I've been dwelling on this idea for an anthology of life on multiple "degenerated" imperial-capitalist interstellar colonies, inspired by a few sources. A broad breakdown of the history:
• Future humanity "develops" the inner solar system by surveying the Moon and asteroids to develop a rationalized system of extra-planetary "rents" and asset exchange, i.e., trading licenses to unproductive rocks as if they were stocks.
• Surveyors encounter an ancient gateway — part of an ancient artificial network of folded-space connections to other planetary systems throughout the galaxy, quite a few containing habitable exoplanets.
• The discovery leads to an alliance of great powers monopolizing the Sol gateway to regulate exploration of the great beyond.
• A massive rush begins to survey and engineer new markets upon the virgin worlds.
• Many of these nascent world-markets boil down to pet projects of industrial and land conglomerates, NGOs like academic organizations and bourgeois charities, governmental agencies, and other less 'notable' influential groups.
• Many worlds are settled only gradually and piecemeal as over-glorified credit traps and enrichment schemes for various interest groups of bourgeois society — from global real estate ventures to utopian community-building projects.
• Decades pass, and the diffusion of capital across the webway of worlds has over-specialized whole planets in this pattern.
• For example, a world that a banking network has very sparsely peopled with a class of debt-captive labor, or land speculators have so monopolized that it's dotted only by clusters of prefab office towers, or that some industrial group has planted a dozen mines or workshops fringed by some shanty towns.
• Very rarely are these colonies actually materially productive.
• Then, suddenly, for no explicable reason, the gateway network crashes — stranding hundreds of human colonies from each other across the cosmos.
• Although most of these worlds proceed to collapse, quite a few follow insular patterns of recovery that lead to barbaric world orders.