Spencer Longo’s new book of collages, TIME, is about what it feels like to live in a crumbling empire, in an era widely regarded as “the end of history.” That phrase was first popularized in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama, who argued—from a right-wing triumphalist position—that with the fall of the Soviet Union, Western liberal democracy had established itself as the “final form of human government.” Sure, there would be challenges, but democratic structures were more than equipped to handle them. More recently, “the end of history” thesis has been revived on the left thanks to the work of Mark Fisher, who claimed that Fukuyama was right. We had witnessed the end of history, but it had ushered in an age of political hopelessness and social malaise in which it was impossible to imagine any kind of alternative to capitalism. Let’s just say that recent events support Fisher’s prediction that slow catastrophe and capitalist authoritarianism would become the global norm.