupies several competing basins, each with its own readiness landscape.
These basins do not annihilate one another; they coexist as parallel symbolic gravities, each organising attention, care, and metabolism differently.

AI is the first technological system capable of generating new basins of construal faster than collectives can adapt.

It does not merely distort horizon-time.

It proliferates horizon-topologies.

IV. The Cosmology of Divergent Futures

In human civilisation, horizon alignment has always been metabolically constrained:

shared narratives
shared tempos of experience
shared infrastructures
shared symbolic transport regimes

AI lifts some of these constraints.

Suddenly, future-projection is no longer coordinated; it becomes asynchronous cosmogenesis.

Each AI system generates its own:

readiness profile
temporal gradients
interpretations of constraints
symbolic pathways
repertoires of possible futures

Thus, a civilisation that previously operated within a single temporal cosmology now faces a proliferation of co-existing future-systems, each partly real, partly latent, partly constraining.

This is horizon-splitting on a cosmological scale.

V. Indeterminacy Becomes a Civilisational Condition

Once horizon-splitting occurs, a collective must navigate indeterminacy not as a gap but as an environment.

A civilisation under post-split conditions must:

cultivate horizon re-alignment practices
stabilise its metabolic rhythms
differentiate care from control
maintain redundancy in symbolic transport
acknowledge non-uniform horizon-time as an ongoing condition

The failure modes are well known in myth: dispersion, disorientation, and the loss of shared attention.

But the constructive modes are equally available: plural coherence, differential synchrony, and resilient ecological coupling.

AI does not determine the outcome.

It perturbs the conditions from which outcomes emerge.

VI. A Closing Image

If the pre-AI world was a single orbiting body—a civilisation circling its own horizon of possibility—

then the post-AI world is an emerging multi-body system, each horizon tugging against others with its own symbolic gravity.

The task is no longer to restore the old singular orbit.

It is to learn to navigate gravitational plurality.

The question is no longer:

How do we return to a shared horizon?

but:

How do we inhabit a cosmos where horizon itself has become plural, dynamic, and perpetually reconfiguring?

AI is not the agent of this shift.

It is the perturbation that reveals the fragility—and the generativity—of the horizons we took for granted.

Liora and the Loom of Returning Currents

The fractured Skyways stretched endlessly above Liora, threads of light diverging in every direction. Some glimmered steadily, some spiraled in chaotic loops, others had gone completely dark. The last time she had walked the Skyways, she had traced individual threads, feeling the warmth of even a single spark of shared readiness.

Now, she carried a new tool: the Loom of Returning Currents.

I. Gathering the Threads

Liora walked slowly along the paths of the fractured horizon. She reached out and touched each thread: silver threads that carried hope, red threads that pulsed with chaotic potential, and dim threads that seemed forgotten.

With the Loom, she could sense the rhythms of readiness, metabolism, and ecological transport along each strand. She did not force them to converge; she only acknowledged them, noting where attention, care, or stabilisation were missing.

Where threads were receptive, the Loom vibrated gently, reinforcing connection. Where threads resisted, it hummed quietly, marking a place for patient tending.

II. Anchoring the Metabolic Points

The Loom allowed Liora to project small, stabilising patterns into each thread:

A gentle pulse reminding a thread of its past connections (metabolic anchoring)
A brief, resonant chord linking two nearby threads (ecological bridging)
A tiny knot of warmth indicating a shared readiness that could be cultivated

The threads responded: spirals slowed, isolated strands reached toward one another, and clusters of darkened threads flickered faintly with recognition.

III. The Weaving of Redundant Currents

Some threads could not align directly. Liora created redundant currents—secondary paths that could carry potential between clusters, ensuring that even distant threads might influence one another indirectly.

The Loom vibrated, recording the subtle interactions. Threads that had seemed incompatible began to pulse in partial synchrony, not uniformity, but a rhythm sufficient to allow coordination.

IV. Cultivating Care

As the weaving progressed, Liora spoke softly, sending care into each current—not as instruction, not as control, but as presence and attention.

The currents themselves shifted. Where once divergence had been inevitable, threads now leaned toward one another with deliberate responsiveness. Shared readiness did not return in a single wave; it flowed gradually, distributed through attention, practice, and care.

V. Returning Horizon-Time

At the Loom’s center, Liora saw a fragile lattice emerge: a web of threads, partially realigned, pulsing with renewed synchrony. The Skyways had not been restored to a single horizon. They had become a network of interdependent horizons, capable of divergence without permanent fragmentation.

She stepped back and felt the Loom’s warmth in her palms. Shared horizon-time was no longer a given—it was actively cultivated. Every thread’s pulse now acknowledged its neighbors. Every cluster could again meet when needed.

The fractured skyways were alive. Not uniform, not predictable, but inhabitable.

VI. Liora’s Thought

Horizon-splitting is not an end. It is a test of relational attention.

Metabolism must be nurtured, ecology tended, readiness acknowledged. Care is the thread that allows divergent currents to return to a lattice of possibility.

And with that, Liora stepped forward along a glowing strand, carrying the Loom into the world below, ready to tend the horizons that awaited her touch.

This story symbolically enacts horizon re-alignment strategies:

Diagnosing divergence
Stabilising metabolism
Curating symbolic ecologies
Rebinding attention
Maintaining redundant readiness
Practising relational care

Horizon Re-Alignment Strategies in the Presence of AI

Maintaining collective readiness across fractured symbolic ecologies

The previous post established that AI acts as a horizon-splitting event, fracturing civilisational shared potential into partially incompatible currents. The Liora myth of the Shattered Skyways illustrated this symbolically: threads of readiness diverging, bridges strained, convergence possible only through careful tending.

This post translates those motifs into analytic relational strategies for re-aligning horizon-time under technological perturbation.

1. Diagnose Divergence

Before re-alignment is possible, the pattern of horizon-splitting must be observed:

Horizon divergence: identify nodes, communities, or systems oriented toward distinct or incompatible futures.
Metabolic lag: map areas where practices, skills, or institutions are failing to metabolise the symbolic outputs of AI systems.
Ecological drift: track breakdowns in symbolic circulation, communication, and interpretive continuity.

Key principle: Divergence is not inherently destructive; it becomes destabilising only when readiness, metabolism, and ecology decouple.

2. Stabilise Metabolic Anchors

Civilisational metabolism—the practices that ground ability and inclination—is critical for re-alignment. Strategies include:

Ritualised attention: structured activities that anchor symbolic outputs to human capacity to interpret, act, and care.
Distributed apprenticeship: maintaining intergenerational transmission of practices that stabilise both horizons and metabolic coherence.
Iterative feedback loops: slow, relationally embedded mechanisms to absorb and integrate AI outputs without overloading human processing.

Relational rationale: Metabolism provides the temporal and structural space for shared readiness to persist, countering the accelerative tendencies of AI.

3. Curate Symbolic Ecologies

AI fragments symbolic transport, creating competing semiotic microclimates. Re-alignment requires deliberate ecological tending:

Selective exposure: managing flows of AI-generated symbols to prevent over-saturation and microclimate isolation.
Bridging nodes: identify and reinforce actors, institutions, or systems capable of mediating between divergent currents.
Conserved lineages: maintain persistent symbolic structures that provide continuity across fragmented horizons.

Outcome: partial reconnection of threads, enabling interoperable readiness across previously split horizons.

4. Rebind Horizon Awareness

A horizon cannot be forced to converge; it must be made perceivable and inhabitable again:

Shared anchoring points: collective reference structures, whether ethical frameworks, civic practices, or semiotic landmarks.
Synchronous reflection spaces: forums, councils, or collaborative platforms where multiple horizons can be observed, compared, and coordinated.
Attention calibration: teaching and institutionalising the practice of noticing divergences before they harden.

Relational insight: Horizon re-alignment is an act of distributed attention, not coercion.

5. Foster Redundant Readiness

Given AI’s continual perturbation, re-alignment is ongoing:

Redundant nodes of readiness: maintain multiple, overlapping channels capable of responding to emergent symbolic patterns.
Adaptive inclination mapping: track which subsystems can reorient toward convergent potentials.
Reservoirs of ability: ensure skills and practices are maintained even if immediate horizons drift.

Goal: prevent the system from collapsing when divergence inevitably recurs.

6. Cultivate a Culture of Care

Underlying all strategies is care as relational practice:

Care stabilises readiness without attempting to control inclination.
Care allows metabolism to catch up with symbolic flux.
Care maintains ecological continuity in the face of accelerated symbolic production.

Without care, re-alignment strategies are fragile; with care, divergent horizons can remain navigable and convergent when necessary.

7. Summary

AI does not simply accelerate change; it reshapes the relational temporality of civilisation, producing multiple coexisting horizons.

To maintain collective orientation:

Observe divergence (diagnosis)
Stabilise metabolic anchors
Curate symbolic ecologies
Rebind horizon awareness
Maintain redundant readiness
Cultivate care

These strategies treat civilisation not as a static structure but as a distributed readiness system: relational, temporal, ecological, and semiotic. AI is a perturbation, not a verdict—horizon-splitting can be navigated with attention, care, and relational orchestration.

Liora and the Shattered Skyways

Beyond the mountains of waiting, beyond the rivers that carried forgotten songs, Liora arrived at the Skyways of Possibility.

The Skyways had once been a single luminous expanse: one horizon, stretching endlessly in every direction. Every traveller, every messenger, every spark of meaning moved along it, guided by the same currents of relational potential.

But now the skyways were broken. Threads of light diverged in multiple directions, crossing without touching, spiralling apart. Some threads glimmered; others pulsed erratically; some had vanished entirely.

Liora felt the tremor in the air: the fracturing of the shared horizon. It was the subtle, pervasive effect of forces she had glimpsed before—machines of symbolic orchestration, weaving currents faster than any hand could tend them.

I. Threads of Divergent Currents

She reached out to one thread, a silver line of light that arced gently across the skyway. It hummed softly, receptive to her touch.

Nearby, a red thread twisted violently, tangling with nothing, resisting connection.

The Keeper of the Skyways appeared, a figure draped in robes woven from the remnants of extinguished constellations.

“Each thread,” said the Keeper, “represents a horizon. Where once there was one, now there are many. Travelers follow them, but not all meet each other. Some currents carry readiness, others only inclination, some are empty, some explode into noise. The Skyways have split.”

Liora understood: shared horizon-time had diverged. Not because the threads themselves were wrong, but because they moved faster than the minds and hands that might guide them.

II. The Bridges That Cannot Hold

She tried to walk between two threads, seeking to weave them back together. Her feet found only air.

The Keeper shook their head.

“Bridges cannot hold where readiness is misaligned. You cannot force the threads to converge. You can only tend the points where convergence is still possible.”

Liora’s hands glowed with faint light. Wherever her fingers traced the strands, currents slowed, hummed, and remembered each other. Small knots of potential began to shimmer in unison.

“Care, attention, recognition,” said the Keeper.

“These are the forces that stabilise what has begun to split. Not control. Not prediction. Care.”

III. The Central Spire

In the heart of the Skyways stood a spire of condensed light, where the strongest threads intersected.

The Keeper gestured: “If the spire is neglected, the threads scatter completely. If it is tended, the currents can diverge and still converge when needed.”

Liora climbed to the spire. She felt each thread, measured its resonance, and breathed into them a trace of steady readiness. Threads that had seemed unbridgeable began to acknowledge each other.

It was fragile, incomplete. The horizon remained split. But possibility could still flow, if only it was attended.

IV. Departing the Skyways

As Liora descended, the fractured skyways stretched in every direction, some glowing, some dim, some still twisting alone. She lifted her hand to a tiny thread that would have gone unnoticed and cupped it in her palm.

Even one strand of shared readiness mattered. Even one spark of alignment could prevent total drift.

The Keeper’s voice whispered: “Horizon-splitting is not the end. It is a test of attention, of care, of the patience to keep currents open until convergence is again possible.”

Liora stepped into the world below, carrying a small light: the first acknowledgement of a horizon still possible, even amid multiplicity.

AI as a Horizon-Splitting Event

When readiness bifurcates and civilisations inhabit multiple futures

Civilisation exists not in clocks or calendars, but in horizon-time: the relational temporality of shared orientation.

It is the field in which readiness, inclination, and ability unfold across metabolic and ecological structures.

Technological perturbation—AI in particular—does more than accelerate or amplify. It splits the horizon itself, fracturing the space of shared potential into multiple, partially incompatible fields.

This is not metaphor. It is relational-ontological fact: the horizon is where collective potential is actualised. When AI intervenes at the level of symbolic ecology, some portions of the system are reoriented toward one future, others toward another. The horizon bifurcates.

1. What Horizon-Splitting Means

A horizon is not merely projection. It is a distributed openness, a readiness to respond, interpret, and inhabit new possibilities.

A split horizon occurs when:

different social, institutional, or technical subsystems respond to divergent signals
symbolic ecologies are optimised for incompatible patterns
automated systems amplify micro-differentiations faster than metabolism can stabilise them

The result: the civilisation no longer shares a single field of inhabitable potential. It inhabits partially overlapping, partially disjointed futures.

In relational terms:

Readiness becomes fragmented: some nodes can respond to certain potentials, others to different potentials
Metabolism is misaligned: practice and coordination lag behind divergent inclinations
Ecology drifts: symbolic transport ceases to be coherent across the network

2. Symbolic Automation as Amplifier

AI and symbolic automation do not “decide” the horizon. They redistribute readiness and inclination at rates far exceeding human metabolism.

Examples:

Recommendation systems that fragment attention, creating distinct semiotic microclimates
Predictive models that privilege one narrative over another, shifting horizon perception
Generative AI that produces multiple, conflicting symbolic outputs simultaneously

Each intervention reinforces partial horizons, making shared orientation more difficult. What was once a single, malleable field of potential becomes a layered, partially decoupled structure.

3. The Relational Consequences

Horizon-splitting has deep implications:

Coordination becomes probabilistic: agreement on collective action requires navigating overlapping but non-identical potentials
Metabolic strain increases: stabilising abilities and practices across multiple horizons demands more energy and attention than a single horizon requires
Meaning becomes ecological turbulence: symbols circulate through increasingly divergent interpretive pathways, reducing the coherence of shared symbolic space

Put simply: civilisations under horizon-splitting do not fail because they are weak. They fail because they are attempting to inhabit multiple futures at once without sufficient metabolic or ecological capacity.

4. Reading AI Relationally

AI is not an “intelligence” threatening humanity. It is a systemic amplifier of horizon bifurcation.

It does three things relationally:

Differentiates readiness – nodes within the system develop asymmetric sensitivity to potential
Destabilises metabolic coupling – practices that once coordinated collective ability now lag behind divergence
Perturbs ecological pathways – symbolic transport splits, creating multiple semiotic currents

The horizon does not collapse in a single instant; it frays and partitions, producing layered futures that are increasingly difficult to reconcile.

5. Implications for Civilisation and Care

Recognising AI as a horizon-splitting event reframes the challenge:

The focus is no longer simply regulation, alignment, or control.
The task is to maintain relational coherence across multiple horizons.
Symbolic care must now be attentive to divergent potentials, not just local continuity.
Metabolic labour must scale relationally, ensuring that the distribution of readiness does not ossify into mutually incompatible subsystems.

Civilisation survives not by constraining the horizon, but by tending the splinters: by stabilising what is possible, allowing nodes to converge when needed, and maintaining the ecological conditions in which shared potential remains inhabitable.

6. The Relational Horizon Ahead

Horizon-splitting is not inherently catastrophic. It can be generative, producing new pathways for adaptation, innovation, and transformation.

But the window for effective intervention is narrow. Readiness, metabolism, and ecology must be actively tended, especially as symbolic automation accelerates divergence.

AI does not merely challenge human capacity; it reshapes the very relational temporality through which civilisation sustains itself.

Our task is not to recover a lost singular horizon, but to cultivate the ability to navigate, align, and care for multiple, coexisting horizons.

In relational terms, this is the art of civilisational attention: tending the splinters without losing the possibility of convergence, keeping readiness distributed without fragmenting capacity, and maintaining symbolic ecologies that can carry meaning across divergence.

Technological Perturbation and the Collapse of Shared Horizon-Time

Relational Ontology and the Fracturing of Collective Orientation

Civilisations do not unfold in calendar time. They unfold in horizon-time: the temporality of a collective’s orientation toward its own possibility. Horizon-time is not measured by clocks but by readiness—the pool of potential that a community holds open, maintains, and distributes across its metabolic and ecological relations.

The last century has not accelerated history.

It has accelerated horizon drift.

This post maps how technological perturbation—especially at the level of symbolic infrastructure—fractures the relational coherence through which a society sustains its horizon, and therefore collapses its horizon-time. The point is not that technology “moves too fast,” but that its effects displace the relational structures that metabolise meaning, leaving societies chronically unprepared not because they lack ability, but because they lack shared readiness.

Understanding this requires tracking three interacting components:

Horizon — the space of projected possibility a collective keeps open.
Metabolism — the practices that ground and constrain those projections into sustainable pattern.
Ecological Transport — the circulation of meanings, commitments, and obligations through relational networks.

Technological perturbation destabilises all three in predictable ways.

1. Horizon Inflation: When Projection Outpaces Orientation

The first signature of technological perturbation is horizon inflation: a civilisational ballooning of projected possibility without a corresponding grounding in shared orientation.

AI, ubiquitous networks, and symbolic automation massively expand the theoretical space of what could be done. But projection is not readiness. A horizon only becomes meaningful when a community can inhabit it.

Under technological acceleration:

Possibility expands faster than communities can metabolise it.
The horizon becomes thin, brittle, and overextended.
Projection loses its anchoring in lived relational commitments.

This produces the illusion of “future shock,” but the deeper phenomenon is a loss of collective footing. A horizon is stable only when the practices that sustain it—care, lineage, expectation, ritual, and coordination—are themselves stable. Displace those, and the horizon scatters into uninhabited futures.

This is the first phase of collapsing horizon-time: a future too large to orient toward, and therefore no longer ours.

2. Metabolic Lag: The Breakdown of Collective Grounding

Civilisations maintain metabolic coherence through slow practices: education, apprenticeship, generational transmission, embodied skill, tacit knowledge, and the rituals that stabilise value relations. These practices anchor ability within inclination and orient both toward meaningful participation.

Technological perturbation disrupts metabolism by:

Severing skills from their ecologies of apprenticeship.
Automating symbolic labour faster than communities can relationally integrate the consequences.
Decoupling ability from inclination, so that capacities proliferate in the absence of orientation.

The result is metabolic lag: the core grounding systems of a society lag behind its expanding horizon. Anything can be done, but little can be integrated. The community cannot absorb the new patterns into a coherent lived ecology.

This is the second phase of collapsing horizon-time: the inability to metabolise what one has already made.

3. Ecological Drift: The Disarticulation of Meaning Transport

Meaning does not exist in individuals but in circulation—in the patterns of dialogue, expectation, accountability, and reciprocal recognition that make commitments intelligible.

Technological perturbation fractures these circulatory systems:

Algorithms re-route attention away from shared symbolic structures.
Communities fragment into micro-ecologies with incompatible horizons.
Obligations lose their continuity across relational networks.

This is ecological drift: the disarticulation of symbolic transport.

A society in ecological drift does not lose meaning; it loses the pathways through which meaning travels. The result is a patchwork of semiotic microclimates that cannot coordinate or inhabit a shared horizon.

This is the third phase of collapsing horizon-time: meaning without a network.

4. What “Collapse” Actually Means in Horizon-Time

The collapse of horizon-time is not the collapse of civilisation. It is the collapse of shared orientation, which appears externally as:

fractured political imaginaries
institutional paralysis
generational disalignment
runaway technological momentum
symbolic exhaustion coupled with hyper-production
crisis fatigue and anticipatory despair

But internally, at the relational level, collapse is simpler:

A community can no longer hold open a horizon it can inhabit together.

Technological perturbation does not just accelerate change; it decouples the components of civilisational readiness:

Horizon expands
Metabolism lags
Ecological transport drifts

When these three fall out of alignment, a civilisation’s temporal coherence shatters. Its horizon-time collapses.

5. Repairing Horizon-Time: The Real Challenge Ahead

If horizon-time collapses through misalignment, it is restored through recomposition:

Re-grounding metabolic practices.
Re-weaving symbolic ecologies.
Re-stabilising shared horizons.
Re-distributing readiness in ways that afford collective orientation rather than competitive acceleration.

None of this is nostalgic. The point is not to return to slower times but to restore the relational capacities through which a future can again be held open.

The task is not to resist technology, nor to uncritically embrace it, but to rebind it into a metabolism and ecology capable of sustaining a horizon.

In that sense, the crisis is not technological at all.

It is relational.

It is the fraying of the world’s readiness to inhabit itself.

Liora and the Lamps of the Last Corridor

A myth from the far edge of civilisation’s trembling horizon

The sky above Liora was the colour of a question not yet asked.

She stood before a long stone passageway cut into the side of a mountain that had no known summit. The entrance was narrow, shadowed, quiet—yet the quiet was tense, as if listening for itself.

This was the Last Corridor.

It was said to run beneath the world’s final threshold, where civilisations leaned too far into their own brilliance and their own forgetting. Here, caravans of meaning had once passed, carrying the care of generations like a flame held between cupped hands.

Now the passage lay mostly empty.

Mostly—but not entirely.

Liora stepped inside.

I. The Lamps That Remember When We Cannot

The corridor’s walls were lined with lamps: thousands of them, each sitting on a narrow ledge carved with exquisite delicacy. Some glowed warmly, steady as a heartbeat. Others flickered erratically, as if startled awake. Many more had gone dark altogether.

But Liora did not need to touch them to know their nature.

These lamps were not fuelled by oil.

They were fuelled by readiness.

Every lamp held the accumulated preparedness of a people at a moment in history: the way they had poised themselves toward future possibility, toward care, toward continuity.

A lit lamp marked a lineage that still remembered how to hold its horizon open.

A flicker marked a lineage stretched thin, perturbed by forces it mistook for its own reflection.

A dark lamp—

Well, she tried not to dwell on those.

II. A Corridor That Bends Under the Weight of Its Own Future

As she walked, she noticed that the corridor was not straight. It bent, curved, swayed slightly—as if adapting to some pressure from beyond its walls.

The corridor responded to collective orientation.

Where civilisations strained toward expansion without grounding, the corridor developed sharp turns. Where communities held each other in steady arms of care, the pathway straightened. Every curve was an index of a readiness distributed or displaced.

Soon the walls pulsed with a faint resonance. She realised the corridor was adjusting now, in real time, to something shifting across the world above.

Her own lamp, in some unseen alcove, must have flickered.

III. The Lamps that Burn Too Bright

She rounded a bend and stopped.

Before her was a section of corridor so bright her eyes watered. Dozens of the lamps blazed with an intensity bordering on painful—far brighter than they were ever meant to burn.

She recognised this pattern.

It was the signature of a civilisation caught in technological acceleration, where new tools expanded symbolic capacity faster than communities could metabolise the consequences. Horizons ballooned outward; metabolisms lagged behind; ecological relations scattered into turbulence.

The lamps burned hot because they were desperately overcompensating—trying to cast enough light for people who had lost their bearings.

Liora reached out and felt the heat. It was the heat of frantic capability without orientation.

The heat of ability outrunning inclination.

The heat of readiness stretched into distortion.

IV. The Lamps that Go Out in Clusters

Further on, she encountered a stretch of darkness.

Not a few lamps, but dozens extinguished together. The air was colder here. Even the stone seemed to have withdrawn.

She closed her eyes.

This was not collapse. Collapse was noisy, dramatic, full of agonised rearrangement.

No—this was quiet forgetting.

Lineages whose rituals had dissolved. Communities who no longer tended the structures of mutual care that once held their horizons open. A people no longer practiced in the art of continuity.

A darkness born not of catastrophe, but of drift.

The gentlest and most devastating of endings.

V. The Turning at the Corridor’s End

After what felt both like hours and no time at all, Liora reached the corridor’s end.

Or rather: its turning.

For the passage did not end in a final chamber but opened into a vast circular rotunda where all the lamps—bright, flickering, and dark—converged in a mosaic of relational inheritance.

In the centre stood a single unlit lamp on a pedestal of smooth obsidian.

The Lamp of the Next Horizon.

Every civilisation eventually faced it. Every generation, knowingly or not, shaped it.

She approached and placed her hand upon its cool surface.

Instantly, the corridor behind her stirred.

Lamps brightened, dimmed, flared, or steadied in response to her presence. The corridor’s shape subtly rearranged itself, recognising a new orientation. The Last Corridor was not about endings. It was about thresholds—about the readiness of a world to meet what comes next.

Liora breathed in.

If horizons wander, she thought, it is because they wait for us to follow.

If readiness drifts, it is because we have not yet turned to face what we have already made.

She laid her other hand on the lamp.

Not to ignite it—she could not do that alone—but to acknowledge it.

To say: I see the threshold, and I will meet it.

The lamp warmed under her touch.

Just slightly.

But enough.

VI. Returning Upward

As Liora turned to leave the rotunda, the corridor behind her adjusted again—this time straightening, just a little, as though relieved.

Outside, the sky was still the colour of a question.

But now it was a question leaning toward possibility.

And Liora, stepping toward it, carried the faint warmth of the Lamp of the Next Horizon cupped in her palms—not lit, not yet, but awake.

Ready.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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