this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Disclaimer: I'm just a bored guy who makes drawings for a living. I live in the US, and this is based on direct observation of local events. I don't actually know what I'm talking about.
I think next year's election will speed or slow the collapse. But ignoring that, and assuming the corporate dickheads who are actually running things keep going like they are, here's my guess:
1-2 years - Theft from large businesses becomes normalized. Police will respond less and less to shoplifting calls, because there are too many calls to respond to.
3-5 years - Riots over food and water start to take place. More people start to immigrate (legally or otherwise) into the US to try and avoid growing heat in central and South America. Attacks on electrical infrastructure rise. In the news: talk about border control, stories about increasing penalties for retail theft and armed guards in every large store. Very serious talk about gun control.
6-10 years - Organized resistance against law enforcement. It will start with people calling 911 and ambushing cops, or cops simply being shot when they pull someone over. (A cop was killed a couple of years ago during a traffic stop in the metro area I live near. Since then, there has been a large and obvious decrease in the amount of traffic stops.) Police can no longer park their cars at home for safety reasons. A billionaire or state/federal offcial is assassinated. Gun control measures start to pass in congress and ate signed into law, because now the "wrong" people have guns.
10-20 years - Repeated attacks on substations, watet treatment facilities, and pumping stations. Due to a lack of funding in maintainence on these systems has people questioning if the failures are from attacks, or breakdowns. Middle class life completely vanishes. Actual civil war is going on, no matter what the news tries to say.
20-30 years - Driving across the country is nearly impossible due to lack of road funding, people are stuck in their local areas. Even making a phone call is questionable. Food, water, and materials drop in quality, due to lack of regulation or lack of regulation enforcement. Outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and other Shakespearian ailments sweep across what's left of the country. Elites who hid in bunkers in previous decades are killed when their staff gets tired of them.
As for the end result? I don't know. There isn't a nice obvious dividing line between one side and the other. There would likely be tens or maybe hundreds of groups of different sizes in conflict or uneasy alliances.
How in the world did you do this? I ask this because that unironically sounds awesome (though it is possible it is not from your perspective).
There's a terrible secret: I'm not making art, I am making drawings. I'm a draftsman.
And even among drafters my job is a bit strange. I work for a place that refurbishes large parts for places like refineries, power plants, water treatment plants, and even rocket launch facilities all over the world. We rebuild parts for plants that cannot shut down, or can't shut down for long. I'm sort of an emergency draftsman. My job consists of waiting for someone to drop either a scralwed drawing (sometimes literally drawn on a torn off piece of cardboard) or a broken piece of something, at which point I leap into action, and create a 3d model and a 2D drawing of whatever it is, so a replacement can be made in the machine shop.
This specific job sort of fell in my lap when I was laid off from another drafting job in january. I'm largely self-taught, and I have a couple decades experience as a machinist, fabricator, and mechanic, it helps if the guy making the prints knows how to make the parts himself.