Whalefall

How we live inside a decaying system that no longer offers a future

The Death of the Order

There is a persistent mistake in how we describe the present moment.

We are told the American order is ending.
We are told a Chinese order may replace it.
We are told the world is in transition — to multipolarity, to reconstruction, to a new era.

This language comforts us because it promises movement, progress, direction.
But there is no movement, no progress, no direction. Not in the sense we have come to expect.

What we are living through is whalefall.

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The Whale’s Body: Still Moving, but No Longer Leading

When a whale dies in the deep ocean, its massive body sinks.
It becomes a source of life for the ecosystem, but not through vitality — only through decay. For decades, sometimes centuries, creatures feed on what’s left.
No new whale needs to be born for the feeding to continue. Energy is extracted, redistributed, fought over, until even the bones themselves are stripped.

This is the state of the world now: The system is not collapsing, but neither is it thriving. It is simply continuing without renewal.

This is whalefall — a world living off the remains of what once was, as everything slows down, decomposes, and becomes something that merely sustains life, but doesn’t give birth to anything new.

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The Illusion of Transition

For much of the last century, the language of “transition” was everywhere.
When one system collapsed, another would rise — one empire would fall, and a new order would take its place. We were told that the end of colonialism would bring a better world. We were told that the decline of the West would usher in a new global order. We were told that the end of the Cold War would bring peace, democracy, and prosperity.

But today, we live in a world where no such transition is coming.

We’re not moving toward a new order.
We’re living in the aftermath of the old one, and we’re trying to survive in it.

The institutions of the old order are still here — still functioning, still existing.
But they have stopped growing. They are not expanding. They are not evolving. They are simply maintaining.

This is why every effort to “build” something new keeps failing.
There is no surplus anymore. Only reallocation, extraction, and a continuous feed off the same decaying system.

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The Failure of “New Order” Narratives

In a true transition, there is surplus.
Surplus means that something can grow, that something new is coming, that we can believe in tomorrow.

But in whalefall, there is no surplus. There is only reallocation.

This is why:

• No actor can promise growth without coercion.

• No institution can claim legitimacy without enforcement.

• No alignment guarantees a future — only conditional access.

What’s unsettling about this is how it slowly shapes everything. The world isn’t falling apart. It’s not on the brink of something new. It’s stuck, feeding off its own past.

That’s why every attempt to declare a “new world order” fails.
It doesn’t understand the condition we’re in. We’re not in a time of building. We’re in a time of decay.

And the world is being held together by who controls decay — who gets to extract the most from what remains.

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The Role of China and America

China doesn’t need to believe in a “Chinese world order” to shape the world.
It doesn’t need to offer a moral vision or ideological agenda.

What China does is simple: it keeps the machines running. It supplies the industrial gravity that the world depends on. It sustains the system of production, keeps the supply chains moving, and absorbs excess.

China’s role is not about leadership in the traditional sense. It is about continuation. It is about keeping things in motion.

The United States, meanwhile, does not need to build a new order.
It does not need to lead in the way it once did.
What it needs is to prevent anyone else from leading.

America’s power is coercive.
It doesn’t need to grow. It needs to block anyone else from growing.

America doesn’t want to build. It wants to manage. It wants to maintain a system where it can control the key resources and decision points.

And in that, there is a fundamental asymmetry.

• China sustains continuation — by keeping the world’s production system intact.

• America enforces friction — by denying others the ability to change that system.

Neither of them promises a better future. Both of them persist.

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AI and the Energy Metabolism

Artificial intelligence did not dematerialise power.
It reclassified it.

AI collapses growth, energy, and sovereignty into a single metabolic constraint. Electricity becomes not just an input, but a strategic dependency. Compute becomes inseparable from fuel, grids, minerals, logistics, cooling, insurance, and jurisdiction.

What this does is accelerate whalefall.
Not because AI is revolutionary, but because it makes energy denial equivalent to sovereignty denial.

In such a world, access to energy, to the grid, to the industrial base is no longer a market outcome.
It is permissioned.

This is why energy politics has re-emerged as geopolitics.
This is why humiliation is becoming infrastructural.

What matters now is not who builds the future, but who gets to continue.

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Life Inside Whalefall

For most societies, whalefall feels like this:

• The future no longer redeems present sacrifice.

• Participation expands rhetorically as agency shrinks materially.

• Alignment becomes emotional rather than ideological.

• Dignity becomes scarce.

People can feel this in ways they cannot name. They feel it in the small choices, in the gradual shift from hope to endurance. Whalefall doesn’t just feel like stagnation.
It feels like being stuck in a system that can’t promise a better tomorrow.

Humiliation becomes a cheap coordination mechanism.
It disciplines allies. It deters challengers. It reminds everyone where the bones still lie.

People sense this. They might not be able to put it into words, but they feel it in their bones — being managed, audited, exposed. It’s not paranoia. It’s the lived experience of whalefall.

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Why Nothing Collapses, and Nothing Resolves

Whalefall systems are stable in a particular way.
They do not collapse easily because too many actors depend on them.
They do not resolve, because no one can afford closure.

Every attempt to declare a new order fails because it misunderstands the condition.
This is not a contest to build the future. It is a contest to endure decay without being stripped first.

That is why waiting for collapse — Chinese or American — is fantasy.
Partial dysfunction does not end extraction. It often intensifies it.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

We are not moving toward a better system.
We are not even moving toward a worse one.

We are learning how to live off a dead thing.

The question is no longer who leads, or which order replaces which.

The real question is:

Who can metabolise whalefall without tearing themselves apart?

And who cannot?

Everything else is commentary.