In The Shadow Of Collapse

Cultural Production, Temporal Displacement, and the Ethics of Documentation in Post-Crisis Societies

Nostalgia, extraction, and care work in Lebanon

INTRODUCTION: THE MILLENNIAL AS ARCHIVIST OF RUIN

I scroll through Instagram and encounter a photograph: an elderly man in Tripoli, Lebanon. His hands were stained permanently brown from decades of work. The caption reads: "One of the last traditional [insert material] workers in Lebanon. His craft is dying." The post has hundreds of likes. Most of them are variations on the same theme: "Allah yo7fazo." "We are losing our heritage." And variations of "Someone should do something."

This essay emerges from that guilt to think through it. What does it mean to document culture in the act of its disappearance? What are the ethics of turning someone else's economic devastation into a portfolio piece? Or an influencer's post? More urgently: is there a way to practice cultural documentation that doesn't aestheticize decline, but instead participates in the conditions for cultural continuity?

These questions emerge from spending eleven years in the United States, studying how American millennials document vanishing worlds, and then returning to Lebanon in September 2025 to find my own country unrecognizable, a place that has undergone six years of active collapse (2019-present) that I witnessed primarily through social media, through family phone calls describing bank freezes and electricity cuts, through diaspora group chats filled with desperate conversations about how to help. I returned as someone who had lived through the crisis by proxy, and as someone who chose to return to it, which is a position entirely different from the first. Yes, as one marked by privilege (I will leave again when needed) and by a specific kind of affording to entertain guilt (though I care).

In post-collapse Lebanon, millennials are exhibiting a role I think of as the cultural hospice: the position of being the last generation to witness living cultural practices before they vanish, and the last generation to remember an economic reality, however imperfect, that allowed for the reproduction of those practices. Millennials are, in one part, hospice workers in the sense that they tend to dying forms without the medical capacity to cure them, save for restructuring deconstructed elements into new brands, new awkward food recipes, and widespread "Unique Concept Stores."

They document, photograph, interview, and archive. They make culture legible in its final moments, but they rarely make it sustainable beyond documentation.

This essay argues for a shift from extractive nostalgia (documentation that converts cultural death into brand capital for the documenter) to generative continuity (documentation embedded within material and relational practices that sustain cultural continuity). Like my previous posts, and acknowledging that many people everywhere need certainty, I want to "reassure" you that this is not seeking to be a manifesto promising a solution. I am already deeply skeptical of manifestos written from positions of relative privilege, let alone about communities in crisis. Instead, this is an attempt to think through the ethical, practical, and methodological challenges of doing cultural work in collapsed contexts, using comparative examples from the United States and Lebanon to illuminate patterns that might otherwise remain invisible within a single national frame.

I. STRUCTURAL PARALLELS: DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, STATE RETREAT, AND TEMPORAL RUPTURE

To understand why millennials in both contexts have become archivists of decline, we must first understand the structural transformations that produced this position.

The Economic Base: Capital's Withdrawal

The American Rust Belt offers an entry point for understanding these dynamics. Factories that employed entire towns closed in the 1970s-1990s as capital sought cheaper labor elsewhere. Ohio lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs between 1977 and 1987. Detroit's population halved between 1950 and 2010. These were catastrophic ruptures, entire economic ecologies destroyed within a generation.

David Harvey's concept of the "spatial fix" explains this: capital, facing falling profit rates, responds by relocating to spaces where labor is cheaper and regulatory regimes are weaker. Each move leaves behind communities whose entire infrastructure was built around that employment anchor. The results: unemployment and the destruction of social worlds that employment sustained, union halls, bowling leagues, church communities, and the intergenerational transmission of craft knowledge.

Lebanon's trajectory is different in form but similar in effect. Lebanon never had a robust industrial base in the post-independence period; the economy was oriented toward services (banking, tourism, trade) rather than manufacturing. But the 1975-1990 civil war destroyed even that service infrastructure, and the post-war reconstruction (1990s-2000s) was and continues to be predatory rather than regenerative. In A Political Economy of Lebanon, Toufic Gaspard documents that reconstruction was debt-financed, with borrowed money flowing primarily to real estate speculation and consumption rather than productive investment. The Solidere project, which rebuilt downtown Beirut, displaced the old souks and small merchants, replacing them with luxury retail spaces that catered to Gulf tourists and the Lebanese upper class and their wannabes.

The result was an economy structurally dependent on remittances from the ever-generous diaspora and deposits from Gulf capital, with the banking sector serving as an intermediary that extracted value rather than generating it. When this scheme collapsed in 2019, banks could no longer pay out deposits because they had invested recklessly, and the central bank had been using new deposits to pay interest on old ones; the entire economic system froze. Bank accounts were locked. The currency collapsed. Electricity provision (already spotty) dropped to 2-4 hours per day until this day. Import-dependent businesses, including the few remaining artisanal producers who needed to import raw materials, became economically unviable. All this was happening during a world pandemic, one of the biggest explosions in human history that blew up the heart of the country, Beirut, and the heart of its citizens, and later in 2023, a devastating invasion.

What both contexts share is capital's withdrawal from the social contract. In the American case, this took the form of offshoring and automation. In the Lebanese case, it took the form of financialization and eventual systemic collapse. But in both cases, the result on a cultural level is the same: entire classes of labor, factory workers, craftspeople, small merchants, suddenly find that their skills, their knowledge, their very presence in the world is no longer economically legible. The market, that supposedly neutral arbiter of value, has declared them obsolete.

Millennials as Hinge

This brings us to the specific position of millennials in these contexts. This generation: old enough to remember when things worked (however imperfectly), young enough to be excluded from the economic security those systems once provided.

In the American Rust Belt, millennials are the grandchildren of factory workers. They grew up hearing stories about union struggles, about jobs that paid enough to buy a house and send kids to college. They saw the physical remnants: union cards in grandparents' wallets, photos of shift workers at vintage stores, empty factory buildings where the next rave was happening.

But then we entered an entirely different economy. The factories were gone or automated. The jobs available were precarious service sector in a gig economy. Student debt replaced pensions. The promise that shaped our parents' lives, work hard, follow the rules, achieve stability with a handshake over a job, was revealed as historically archaic.

In Lebanon, the pattern is even more compressed, and my own position within it is particularly fraught. Lebanese millennials (born 1980s-1990s) grew up during the war/post-war reconstruction period. Beirut in the late 1990s and 2000s was, for a certain class, genuinely cosmopolitan, with restaurants, nightlife, cultural production, and relative political stability. The Lebanese pound was pegged to the dollar at 1,500:1$, creating an illusion of stability. Middle-class professionals could sometimes travel, could afford imported goods, and could project themselves into the future.

I left in 2012, before the Syrian war's full weight pressed down on Lebanon, before the refugee crisis overwhelmed infrastructure, way before the very exciting October 2019 revolution and subsequent collapse. I spent eleven years in the United States building a career, accumulating the very cultural capital that now allows me to write this essay, to position myself as someone who can "speak about" the Lebanese cultural crisis. I watched the collapse closely from Brooklyn, New Paltz, Edgecomb and Tucson, through WhatsApp messages from my brother, my aunt and some friends describing the bank freezes and trying their very best to explain the unexplainable "L-ollars," through Instagram posts documenting air raids, through reports about the carnage that the port explosion in August 2020 left, the explosion that killed many and destroyed a very special place in every Lebanese heart.

When I returned in June 2025 for a visit, I returned to a country I recognized only in fragments. The physical landscape was familiar, the mountains, the sea, the same architecture, but the social fabric had been completely shredded. Friends I'd grown up with had emigrated to anywhere else. The restaurants and cafes I remembered had transformed into establishments serving a tiny elite. The middle class I'd been part of had been effectively eliminated.

My return is marked by profound temporal dislocation. I carry memories of a Lebanon that existed, that I lived in, but those memories are now 11 years out of date, and many of those 11 years contained multiple apocalypses. The people who stayed lived through the revolution, the banking collapse, COVID lockdowns under crisis conditions, the port explosion, political paralysis, pandemic outbreaks, many deaths, and ongoing economic freefall. They have embodied knowledge of survival under collapse that my body doesn’t or keeps very little score of.

I am simultaneously an insider (Lebanese, Arabic-speaking, originally from here) and almost a complete outsider (returning after a long absence, carrying American professional and academic frameworks, able to leave again). I have the distance that allows for an analytical perspective, yet I lack the immediate embodied knowledge that comes from living through a crisis.

Platform Capitalism as Infrastructure of Mourning

The third structural element that shapes contemporary cultural documentation is the specific affordances of social media platforms. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, those platforms are not neutral tools for archival work. These are attention economies with specific algorithmic logics that shape what gets documented and how.

Instagram's algorithm rewards high engagement, likes, comments, shares, and saves. Posts that generate emotional responses perform better than posts that provide analysis. A filtered video of an elderly artisan, captioned with elegiac text about disappearing traditions, will outperform a detailed explanation of the trade policies that made that artisan's work economically unviable. The platform's logic encourages aestheticization of decline, making poverty and loss lamentable, beautiful, consumable, and shareable.

This creates the selective framing of decline that emphasizes picturesque ruin while cropping out less aesthetically pleasing elements. A Lebanese tannery becomes a study in texture and light; the surrounding urban decay is excluded. Detroit's abandoned Packard Plant becomes an architectural marvel; the displaced Black residents who once worked there remain invisible.

Most importantly, social media platforms decouple documentation from material solidarity. In previous eras, think of Farm Security Administration photographers during the Great Depression, documentation was embedded within broader political projects aimed at reform. Dorothea Lange's photographs contributed to arguments for concrete interventions.

Instagram documentation, by contrast, typically begins and ends with visibility. The post is the intervention. "Raising awareness" substitutes for organizing, for resource redistribution, for policy change. The platform is designed to convert attention into advertising revenue for Meta, not to facilitate solidarity between documenters, viewers, and the documented.

II. THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF EXTRACTION

Having established the structural conditions, I want to turn to the microdynamics of extraction, how power operates in the specific encounter between documenter and documented.

The Myth of Mutual Precarity

One common defense: "We're all struggling. I'm documenting because I care. I'm not getting rich. We're in this together."

There's a partial truth here. Many documentarians are themselves precarious. But shared precarity does not erase power differentials. The curator and the artisan struggle in different ways that create asymmetric vulnerabilities.

The curator has:

Mobility. We might emigrate if things deteriorate. We have credentials, language skills, and networks legible in diaspora contexts. The artisan, often older, monolingual in Arabic, with highly specific skills, cannot easily relocate.

Cultural capital. We understand how to navigate platforms, craft narratives for international audiences, and translate local specificity into consumable content. This converts into opportunities, media careers, consultancies, and speaking engagements.

Temporal horizon. We're young enough to imagine futures elsewhere, to treat documentation as portfolio building. The artisan is aging into a context with no safety net, no pension, and no functioning healthcare.

The privilege of return. For those of us who left and came back, there's privilege in choosing when to engage with crisis. I left before the collapse. I'm returning after the worst shocks. I didn't live through the terror directly.

The artisan has:

Embodied knowledge that took decades to acquire. It's cultural wealth in a collapsed economy, precious but not fungible.

Rootedness in place and community, which provides non-economic support but becomes vulnerability when that place collapses.

Dignity, knowing their work matters, that it represents generations of accumulated skill. But dignity doesn't pay bills.

The extraction happens not because the curator is malicious, but because cultural capital flows upward while economic precarity remains stuck. The curator's follower count grows. They get invited to panels, get grants, and build portfolios. The artisan receives temporary visibility, then continues struggling.

This is what makes extractive nostalgia insidious; it happens with the best intentions. You genuinely care. You're genuinely documenting something important. And yet your position improves while theirs doesn't.

The Epistemological Problem: Who Narrates?

There's a deeper issue: epistemic extraction—who gets to tell the story, whose interpretation becomes authoritative.

In most documentation, the curator becomes the narrator. They write captions, choose quotes, and decide what's "interesting." A Lebanese millennial documenting traditional crafts is typically:

• Urban (Beirut-based), documenting practices in places they visit but don't live in

• Educated (university degree, often studied abroad), documenting working-class knowledge acquired through apprenticeship

• Multilingual (Arabic, English, French), documenting Arabic-speaking subjects for audiences expecting English captions

• Secular, documenting practices embedded in religious communities, through a more flattened, accessible lens

• Class-mobile, documenting people whose families have been working-class for generations

Each gap creates potential for misrecognition and ventriloquism—speaking for rather than with, framing according to what resonates with the curator's audience rather than what matters to the practitioner.

Luke Eric Lassiter's work on collaborative ethnography argues that ethical documentation requires:

1. Negotiated research questions: Subjects help determine what gets documented and why

2. Shared drafts: Subjects review their representation before publication

3. Co-authorship: Subjects credited as knowledge producers, not just sources

4. Material and symbolic reciprocity: Benefits flow in multiple directions

Most Instagram documentation fails all four criteria.

The Class Composition of Nostalgia

Nostalgia itself has a class character. The nostalgia dominating Lebanese social media is primarily Western-facing, characterized by Instagrammable cafes, where Arabic, French, and English mix fluidly, and where nightlife is vibrant and secular. This is "Beirut as the Paris of the Middle East" nostalgia, always partial, always exclusionary, always representing a particular class and sectarian position while claiming to speak for Lebanon as a whole.

This matters profoundly because it determines which cultural losses get mourned and which get ignored.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Skills and Class Aspiration

In Lebanon, there's a widespread assumption that university education should lead to white-collar work, that manual labor is what you do if you "failed" at school. This is a stigma that many millennials post-2019 collapse are actively challenging by returning to trades and seeking to revive artisan workshops.

When artisan workshops close, it's not primarily because young Lebanese don't want to learn; it's because learning those skills is seen as accepting downward mobility. The son of a traditional metalworker is pushed to get an engineering degree and leave for the Gulf, not to apprentice in his father's workshop. Still, there are exceptions. I hope everyone is as proud as I am as a maker and an artist!

This creates profound tension in cultural documentation. We nostalgically mourn the disappearance of craft knowledge while simultaneously participating in the social systems that devalue that knowledge. At the same time, the Instagram post celebrating "the last traditional carpenter" coexists with a few proud millennials who are leaving white-collar careers, returning to the trades, doing their best to avoid a euthanizing nostalgia of a dying business.

But, and this is crucial, the alternative is not to stop documenting, to turn away, to let these cultural forms disappear without record.

The alternative is to ask:

How can documentation be structured so that it serves the communities being documented rather than extracting from them?

How can it be embedded within projects of solidarity rather than projects of consumption?

III. TOWARD RELATIONAL METHODOLOGY

I want to propose thinking about documentation as care work, with all the ethical obligations, practical challenges, and emotional labor that entails.

Care work is:

• Relational: It happens within ongoing relationships rather than extractive encounters

• Responsive: It adapts to the needs articulated by those being cared for

• Materially embedded: It involves actual labor, time, resources, and presence

• Unglamorous: Much of care work is mundane, invisible

• Undervalued: Our economies systematically undercompensate care work

• Emotionally demanding: It requires managing your own responses while remaining present to others' needs

Principle 1: Long-term Relationship Over Viral Moments

Most social media documentation operates on extractive temporal logic: visit once, interview, photograph, post, move on. The artisan gets a spike of visibility, then nothing.

Care-based documentation means a sustained relationship. You visit regularly. You become familiar enough that your presence isn't performative. You help with tasks unrelated to documentation, carrying materials, translating forms, and connecting to customers. Documentation emerges from a relationship, not the other way around.

This is slower, less scalable, and less amenable to building large followings quickly. But it's ethically different in kind. The artisan isn't a subject to extract from; they're someone you're in a relationship with.

Lebanese examples exist, though less visible than viral accounts. People are documenting traditional embroidery who have visited the same elderly women for years, helping them sell pieces, driving them to appointments. When they post something, the women have seen it, approved it, and sometimes suggested what to emphasize.

This doesn't scale to thousands of followers quickly. But it's ethically coherent in ways viral documentation isn't.

Principle 2: Material Reciprocity as Minimum Requirement

If you profit from documenting someone, including symbolic and professional gains, you must materially reciprocate. This should be non-negotiable.

Material reciprocity could take many forms:

• Direct cash transfers: If your page earns money, a percentage goes to featured artisans

• Skill-sharing and labor: You use your capabilities to materially benefit the artisan economically

• Transparent crowdfunding: You account for every dollar with receipts and testimony from recipients

• Co-ownership structures: The artisan co-owns the project, has veto power, and shares benefits

The objection: "But I'm precarious too. I can't afford to pay people I document."

Response: Then be honest about limitations. Say explicitly: "I can offer my time, my platform, my skills, but I don't have money to share. Would this visibility still be valuable?" Let them decide.

And if you cannot offer material reciprocity, perhaps reconsider whether you should be documenting at all.

Principle 3: Political Contextualization Without Simplification

Care work involves telling the truth, even when uncomfortable. If you're documenting dying crafts, you must address why they're dying, not as inevitable modernization, but as a result of specific political and economic forces.

In Lebanon's case, this means naming:

• The political system that extracts state resources for patronage networks

• The banking sector's predatory practices and the central bank's Ponzi scheme

• Policies that opened markets to imports while providing no local support

• The electricity crisis resulting from deliberate political choices

• The absence of any social safety net

• The emigration pressures are pushing young people to leave

Documentation that aestheticizes decline without naming causes isn't just incomplete, it's complicit. It converts political failures into natural tragedies, evacuating the possibility of accountability or change.

But political contextualization also requires resisting simplification. Lebanese artisans aren't just passive victims; many are actively strategizing, adapting, and finding ways to survive. Documenting their agency alongside their vulnerability is crucial.

Principle 4: Transmission Over Archival When Possible

The goal isn't to create beautiful archives of dead practices; it's to sustain conditions under which practices continue to live, evolve, and be transmitted to new practitioners.

This means documentation should, wherever possible, be pedagogical rather than memorial. Not "meet the last soap maker" (framing them as a museum piece) but "here's how soapmaking works, you could learn this."

It means supporting transmission structures: funding apprenticeships, creating learning spaces, documenting techniques in ways useful for learners.

It means accepting that living cultures evolve. An apprentice might blend traditional techniques with new materials. This isn't corruption of authenticity; it's culture continuing to be alive.

The challenge: transmission requires material conditions that often don't exist. A young person can't apprentice if they need three jobs. A master can't teach if their workshop is closing. Transmission requires time, proximity, and economic viability, precisely what chronic collapse destroys.

IV. METHODOLOGICAL HUMILITY: WHAT DOCUMENTATION CANNOT DO

I want to end by acknowledging severe limitations. Even documentation done well, embedded in relationships, materially reciprocal, politically contextualized, and oriented toward transmission, cannot solve systemic collapse.

The Lebanese artisan needs:

• Currency stability

• Electricity infrastructure

• Access to imported raw materials without prohibitive costs and grueling customs costs

• Educated customers with disposable income

• Apprentices who can afford to learn rather than emigrate

• A social safety net

• Political transformation

No Instagram page provides these things. That requires state capacity building, economic restructuring, and collective political organization, none of which are on the horizon.

So why document at all?

The answer: cultural death matters, not just instrumentally. When a craft disappears, the embodied knowledge accumulated over generations vanishes. This matters for its own sake. The tannery worker's knowledge is valuable independent of market demand.

Ethical documentation serves several functions:

• Witnessing: Refusing to let cultural death go unnoticed, unmarked, un-mourned

• Counter-archiving: Creating records from community perspectives when official archives ignore or misrepresent

• Solidarity: Connecting people experiencing similar structural violence across geography

• Evidence: Creating documentation that might support future claims, for reparations, policy change, and historical accounting

• Meaning-making: For both documenters and documented, the process of telling the story can provide dignity even without material improvement

None of this solves the crisis. But it refuses the erasure that often accompanies crisis, the way communities become invisible, their knowledge dismissed as obsolete, their lives treated as disposable.

DEBT ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I return to where I began: scrolling Instagram, seeing the old artisans, feeling the pull of extractive nostalgia.

What I'm arguing for is documentation that understands itself as debt acknowledgment. The collapse I'm witnessing isn't a natural disaster. It's the outcome of specific political and economic systems.

My education, my mobility, my professional opportunities, all embedded within systems that produced the Lebanese banking collapse and American capital flight. I may not have caused these outcomes directly, but I'm implicated in the systems that did.

I cannot repay that debt through documentation. But I can refuse to add to it. I can practice documentation that:

• Doesn't extract further cultural capital while offering nothing material

• Centers the voices and needs of those being documented

• Tells the truth about structural causes

• Orients toward the possibility of transmission

• Accepts its own limitations

This requires:

• Slower work, deeper relationships, less scalable projects

• Material reciprocity even when resources are scarce

• Political clarity, even when uncomfortable

• Willingness to step back when documentation would cause harm

• Methodological humility about what individual projects can accomplish

And perhaps most uncomfortably, it requires accepting that sometimes the most ethical choice is not to document at all, which is what I am doing now, to recognize when your presence, your camera, your framing would add to someone's burden.

The artisan doesn't need my documentation to know their work has value. They’re known for decades. What they need are the material conditions that would allow their children and grandchildren to learn the trade. If my documentation cannot contribute to creating those conditions, and often it cannot, then at minimum I must not claim that it does, must not frame visibility as salvation, must not extract content while offering only awareness in return.

We are millennials navigating collapsed economies, archivists of decline, care workers tending to dying cultural practices. We cannot cure the disease, which requires political transformation beyond individual capacity. But we can refuse to profit from the death. We can document relationally, reciprocally, honestly, and humbly. We can build practices of cultural care that honor what's being lost without pretending that our caring alone can prevent the loss.

This is not a solution. It is an ethics of practice in the absence of solutions, a set of commitments about how to be present to devastation without adding to it, how to witness cultural death without making that death consumable, how to practice documentation as care work rather than as extraction.

It is what we owe to the communities whose collapse we document and whose losses we have, in our mobility and privilege, partially escaped.

RECOMMENDED READING LIST

1. Svetlana Boym - The Future of Nostalgia (2001) Distinguishes restorative vs. reflective nostalgia; foundational for understanding how memory work can be generative rather than reactionary.

2. David Harvey - The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) explains "time-space compression" and how capitalism accelerates change, creating nostalgic backlash. Essential for linking economic collapse to cultural nostalgia.

3. Stuart Hall - "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'" (1981). Explains how culture is a contested terrain, and elites and subalterns fight over meaning. Nostalgia can be appropriated by power or reclaimed by resistance.

4. Toufic Gaspard - A Political Economy of Lebanon, 1948-2002 (2004). Explains Lebanon's post-war economy, how reconstruction was predatory, debt-fueled, and enriched elites without rebuilding a productive base. Essential for understanding why Lebanon has no industrial capacity.

5. Luke Eric Lassiter - The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (2005). Practical guide to participatory research, how to document communities with them, not about them. Direct application to ethical cultural documentation.

6. Erica Kohl-Arenas - The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty (2016). Critiques how nonprofits depoliticize poverty through feel-good projects without challenging structural inequality. Warning against documentation becoming a charity-trap.

For conversations or collaboration inquiries, contact: I.khazzaka@gmail.com