The Fate of Rome
This book is a sweeping new history of how climate change and disease helped bring down the Roman Empire. Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power -- a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a "little ice age" and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. A poignant reflection on humanity's intimate relationship with the environment, The Fate of Rome provides a sweeping account of how one of history's greatest civilizations encountered, endured, yet ultimately succumbed to the cumulative burden of nature's violence.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
25mentions
6people
2018–2024years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations.
<https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...>
That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further.
The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans.
James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video:
<https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0>
More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place.
Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from Plagues Upon the Earth: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.
- This is more or less how more recent scholarship looks at complicated, long-term multi-modal sort of events and changes. Fate of Rome is a fairly recent book that examines things like disease and climate change, for instance:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...
- Pretty much that.
For further parallels with Rome, I strongly advise Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome, which develops the idea that empires and diseases co-evolve with one another. Another lesson from history which seems increasingly significant now.
- This is typically discussed in terms of:
- Avoided negative externalities. FB/Google get to ignore the costs of insufficient moderation by imposing those on their users or third parties (say, the victims of the Myanmar genocide).
- Monopoly rents. By securing a position in which they are the arbiters of access control, these giants can set both prices and terms for participation.
There's another element you're suggesting to me as well, which I don't think I've seen anyone articulate before: large monopoly players such as Facebook and Google effectively emerge into a "naive environment", one in which the scale which they provide has not yet evolved threats. Any threats which do emerge co-evolve with the monopoly.
Subsequent entrants don't have this advantage. Whilst they do have the benefit of techniques for combatting such threats, they must address the threats from the beginning.
The threats might variously be spammers, various network attacks (most especially DDoS), sockpuppet and other misrepresentation and manipulation attacks, harrassment, and the usual laundry list of Trust & Safety issues.
The notion of co-evolving threats comes from biology generally, though I'd strongly recommend Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome which postulates that civilisations (themselves social networks) and their plagues co-evolve alongside one another. I've just learned that the Santa Fe Institute crowd are fans of Harpers (Geoffrey West and David Krakauer, in a recent Complexity podcast episode), as well as Neal Stephenson.
- Noodling at some thoughts on how technology works --- is fundamental mechanisms, not what it is --- I'd come up with a list of eight factors that seemed central. And then thought for a few days and came up with a ninth: hygiene.
In building any technology, what comes to dominate after a time are the unintended or unwanted consequences. This is particularly true of any networked system, in which as the network grows, various cost functions emerge and begin to overwhelm the value prospects.
I suspect that those cost functions are both relatively constant per node, but also tend to increase over time. The result is that small networks can grow quickly (the large positive per-node values dominante the costs), but as the node-count rises, marginal value decreases (see Tilly-Odlyzko's refutation of Metcalfe's law: v = nlog(n)), and* the cost functions increase both as bad actors are attracted to the system and as interactions between nominally good-faith actors become increasingly high-friction.
The consequence is that a "no-moderation" or "light-moderation" policy works really well, until it suddenly doesn't.
This has parallels to other network-based structures, most notably cities. Without sewage, or crime, or public health, or waste-removal, or pollution-control systems, cities can grow fairly rapidly, up to some maximum viable size. After that point, not only do already-extant issues become intolerable (or more specifically: unsurvivable), but new harms co-evolve with the cities themselves to emerge within them. (See Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome for a wonderful exploration of this concept.)
For online UCG platforms, this presents as various forms of activity that directly attack trust and safety of the platform itself. Ultimately, growth of the platform is often limited by these effects.
Incidentally, a new professional organisation formed last year to address these issues specifically, the TSPA (Trust and Safety Professional Association). It's still finding its feet, though it's begun organising both a training curriculum and a library of practices and references on the issues, processes, considerations, and legal factors involved.
https://www.tspa.info/2020/06/17/new-organizations-dedicated...
- Several items are concretised in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998576
I've addressed specific dismissals and their proponents numerous times on my subreddit, search "cornucopians":
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=cornucopians&r...
One of the most cogent arguments for limits I've found is in William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, most especially the first three chapters. The book is available on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/ecologypoliticso0000ophu/page/n7...
As well as many libraries: https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=au%3Ao...
Other examples of dismissed consequences can be found in the works of Naomi Oreskes, notably Merchants of Doubt, on the negative long-term latent and complex consequences of asbestos, lead, CFCs, cigarette smoke, and fossil fuels. There are also the consequences of pesticides (both environmental contamination and increased resistance), antibiotics (resistance), various medications (thalidomide comes to mind), advertising, shipping (invasive species), just off the top of my head.
Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome argues compellingly that civilisations co-evolve with their plagues, which raises some interesting implications.
I've been suggesting in conversations elsewhere that we're living in an era of consequences.
Related
Armageddon averted
2 recommend · 3
The fall of Rome
2 recommend · 5
How Rome fell
1 recommend · 3
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire
29 recommend · 104
The rise of Rome
2 recommend · 2
The Collapsing Empire
15 recommend · 20
The Inheritance of Rome
recommend · 6
