[rewrewrewqf]

>I believe that what we are looking at in the USA now is closer to Rome in 180 AD than it is to 470 AD

Maybe, but following the argument in the parent comment about the speed of transfer of information and physical goods, the timeline now may progress significantly quicker.

I suspect that the root cause now will be a technological failure, or more accurately, the inability of even a large group of citizens to maintain or re-build the globe-spanning technological structures on which our lives depend. It's an effect I've called the "Anti-Singularity" - at some point, some key component of this technological structure will fail for whatever reason, and cause a cascading and quite rapid failure of the rest of the system. At this point, progress and knowledge growth will very rapidly halt.

It's getting ever-easier to observe this!

[entropicdrifter]

I'd take it a step farther and say that it's not going to be one single key component that will fail, but rather that much like any empire, our modern technological infrastructure is a complex system. Like all complex systems, it will have many small failures that gradually erode the redundancies built into the system. Finally something will break for which no backups exist any longer and the whole system will go down, only to come back up after a while. Gradually it will go down more and more frequently until we cannot keep up with maintenance to any useful degree, then we'll see smaller regional internets for a long while before it eventually becomes a myth of the past glory days.

These internet fiefdoms will be owned most likely by giant monopolistic corporations, much like the old AOL network before it connected to the broader world wide web. Content ownership laws will go even further towards squashing the creativity and organic growth of our culture as these corps gain even greater control than they currently have.

The actual world-wide internet will become a niche relegated to the people willing to hack their way out of the walled gardens and a necessity for tech workers who live outside of the areas serviced by the limited networks.

Dang, now I really want to write a cyberpunk story.

[svth]

This is a very good and important point. As our technology becomes more complex and our global structures more essential, the system surely must tend towards ever greater fragility. Just like software, really.

[entropicdrifter]

Just like supply chains, too. Look at the Late Bronze Age Collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse ), where a whole cluster of highly interconnected societies all fell at once due at least in part to systemic failures.