soviet collapse

An episode of Fall of Civilizations on the Late Bronze Age Collapse around 1100 BC, when many Eastern Mediterranean societies were destroyed in a short span. It explores the Sea Peoples and the lessons for modern globalised societies.

Urban explorers break into the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to film the abandoned Soviet Buran space shuttles. The video shows the decaying orbiters and the dangerous trip to reach them.

The first part of Extra History's series on the Bronze Age Collapse, introducing the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaeans and their interlinked system of trade, agriculture, and war before the Sea Peoples arrive.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

Archaeologist Eric Cline lectures on the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1177 BC, when interconnected Mediterranean empires fell in rapid succession. He discusses the Sea Peoples and the combined causes of the collapse.

Arthur Keller gives a roughly half-hour crash course on environmental collapse, covering exponential growth, carrying capacity and ecological overshoot.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.

Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.

Eric Cline presents the thesis of his book 1177 BC on the collapse of the interconnected Late Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations. The talk covers the Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Canaanites and their trade networks.

A Virginia Tech presentation by Sid Smith about collapse, fossil fuels and overshoot, arguing that industrial civilization faces a decline and how one might live with that. It was later expanded into a video series.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.

Part one of Sergey Kuryokhin's 1991 live Soviet TV hoax in which he claimed that Lenin was a mushroom. With subtitles, it shows how a surreal absurd theory can be made to seem proven on live television.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, lectures on parallels between the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the United States. He argues the US shows the same symptoms: overextension, corruption, and an inability to reform.

A 30-minute animated film explaining how money, banking and the Federal Reserve work and arguing that the American economy is heading for collapse. It is opinionated and has a strong point of view.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

A 2006 television appearance in which Peter Schiff warns on Kudlow & Co about the housing bubble and an approaching US economic collapse.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

The music video for Aphex Twin's T69 Collapse, directed by Weirdcore, with heavy strobing and glitchy audiovisual imagery. It is a track from the Collapse EP.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

PolyMatter's first part of a series on China's demographic collapse, covering the effects of the one-child policy, shrinking workforce and economic consequences.

A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.

A short 2013 video in which Roger Ver says Mt. Gox's withdrawal delays are not caused by a lack of liquidity. Mt. Gox collapsed months later, and the description carries a later update and apology.

Short British Pathe newsreel footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it twisted and swayed in the wind. The only casualty was a dog left in a stalled car.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

An animated visualization of basic quantum mechanics using a free particle, with simulations based on the actual equations. It covers waves, particles, and how measurement collapses the wavefunction.

A New York Times Opinion documentary tracing Soviet and KGB disinformation, from the 1980s AIDS origin hoax to modern campaigns like Pizzagate. It features former KGB officers and the people who tried to counter the lies.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.

A documentary about Riot Entertainment, a Finnish dot-com-era startup that raised millions in funding and then collapsed. It follows the hype-driven rise and implosion of the company.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

A Kurzgesagt animation on South Korea's record-low fertility rate and rapidly aging population. It explains why a demographic collapse looks hard to reverse and projects the population shrinking sharply by 2060.

Adam Something gives a short, tongue-in-cheek defense of Soviet-era prefab apartment blocks. He argues they offer efficient, dense housing with schools and services built nearby.

A controlled demonstration by Wabash National of a tank trailer collapsing under vacuum, staged at an industry expo. The tank implodes as air is pulled out.

A short clip showing how the Soviet Union used a nuclear explosion to extinguish a blown-out, burning gas well.