The Spodocene: inhabiting the ruins of progress

Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Hakan Illatikdi, originally in Italian and published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on Tuesday 23rd December 2025.
(All formatting original).

When the economy stops producing a future and politics becomes waste management

This is not just another crisis. It is not a recessionary cycle that can be reversed by ingenious monetary policy or timely fiscal stimulus. What we are experiencing is deeper, more structural and, in many ways, terminal: the exhaustion of the energy logic that has sustained the civilising expansion of recent centuries. Moral tales of greed or mismanagement are not enough to understand this dysfunction. We need to abandon ethical illusions and return to a more relentless grammar: that of the political physics of energy, entropy and residue, as those who, starting from biophysical economics, questioned the myth of infinite growth had already warned.

Historical capitalism has functioned as a heat engine on a planetary scale. Its expansion has been fuelled by exceptional energy gradients: abundant coal and oil, cheap and disciplined human labour, territories to colonise (hot reservoir in thermodynamics) and nature conceived as an unlimited absorption well (cold reservoir in thermodynamics). This external energy made it possible to transform resources into “useful work” — commodities, surplus value, geopolitical power — while the residual heat from the process was systematically externalised (dissipated heat). As the thermodynamic critique of economics had already pointed out, every productive transformation involves an irreversible loss of available energy: entropy does not disappear, it shifts. The need for an absorption well (cold reservoir) is not a flaw in the system, but a necessary condition for its functioning.

For centuries, the system has been able to shift (dissipate) this residue to its peripheries: colonies, expendable populations, degraded ecosystems and, above all, the future. This has been the great material fiction of progress.

But no absorption well is infinite in a closed system such as the Earth. When the absorption capacity is exhausted, the law of thermodynamics imposes itself without any possibility of negotiation: entropy returns to the system and efficiency collapses, not because of management errors, but because of physical and structural limitations. This is what defines our historical present. The planet is saturated as a material sink, societies are saturated as social sinks, and the future itself has been colonised as a temporal sink through debt, precariousness and broken promises. The global system has lost its “outside”. There is no longer a space where contradictions can be discharged without returning amplified to the centre.

This closure is not only material. It is political. Modern politics was built on a premise that is now exhausted: the possibility of redistributing future surpluses. As long as growth was possible, social conflict could be contained through promises of deferred integration. When this promise evaporates, it is not only the economy that collapses: the political pact that sustained it collapses. As the great transformation of the 20th century showed, markets do not regulate themselves without destroying the social fabric that contains them.

In this context, financialization emerges, not as an anomaly, but as the inevitable metabolism of an exhausted system. Unable to extract new material energy, capital folds in on itself. The financial sphere does not create substantial wealth: it accelerates the circulation of residual value. It redistributes what has already been produced through debt, derivatives and speculation. It is an economy of captured time: it transforms expectations of non-existent growth into present assets, mortgaging entire generations to sustain the illusion of continuity. Debt is nothing more than future work anticipated and transformed into a permanent obligation.

This frenetic circuit does not reduce entropy: it multiplies it. It increases the internal disorder of the system and produces its true terminal output: residue.

This is where it becomes necessary to name our era with a precise concept. The Spodocene — from the Greek spodos, ash, residue — is not a poetic metaphor, but an ontological definition of an era. Unlike the Anthropocene, which dilutes responsibility into an abstract “humanity”, the Spodocene identifies the specific logic of an exhausted civilisational regime. It does not describe human impact on Earth, but the systematic production of ruin as the organising principle of social life.

In the Spodocene, energy ceases to be expansive and becomes recycled waste. Entropy is no longer a side effect, but the basic condition of the system. And waste ceases to be an unwanted by-product to become the core of social order. Material waste — plastics, obsolete infrastructure, uninhabitable territories — coexists with human and symbolic waste: surplus populations, unanchored subjectivities, languages emptied of meaning and futures closed before they even begin.

This human residue is not a pathology of the system: it is functional. When an environment becomes saturated and loses its capacity for expansion, dynamics of relational disintegration, isolation and the collapse of social bonds emerge. The Spodocene does not produce communities, but managed human aggregates. The old ideal of inclusion becomes impracticable in a world without expansion; what remains is the administration of human surpluses.

War, entropy and absorption wells: violence as an attempt to restore efficiency

If financialization constitutes the internal emergency metabolism of an exhausted system, war represents its extreme external complement. In the thermodynamic logic that structures social systems, war has historically performed a specific function: to violently force the reopening of absorption wells when they begin to saturate. Just as no thermal machine can sustain its efficiency without a well capable of absorbing residual heat, no economic system can maintain the production of value without spaces where it can discharge the material, social and human waste of its own functioning.

During the expansive phases of capitalism, war has operated as an extraordinary mechanism for restoring systemic efficiency. By destroying obsolete fixed capital — as happened paradigmatically in the industrial wars of the 20th century —, displacing populations, reconfiguring territories and reorganising geopolitical hierarchies, war has made it possible to create or impose new absorption wells. Entire regions were transformed into sacrifice zones capable of absorbing entropy: material ruin, disposable bodies, devastated nature and cancelled futures.

From this perspective, war was not an accident external to the system, but an extreme thermodynamic operation. It transformed internal contradictions into organised external destruction. Accumulated social energy was dissipated in the form of violence, but this dissipation was not chaotic: it served to decompress the central system, allowing it to restart the cycle of accumulation on a basis “cleansed” of devastation.

In strict terms, war functioned as a forced expansion of the absorption well. Where the economic metabolism could no longer absorb its own residues, violence opened up spaces where they could be deposited.

However, this function depended on a condition that no longer exists today: the existence of an outside. As long as the system was able to externalise entropy to colonies, peripheries or territories relatively disconnected from the productive core, war retained its systemic effectiveness. This is why the great wars of the 20th century were followed by phases of reconstruction and expansion: the absorption well was still large enough to absorb the devastation.

In the Spodocene, this condition has ceased to exist. The planet is saturated as a material well, societies are saturated as social wells, and the future has been colonised as a temporal well through debt, precariousness and broken promises. Contemporary war can no longer create new absorption wells; it can only redistribute and multiply the residue within a closed system. Prolonged conflicts such as those in Syria, Ukraine or Yemen do not open up new frontiers of accumulation: they generate migration crises, geopolitical instability and environmental damage that feed back into the systemic crisis.

From a thermodynamic point of view, this implies a decisive break: war ceases to restore efficiency and becomes an entropic multiplier. It does not destroy capital in order to restart the production cycle, but generates ruin that can neither be absorbed nor recycled. Displaced populations with no return, unusable territories, infrastructure that is not rebuilt and generations without a historical horizon.

War no longer opens up space for useful work; it only accelerates the conversion of social energy into waste. For this reason, it does not produce stable post-war periods or new lasting orders. It produces chronic fragmentation and permanent states of exception. There is no closure, because there is no well deep enough to absorb what has been destroyed.

In this sense, the proliferation of contemporary wars is not a sign of strength or expansion, but of systemic despair. It is the final attempt by an exhausted order to violently recreate the material conditions that had made its functioning possible. But in a world without an outside, this attempt can only fail.

In the Spodocene, violence ceases to be the midwife of new worlds and becomes the brutal confirmation that the absorption well has collapsed.

The politics of waste and the management of ruin

In this context, politics undergoes a decisive change. It ceases to be the art of projecting a common future and becomes the technique of administering waste. While industrial policy organised production and social policy distributed surpluses, the politics of the Spodocene manages ruin. Governing means deciding which residues are recycled — transformed into new financial assets —, which are pushed to the margins and which are abandoned to their fate.

Power no longer governs by producing consensus, but by administering scarcity. The central conflict no longer revolves around the distribution of wealth, but around the distribution of ruin.

Living in the Spodocene therefore requires radical realism. There is no way out through a “Green New Deal” that claims to reactivate the old thermodynamic engine with green technologies without questioning the logic that destroyed it. Nor is it enough to denounce inequality without addressing the entropic structure that produces it. The most urgent political and intellectual task is to learn to think, organise and contend with life starting from residues and with residues.

This is not a call for defeatism, but for clarity. It implies recognising that the promise of linear and infinite progress is itself the heaviest conceptual residue we carry with us. Faced with this burden, a harsh but unavoidable path opens up: to stop fantasising about a return to expansion and to build forms of meaning, community and justice compatible with a finite world.

The question of the Spodocene is not how to return to growth, but how to learn to inhabit a world that can no longer hide its waste. Our era is not one of sudden collapse, but of managed depletion. And it is in the way this management is contested — or naturalised — that the future is decided.

Before the systemic change of state

In thermodynamics, a system does not necessarily collapse when its energy is exhausted. First, it goes through a more disturbing phase: the point preceding the change of state. It is the moment when matter is formally the same, but no longer behaves as before. The temperature rises, pressure builds up, molecules agitate without finding a new stable form. Nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything is about to change.

Our era is exactly there.

The Spodocene is not yet the next state. It is the antechamber. The system continues to function, but it does so erratically, inefficiently and increasingly violently against itself. The energy that circulates no longer produces order, but friction. The mechanisms that once guaranteed stability — markets, institutions, narratives of progress — continue to operate, but have lost their ability to structure the whole. The result is not immediate collapse, but prolonged instability: a social, political and subjective warming that heralds an inevitable transition.

The change of state is neither a moral decision nor a voluntary act. It occurs when a critical threshold is reached. The most common mistake is to confuse this phase with a correctable anomaly. The most costly mistake is to try to force the old form when the conditions that made it possible no longer exist.

This is what defines our present. The elites continue to act as if it were enough to regulate the temperature, redistribute pressures or adjust variables to recover the previous balance. But that balance is no longer available. The system is not disordered: it is saturated. It does not need corrections, but transformation.

The Spodocene precisely names this saturation. It is the phase in which residue accumulates because the previous form can no longer reorganise it. It is the moment when politics is reduced to the management of social heat: containment, cushioning, distraction and displacement of tensions.

The decisive question is not whether there will be a change of state, but what kind of state will emerge. The same accumulated energy can produce radically different configurations. In historical terms, this amounts to a brutal disjunction: either an authoritarian solidification of disorder — more control, more exclusion, more administered violence — or a deliberate reorganisation of life around assumed limits, reconstructed bonds and meanings not based on expansion.

There is no guarantee that the outcome will be emancipatory. History does not reward lucidity. But neither does it grant second chances to systems that refuse to recognise their own thresholds.

We are still in the moment before. The world has not changed state, but it can no longer return to its previous one. This interval — unstable, uncomfortable, fraught with tension — is the only real space for dispute. The Spodocene is not the end of history: it is the moment when history returns to being open, not because of the promise of progress, but because of the exhaustion of all the illusions that sustained it.

Living on this threshold requires something more difficult than hope: it requires precision. Because when the change of state occurs, it does not happen slowly. And those who have not learned to read the preliminary signs will only be able to describe it afterwards as a catastrophe.

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