US cultural hegemony reaches the historical limits of the its sphere of influence with the imposition of Global English as lingua franca, whose peak and downfall, at the same time, is represented today by Large Language Models and their powerful capacity for translation and text generation in all idioms. A mirror of the global economy in stagnation, however, LLMs are struggling to generate meaningful outputs due to the phenomenon of 'model collapse', an inflation and degradation of the training data on which they are based – a scarcity of the living labour that is required constantly to make them look 'intelligent' and more valuable. The collapse of LLMs can be taken as a metaphor of the crisis of knowledge extractivism and the global trade system as a whole (to which the Trump administration is responding with neocolonial tariffs). Economies in decline indeed generate monsters, such as military expansions, authoritarian personalities, and toxic culture. But through the fissures of this collapsing system, alternative futures glimmer.