I think my question for anyone who wants to ponder it is how close we are to the political/technological breaking point, in regards to the United States as an empire in the traditional sense. For a comparison, I've always viewed the Eastern Roman Empire's breaking point as being Manzikert, even though there was a partial restoration under Alexios (and the empire itself didn't actually fall until 1453, 400 years after Manzikert). I bring this up Manzikert was when the political/technological centralization of Eastern Rome had finally collapsed entirely. To equivocate to the modern day, what I'm asking is A: has the technological zenith of the US already appeared. If it has not, is it soon? and the second question I have is: what would a collapsed America look like? Even when the ERE "collapsed" (at Manzikert), it still lasted for a very long time and had strong regional influence, but it was no longer the leader in technology in the western part of the world. (To also put a positive spin on it, at it's nadir, the ERE was a hotbed of philosophy that was basically the zygote of the renaissance in Italy). I genuinely thought that the peak of technological globalism was going to be with Trump, and it looked that way for a little while, since Trumps' entire platform was nativist and populist (which is a *radical* departure from the small-issue split the democrats/republicans had since WW2). (I also have a specific video that explains this shift, from Peter Zeihan - a geopoliticist who is very much a nihilist about most geopolitics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o--FmUXHPKE&ab_channel=NathanWatson. It's about 20 minutes in, but the whole video is very interesting because it provides a good timeline of imperialist USA. 20 min in he starts discussing demographics as a huge driving factor behind why nation-states do what they do, and the political shift at Trump's election). However, Trump's administration became marred with globalists again, even if he did enact some good anti-imperialist measures (turning away from international trade). I was hoping that Trump would end up being even more anti-globalist than he was, and now we're stuck with Biden. I was hoping Trump was our Manzikert, but he wasn't. But, I think the entirety of Trump's popularity as a myth is valuable for people like us, because it shows that there's a very strong (I would say silent majority or plurality) drive against technological imperialism and globalism in the United States across pretty much every demographic (see video above). So, I think that the zenith is going to happen within the next 10 years, mostly because Biden is the last 4 presidents (sans Trump) in a different suit, and that's going to continue to inflame the anti-globalistic tendencies in the American populace across the board (because no matter how sweet they talk, the average American is still being utterly screwed by an incompetently administered global empire). I think what a technologically collapsed America would look like would be actually pretty akin to what we were pre-civil war (sans slavery) - a mostly agricultural, small scale production-community oriented society with the federal government mostly being around to keep external threats away. At one point, in the 1850s, the supreme court literally thought that you would never need to worry about being sued in another state, because *nearly everyone* never left their home state (where they lived) their entire lives.