Collective Interfaces and Cultural Decline: An Ontological Mechanism for Civilisational Collapse

Existing theories of civilisational collapse invoke external factors—climate, resource depletion, invasions—or internal contradictions—inequality, institutional decay, complexity overload—but none identifies a unified ontological mechanism explaining why cultures lose the capacity to process complexity before collapsing. This paper proposes the concept of the Accumulated Interface, an emergent property of the historical accumulation of interactions between individual cognitive systems and a non-local informational domain. The Interface functions as a collective access structure that orients cognition, filters information, and sustains cultural complexity. Its degradation is ontological, not metaphorical: it reduces the system’s capacity to integrate complex information, generates cumulative entropy, and is strictly irreversible within the same civilisational lineage. The paper presents convergent empirical evidence—the Reverse Flynn Effect, harmonic simplification in popular music, syntactic decline in mass-consumption texts, and reduced semantic richness in digital communication—and argues that these phenomena constitute measurable indicators of Interface degradation. The collapse of a civilisation, under this framework, is not a historical accident but a recurrent structural process: the terminal phase of a system that has exhausted its capacity for informational mediation.