Rejecting the normalization of decay

Everyday transactions now require cameras, locks, and scrutiny. Each change makes sense on its own. But in aggregate, they reveal a society reorienting itself around distrust.

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Zahra Sethna from Collapse Life just returned from a trip to London and shared a jarring sign on the side of the road in super-wealthy Mayfair prohibiting open defecation in a doorway.

A loyal reader responded that public defecation is nothing new in London:

The fact that it’s nothing new is surely true. London has always had crime, rubbish, and poverty. It’s a big city — what do you expect? Big cities are rough around the edges, and London in particular is an old city layered on even older cities. Every street is imbued with centuries of empire and austerity, boom and bust, reinvention and contradiction. And, if we’re being crude, layered with sh*t and piss.

Since at least the 1990s, big cities around the globe experienced a remarkable transformation — streets were cleaned up, shops prospered, transactions were smoother and trust was restored. For a North American example, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani engineered a remarkable turnaround for New York City. But he wasn’t the only one.

Yes, there is the argument that cities, like all things, are cyclical. And that what many of us witnessed (and lived through) was an amazing upward trajectory coming off the lows of “white flight” and the gutting of inner cities in the 1970s and ‘80s.

So when you see a printed sign explicitly prohibiting open defecation, you pause not because such behavior has never happened before, but because the need to formalize it in writing signals something about what’s happening — shifting expectations, backwardization, thirdworldization… whatever you want to call it. Our baseline has shifted so much that what most people once assumed — you don’t take a dump in a doorway — must now explicitly be instructed.

But this isn’t just a fecal matter.

There was a time not long ago when people went into Pret a Manger, the popular British café chain, for a sandwich and a coffee and were expected not to shoplift or assault a staff member. Now Pret has taken to having staff wear body cameras, as a quiet technological solution to a growing problem of worker safety and theft. They are not the only chain doing this and, for the reasons indicated, it’s a rational and understandable measure. Just like locking up chocolate bars and cheese blocks behind clear plastic shields is a rational response to an increase in organized theft.

Photo courtesy of BBC News

Fly-tipping, which is what British people call the illegal dumping of waste, has been spiking across London, with discarded sofas, broken appliances, and black garbage bags becoming semi-permanent fixtures on many streets. Again, there’s a rational explanation: council budget cuts, rising disposal fees, stretched households, overstretched services. When a cashier pauses to scrutinize a ten-pound note for forgery, it’s not melodrama; it’s adaptation.

Every measure is defensible and every adjustment is logical. And if you take each change individually, none of them signals anything too dramatic. It’s just business as usual.

The problem is not that any of these responses exist; it’s how many of them exist, in such density, and how they are being woven into the fabric of daily life until they become par for the course. Before long, we’ll stop noticing that transactions that used to be governed by trust are now governed by cameras, locks, scrutiny, signage, and suspicion.

So when people say, “It’s always been like this,” what they are really offering is a psychological exit ramp — a way to avoid asking whether the direction of travel is forward or backward.

Just because things were once that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for something better. We should be moving toward more trust and more civic order. Toward the assumption that most people cooperate, most people dispose of their rubbish properly, and most people don’t require bodycam surveillance to buy a sandwich.

Instead, our underlying assumptions are being recalibrated. Rather than assuming most people will behave, systems are being built around the expectation they won’t… an inversion of the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ standard.

It happens in layers: pilot testing body cameras and facial recognition in supermarkets. Signs that would have seemed absurd a few years ago. Currency verification that creates friction in a once-fluid interaction. It’s not Mad Max; it’s the normalization of lower expectations, of guarded exchanges, of visible disorder as part of the daily scenery.

The most dangerous thing you can say in a declining society is not: “everything is collapsing.” It’s: “this is normal.”

Because once trust must be enforced rather than assumed, it will likely never go back to the way it was before. Worse, it becomes the platform for justifying more control and more restrictions (all this counterfeiting necessitates the end of cash and the ubiquity of digital currencies, doesn’t it?).

London is still vibrant, interesting, and culturally alive. But it is also quietly reorganizing around distrust rather than cooperation.

And that is a shift worth noticing.

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Catch Zahra’s monologue on Saturday, reflecting on her travels in England and Ireland.