A Unified Theory of Collapse™

 When systems forget their purpose, collapse becomes the operating system beneath everyday life. It reframes modern institutions as self-consuming architectures that escalate drift, extractive logic, and legitimacy failure until meaning must be rebuilt from first principles. 

 This framework codifies the mechanics of systemic decay and contextualizes how institutions mutate into engines of optimization, depletion, and symbolic performance. It maps a cross-domain collapse cycle that destabilizes governance, culture, labor, technology, and identity, then restores coherence by formalizing the conditions required for Rebinding. It accelerates cultural literacy by translating collapse into a diagnostic instrument — a scalable blueprint for analyzing any system, sector, or narrative universe through the Antherra lens.