The Future Is Now Film Series
Social Collapse Best Practices
Wed, Aug 19, 5–6pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos 

Reinventing collapse
By Georgeann Johnson

Dimitry Orlov

Dimitry Orlov Are you wondering what the future of the US will look like? What will happen if the markets don’t revive? Theorists think the peak oil point of maximum production has been reached, after which it enters terminal decline.

In this film, Dmitry Orlov speaks to the probability of social collapse and what it will look like. Computer engineer and author, Orlov is uniquely positioned to give an authoritative outline.

Orlov was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the US with his family at age 12. He returned to Russia for extended visits in the late eighties and mid-nineties, and was a close observer of the sequence of events in a collapsing empire.

With dry humor and graphic illustrations, Orlov makes the case for the parallels between the USSR and the US. Orlov demonstrates several reasons the USSR was in better shape for navigating a sustainable collapse than the US. He also emphasizes renewal is on the other side of collapse and the process can be hastened.

Orlov wrote Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects. This talk, “Social Collapse Best Practices,” was given as a “Seminar about Long-Term Thinking” at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco on February 13, 2009.