Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and writer who was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States at the age of 12. Orlov lives off the grid, sailing his boat up and down the Eastern Seaboard and commuting by bicycle. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse and blogs regularly at Club Orlov.
Introduction: Collapses in General
What is collapse?
When will collapse occur?
What are the stages of collapse?
1. Financial Collapse
The root of the problem
The wrong math
Defaults big and small
The end of money
Options for cashing out
Alternatives to money
How we did it
Chits, specie and stock-in-trade
A likely endgame
Cold-starting instructions
Beware financial despotism
Monetary mysticism
The untrustworthy and the trustful
Götterdämmerung
Case Study: Iceland
2. Commercial Collapse
Cascaded failure
Liar word: efficiency
Life upside down
The many advantages of gift
Money corrupts
Opportunities for gift-giving
Meanwhile in Soviet Russia
The new normal
A cultural flip
Case Study: The Russian Mafia
3. Political Collapse
Anarchy's charms
The nation-state fades out
National language
Taking care of your own
State religion
Life after the nation-state
The problem of excessive scale
The proliferation of defunct states
Government services disappear
Denationalization of currency
What governments are good at
Warfare becomes self-defeating
The end of law and order
The end of the welfare state
Virtualized politics
Case Study: The Pashtuns
4. Social Collapse
The limits of community planning
The new rules
Social reclamation
Religion as organizing principle
Charitable giving and taking
What society?
Case Study: The Roma
5. Cultural Collapse
Humans and other animals
The limits of language
Spoken memory
The isolated human
The primacy of family
Case Study: The Ik
Afterword
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
