Runaway Abstraction and the Reset Fantasy

There is a subtle but interesting pattern hiding in plain sight in modern culture.

It appears in the kinds of stories we tell, the political language we use, the technologies we build, and the way we imagine the future. It also appears, when it’s interpreted through the right lens, in Strauss–Howe generational theory.

I want to explore the idea that each historical “turning” is accompanied not only by institutional change, but by a dominant moral mood – a shared intuition about whether the world is ordered or broken, and whether or not human beings are capable of changing it.

A particularly lucid version of this idea appears in an essay by Joe Vasicek, The Generational Cycles of Grimdark vs. Noblebright, where he maps four fantasy genres to the four turnings:

Noblebright
Grimbright
Grimdark
Nobledark

Vasicek’s mapping is explicitly about fiction. I believe it extends much further: into politics, technology, and the psychology of entire societies.

And I believe it also sheds some light on one of the defining pathologies of our age: runaway abstraction, and the recurring attempts to escape tragedy by building new “realms” instead of repairing the world we already inhabit.

The Four Moods

First, a quick summary of the four mood genres (using common definitions):

Noblebright – The world is fundamentally ordered; good usually triumphs; heroes have the power to save it.
Grimbright – The world is mostly okay; good still wins, but characters are focused on local or personal concerns rather than saving everything.
Grimdark – The world is morally broken; power is corrupt; good often loses; agency feels limited or illusory.
Nobledark – The world is broken, but meaningful action is still possible; evil may be strong, yet resistance and repair matter anyway.

Vasicek describes which fictional genre peaks at the start of each turning. I’m more interested in which cultural mood dominates the bridges between turnings. It’s still the same model, just a slightly different perspective on it where it’s applied directly to society rather than implicitly through looking at fiction.

Mapping the Moods to the Bridges

Here is how I would state the pattern explicitly:

Noblebright: High → Awakening

Dominant from when a new High has stabilized until cultural change fatigue sets in during the Awakening.

Institutions are trusted. Collective action feels legitimate. The future is seen as something that can be built deliberately.

Language is constructive and technical: plans, systems, development, coordination.

Grimbright: Awakening → Unraveling

Dominant from the heart of the Awakening into early Unraveling.

Institutions still function, but legitimacy is questioned. The focus turns inward: identity, meaning, authenticity, personal freedom.

Grand projects feel morally suspect. Local stories feel more honest than civilizational ones.

Grimdark: Unraveling → Crisis

Dominant from mid-Unraveling into the early Crisis.

Institutions feel hollow. Systems are complex, abstract, procedural, and unresponsive. Power is opaque. Cynicism spreads.

Language becomes legalistic, technocratic, or ironic. Moral confidence collapses. Agency feels performative.

Nobledark: Crisis → High

Dominant from the depths of Crisis into the emergence of the next High.

The situation is recognized as dire. Failure is possible. Sacrifice is real. But action regains legitimacy.

This is the mood of rebuilding: tragic, constrained, unsentimental, but serious about responsibility.

From Mood to Metaphysics

So far this is purely descriptive. But something else happens during all this (and peaks and accelerates sharply during late Unraveling) that deserves special attention.

Abstraction begins to run ahead of reality and reorganize power independently of it.

Economic systems become more symbolic than productive. Political language becomes detached from material consequences. Institutions become procedural shells. Technology is described not as a tool, but as a destiny.

This fracture can be called runaway abstraction.

Here, Jean Baudrillard’s insights become hard to ignore.

Baudrillard argued that modern societies increasingly operate inside simulations: symbolic systems that no longer merely represent reality, but replace it. The map overtakes the territory. The model becomes more important than what it models and ultimately becomes completely detached from any sort of reality, in an ultimate stage of abstraction that he called hyperreality.

In genre terms, this is the metaphysical form of Grimdark:

systems without meaning
meaning without systems
power without legitimacy
agency without effect

But human beings do not tolerate this state for long.

When reality becomes unbearable and institutions feel irreparable, a new temptation appears.

The Ontological Reset

Instead of gracefully entering the Nobledark phase – the phase of tragic responsibility and repair – modern society has repeatedly attempted something else:

Leaving the world behind.

Not physically, but conceptually.

A new realm is declared, where the old constraints supposedly do not apply.

Cyberspace.
Web3.
The metaverse.
Fully automated AI governance.
Network states.

The clearest early expression of this impulse is John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which proclaimed the birth of “a civilization of the Mind” – a world beyond matter, bodies, law, coercion, and government.

Its double tone is revealing:

Toward existing society: Grimdark (corrupt, tyrannical, obsolete).
Toward the new realm: Noblebright (pure, ethical, self-governing, humane).

It is a hybrid mood: despair for the real world, utopian confidence for the abstract one. One was appropriate for late Unraveling, the other was entirely untimely.

Because what this sort of bifurcation of mood tries to do is skip the Nobledark phase entirely.

Instead of saying:

“The world is broken, therefore we must repair it under tragic constraints,”

it says:

“The world is broken, therefore we will build a different one where tragedy no longer applies.”

Baudrillard would call this a move deeper into simulation. Which it is, but Strauss-Howe would also call it postponement.

Why the Reset Never Works

Every attempt at ontological exit eventually fails for the same reason:

Power does not disappear through the denial of it.

New realms still depend on physical infrastructure. They still concentrate wealth. They still require enforcement. They still generate conflict, hierarchy, coercion, and unintended consequences.

Cyberspace became platform empires.
Crypto became financial extraction.
AI will no doubt become something different than what was dreamt of.

The tragedy returns inside the abstraction. Because as alluring as digital hyperreality can be, it can never replace actual reality.

So the Nobledark work – building institutions, restoring trust, accepting limits, coordinating under imperfection – still remains undone.

The cycle resumes.

Authoritarianism as Reset Fantasy

There is a second way societies attempt to skip the difficult phase of Nobledark repair. This one is (unfortunately) a tried and tested one.

Where the technological reset fantasy promises that complexity will vanish once we move into a new substrate—cyberspace, AI governance, the metaverse—the authoritarian reset fantasy promises that complexity will vanish once the right people hold power.

Both imagine a decisive intervention after which the work is largely done.

This is why authoritarian movements often present themselves in Nobledark tones: the world is corrupt, enemies are real, catastrophe looms, and only extraordinary action can prevent collapse. But the structure of the solution is revealing. Evil is treated as an external agent that can be defeated, rather than as an emergent property of systems that must be contained, regulated, and continuously repaired.

In this worldview, politics becomes a literal fight rather than an ongoing form of maintenance.

The promise is not “we will rebuild institutions under constraint,” but “once the traitors are removed, order will naturally return.”

So this is just a different reset fantasy. Instead of retreating into new realms, it dreams of applying force to reset society in one fell swoop.

It accepts that the world is broken, but refuses the implications of that fact: that repair is slow, morally compromised, technically difficult, and never final. Noblebright is not something to be worked towards but something that exists here and now, in the “right” leadership. Grimdark is not ignored but projected onto clear enemies that must be purged. It’s the same Nobledark-avoiding bifurcation, just a different mechanism.

The Core Missing Element

The authoritarian reset fantasy can still feel like Nobledark from the inside because it’s trying to actively engage with Grimdark rather than escaping it.

The difference, however, can be stated simply:

Authoritarian (False) Nobledark locates salvation in winning.
Grounded (True) Nobledark locates it in work.

The authoritarian story assumes that history is blocked by malicious actors. Remove them, and the system reverts to health. Institutions need not be rebuilt; they merely need to be “liberated.” Complexity collapses into moral clarity. The future becomes legible again. This is the authoritarian hyperreality.

True Nobledark, grounded Nobledark, assumes the opposite. That systems decay even without villains. That power corrupts even the well-intentioned. That coordination itself is fragile. That trust must be regenerated slowly. That tradeoffs do not disappear when the “right side” wins.

Pessimism vs Responsibility

Baudrillard himself was deeply pessimistic. Again, his diagnosis is Grimdark: the system is self-referential, self-replacing, inescapable. All attempts at repair happen inside hyperreality and therefore no actual repair is possible.

There is honesty in that.

But Nobledark is something else.

Nobledark does not promise salvation. It does not believe evil will be eliminated. It does not imagine clean slates or frictionless futures.

It simply says:

The world is damaged. Responsibility still exists.

It is the ethic of maintenance rather than transcendence.

It values:

boring competence
small institutions that still work
limited but real coordination
truth over symbolism
repair over escape

It offers no guarantees.

But it asks you to act anyway, and within the limits posed by reality.

Nobledark is the hyperreality detergent.

The Choice Beneath the Cycle

Seen this way, the generational cycle is not only institutional or demographic.

It is moral.

Again and again societies face the same fork:

escape into abstraction, or
remain in reality and repair

The first path feels lighter. It tries to skip the psychological burden imposed by Nobledark by creating a hybrid Grimdark/Noblebright world where all that remains is to either escape Grimdark completely or defeat it through force.

The second is heavier. It accepts the burden. It sees reality as complex, and Noblebright not as a utopia—nor as something that can be built overnight—but as an ideal to stumble toward, however imperfectly.

Baudrillard saw only the desert of the real: a world so thoroughly stripped of the real that it might as well be a desert. But even deserts have oases. And where there are still oases, the responsibility of maintaining them and helping them to grow still exists.

A Brief Footnote on Influence

This line of thinking—the possibility of resisting runaway complex systems through concerted effort, while remaining acutely aware of how daunting that task is—is influenced by many things: essays, conversations, and various forms of fiction among them.

However, one related piece of writing is so foundational that it deserves special mention.

Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch provides an evocative and highly compelling analysis of why coordination is so difficult: because not coordinating is often locally rewarding when individuals act in isolation. I believe this is one of the core problems that any Nobledark project must ultimately confront.

It is a long piece, but well worth the read.

Spellraiser