I think the theory is more that everything ends eventually.

Even democracies can produce political and economic collapse. And there are examples of long-lasting dictatorships (Cuba, North Korea, etc.) that are still surviving with economies and technology far less advanced than China.

I think the scary reality is that throughout history a small percentage of a population has frequently been able to hold power over even millions of people for multiple generations. And unfortunately, there does seem to be "economies of scale" in this where only adding technology and a few more people to the power structure can dictate power over an increasing number of people.

That said, it's easy to see the faults in other countries and I'm sure the diverse group of readers at HN can find similar instances of this power structure in their own countries.

All states must inevitably collapse.

There’s no law of the universe about this, other than the sun exploding and heat death.

One of the plausible catastrophic end states for humanity is an ultra-stable technocratic totalitarian global state, enabled by pervasive super high tech surveillance and censorship. It’s one of the ‘great filter’ possibilities for why sentient beings never colonise the galaxy - they’re all trapped in bureaucratic self serving versions of 1984 where the state only exists to maintain the state. Democracies and other forms of goveenment are never stable, the only stable state is bureaucratic autocracy, and falling into one only ever has to happen once and you’re done.

This is what China is building, and the model they are exporting to the world.

I would disagree with your assertion there that bureaucracies are terminal. Historically, military dictatorships tend to overthrow bureaucracies, while democracies overthrow military dictatorships and bureaucracies subsume democracies. Each of these transitions can be understood thermodynamically; each transition results in a lower energy state for the problems facing them at the time:

Bureaucracies lack military response time. Dictatorships lack economic stability. Democracies lack efficiency. Each of these are actually each model's strength, but over time becomes fatal.

I think that's arguable, but anyway a global totalitarian state with 100% communications channel surveillance linked to super-advanced AI analysis engines doesn't need a military. All they need is a detention force to send anyone with seditious tendencies or too low on their Citizenship Points[1] for organ harvesting[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

Can you expand on this or provide some source material for further reading? I find this a fascinating subject.

So basically Brazil (Terry Gilliam)?