The End of History: for real this time
The End of History: for real this time
Originally published in Tvērums No 12. Laiks (Time), Rīga, December 2025
Many have tried to forecast the end of the World. It almost seems like eschatological guesses are a characteristic of humanity as a whole. The relatively recent attempts by Francis Fukuyama have remained in the collective memory most prominently. He promised that, with the withering of communism, peace and prosperity would rule over the world, that we would enjoy a period of there being “no ideological grounds for major conflict between nations” and “the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states”, that international relations would become trade relations. You see, we would reach “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, one which we could never possibly exceed. It would be the end of history because nothing geopolitically significant could possibly happen. But I offer to view a different eschatology.
My proposed End of History would not be borne by liberalism or any other economic or state-organizational system. No, these Seven Trumpets of the Apocalypse would be sounded by technological and social development — “progress” if one dares to call it that. You see, the collective human informational space will be transformed so that it won’t be the actual historically significant events that seize to take place, but rather Our meaningful understanding of them. Remembering past events will be possible, but turning a new page in the history books and continuing to write it — will not. Modern technology and other factors will create an informational bottleneck from which it is doubtful we’ll be able to escape.
In the Age of Information everything we could possibly want to learn is merely a few clicks away. News about local and World events don’t even have to be searched for anymore — their presence is incessant. Every day journalists produce so much news content that it is impossible to follow everything; there exists an uninterrupted flow of information. This is a problem unique to the digital age. Not only has the amount of journalistic materials changed, but also the pathways by which they are received.
In years gone by, one would consume one, maybe two newspapers to get his understanding of current events. Ideally this would be done while comparing the ideological tendencies of various sources, in the end extracting actionable information. One listened to about as many radio broadcasts, watched one of a few TV channel news broadcasts. The informational space was easily overseeable, geographically and quantitatively bound. And the financial bar to start a mass media enterprise was far higher. The internet has changed that. 21st century news media no longer needs a start capital — only as far as to cover their webpage costs. Additionally, the tendencies of the last few years indicate that, on the level of individual businesses, the propagation of content on social media platforms is given priority. Here traditional media has to, for profit and the goodwill of the algorithm, compete or even adapt to short-form content and its regularity. And it is almost unnecessary to say that geographical boundaries no longer exist in this World.
These changes do have their positives. It is easier for free speech to break through authoritarian states. We can receive news relevant to Ourselves faster, sometimes even as they unfold. One no longer has to wait for news crews to arrive on the scene or until the news office receives notice. News are now readily attainable from citizen-journalists, who can pull out their smartphone in seconds and share current events with the whole World. But a few advantages cannot fully cover for the downsides of the over-connectedness of World information channels.
If one cannot absorb all the information (because there is simply too much of it), everyone will look at only whatever he fancies. Or, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg: “Our goal is to build the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world,” So, due to the oversaturation of the modern journalistic environment and the mangling of motivations for participating in it, people live not in some shared information-space but rather each in their own little idiosyncratic bubble. That, then, only artificially decreases the already ailing trust in media, as is confirmed by the US example, — if everyone is informed only of his hyperspecific field and polarized in his views, there is little benefit in rational discussions and deliberations.
But it is not just the fault of the media. The amount of journalistically-relevant information is indeed increasing. Here we meet with the periodization problem so well-known to historians. You see, with every passing year the amount of events documented seemingly increases. When periodizing history, most researchers and schools of thought in history inevitably arrive at a system where every next period is shorter than the last. Classical Antiquity lasted about one-and-a-half thousand years, the Middle Ages — a few hundred, the Cold War — just a couple decades. This can be explained in two ways: both of which require referring to the exponential nature of the increase in human population and technological development. When there are more people, more notable interactions happen between them. Technological development, then, has, in the later periods, enabled additional means by which said people interact and allowed for better notation and broadcasting of those interactions.
You see, the amount of significant events increases not just seemingly but in reality as well. Here the ever-controversial Malthusian theory is applicable, just to human information processing capabilities and not the planet’s food production capacity. If human information processing capabilities increase at all, then they certainly do so linearly. But the amount of perceptible events increases exponentially. It only remains to look upon these well-known tendencies to realize that we are encroaching upon the singularity of events or the End of History.
If a few years or decades ago the human popular imagination regarding artificial intelligence was concerned mostly with Skynet, it has now crystallized that the main risk created by AI is actually the creation of false information. Just in these past 3-4 years this technology has developed at an incomprehensible pace. AI generated videos, for example, experienced a small technological revolution — the release of the Sora 2 model, and became considerably more realistic during the writing of this article.
The biggest threat is not the propagation of a few fake videos or images but rather the general distrust which this will aggregate. Of course, there are already reasons to doubt the ethics of the media: the existence of tabloids, the publication of incorrect information, a frequently one-sided portrayal of events, the prioritization of financial gain. Even in the current political rhetoric it is accepted to criticize the afore-mentioned aspects. But, when the false and the true become indistinguishable, the concept of truth loses its meaning. Nothing will be true, because there is no point to the truth, if no one believes or is able to verify it.
It also bears mentioning that very little of Our contemporary culture will be left for research by the archeologist and the historian after a few decades, not to mention any longer timespan. So much of Our contemporary culture and art exists only in digital format and, additionally, is not stored locally, no, but rather in cloud storage facilities. And physical writing happens no longer on the stone or the parchment but rather on the thinnest paper that has ever been commercially available in the history of the World. There is also a basis to think that the very digital devices themselves become more fragile as time goes on.
No matter how paradoxical it seems, we are experiencing and creating more than the people of any other age but we will leave behind Us considerably fewer remnants than previous civilizations. The person of the future will not be able to gain meaningful insight of events between roughly the eve of the 20th century and the beginning of his own personal memories.
Of course, we need to be informed about the World’s big events —wars, scientific discoveries and everything else that impacts humanity as a whole, as well as that which affects directly Our country and community. But the human perception is not unlimited. Therefore, I invite to consider whether it is truly necessary to learn about every foreign domestic affair, every civil engineering catastrophe, every cultural event, etc. with the expansion of the Ecumene, so too has Our emotional attachment to events which do not affect Us, and which we cannot control, grown. It would be unfortunate to sink too deep into stoicism or cynicism but one has to recall the sweet taste of the bliss of ignorance and ask himself, whether it is truly so evil in cases when we cannot change the course of the events to which we are being ignorant towards.
To crystallize what has been said so far: the amount of information in circulation exceeds for the first time in history the bounds of perception and only continues to rise.
I predict that we will most likely return to a pre-digital age. When society’s trust in informative digital media vanishes fully, they will simply not be viewed anymore. Either we will return to a roughly early-20th century state in the informational space where mass media existed only in a limited capacity, or we will seep into a neo-medieval World where knowledge of events in the World around Us will be gained primarily through word-of-mouth retellings.
Looking more optimistically, one way to avoid this End of History would be the deescalation of the development and implementation of information technologies. This does not necessarily mean following the suggestions of the infamous mathematician Theodore John Kaczynski and returning to a pre-technological age but rather raising guard when it comes to the spread of “smart” technologies.
Technological discoveries and implementation of technology can be slowed down but it is impossible to forget or erase them from the collective memory. Those few times when inventions have been forgotten are always tied to civilizational downfall. For example, the disappearance of Roman civil engineering skills in the Middle Ages. When an invention has been created, the cat comes out of the bag. The World will not be saved by smashing the nearest computer-screen with a hammer or baseball bat but rather with a certain piety towards the truth.
