I’m writing you from the haze of a 35 degree day (95F) after a muggy night with two hours of sleep. We don’t have any A/C units, but it didn’t help that our fans slowed down and dehumidifier shut off because of the brownouts. Why were there brownouts? Given the heatwave, a lot of homes and businesses had their A/C on full blast and the grid couldn’t handle it. Across the Midwest, the Mississippi Valley, Appalachia, and along much of the East Coast, government agencies issued extreme heat warnings and power grids went down.
Clearly, it’s a sign that global warming is unfolding faster than the major scientific agencies predicted, which also means the overall impacts of the ecological crisis will be worse than they claim.
Hopefully, the implication is just as clear: in North America as in Europe, where a recent heat wave killed thousands, governments do not have the infrastructure to deal with even the early, relatively easy stage of the ecological crisis. And that’s in two of the richest regions on the planet.
We can be even clearer: those in power and those with access to the media and to significant funding have absolutely no feasible plan for getting us through the ecological crisis that they helped cause.
My theory, in general, is based on three facts.
1: Climate change is happening and will be devastating. 2: The people in charge know it is happening but are too invested in the causes to stop it. 3: The people in charge, and those with the economic power to make changes happen, do not believe in the intrinsic value of human life, or at least they believe that some human lives are inherently more valuable than others.
Now, there are other reasons for the things happening now to be happening. There’s at least 50 years of history that shows that the right wing and business interests have been quietly taking over, at least in the US, even before climate change became a major talking point. Those are facts that we can just push into the wave of things happening as causing amplification or resonance, not really the core factor right now.
My core belief is that the tech-bro billionaires and some select think-tanks and investment firms are planning for what we can simply call the apocalypse (as driven by climate change) rather than trying to avoid it.
The push for AI is really a push for the surveillance state and data control. They are redesigning the way the internet, communication, and commerce work. The future of computing, in their minds, is cloud-based, with users only getting access to things via a glorified workstation. Information is controlled and given out by AI that tells you what someone said instead of letting you see it. “There is no war in Ba Sing Se” type stuff.
It’s not about making money right now. Right now is the R&D phase. It’s the market-capture phase. Your average user is a beta tester for the infrastructure that will become the new internet.
If you want a good picture of it, you can watch the new Running Man movie. I think it’s a good encapsulation, but it’s still too kind for how bad things will likely get.
Will there be something like the Holocaust? I can’t say. But I can assume that, given the state of the world we are creeping toward, there will need to be a way to dispose of “excess people,” or at least to control those people and use them until they pass. This can be done by war, prison, death camps, or even just plain negligence. If the surveillance state is so complete that you can’t organize and riots are wiped out without even an evening news report, then they don’t matter much.
I think the US is done. There are plenty of stupid people doing whatever they need to do now just to make money, but behind them, just off-screen, are people that I think are working to pick up the pieces after the fall. I could ramble on about that… and China trying to take over the US’s place in global hegemony, but I think it’s more important to focus on the core issue.
Global catastrophe is coming. I know it is more comfortable to believe that our leaders are just greedy idiots. And yeah, some are. Some are even that special kind of stupid where they’re super high-intelligence but low in practicality and empathy.
But the truth is, that somewhere in most of the major nations, there is a report that shows the coming shitshow, and most of them have either realized that things are going to be unavoidably bad or have outright leaned into it.
“super high-intelligence but low in practicality and empathy” Just look at the brains behind the “Dark Enlightenment” and the “Network State”… and those at the Heritage Foundation… their agendas are all bankrupting scams from which the USA might never recover, which would only be poetic justice after what that they’ve done over the past centuries… and I said this despite all my love for certain extraordinary figures and acts of counter culture from there…
Considering the projections that the Atlantic might slow down… and a large part of Europe will suffer soon from a climate spanning more than one extreme but very little suitable architecture… the tables might turn to such a degree that some of us who happen to live in Europe – …but I struggle to call myself an “European” when the European Union is so strangled now by far-right thinking about migration and identity and by privacy-hostile policymakers, on top of all the nations refusing to let go of ethnonationalism – might have to migrate, not so many years from now, to an African, Asian or South American country and live more like the common people there, not like some douchebag Dubai-style expat…
Oh dear, those “third world” countries some people still mock out of pure ignorance rather than ideological slant… I may be wrong, but those countries seem in at least some ways better prepared for what’s to come… from sticking to traditional architecture that makes sense in the region… to making use of solar panels from China and whatever low tech discarded by the West they can make hold of… Most certainly, not everything is rosy, but we’ll be surprised. At least I’d very much like to see tables turning like this. “Europe” has learned nothing good from history. Western supremacy is stupidly suicidal.