The Garbage Time of History Is Global

The Chinese culture has a rich trove of apt, often humorous expressions that summarize a situation with imaginative metaphors. For example, let it rot (bai lan) summarizes the realization that the present era is the garbage time of history (lishi de laji shijian), and the appropriate response is to “actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around.”

The garbage time of history was “coined by essayist Hu Wenhui, that describes a period of prolonged societal decline or stagnation where a nation’s system is no longer viable but hasn’t collapsed, characterized by individuals being powerless and the future being set on a downward trajectory. The term is a metaphor for the final, inconsequential minutes of a sports game where the outcome is already decided, and any effort is futile.”

The garbage time of history is not unique to China; the entire world is mired in the garbage time of history because we’re all enmeshed in financial and globalized feedbacks and tightly bound subsystems that are the gearing of the world-system.

The gearing can’t be changed, as that might disrupt those gorging at the money-trough, so cause-and-effect are limited to garbage in, garbage out: inputs are modified for show, spectacles are performed as a substitute for substance, and illusory solutions are batted around, as if the core problem is “money” rather than the gearing of the system.

The problems are far deeper than “money.” A system geared for “growth at any cost” finds real advancement is limited, so a pretense of growth is favored: growth of “money,” growth of gamed statistics, growth of waste, etc.

Since the gearing is fundamentally financial, everything else is for show. For example, “healthcare” in the U.S. is an extractive financial machine which operates behind a screen of providing medicine. Big Tech is an extractive financial machine operating behind a screen of search, social media and AI agents. Higher education is an extractive financial machine operating behind a screen of research, virtue-signaling and going through the motions of offering coursework and credentials.

The key insight of let it rot and the garbage time of history is the inauthenticity of all “reforms”, as the “reforms” never change the gearing of the machine, they only modify the garbage being fed into the machine.

The score is Extractive Financial Machine, 103, Workers, Customers and Citizens, 17. There’s four seconds left, so by all means launch the ball from 3-point land, and as spectacular as a bucket at the buzzer would be, it won’t change the outcome of the garbage time of history.

The whole point of “reforms” is to leave the gearing unchanged behind a gaudy show of going through the motions of reforms that change nothing.