You know I never thought of Rome this way: grow at all costs, consolidate, enshittify.

I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium.

This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak.

https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalo...

Also there's a whole bad history meme about how Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The bulk of destruction was done by imperial Rome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...

Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake.

... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.

Yep. It's a limited analogy. Other than Pharaonic Egypt and Confucian China (maybe also Mayans/Aztecs), empires back then didn't have a clear understanding like we do today about planning for sustainability. And even those two aforementioned ones couldn't do so without technological ossification and internal social repression, which led to their demise.

Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.