There is a specific, unsettling sensation that accompanies walking through a shopping mall that has lost its anchor stores. The lights are still buzzing, the Muzak is still playing, and the janitors are still polishing the floors. But the commerce has stopped. The purpose of the structure has evaporated, leaving behind a hollow shell that mimics the motions of life without possessing a pulse.
This feeling of walking through a “ghost structure” is no longer confined to abandoned retail spaces. It has expanded to encompass our entire geopolitical reality. When you look at the United Nations, the global financial systems, or the sprawling bureaucracies of public health, you are witnessing the same phenomenon. The buildings are there. The press releases are issued. The meetings are convened. But the mechanism behind the curtain has snapped.
We sense this intuitively. It manifests as a cognitive dissonance where the official data says the economy is booming, but your grocery bill says you are poor. It appears when leaders speak in platitudes that bear no resemblance to the chaos on the streets. We are currently adrift in a historical twilight zone, a period of suspension where the old rules no longer apply, but new rules have not yet been written.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s, identified this terrifying interval. He called it the “Interregnum.” It is a gap in history where the timeline breaks, and in that fissure, nightmares begin to take shape.
