What might bring down civilisation? The computer. How can that be? Well computers deal with data. What is data, as distinct from, say, prose or literature? Data is compressed prose.
Think, for example, of a small UK charity publishing the usual record of its Annual General Meeting. It first includes the minutes of the meeting, followed by a table of its annual accounts summary, which can be seen as tabulated data. This data could instead have been written as prose "In the first month of the year, January, we spent £200 on office stationery. In the second month ..." but that would be tedious to write and tedious to read. The table format circumvents the tedium.
The tabulation of data historically preceded prose in Sumerian times around 3500 BC in Uruk where accounts of donations to the temple were recorded with symbols impressed into stone or clay tablets in a table format, and understood by convention. Only around 3000 did prose sentence construction appear to us in the archaeological record of Tel Fara and surrounding towns around 2800 BC, the Fara Period, at which point poetry as well as prose started to be written with symbols on clay and stone tablets. (Examples: Instruction of Sharappak, and the Temple Hymn of Kesh.) So historically the tabulated data idea is very ancient and very well understood and underpins civilisation through all of history in many parts of the world. It allows the recording of financial accounts, for example, and documentation of individual payments. Yet prose is an alternative which is almost as ancient and allows expression of ideas and recording of human sentences, such as the minutes of a meeting. The two have coexisted side-by-side throughout human civilization in most 'advanced' cultures. Arguably the existence of these two forms of writing has brought about civilisation by allowing the persistence of knowledge between generations.
A plausible corollary of this is that civilisation might collapse if both data and prose formats evolve into something which cannot be persisted between generations. This is where computers come in. They have the potential to cause the loss of the ability to read data. They use binary exclusively to store that data. If the world loses the ability to make and use electricity and fossil fuels it would lose the ability to handle all that binary data. A nuclear war could accelerate all this.
As nuclear war peril looms, maybe we should print data and knowledge considered essential to future generations of civilisation, such as calendars and basic maths, onto sheets of plastic, perhaps by stencil holes rather than perishable ink, and do so worldwide now in case of nuclear war. Making use of the persistent nature of plastic. Before the world loses the ability to read binary and loses the ability to pass down knowledge to the next generation and civilisation collapses.
