We have long been fascinated by ima-ges of decline. From the intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance to 19th-century Romantic painters and 18th-century English architects, scenes of decay and ruin have served as reminders that, no matter how great our civilization, like Ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt, it too will one day end—a kind of memento mori for society. In the 19th century, architect John Soane even celebrated the completion of his design for the Bank Of England by commissioning a painting that rendered the building as a Roman ruin.

The tradition continues today in the age of social media, with popular accounts juxtaposing images of war-damaged European cities with their present-day appearance, or sharing slideshows assembled from Google Street View images showing houses gradually becoming overrun by nature. But while such depictions have traditionally invited reflections on mortality and impermanence, a newer genre of online content revels in decline itself—and in the anger it provokes.

One of the most infamous examples of “decline porn,” as it has come to be known, is a video purporting to show a squalid, “taxpayer-funded” water park in Croydon, a borough in south London. No such park exists; the video is entirely fake, having been generated using AI; and when the BBC’s disinformation specialist, Marianna Spring, reached out to the creator, she learned that he had never even been to Croydon. He explained that the video was purely for entertainment.

As Spring observes, however, there is often a “political undertone” to this type of content. The deepfaked Croydon video, which shows mostly gangs of young men wearing balaclavas and padded jackets, plays into narratives promoted by far-right figures such as Elon Musk and JD Vance, who have decried the “civilizational erasure” of the West. The reality is quite different: A report published in early 2026 found that 63% of Londoners believed the city was a safe place to live.