The award for best Long Read of The Week goes to the inimitable Ron Unz for his 8,500-word opus, “The Iran War and the Manipulation of Oil Markets.” There’s no way to summarize it and do it justice — you’ll need to take the time to read it yourself, or click the audio button and let Ron read it to you. It’s quite worth your investment.

If you’ve been wondering why the price of a barrel of oil has hovered around the same level it was before the war began, only hitting $100 this week for the first time since May as the conflict spilled into the Red Sea, this article will begin to shed some light on the subject.

Read it alongside this excellent analysis from from his new venture, SNAFU Investing, and let us know your thoughts on the picture that begins to emerge.

SNAFU Investing with Lau Vegys

Who Canceled the Oil Apocalypse?

Remember the oil shock…

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2 days ago · 62 likes · 16 comments · Lau Vegys

As we explored in this week’s podcast with of The Daily Doom, the gap between official economic statistics and the economy people actually experience seems to be widening. Here’s another great indicator to demonstrate that: more Americans are treating themselves to the five-finger discount.

A new survey from LendingTree reveals that 30% of Americans say they’ve shoplifted, up significantly from 23% in 2024. Food and nonalcoholic drinks remain the most commonly stolen items, with most respondents citing financial strain as their motivation for shoplifting. Younger people were more likely to say they’ve shoplifted at least once, and respondents say they are more likely to steal from a chain store like Walmart or Family Dollar than from a local store.

This tracks with the sentiment recently revealed in a now-infamous New York Times podcast, in which three millennial influencers discussed their views on stealing from box stores as not “right” but not necessarily wrong either.

Watch this space… the shoplifting index may be the new benchmark for the real economy and public sentiment all rolled into one: when more people are stealing food and feeling morally OK about it, the economy — and society — may not be as healthy as the spreadsheets suggest.

A man and his wife went into a Kohl’s in suburban Minnesota to drop off some Amazon returns. Sounds like a pretty familiar scenario, right?

Well, imagine their surprise when they got back to the parking lot and were swarmed by four armed squad cars.

…four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting. It’s a situation that can quickly and frequently turn bad, so as unprepared as I was, I followed their orders, got out with my hands up, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.

What was happening, as it turns out, is that the police had incorrectly identified the vehicle’s license plates as stolen. The driver was Joel Feder, an automotive journalist and director of content and product for The Drive. He was test driving a $155,000 Land Rover with manufacturer’s plates that had been entered incompletely into a federal database used by Flock’s system to surveil traffic around the country.

Police received a clear image showing the mismatch but failed to verify it before tracking Feder in the vehicle for days and finally confronting him and his wife as suspected felons.

The now-viral tale has an ersatz happy ending, ultimately coming down to a matter of human error. But Feder says the mix-up is a warning that the integration between Flock and police departments into a nationwide surveillance grid is far from perfect. One trigger-happy cop could have set this course of events spiraling in a different and decidedly dangerous situation.

“They need better guardrails,” Feder told “NewsNation Prime” on Saturday.

Resistance to this Flocked Up digital prison is growing, which is welcome news. But don’t be surprised if it goes away temporarily, only to return in a form that’s harder to destroy and impossible to avoid.

Let’s make resistance fertile.

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So why do so many people feel like they are actually falling behind?

In our latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast, financial writer , of the Daily Doom substack, argues that the apparent normality may be sustained by something far less reassuring: credit cards, government borrowing, depleted reserves, and a willingness to keep pushing today’s costs onto tomorrow.

We look at how war and higher energy prices could intensify inflation, why student-loan defaults may be an early warning of wider household distress, and what happens when Social Security promises collide with a shrinking workforce and a rapidly rising national debt.

We also examine the enormous AI data centers being sold to rural communities as engines of economic growth. They require extraordinary amounts of electricity, water and public support, yet may create only a handful of permanent jobs — and could become obsolete before their costs have been recovered.

Then the conversation takes a turn toward something even more fundamental: the growing complexity of ordinary life. Why does my toaster need my email address? Why does parking require an app, an account, a credit card, and a photograph of your license plate? At what point does convenience become dependence — and dependence become a digital prison?

This episode is ultimately about the distance between what an economy appears to be and what it can actually sustain.

Watch the full conversation and decide how much of today’s prosperity is real — and how much has simply been borrowed from the future.

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Data centers have become a visible example of a major divide in America right now; on the one hand, all the “prosperity” and “healthy economy” politicians keep banging on about. On the other, the actual economy in which regular Joes and Janes participate.

So, what do data centers have to do with it?

The projects are sold to constituents as economic development, innovation, and investment. After state and local governments offer billions in tax breaks and other incentives to attract the facilities, they promise the investment will pay off in jobs and money flowing into the local economy.

“Data Centers are tremendous WINS for the States and Communities that are lucky enough to get them,” President Trump wrote in an oddly capitalized Truth Social post last week castigating New York governor Kathy Hochul for her recent decision to put a moratorium on data center construction.

“They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built,” the President continued. “Both the Taxes and the Jobs amount to LIQUID GOLD!”

The people in the communities where hundreds of acres are being occupied by data centers are increasingly seeing through this façade and arriving at a different conclusion: we’re on the losing end of this bargain.

Across the country, people are objecting to possible increases in their utility costs, industrial noise and pollution, light pollution, maximum penitentiary-like security, and relatively few permanent jobs that remain after the infrastructure has been built.

A 2,250-acre Meta data center in Louisiana required more than 5,000 workers during construction but is expected to end up creating just 500 permanent jobs when it opens. In Abilene, Texas, a data center the size of Central Park required a peak construction crew of 4,000 workers, but the developer is contractually obligated to maintain a staff of only 57 people once construction is complete, though the actual workforce may swell to around 100 people.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry says 500 jobs is better than no jobs. “I’ll take it,” he told CNBC last year. “I don’t know where the people are who complain about 500 jobs, but I’ll take them in Louisiana. We will take every job we can get.“

One would think the localities chosen to host these data centers would welcome the economic development, but new research shows that the communities fighting back are more often than not working class and lower-income places where people are questioning why their electricity, water, land, and public finances should be promised to some of the richest companies in the world.

Data scientist recently examined data on more than 1,400 operating and proposed data centers and matched their locations with census-tract information on household income, education and homeownership.

His most striking finding was that data centers in the lowest-income quarter of the communities studied encountered organized opposition 19 percent of the time, while in the wealthiest quarter, the rate was just 3.8 percent.

“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8,000 and $72,000,” Holtzman noted to , author of Blood in the Machine on Substack. “The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133k and $250k per year.”

In other words, lower-income neighborhoods resisted data center development at nearly five times the rate of wealthier ones. NIMBY — not in my backyard — is alive and well in these places.

That finding complicates the familiar claim that opposition to new development is primarily driven by affluent homeowners protecting their property values.

Even more interesting, resistance appears to be having an effect.

Among recently proposed data centers, Holtzman found that 28.2 percent of projects encountering community pushback were cancelled or suspended. Only 5.2 percent of projects without documented resistance met the same fate.

Holtzman calculated that the odds of cancellation were approximately six times higher when communities fought the project. Higher cancellation rates in lower-income areas could be statistically explained by the greater frequency of resistance there, rather than by income itself.

While the analysis demonstrates correlation but cannot prove that opposition alone caused each project to fail, its central conclusion is supported by a much broader change in public opinion.

A Heatmap survey in May 2026 found that 71 percent of respondents would oppose a data center near their home, including 55 percent who would strongly oppose it. Opposition reached 80 percent among adults under age 35 and extended across political parties and geographical regions.

A separate Gallup poll reached almost the same overall result. Respondents most frequently cited excessive water and electricity use, pollution, higher utility bills, and other effects on local quality of life. Gallup found no significant difference in overall opposition by income, suggesting that lower-income communities may not necessarily dislike data centers more than wealthier ones, they just may organize more frequently when projects are actually placed near them.

The easy conclusion here is that people don’t like artificial intelligence. But the more nuanced reasoning is that the conflict is centered around who receives the benefits of economic development and who absorbs its costs.

The AI industry wants communities to believe that data centers are essential infrastructure: the mills, factories, and railroads of a new industrial age. But factories historically employed a majority of the local community and produced tangible goods. Modern data centers can consume the electricity of a small city while employing only a handful of people after they are built. In other words, as opposed to a reciprocal relationship, data centers are parasitic.

The emerging revolt shows that communities are beginning to recognize this calculus. The fact that so many communities are finding their voice at the same time, and using it to show that the machinery of borrowed prosperity can still be stopped by the people expected to pay for it, is a rare silver lining in these otherwise bleak times. Perhaps it may lead more people to recognize that the future being built for us, by people who see us as ‘data livestock’, doesn’t have to be inevitable.

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Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, has spent the last two months away from public view. Amid reports of declining health, the 80-year-old has made only sporadic appearances in 2026, including one in April where he described US President Donald Trump as “mentally deranged.”

His return on Sunday, July 19, at a rally commemorating the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution was notable, therefore, not only because he appeared publicly, but because of the message he delivered.

“There won’t be any more elections here for [opponents supported by the USA] to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega declared. “The days when parties backed by the Yankees and the Somocistas would return to power are over — never again.”

This wasn’t exactly a ‘mic drop’ moment — Nicaragua didn’t have a particularly healthy electoral system to begin with. The last elections were held in 2021 and were widely disputed, after opponents and business leaders were detained and dissent was criminalized.

In 2025, Ortega — who has ruled continuously since returning to power in 2007—further consolidated his position through constitutional reforms that named his wife, Rosario Murillo, “co-president.” He also extended presidential terms to six years and placed the judiciary and legislature under even greater executive control. Together, the couple now controls virtually every part of the state, including the armed forces and the courts.

What stands out from Ortega’s speech on Sunday is how he is apparently abandoning the need to preserve any fiction or fantasy around the role of elections in the outcome of a nation. He hasn’t gone into any details on how elections could be called off indefinitely, but ultimately the mechanism doesn’t matter much. What matters is the message the government sends to its people when it decides even the performance of public consent is unnecessary.

But the Nicaraguan people weren’t the only intended audience for Ortega’s speech. It appears he was also speaking directly to Washington, delivering the unmistakable message that Nicaragua’s political future would no longer be negotiated through institutions recognized or influenced by the United States.

The timing of that message is significant. In recent years, Nicaragua has been rapidly expanding its relationship with China. Ortega broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan and restored ties with Beijing in December 2021, giving China another foothold in a part of the world traditionally regarded as Washington’s sphere of influence. Two years later, Xi Jinping and Ortega elevated the relationship to a “strategic partnership,” while a bilateral free-trade agreement took effect on January 1, 2024.

The relationship has since become more than symbolic. According to an investigation published by El País just last week, the Ortega government has granted 84 mining concessions to 22 Chinese-owned companies, concessions that now cover approximately 10 percent of Nicaragua’s territory. The deals include land claimed by Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and have reportedly been issued without any meaningful community consultation.

With China as an alternate source of investment, trade, infrastructure, and international legitimacy, Ortega has the confidence that previous leaders may not have had, giving him an ally to turn to when Washington applies pressure.

That certainly doesn’t mean Nicaragua no longer needs America. The US is still Nicaragua’s main trading partner and primary source of remittances, with bilateral goods trade totaling an estimated $7.4 billion in 2025. The International Monetary Fund has warned that changes in US tariffs and migration policy could materially affect Nicaragua’s economy.

So, Ortega isn’t exactly declaring independence from the US.

In light of the fact that America has spent years imposing sanctions, condemning Nicaragua’s repression, and demanding the restoration of democratic rule, Ortega appears to believe those demands can be ignored — and that China gives him enough economic and diplomatic leverage to absorb the consequences.

The fact that Ortega no longer believes Washington is willing, or strategically able, to use enough of its power to threaten his rule may be a small but conspicuous marker of the changing world order. A government in America’s former sphere of influence has closed the electoral path, rejected Washington’s authority, and placed bets on a future in which the United States is no longer the only power that matters. Given what we are watching unfold in the Persian Gulf, that’s definitely a signal worth noting.

Roubini went on Bloomberg TV this weekend and casually explained that AI and robots would make large chunks of the population permanently unemployable, blowing a hole in the payroll tax system that supports Social Security and eventually making universal basic income or partial government ownership of Big Tech an inevitability.

The Bloomberg hosts, Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene, barely blinked and only briefly noted that Roubini’s future sounded like everyone losing their jobs. But then they cheerfully returned to reminiscing about Davos. Civilization may be approaching the end of productive work, but remember that time at the bar in the Alps?? Those were good times…

Roubini, for his part, tried to paint an optimistic picture: machines do the work, growth explodes, governments tax the winners, and everyone gets a check. The less charming and more realistic version is that humans become unnecessary as workers but remain useful only in their role as consumers. The state sends a monthly allowance to keep the shopping carts moving and the pitchforks in storage.

Welcome to the post-work future: fewer jobs, more surveillance, and just enough “money” to keep Amazon delivering.

Roubini’s post-work future depends on taxing the winners and redistributing the proceeds. Canada may want to check whether the winners are planning to stick around.

A new report from the Fraser Institute says the top 20 percent of families now pay 65 percent of personal income taxes and 58 percent of all taxes (sales, payroll, property, and other taxes), despite earning just under half of total family income.

The report comes as Canada expands benefits, raises expectations, and watches high earners, doctors, and other skilled workers head south. A November 2025 report found that 20 percent of immigrants leave Canada within 25 years of landing, with onward migration peaking in the first five years. Immigrants with doctorates are nearly twice as likely to leave Canada within five years as those with bachelor’s degrees, and highly-skilled immigrants are more than twice as likely as lower-skilled immigrants to leave Canada within five years.

Progressive taxation is supposed to make the wealthy carry more of the load. The problem begins when the entire system depends on a small, mobile group unwilling to be the national ATM. How’s that working out, Canada?

So, when the national ATM decides enough is enough, there’s always a Caribbean island willing to sell an escape route. At least, there was…

The European Union is now threatening to strip visa-free travel from Antigua, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Grenada unless they shut down programs that sell citizenship to foreign investors — programs the small island nations say have become critical sources of revenue for them.

A critical source of revenue for one government is an annoyance to another government. People who want to unburden themselves from the pilfering that comes from high-tax countries will alway seek new places — it’s the free marketplace of sovereignty.

Until it isn’t.

Western nations have argued that the citizenship programs offer a backdoor for applicants from other countries to gain visa-free access to their countries with little due diligence. OK… a fair concern; citizenship should require a little more checking than a Costco membership.

Still, the ultimatum is rich coming from a bloc built around the concept of free movement of capital and people. Europe spent decades teaching the world that citizenship was an economic asset, but now it’s alarmed when small Caribbean nations are charging market rates for it.

Apparently passports may be bought, sold and leveraged — just not by countries too small to write the rules.

We take these kinds of grumblings as a shot across the bow; your ability to move freely and find places to protect the spoils of your own hard work is being eroded with each passing month. Continue to position yourself wisely in this increasingly hostile environment.

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Then the sun came back out. When nothing dramatic happened immediately, most people stopped paying attention.

of Overcome Babylon says that may have been a serious mistake.

In the latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast, Ojeda connects the 2017, 2023, and 2024 eclipses to an ancient biblical symbol, earlier periods of upheaval, and two of the most dangerous fault zones in North America. He also links the eclipse paths to Iran, the shifting balance between East and West, and the increasingly fragile systems on which modern life depends.

His central argument is not that an eclipse causes an earthquake, a war, or the collapse of an empire. It is that signs arrive in the heavens before events take place on earth.

The larger question is what anyone should do with such a warning.

Abraham rejects both complacency and panic. He does not advise sitting still and assuming that God, FEMA, or the existing system will take care of things. Nor does he advocate living in a state of permanent fear, frantically buying supplies, or waiting for catastrophe to strike. Instead, he recommends strategic relocation, resilient living, and a deliberate reduction in dependence on fragile systems.

This conversation is perhaps not what many have come to expect from Collapse Life — but it is perhaps one of the most consequential discussions we’ll ever have.

Watch and decide for yourself.

NOTE: The slides shown during this episode are a small part of a more complete analysis presented in Abraham’s second book, Bible Prophecy Secrets II. The complete presentation is available below, for paid subscribers only. We want to acknowledge and thank Abraham for generously sharing his insights with our subscribers.

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A few weeks ago, leaked records offered a rare look inside Dialog, the invitation-only network cofounded by Peter Thiel that brings together political officials, military leaders, technology executives, investors, intellectuals, and celebrities for off-the-record conversations.

The records appeared to show 222 people were registered to attend this year’s retreat, scheduled for August 12-16 at the five-star Powerscourt Hotel in Ireland’s County Wicklow.

The gathering has now been called off.

After weeks of media scrutiny, political criticism, and plans for public protests, the hotel confirmed that the August event would no longer take place there. Once the identity of the group, its guest list, and its agenda became public, opposition politicians and pro-Palestinian campaigners in Ireland began to demand that the event be cancelled completely.

Sinn Féin lawmaker John Brady argued that Dialog should not be permitted to relocate elsewhere in Ireland, citing Thiel’s role as a co-founder of Palantir and the defense company’s support for the Israeli military.

“The Government should make it crystal clear that Ireland is not a venue for events connected to those profiting from the genocide in Gaza,” he said, while calling for officials to disclose whether any ministers or state agencies had been involved in planning the event.

Dialog had operated for two decades without generating this kind of resistance in the past, largely because most people did not know what it was, who would be there, and where it was meeting. Once those details became public, the venue faced reputational pressure, politicians faced questions, and participants faced demands to explain themselves.

Even before the hotel pulled out, the people associated with Dialog had already begun running for the exits.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein acknowledged attending twice, but emphasized that he had never encountered Peter Thiel there. Klein described the 2018 gathering as optimistic and idealistic, but said that by 2022 the atmosphere had become more “curdled and resentful.”

Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt also confirmed attending two past conferences, while stressing that he had also never met Thiel and regarded him as a political and ideological opposite. Actress Sophia Bush said she was a past attendee but that Thiel was someone “you could not pay me to be in a room with.” Irish Senator Lynn Ruane, who had accepted an invitation to the August gathering, withdrew and publicly apologized for failing to conduct adequate due diligence.

When participation was private, access to Dialog was valuable to its participants, offering proximity to power, introductions to influential people, and conversations unavailable to the general public. Once participation became public, the same access suddenly required backpedaling, PR spin, and careful explanation.

Rather than taking responsibility for having systems that exposed highly sensitive information, Dialog stated that it had been attacked by a “well-known criminal,” in reference to the anonymous Swiss hacker who disclosed the information. Its lawyers demanded that Wired, one of the publications which published the leaked information, surrender what they called “stolen” data.

Wired and outside cybersecurity experts found no evidence that anyone had broken through a protected system. According to their analysis, Dialog’s website loaded the records into visitors’ browsers after they entered an email address, without even requiring a password. The information was not sitting behind sophisticated security defeated by an elite hacker. It had effectively been left in public view by Dialog’s own lax configuration.

There is something almost too perfect about an elite network populated by surveillance executives, so-called intelligence officials, and technology leaders exposing its own membership through elementary security failures — and then attempting to label the people who noticed as “well known criminals.”

What’s interesting is that the original leak showed that anticipating social breakdown has become a networking opportunity for the parasite class. (The agenda ranged from artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, and preparations for a third world war, to sessions titled “It’s Fun to Be in Charge” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”) But the aftermath shows how much networks like this, and no doubt there are many more, depend on remaining outside public view.

Sunlight may not have destroyed Dialog, but it did something potentially even more consequential: it gave secrecy a reputational cost.

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Their grandparents had the Summer of Love. In 2026, young people disillusioned with the digital world answered with the ‘Summer of Ludd.’

Two weeks ago, New York City’s East Village became a gathering place for a new generation of Luddites. Events included self-defense workshops, tea parties, journaling with scraps and found materials, and our personal favorite: Google in Real Life, where people gathered to ask and answer each other’s questions. Another hands-on session introduced participants to shortwave radios, FM transmitters and walkie-talkies.

Participants also revisited the original Luddites, the skilled textile workers who rebelled in early 19th-century England against factory owners using new machines to deskill their work, drive down wages, and concentrate their economic power.

Two centuries later, their argument feels familiar. Earlier this year, Gallup found that roughly one-third of young people said AI made them angry, while 42 percent said it made them anxious. Excitement about AI had fallen to just 22 percent.

Young people have certainly not rejected technology outright — about half still use generative AI at least weekly. But many are increasingly angry about what technology has become: intrusive, compulsory, addictive, and designed to displace human judgment.

Gen X had the iconic printer beatdown scene in Office Space: three frustrated workers dragging a piece of office equipment into a field and smashing it to pieces.

Maybe the ‘Summer of Ludd’ is Gen Z’s response. A bit more constructive than smashing machines… but maybe, just maybe, while late 60s feminists burned bras, this generation will act on the impulse to burn their phones.

When Venezuela’s government stopped publishing credible economic statistics in 2016, Bloomberg began tracking the price of a café con leche at a bakery in eastern Caracas. The result is a decade’s worth of data that shows what monetary collapse looks like in real time.

Today, the price of a simple cup of coffee has gone parabolic. The years immediately following 2016 appear almost flat, but not because things were economically stable. It’s because the latest price increases are so extreme they visually crush everything that came before them. After a sharp rise in 2025, the line went nearly vertical in 2026.

This month, the tracked price climbed above 2,000 bolívars, up from around 300 a year earlier — an increase of roughly 563 percent in just 12 months.

The blunt simplicity of Bloomberg’s index is why it’s so striking. Governments frequently revise their methodologies, suppress statistics, lop six zeroes off currencies, and declare fresh beginnings. All the while, the people buying breakfast still know their money is dying.

America is nowhere near Venezuela’s monetary collapse — at least not yet. But the growing suspicion that official inflation figures bear little resemblance to real life is becoming palpable.

Questions remain, though. What does the breaking point look like? Is the same hockey stick fate waiting silently in the wings for the right moment to pounce in America? If the Pandora’s box that was opened in Hormuz doesn’t get straightened out quickly, that breaking point may come sooner rather than later. Hello Zimbabwe!

Poor Dr. Evil. All he wanted was sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. Instead, because of all the bureaucratic red tape, he got ill-tempered sea bass. We bet he’d be pretty excited about what the technology industry is cooking up now.

The CEO of a company called Axon, Rick Smith, says his team is actively researching drones capable of physically stopping suspects using tasers. We already have drones that can provide real-time surveillance. The next obvious step in is to let them “put an effect on somebody” — corporate language for remotely incapacitating a human being. For ‘public safety’, of course.

The dystopian future just got one step closer.

Axon insists… cough, cough… it will never build intentionally lethal drones. Its stated mission is to replace situations that might otherwise end in death with less-lethal alternatives. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But we’re less interested in whether a taser is preferable to a bullet and more interested in what happens when force becomes this cheap, scalable, and psychologically detached from the person who deploys it.

A police officer standing several feet from a suspect must make a visible decision and accept at least some immediate risk. A drone operator could eventually stun someone from a command center miles away — a gamer’s wet dream. Or maybe the ‘operator’ is AI… in which case, there is zero emotion, zero ethics, zero morals and zero accountability.

Maybe Axon genuinely intends to keep humans firmly in control and lethal force out of the equation. But history suggests that once institutions possess the ability to remotely immobilize people, the argument will quickly shift from whether it should be used to how often.

The future, apparently, is a flying robot watching you from above and congratulating itself for not killing you.

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Then reality sets in and they ask: Will I actually be able to live that way?

In this episode of Collapse Life, Kemble Hildreth talks about his new app, , which aims to take the guesswork out of many of the choices facing those seeking freedom. Hildreth describes the app as the “Zillow for Living Free,” which is a useful marketing phrase, but this conversation goes well beyond real estate to explore the possibilities that still exist, even as the normal American script collapses.

You know the routine: college, debt, job, house, constant work to afford the house. And then, desperate hope that the system holds together long enough for you to retire from the job that paid for the house you were too busy to ever enjoy.

More and more people are coming to the realization that this treadmill is a dead end. Some saw it during the 2008 crash, while for others the eye-opening moment came during COVID. Some are seeing it now for the first time in the form of stagnant wages in the face of unbelievable grocery prices, impossible housing costs, layoffs, social fragmentation, institutional distrust, and the vague (but persistent) sense that the future being sold is not one they actually want.

Hildreth’s work begins from that recognition, but it doesn’t stop at the fantasy version of “opting out.” This is no romantic pitch for running away to the woods. In fact, he is pretty blunt about the illusions that often surround off-grid living, explaining that most people who call themselves “off-grid” are still deeply dependent on the broader system.

His real point of differentiation is reducing complexity.

A smaller home takes less energy to heat and cool. A simpler lifestyle can have fewer fixed costs. A place where local rules are more lenient will actually allow the kind of life you want.

One of Hildreth’s strongest (and smartest) pieces of advice is also one of the least glamorous: rent the lifestyle before you buy it. Go work or volunteer on a farm before you invest in a herd of goats. Rent in an area you’re interested in before sinking a bunch of money into a plot of land. Test yourself and really explore whether you can handle the labor, responsibility, isolation, and expense that comes with 50 acres, solar panels, and animal husbandry. Because the real truth is that a lot of people think they want “freedom” but what they really want is a more aesthetically pleasing dependency.

Real freedom may not be a homestead or rustic cabin with a view of green rolling hills. It could be something far less dramatic — like lowering your overhead, selling a bunch of the stuff in your garage you don’t really need, getting involved in your local council to ensure the rules in your location are friendly to folks seeking self-direction. And above all else (and the Collapse Life team speaks from experience here) staying flexible and refusing to become emotionally trapped by land, possessions, or a fantasy version of what it means to be “prepared.”

There is no way to ‘app’ our way out of collapse… and we’re not going to buy our way into resilience. We are not going to achieve freedom by purchasing a different lifestyle package from the same system that made us dependent in the first place.

But we can start asking better questions, and Hildreth’s project can help with that, walking you through some of the main components of successfully building an alternative life.

This conversation is for anyone who has looked at the standard path and thought: there has to be another way. There is, but it probably starts at a smaller, humbler, and more practical scale than you think.

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A small group of defense, intelligence, and lawmaking figures recently gathered in a suburb of Washington, DC, to imagine how they would respond if a nuclear weapon detonated in space.

In the fictional scenario, the detonation caused American satellites to fail, crippling GPS systems and wreaking havoc on financial markets. Officials were forced to wrestle with who was responsible, how quickly the United States could rebuild its satellite constellations, whether nuclear escalation could still be avoided, and how ordinary civilians might cope if the invisible systems that hold daily life together begin to go out.

While the exercise was ‘fictional,’ the market behind it is very real. This war game was organized by Fuse Energy Technologies, a fusion-energy company whose business model depends on the kind of future it was asking Washington to imagine.

Founded in 2019 by JC Btaiche, who was 19 years old at the time, Fuse is valued at more than $200 million. The company has a two-track business model — generating commercial revenue through nuclear effects testing, while at the same time developing long-term fusion power technology. By using pulsed-power machines to simulate the extreme radiation environments of nuclear reactions, they provide what they call "Radiation-as-a-Service" (RaaS) to government and the private sector.

Btaiche’s rapid ascent to this geopolitical playground carries a somewhat mysterious and distinctly cinematic quality. Born in Lebanon, he immigrated to Canada before migrating south to the heart of the American defense tech apparatus. By age 25, an age when most peers are navigating entry-level corporate jobs, Btaiche had successfully transformed himself into a trusted, high-clearance service provider for the United States military and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

So, Fuse is not some neutral convener of preparedness conversations. The rehearsal also appears to be a sales pitch. Fuse sells, or wants to sell, nuclear effects testing and radiation hardening capabilities. The tabletop scenario imagines a nuclear event in space that exposes weaknesses in satellites and other systems. The likely conclusion is not difficult to see: America needs more radiation testing, more hardened infrastructure, more resilient satellites, more simulation capacity, and more spending. That conclusion happens to point directly toward Fuse’s business model.

In February 2024, DefenseScoop reported that the Air Force had selected Fuse to develop nuclear effects testing options for military survivability and adaptability. Btaiche told the outlet that existing nuclear weapons simulators were “old and aging out,” “oversubscribed,” and mismatched to the evolved threat profile — a remarkable insight for a 20-something. He also described the contract as a modest deal to get Fuse “our foot in the door” into a projected $127 billion pool of Defense and Energy Department programs for nuclear simulation, nuclear effects testing, and fusion pulse power over five years.

That foot in the door quickly became a massive footprint. In April 2026, Fuse opened a multi-million-dollar radiation testing facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico — strategically located near Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories — specifically designed to relieve critical defense supply bottlenecks and scale up their testing capacity.

The company’s personnel only make the story stranger. Maura Burns, a former Assistant Director of the CIA's Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center, was recently appointed to its advisory board. The company’s lead engineer, Vahid Damideh, was previously one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, where he oversaw the country’s National Nuclear Fusion Project.

Those details are not evidence of wrongdoing, but they matter because they reveal the world Fuse inhabits: former intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, defense customers, space infrastructure, radiation testing, and a Washington policy class being invited to imagine a future in which all of this becomes urgent.

“We felt like a war game was the best way to educate people,” Btaiche told Axios reporter Colin Demarest, who was offered an exclusive to cover the recent tabletop exercise. Btaiche explained that the goal was to help people “understand why the hell this matters and what the world may look like in five to 10 years.”

That admission is revealing. The exercise was not merely a neutral rehearsal for an unknowable crisis but a tool of persuasion, a way to take an abstract vulnerability and turn it into a roomful of people feeling the urgency of a market Fuse is already trying to serve.

Tabletop exercises have a long institutional history, from military war games to Cold War nuclear planning to the post-9/11 homeland-security world. They can expose real weaknesses, but they can also become a ritual through which elites rehearse disasters that the public is rarely allowed to understand until after the failures begin.

Since COVID, exercises like these have carried a strange aftertaste. Event 201, hosted by Johns Hopkins, the World Economic Forum, and the Gates Foundation in October 2019, simulated a fictional coronavirus pandemic just months before the real one emerged. Johns Hopkins has emphasized that the exercise was not a prediction, but even so, it makes many people uncomfortable to learn that institutions rehearse disasters before the public is forced to live through them.

Even if Fuse’s recent dog-and-pony show in Washington doesn’t turn out to be predictive of a real future event, it is revealing because it shows which systems insiders think are most fragile and where budgetary stockpiles are being built.

At one time, preparedness meant identifying a vulnerability and hardening the public system. Now, that same vulnerability becomes a procurement category. The failure is rehearsed, the threat is narrated, the officials are gathered, the urgency is created, and the mitigation is sold back to the taxpayers.

That is the business model of a state that has fused with the industries that service its anxieties.

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Prediction markets like Kalshi are enjoying a winning streak when it comes to trading volume, thanks to events like the FIFA World Cup and Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce. CNBC reports that Kalshi did more than $30 billion in trading volume in June.

That’s billion with a ‘B.’ In one month.

Scroll down to the bottom of that story (which most people don’t do these days) and you’ll notice a disclosure advising readers that “CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.”

According to a new joint investigation by news sites and , both CNBC and CNN have been heavily promoting Kalshi, but only disclosing Kalshi as their business partner infrequently and inconsistently.

CNN has featured Kalshi in at least 115 segments of its “The Odds” feature, often with data analyst Harry Enten presenting market probabilities as usable insights. CNBC has published dozens of articles on Kalshi markets and regularly integrates them into on-air graphics and reporting. Their disclosure, when used, is written in typical legalese, but the terms of the actual partnership mean the network stands to benefit directly from converting viewers into new Kalshi users and from growth on the platform, more generally. In some on-air and online segments these ties reportedly go unmentioned.

Kalshi has described the arrangements as standard data and integration deals, while emphasizing that viewers can choose how to use the information. “People aren't dumb,” the company said in a statement after Popular Information/Public Notice released their reporting. “They hear and see these disclosures and can choose to use our data as added context or choose not to.”

Kalshi’s rival, Polymarket, has its own partnerships with mainstream media. In January 2026, it struck a deal with Dow Jones to share its prediction data with outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and Investor’s Business Daily. It was Polymarket’s first big media partnership, and was followed shortly thereafter by a partnership with .

“Journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets,” Polymarket wrote in an X post announcing the deal. How convenient!

We beg to differ.

Journalism outlets present odds as though they are legitimate signals of what ‘the market’ thinks. A ticker across the bottom of the screen gives a ‘breaking financial-news’ façade. Hosts talk about probabilities as if they are neutral indicators rather than the output of incentive-driven markets that can be thinly traded, gamed, or influenced by the very coverage now amplifying them. And somewhere in the background, the viewer is being nudged to participate.

To be clear, that’s not better journalism.

That concern becomes even sharper when placed against the longer history of Polymarket and the national-security roots of prediction markets, traced in a new investigation by Whitney Webb and author and journalist, Mark Goodwin.

Webb and Goodwin argue that today’s prediction-market boom didn’t come out of nowhere. Long before Kalshi and Polymarket were being dressed up as clever financial tools, elements of the US national-security apparatus were already interested in prediction markets as mechanisms for forecasting, information aggregation, and policy decision-making.

According to Webb, the government’s interest began around 2000, when DARPA program manager Michael Foster persuaded colleagues to fund research into whether prediction markets could help guide public policy. DARPA, an agency of the Department of Defense, also saw another use: prediction markets might help intelligence agencies aggregate dispersed information and bypass bureaucratic obstacles. After 9/11, when intelligence agencies blamed “siloed” information for their failure to prevent the attacks, that logic became even more powerful.

The solution offered by the intelligence world was not less centralization, but more: more data sharing, more surveillance, more predictive tools, more systems designed to turn scattered human behavior into actionable signals and patterns.

Webb connects this push to the rise of intelligence-linked data-sharing and surveillance projects including Chiliad, founded by Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell; Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel; and Total Information Awareness, conceived and directed by retired Navy Admiral John Poindexter, who served as National Security Advisor during the Reagan administration.

Her argument is that prediction markets belong to a broader post-9/11 architecture of intelligence, surveillance, behavioral forecasting, and policy-shaping technology, and seen in that light, the media partnerships matter even more.

If prediction markets remain niche betting platforms, their influence is limited. But once their odds are piped into cable news graphics, financial news coverage, newsletters, and political reporting, they begin to shape what the public thinks is likely, credible, inevitable, or already “priced in.”

The opposite can also happen — a strange mashup of a Las Vegas casino and the UK’s ‘nudge unit’, where betting on the odds to make money shapes the public opinion and justifies ‘necessary’ action.

Media coverage can move attention toward a market. More attention can move money into the market. More money can make the market look more authoritative. That appearance of authority can then be cited by the media as evidence of what “the market” believes.

This is an incredible danger and a fundamental betrayal of the role of journalism.

Once media companies, traders, political insiders, celebrities, intelligence-adjacent networks, and retail users are all inside the same feedback loop, the market doesn’t just wager on the future — it may actually be helping to create it.

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had never seen the 2006 cult film, which imagines a future America so polluted, dumbed down, over-branded, over-medicated, and nutritionally ruined that the most average man cryogenically frozen in the past, goes on to become the smartest man alive in the future.

It’s a somewhat ridiculous film that is also uncomfortably prophetic.

We talked about the film’s now-famous jokes — crops being watered with an electrolyte drink, a lawyer who got his degree at Costco, hospitals that look like casinos, television programs like ‘Ow, my balls,’ corporations dominating everything, and a president who is more wrestling spectacle than statesman. But the deeper question was not whether Idiocracy is funny. It was whether modern satire can even keep up anymore.

That took the conversation into a broader discussion about what’s happened to comedy, especially political satire. In Britain, Susan remembered shows like Spitting Image, Yes Minister, and In the Thick of It — programs that gave people a shared language for laughing at power. In North America, talked about the uneven but important tradition of shows like Saturday Night Live, Canada’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and a prolific era of mockumentaries such as Spinal Tap, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman… a genre which seems to have disappeared.

A major cultural shift was noted, as well. The old water-cooler culture is mostly gone. People no longer gather around the same shows in the same way. Even pub culture is fading in Britain. Cinema clubs now have to be organized intentionally just to get people out of the house. Memes and clips have replaced the shared experience of watching something together and laughing about it the next day.

On top of everything, there is the fear of offending and being cancelled. Where comedy once worked by pushing into uncomfortable territory and reflecting our absurdities back to us, much of the public square now feels too brittle for that.

One of the strongest themes of the conversation was that satire is not frivolous. It has always been one of the ways human beings make sense of power, bureaucracy, propaganda, social pressure, and despair. Films like Brazil, Wag the Dog, The Truman Show, Don’t Look Up, The Death of Stalin, and even Iran’s Marmoulak (The Lizard) all use humor, absurdity, and exaggeration to reveal something true about the world.

The problem now is that reality itself has become so absurd that even satire struggles to exaggerate it. How do you parody a culture in which politics already looks like professional wrestling, medicine increasingly looks like automated button-pushing, language is degraded in real time, food is engineered for profit rather than nourishment, and AI is being offered as a substitute for thought, friendship, creativity, and even reality?

This was definitely not a doom session, however. In fact, one of the most important moments came early in the conversation, when a viewer questioned whether it was appropriate to talk about films and fun when so much suffering is happening in the world.

It is a fair question.

Our answer was that laughter is not denial or avoidance. Art, film, literature, comedy, and conversation are part of how human beings stay sane in difficult times. If all we do is carry the weight of the world every day, without ever setting it down, we eventually collapse under it.

There are certainly real things to be outraged about. But there are also countless ways we are manipulated into outrage, distraction, division, and despair. Sometimes the most rebellious thing we can do is pause, laugh, look around, and remember what is real.

Next week, Book Chat returns to more serious territory with Sarah Wilson’s I Eat the Stars, a new book on collapse, meaning, children, money, and the spiritual questions that come with facing a world in decline. Susan will lead that conversation on July 12, and Sarah Wilson will join Book Chat on July 19.

After that, we’ll take a short summer hiatus and return in September with more books, more conversations, and hopefully still enough humor to keep us honest.

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Students at Quebec’s École nationale d’horlogerie may be among the few who are not anxious about their jobs being stolen by a humanoid robot soon after they graduate.

That’s because they’re learning something artificial intelligence definitely cannot do: how to sit in a quiet room for long hours, hold your breath, and reassemble parts so tiny a small breeze can ruin a day’s work.

This week the CBC profiled Canada’s only watchmaking school, and we highly encourage you to read the entire article or, better yet, listen to the audio documentary. It’s a superb example of radio journalism — the kind for which CBC became famous. And while Notes is normally full of snark and bite, this time we’ll just say this is a story worth reading.

It describes how the school in Trois-Rivières, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River northeast of Montreal, was founded after World War II to help veterans re-enter civilian life through a skill that required patience, discipline, precision, and calm. Eighty years later, it is still teaching how to repair machines most people don’t use, in a culture where most people throw things away.

One of the most poignant moments comes from Louis-Philippe Grondin, a 47-year-old student who used to work as an interior designer. He left the industry after becoming frustrated with creating spaces out of materials good enough to last for a lifetime, but which would all go into the trash in five to seven years because it was out of fashion. “I wasn’t at ease with that,” he said.

“It’s more meaningful,” Grondin says, “to maintain something.” Amen to that!

Cynics might argue that the students at a watchmaking school are wasting their time and effort. Who needs a watch to tell time anymore? Your phone does that, along with your oven, your car, and countless other digital gadgets.

A phone can tell you what time it is, but it can’t remind you what that time is worth. Leave that to a website called foodnevercomes.com. It does exactly what it says.

It looks just like a regular delivery app, where you can scroll menus, customize an order, enter an address, choose a payment method, and track a fake courier across a fake map.

But nothing is cooked, nothing is paid for, and no food will ever arrive.

The app belongs to a growing category of something called ‘dopamine sites’: digital spaces that recreate the thrill of buying without the inconvenience of actually receiving, using, digesting, cleaning up, or living with anything. It is consumption stripped down to its purest form: anticipation without consequence.

So, in contrast to the watchmaking school in Quebec, where students are learning to bring back to life something that is very real, we have a viral app from South Korea that caters to people who order food when they’re not hungry, only because they’re so under-stimulated, restless, and bored out of their skulls that pretending to order a hamburger from a restaurant that doesn’t exist can feel like some sort of relief.

Welcome to the dopamine economy, where people learn to desire without receiving, choose without committing, consume without consuming, and simulate satisfaction just long enough to survive another evening inside the matrix. This pure conditioning for life inside the digital corral. As we always try to remind: stay human, friends.

Since it’s a holiday weekend in America, we’ll keep this week’s Notes short, and end on some seemingly good news. In his July 4th speech, President Trump made mention of interplanetary travel:

“We’re going to be going to Mars very soon. And I think that's something that we do have in mind. And we're going to do the moon and we're going to go from there. We're going to go to Mars, and we're going to continue to be way ahead.”

Does that mean Don and Elon are back together again? We’re not going to Mars without Elon, right? Add this to the wedding of the year, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden with about a thousand of their closest celebrity friends, and we’re feeling the love here in America this weekend.

(It wouldn’t be Notes from the Edge of Civilization without a little snark, right?)

Join us at 12:30 ET for Book Chat. This week we’re actually going to be talking about movies that predicted the future — what they got right and what still hasn’t come to pass. It’ll be fun and light after weeks of talking collapse. Be there!

The 250th anniversary of the United States is no small feat. For all its failures, contradictions, betrayals, lies, and unfinished promises, America is still one of the most extraordinary political experiments in human history.

The idea that ordinary people could build a life, speak freely, worship freely, own property, raise families, form communities, and govern themselves is still a radical thought in many parts of the world.

But we must acknowledge: the American Dream is on shaky ground. Despite this, even if it’s not what it once was, it’s absolutely worth defending.

That’s why we decided to share our thoughts this week in the video monologue above.

Collapse Life was never meant to be a doom-and-gloom project. Yes, we talk honestly about institutional overreach, narrative deception, economic fragility, political dysfunction, technological tyranny, social atomization, and the slow unraveling of systems people once trusted. It’s heavy stuff, and we get that not everyone wants to face it or, potentially, has the mental bandwidth to understand it. That’s OK.

What we won’t do is pretend such things don’t exist — it would be dishonest at the very least. Collapse Life tries to tackle our future forthrightly, asking honest questions and rejecting controlled narratives and gatekeepers. In the murky water that is modern America lies a truthful, painful, jubilant, and candid truth… and we seek it, even if it is the Holy Grail.

Collapse is just part of the story we tell. Just as often, we talk about what people do in response to what they see.

Do they check out completely? Do they despair? Do they hand over their agency to experts, algorithms, bureaucrats, and institutions that have already failed them?

Some do. But others dig deeper and try harder — focusing closer to home, closer to reality, closer to each other. For example, the man who has generously taken us under his wing — Peter Grandich — devotes a substantial amount of time and effort to his local food bank: the Freehold Area Open Door. That’s Grandich literally putting his money where his mouth is.

That’s the best of America. That’s the work that inspires us here at Collapse Life and that we try to highlight, embrace, and support.

Certainly, we want to tell the truth about what in our society is breaking. But we also want to highlight those people who are still building: families, farmers, thinkers, makers, homesteaders, dissidents, teachers, neighbors, small businesses, local communities, and ordinary people trying to recover responsibility in an age that trains them to outsource it.*

The American Dream was never about ease. It was about working hard, taking chances, and creating things — homes, families, livelihoods, communities, opportunities. Choices that we control.

That dream has taken a lot of hits over 250 years. We’ve seen it cheapened by consumerism, strangled by debt, hollowed out by bureaucracy, debased by forces that want people passive and demoralized, and sold back to us as propaganda and jingoism. We’ve also watched secularization move America away from its spiritual North Star.

But something real still survives underneath it all, and if we want to see it continue for another 250 years we don’t need slogans and flag-waving. We need people who still believe in creating things, even when the foundation feels unstable.

That’s why reader support matters.

Collapse Life is 100% independent. We’re not backed by a media company, a think tank, a political party, or any corporate sponsorship. This work exists because people like you choose to support it. We promise it will always be that way — in the marketplace of ideas, your support IS our survival.

Paid subscriptions allow us to keep producing articles, interviews, book chats, livestreams, monologues, and deeper conversations that don’t fit neatly inside the usual boxes. Your support allows us to keep asking better questions, following uncomfortable threads, and looking for signs of life in places the mainstream conversation usually ignores.

If Collapse Life has helped you make sense of the moment we’re in, feel less alone, or remember that collapse is not about surrender, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Or sharing our articles far and wide. Your support helps keep this project alive and allows us to continue highlighting the people still doing real, honest-to-goodness American things.

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Thank you for reading, watching, listening, and being part of this community.

* If you know someone who embodies the best of America, share your suggestions with us by emailing info@collapselife.com — we’d love to speak to them.

One year ago, historic flash floods devastated Texas Hill Country, killing at least 139 people and causing over $1 billion in damages.

Meteorologists explained that the flooding was caused by a “mesoscale convective vortex with enhanced tropical moisture.”

Most people don’t know what that means.

But when they heard that a tech startup founded with the support of a Thiel Fellowship had launched cloud-seeding operations nearby just 48 hours before the storm hit, some wondered whether or not there could have been a connection.

The official fact-checking machine was quick to debunk the claim and anyone who asked the question was swiftly dumped in the dreaded ‘conspiracy theorist’ camp.

Much of the debunking had to do with the fact that Rainmaker, the cloud seeding startup, operated 130 miles away from the flood zone. Therefore, the conclusion was that the operation could not have had anything to do with the floods, and the mere suggestion was a far-right fabrication.

But the public also understands something fact-checkers often fail to communicate well: weather systems move, atmospheric interventions do not occur inside controlled laboratory conditions, and people are entitled to ask how far the effects of a seeded cloud may travel. In July in that part of Texas, wind currents flow from south to north — meaning the clouds being sprayed could have moved directly into the disaster zone. Correlation does not equal causation, to be sure, but branding skeptics as ‘conspiracy theorists’ simply for being concerned is an example of institutional gaslighting.

It’s completely understandable that people get overwhelmed by the nuances of a term as broad as ‘geoengineering.’ It is a massive topic with high stakes, and the debate often gets confusing because it lumps totally different technologies into the same bucket.

Geoengineering includes approaches that aim to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflect the sun back into space, including planting massive forests, building direct air capture machines, or spraying reflective aerosol particles (like sulfur dioxide) into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of a large volcanic eruption. These efforts are technically distinct from weather modification techniques like cloud seeding, because geoengineering aims to alter the entire planet’s climate to counter global warming, whereas cloud seeding is a localized method used to increase rain or snow from existing clouds.

“The geoengineering term is a bit of a catch-all, so we need to be a bit precise,” Jem Bendell said during a recent Book Chat, a fair point that is hard to argue.

Bendell noted that local weather modification has been used for decades, citing Bali as an example. “A few years ago there was going to be a big summit and they used cloud seeding to try and get the rain to fall before the summit started so they’d have more sun for their pictures of world leaders.” He even acknowledged that a friend in Bali believed the intervention had damaged his farm, and conceded that weather modification technologies need governance.

Bendell went on to explain that because weather modification exists and has been used locally, many people think it is already being used globally at scale. He argued that if clouds were being seeded globally, it would not explain the warming trend we are experiencing because cloud seeding would tend to cool, not heat, the planet. He also said there would likely be far more evidence of such a program and that it would require a “conspiracy of silence amongst the world’s governments.”

He then shifted the frame to say that the real geoengineering humans are doing includes: wiping out large forests; polluting oceans (which disrupts natural cloud formation by killing off marine organisms that release cloud-condensing sulfur compounds); and pumping carbon and methane into the air.

This is a classic semantic tactic. Bendell is implying that some people are wasting time looking for a secret, coordinated conspiracy in the clouds, but the actual, destructive ‘geoengineering’ is happening in plain sight through corporate greed, industrial pollution, and deforestation.

But this logic belies a massive blind spot: the persistent white streaks you see blanketing the sky above you are not a fiction. Microscopic soot from aircraft engine exhaust does, in fact, create artificial cirrus clouds that trap heat rising from the Earth. Peer-reviewed atmospheric research shows that aviation-induced contrail cirrus is a warming factor. The public is not imagining a changing sky; they are observing a visible transformation of the atmosphere that can actively heat the planet.

The issue is not even whether every white streak in the sky is part of a single coordinated program. It most likely is not. The real question is whether humans are increasingly intervening in atmospheric systems without public consent, clear liability, or trustworthy governance. The answer to that is most likely, yes.

Later in the book chat conversation, while reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, Bendell lamented the “demonization and suppression of dissenting opinions on how best to manage a public health crisis,” and said that directly led to loss of public trust. He argued it was tragic that valid questions regarding “the effects of masking, school closures, social distancing, the safety or effectiveness of novel vaccines, the importance of alternative methods including vitamin D and nutrition,” were aggressively buried.

“It should have been a really interesting conversation,” he said. “And it totally didn’t become an interesting conversation. It just became a nasty one.”

But the moment the public applies critical thinking to the manipulation of our environment, it seemed to us as though Bendell deployed the kind of dismissive tactics he lamented in the context of public health. It’s the kind of behavior that typifies what would describe in his ‘three camps of awareness’ framework as classic Camp Two narrative gatekeeping.

While it felt hypocritical to us here at Collapse Life, some viewers agreed with Bendell on this. One commenter, ‘Paul’, praised Bendell for pushing back on the “geoengineering stuff,” which he explicitly labels as “conspiracy porn.”

Paul implies that because he and Bendell have “sat with it all long enough,” they have moved past the primal desire to blame groups or individuals for collapse, achieving a higher, more enlightened perspective on “governing systems.”

This is another classic gatekeeping tactic designed to make everyday citizens feel too emotionally or intellectually immature to participate in the conversation. It implies that if you are angry about your skies being altered, you simply haven’t “sat with collapse” long enough to accept it.

But public anxiety regarding the intentional control of weather is well-grounded in historical fact, not conjecture. The weaponization of the atmosphere is a matter of declassified military record. During the Vietnam War, the US military conducted ‘Project Popeye,’ flying over 2,000 cloud-seeding missions to prolong the monsoon season, intentionally turning enemy supply routes into impassable mud. This real-world weaponization was severe enough to force the United Nations to draft the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD) treaty.

As Bendell himself later conceded, current international frameworks are utterly useless. ENMOD was designed around military or hostile use, leaving a serious governance gap around interventions framed as peaceful, commercial, humanitarian, or climate-protective.

That gap has already paved the way for unregulated corporate exploitation. Startups like Make Sunsets have actively bypassed international oversight to sell commercial “cooling credits,” launching rogue sulfur dioxide balloons into the stratosphere until the Mexican government intervened to ban the unauthorized experiments within its borders.

Even the ambition to “steer” global weather systems like hurricanes, a concept still relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory, can no longer be confined to science fiction. A recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Water outlines proof-of-concept models to use artificial intelligence and targeted cloud-seeding operations to deliberately disrupt or redirect hurricanes. As researchers openly acknowledge, steering a superstorm away from one major metro area could mean steering the destruction elsewhere, creating an immediate, terrifying ethical crisis.

When asked if he was an advocate for geoengineering, Bendell rejected the frame of the question, calling it unhelpful because it forced an artificial binary.

“No, I’m an advocate for a far smarter conversation about types of geoengineering that could be trialed and how to govern it and how to finance it,” he said. “And also that includes what kinds of geoengineering should be banned and banned intergovernmentally and through mechanisms with teeth, meaning enforcement, monitoring and punishment.”

Demanding a “smarter” conversation is great way to silence critics who lack expertise in the use of academic jargon. The public understands blunt truths like: ‘If you spray stuff into the sky, you can alter the weather in ways you may not intend.’ You don’t need a Ph.D. to ask who is at the steering wheel, who profits from the intervention, and who bears the cost of the unintended fallout.

Most people who express concern about geoengineering are reacting to the fact that humans now possess the computational power to scale up these atmospheric interventions without the ethical frameworks or legal guardrails to stop it from going horribly wrong. Questioning high-stakes, planet-altering technology is the very foundation of safe science, not a fringe theory or conspiracy “porn.”

If a technology carries risks like shifting monsoons, threatening food supplies, or toxic bioaccumulation, skepticism is not just common sense, it’s the only rational response left.

The Texas flood controversy may not prove that cloud seeding caused a disaster. But it does prove something else: the public no longer trusts atmospheric interventions to remain modest, local, transparent, or accountable. That distrust did not come out of nowhere. And dismissing it is a fool’s errand.

Weather modification has been used militarily, explored commercially, theorized globally, and governed weakly. So when experts respond to public concern with ridicule instead of explanation, they are not defending science. They are repeating the exact trust-destroying behavior they claim to oppose.

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Long before we put machines in windows or boxes humming behind our houses, people worked to solve the same age-old problem: how do you survive the heat?

In Iran’s desert cities, the answer came in the way of badgirs ( pronounced ‘bahd-gears’) — windcatchers — tall, chimney-like towers designed to pull moving air down over a water pool to create natural cooling in ancient homes and courtyards.

In Yazd, one of the great desert cities of Iran, the skyline is still punctuated by these towers, along with domes, minarets, shaded alleys, and covered passageways built to protect people from the sun. UNESCO describes them as one of the defining features of the historic city’s skyline. Many are still used and they actually work incredibly well.

The badgir was a form of passive air conditioning technology — a way of using wind, shade, pressure, evaporation, and architecture to make life possible in hot, dry places.

That’s the part the modern climate alarmists never quite understand: human beings have always needed ways to stay cool.

We built courtyards, planted shade trees, dug channels, slept on rooftops, and designed verandas, porches, high ceilings, shutters, and ceiling fans. Eventually we came up with compressors and refrigerants, not because we became soft and unable to cope, but because the relentless pursuit of technology and science enabled progress.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, understood this well. In a 2009 interview in which he was asked about the secret of Singapore’s success, he explained that air conditioning was one of the signal inventions of history.

“It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics,” he said. “Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.”

Compare this quote, from a man who oversaw the miraculous transformation of mosquito-infested swampland into arguably the most powerful financial center in the world, to the current moral panic over cooling in many countries in the West.

In Britain, homeowners are being ordered to remove air conditioning units from private properties under climate and planning rules, even in sweltering temperatures. In parts of London, councils are applying a so-called “cooling hierarchy,” where active cooling (such as A/C) is treated as a last resort, only to be considered after passive measures like shading, fans, open windows, and ventilation have supposedly been exhausted.

In one Camden case, a resident was reportedly told to remove air conditioning units and rely on open windows and balcony doors instead. Security concerns about leaving windows open on the first floor were dismissed. In another case, local government inspectors noted that a homeowner had an “absence of ceiling fans,” even though local rules did not make them mandatory; the A/C unit was ordered to be removed. In many cases of what can only be described as overreach, the issue with air-con was not about noise, ugliness, or danger. The problem was that the need for “active cooling” had not been sufficiently justified.

Think about that — the way you choose to cool your own home now has to be justified. To whom? Local councils, government inspectors, thought police... the ludicrosity knows no bounds.

The Camden case is especially revealing because, according to the backstory circulating from a Reddit post — that was, tellingly, memory-holed à la 1984 — this did not begin with some abstract debate about climate policy. It began with something much more human.

A man bought an ex-council home, installed air conditioning, and then his neighbors took notice during a heatwave. They were tenants, renting from the local council. But they saw that his home could be cooled, while theirs could not. So they asked the obvious question: why don’t we have that too?

This was not envy, it was recognition. One apartment had found a practical answer to a pressing problem, and the surrounding apartments wanted access to the same relief.

A healthy society would look at that and ask: how do we help more people stay cool?

A declining society asks: how do we formulate a justification to make one person remove his air conditioner?

This is the psychology of managed decline in a nutshell.

And ultimately, that’s why this story matters. It is not just about one air conditioner. It is about a system that no longer knows how to deliver abundance, so it settles for enforced equality of discomfort.

It’s the bureaucratic mind in its purest form.

In Ghent, Belgium, the municipal website reportedly discouraged residents from using air conditioners during the recent heatwave, telling them that the best air conditioner is a tree.

(A tree? Is it possible that overconsumption of moules-frites and Chimay has created cognitive decline among Belgians?)

Active cooling is essential when heat rises to dangerous levels, especially for the elderly, the sick, infants, people in dense housing, people on upper floors, people in unsafe neighborhoods, and people whose buildings were never designed for the temperatures they now face.

Even the World Economic Forum understands this, even if they couch it in sickly globalist language. In a 2019 story on its website, cooling access was referred to as “a climate justice and equality issue,” acknowledging that access to cooling can no longer be treated as a luxury, especially for vulnerable people. In some cases it is a matter of survival.

So which is it? A climate justice issue, or a selfish indulgence? Reading between the lines is critical: poor people in hot countries do not have enough cooling, and middle-class people in rich countries have too much.

In Mumbai, low-income families living in dense, poorly ventilated tenements are spending money they don’t have on air coolers, exhaust fans, ceiling fans, and air conditioners because the heat inside their homes is unbearable. In one 10-by-12-foot home, a domestic worker named Swati Yeshi, who earns just over $60 a month (6,000 rupees), bought a $100 cooler on installments because, in her words, she could not live without it.

“You can’t live without a cooler,” she said. “We needed it badly.”

The ancient Persians understood something our modern bureaucrats seem to have forgotten: the point of architecture, technology, and infrastructure is to make human life possible under difficult conditions. The badgir wasn’t a sin against nature, it was an intelligent response to nature.

Five thousand years later, air conditioning is the same impulse, only in modern form. And you gotta admit, that’s pretty cool.

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Bendell is best known for his 2018 paper on Deep Adaptation, which helped bring the language of societal collapse into broader public conversation. For many people, that paper was a rupture: a moment when climate change stopped being a future policy problem and became a personal, existential reckoning.

In Breaking Together, Bendell expands that reckoning into a broader diagnosis of modern systems — economic, ecological, political, spiritual — and asks what kinds of freedom might still be possible in an age of breakdown.

The strongest moments in the discussion came when Bendell reflected on his own journey: from working inside the world of corporate sustainability and global institutions, to questioning whether reform had any real chance of success given the scale of the metacrisis.

He spoke candidly about the assumptions that shaped his earlier career: that there was still time, that systems could be reformed step by step, and that institutions could be persuaded to do the right thing.

That part of the conversation felt especially resonant because so many people in our audience have gone through some version of that same process: i.e., believing in a system, working inside it, trying to make it better, and then, whether slowly or suddenly, realizing the system may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

One of the more interesting threads was Bendell’s critique of consensus culture — both in climate science and during COVID. He made a strong case that science suffers when dissent is demonized, especially when informed disagreement is treated as dangerous rather than necessary. That point matters far beyond climate change or public health. In almost every major field now, there are questions one is permitted to ask and questions that mark you as suspect.

Bendell’s discussion of eco-libertarianism was another important thread. He pushed back against the darker forms of environmental despair — the idea that humans are a cancer on the earth, or that the planet would be better off without us. That kind of thinking may sound like grief, but it can lead to dangerous places. Once humanity itself becomes the problem, coercion starts to look like compassion.

His alternative is to recover a view of human beings as dignified, sovereign, and capable of voluntary cooperation. The enemy is not humanity itself, but the systems that reward destruction, dependency, extraction, and disconnection.

That may have been one of the most valuable ideas in the conversation.

At the same time, some of the most interesting practical questions remained unresolved. When audience questions pressed into geoengineering, public policy, solar cooking, regenerative agriculture, or real-world examples of eco-libertarianism, the answers sometimes became more about correcting the frame than exploring the question.

To some extent, that is understandable as Bendell has clearly spent years being misrepresented, attacked, and forced into categories he rejects. Still, there were moments when the conversation seemed to brush up against something deeper — only to move away from it.

Perhaps the most honest takeaway from the conversation is that there is no single collapse response.

Some people will move to the countryside, some will build intentional communities, and some will focus on food, soil, water, and local resilience. Still others will stay in cities and live as fully, gratefully, and creatively as they can. Some will turn inward, some will organize, some will pray, while others will make music.

There might be something unsettling about that if you’re seeking hard answers and global-scale solutions. But there’s also something freeing about it, because if there is no one way to go about this, then we each have to ask ourselves: what can I actually do?

What is actually possible, honest, and necessary in the life we have? And how do we keep asking difficult questions without turning every conversation into a test of loyalty, purity, or worldview?

Those are not easy questions, but they may be the ones that matter most now.

After several weeks of heavy collapse reading, we thought we’d do something a bit more light-hearted and fun next Sunday. Please join us and bring the laughs!

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A new report from The Guardian describes factory workers in India being asked to wear head-mounted cameras while they sew garments, fold towels, build, sort, and perform other physical tasks. At first, some workers found the setup funny; that is until they realized they were producing training data, known as ‘egocentric data’, for the robots who would eventually replace them.

Large language models like Chat GPT and Grok were trained on huge volumes of text scraped from across the internet. But humanoid robots like the ones Elon Musk is developing need data that teaches them how to move through the real world. And increasingly that data is coming from human laborers doing repetitive, precise, underpaid work. A few weeks ago, we told you about a company called Shift that offers free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work. The pitch: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

But just like with everything else, there’s a way to cut costs by offshoring the work. So instead of workers in New York gathering data in exchange for free housecleaning, increasingly the data is coming from garment factories, construction sites, warehouses, and informal labor markets in India, where workers already earn just a few dollars a day. Now their movements are becoming a valuable digital asset for companies racing to automate industrial work, and they get nothing in return except maybe a soft drink once in a while.

This is the next stage of the AI economy: not just stealing words, images, music, and creative work, but extracting human movement. And then eventually, humanity itself.

At any rate, the worker sells their labor once, then the recording of that labor gets cleaned, annotated, packaged, licensed, resold, and used to build systems that may eventually make the worker unnecessary. It’s the cycle of life, right?

The quote that says it all comes from Lalita, one of the garment workers profiled in The Guardian story: “We are not even getting our full worth for the work we do now. Who is going to pay us when we are replaced by robots?”

Bingo!

Here’s a good question an X user recently asked: Can’t the UK stop being an insufferable c*nt for 5 seconds?

You may think this post is perhaps too profane, but we dare you to hold to that claim after you’ve read about the situation that prompted the expletive in the first place.

Paul Powlesland, a British barrister and environmental campaigner, helped organize a volunteer cleanup of Aldersbrook, a tributary of the River Roding, which runs through Essex and the suburbs of Greater London.

He and his crew reportedly removed around 200 bags of rubbish, branches, weeds and silt over 10 days from a waterway already plagued by illegal dumping and sewage discharges.

Then came the bureaucrats: the Environment Agency investigated whether the cleanup itself was illegal because Powlesland had done it without the proper permit.

To be fair, river work is not always simple. Dredging, flood risk, waste left on floodplains, and disturbance of habitats can create real problems. Not every well-meaning person with a shovel is automatically a hero. But that’s also not the whole story.

The absurdity is the asymmetry. Major pollution, sewage discharges, and illegal dumping can carry on with seeming impunity, but a group of volunteers with bags and boots are a sudden reminder to the state that it has rules that must be obeyed. It’s a lot easier for the system to go after citizens who act, than institutions that don’t.

This story resonated with enough people that, after it came to the public’s attention the agency dropped the charges. The machine certainly can move quickly when it has egg on its face, can’t it?

Powlesland is now asking for a meeting with the chief executive of the Environment Agency to request them to redirect their energy away from punishing river volunteers and toward two constructive goals: forcing Thames Water to produce a serious, near-term plan to stop illegal sewage discharges, and turning the River Roding case into a model for how regulators can work with grassroots river guardians instead of treating them as the problem.

Bravo, Mr. Powlesland!

In December, Australia introduced new regulations requiring age-restricted platforms to take “reasonable steps” to stop Australians under age 16 from creating or keeping accounts.

Awkwardly, the ban doesn’t appear to be working very well. While the government reports that more than 5 million under-16 accounts have been deactivated or restricted, a recent study found that 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using social media months after the ban began, often by self-declaring an older age or passing weak selfie checks.

Importantly, children and parents are not penalized; the legal burden sits with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit.

This weekend, the government said it will double the maximum penalty for breaches to A$99 million (about US$68 million), while giving the eSafety Commissioner stronger powers to force platforms to provide evidence of what they are actually doing to comply. The government says investigations are already underway into alleged non-compliance by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Opposition to the social media ban has always centered around the fact that child safety is the perfect Trojan horse for policing everyone else. And now that real-life evidence is proving that self-declaration, selfies, and parental permission are useless, there’s only one thing left: identity verification at scale.

That’s precisely where this story stops being about teenagers and starts being about the architecture of online life. Today it is under-16s on TikTok, but tomorrow it’s “misinformation,” “harmful content,” “extremism,” “public health,” “financial scams,” or whatever fresh emergency requires adults to show their papers before speaking, reading, watching, posting, or dissenting.

Big Tech created the addiction machine. Government now offers to fix it by building the permission machine.

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Join us today at 12:30 ET/9:30 PT for a very special Book Chat, featuring Professor Jem Bendell, to discuss his book ‘Breaking Together.’ Join the live discussion on either Substack or YouTube.

This week on the Collapse Life podcast, Greg Weldon, a 40-year market veteran and founder of the Global Macro Strategy Report, reflects on that gap — and why he thinks it matters more than most people realize.

Weldon does not believe that everything is going to collapse tomorrow. In fact, one of the most useful parts of this conversation is that he does not reduce the moment to a simple crash prediction. Instead, he looks at the underlying data: real wages, savings, consumer spending, service inflation, gasoline inventories, food costs, housing, the dollar, and the stock market’s relationship to all of it.

His conclusion is that the consumer is weaker than the headlines suggest, inflation is not dead, and the stock market is likely floating far above the fundamentals.

The discussion also touches on why so much spending growth is now going toward necessities rather than discretionary purchases, why service inflation remains sticky, and why food price inflation may become a bigger story in the second half of the year. He also walked through oil and gasoline supply pressures, the dollar’s role in the next phase of market risk, and why gold, silver, commodities, and real diversification may become increasingly important.

This is not investment advice, and we say that clearly in the conversation. But it is a useful framework for anyone trying to understand why the official story feels so utterly disconnected from daily life.

• Follow Greg Weldon on X: https://x.com/WeldonLIVE
• Weldon Online: https://www.weldononline.com/
• Greg Weldon’s book — Gold Trading Boot Camp: How to Master the Basics and Become a Successful Commodities Investor: https://amzn.to/4g6toT8

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The day after America’s bicentennial in 1976, the Boston Globe printed a zany, futuristic insert and included it with the normal Sunday edition. It was forward looking by 100 years, declaring:

Aside from the very obvious and rather accurate prediction of… let’s say, the ‘evolution’ of the English language (something we’re all living through at the moment), the entire insert showcased eerie accuracy in predicting things to come, in particular, technocratic global governance.

In one of the articles, a man named Alexander Holz has just been reanimated after being held in cryogenic suspension for 90 years. He is pleasantly surprised to find there is still someone around to thaw him out, and delighted at the state of the world in which he awakes.

“When I had myself frozen back in 1986, everybody was convinced we were all going to hell in a handbasket,” said the 68-year-old former scientist, who froze himself out of concern for an imminent nuclear war over natural resources.

“I had no desire to experience a holocaust, and yet I was not so totally without hope that I could feel comfortable with suicide, so this seemed the most responsible course to me.”

Upon learning the earth is now managed by a technocratic world government, Holz said he is pleased that this once-elusive idea had at last come to pass. On a personal note, he is also overjoyed that, after a lifetime of tooth pain, that small mundane suffering has been permanently eradicated.

The fictional paper is at once funny, sinister, and unsettling. The editors anticipated the development of universal vaccines, the rise of socialism and global governance, weather modification gone wrong, and space travel to Mars at a time when Elon Musk was still in kindergarten.

They highlighted resistance movements and remnants that persisted outside the clutches of the rising technocracy, but also showcased how the new controlling powers were successful in solving some of the world’s most intractable problems.

In its imagined 2076 scenario, the economy never collapsed, it was just absorbed into technocratic management. In a story headlined: “Quality of Life Council says world economy up,” (with a dateline of Tehran[!] oddly enough) human life has been reorganized into indicators, pools, units, cards, credits, debits, sabbaticals, service obligations, cooperatives, production sectors, and quality-of-life dashboards.

Quality of Life Council says world economy up

TEHERAN — The World Quality of Life Council released its monthly indicators yesterday and reported that it is encouraged by general upgrading of the standards of living in all nations.

“As of June 30, the number of people in the International Income Subsistence Pool had dropped 1.2 percent,” said Alice Jones Istani, council coordinator. “That brings the number of world unemployed down to 1 million, the lowest since the pool’s formation in 2004. We feel this is indicative of an ever-increasing community and whole-Earth consciousness.”

Istani also reported that 22.6 percent of the world’s population has returned from one-year leisure-time sabbaticals to public service.

She said that there had been a 4 percent increase in people applying for and receiving Unit Transaction identification Cards from the Universal Banking System, and that credit units were up 31 percent and debits down 15 percent.

Istani reported the formation of five new cooperatives in the synthetic materials sector and said production of synthetic fibers was up 7 percent for June.

“World Quality of Life Council” sounds so benevolent. Even boring. Who could be against quality of life? But the language that follows describes a managed system, not a free society with a flourishing economy.

A few details jump out:

• “International Income Subsistence Pool”: Sounds a lot like Universal Basic Income, doesn’t it?

• “Unit Transaction identification Cards”: Universal digital IDs and digital payment systems jump to mind, dressed up in 1976 sci-fi language. The fact that applications for the cards are treated as a positive economic indicator is… well, creepy. Compliance with the system has become evidence of progress.

• “Credit units” and “debits”: The money system has been abstracted into programmable accounting. Not dollars, wages, savings, or property — just units. (Andy Schectman gave a precise account of a new monetary vehicle being developed by BRICS+ nations called “The Unit” in this 2024 Collapse Life interview.)

• “One-year leisure-time sabbaticals”: Sounds voluntary and humane until you think about it for a minute. A society in which the world’s population cycles between leisure sabbatical and public service is either utopian or total enslavement. (If you ask us, it sounds like the love child of 1984 and Brave New World.)

And then there’s the sickeningly saccharine phrase: “whole-Earth consciousness.” It is basically saying this New World Order proves that mankind has evolved morally into a new planet-oriented sentient state.

Strategic trappings of the old world are still present, however. In this imagined future, America still has presidents, crowds, flags, anniversaries, speeches, newspapers, and patriotic landmarks. But they have all been repurposed to serve a post-national world order.

The president is named Joyce Haas, and she sounds like a respectable managerial-socialist politician rather than a military strong(wo)man. The real nightmare future seems to be bureaucratic rather than tyrannical.

There are dissidents… over 10,000 of them, in fact, lifting high the Stars and Stripes, above the World Confederation flag. So resistance exists, but it has been pushed to the margins — literally across the river, outside the approved ceremony.

Media censorship has been disguised as professional responsibility. The United States Television Network runs “public service and political education messages” at moments when the dissidents might appear on camera or interrupt the President’s speech. Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

As an aside, President Haas is planning to “die voluntarily” in 2080. We can just imagine the Boston Globe editors ashing their cigarettes, leaning on their typewriters, and having a chuckle at how ludicrous that idea must have sounded. But here in the real world, in the actual 2026 we inhabit today, the Netherlands has now recorded its first euthanasia death of a child under 12, to say nothing of the euthanasia industrial complex they’re setting up in Canada.

The fake paper does hint at some potential weak points of technocracy. In a story headlined: “Meteorologists may be losing control of weather,” a technician openly admits, “I guess we don’t quite understand the whole system as well as we thought we did.”

The basic goal, he added, was to use ozone molecules afloat at high altitude to keep some of the sun’s ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface. He said it was hoped that earlier natural levels of ozone could be restored, so that eventually humans might not have to wear protective clothing.

Under questioning, weather service officials admitted that complaints have already been received from some remote farming regions where increased cloud cover has limited production of solar power. Decreased sunlight is also holding down protein production in the Middle East.

In the Boston Globe’s imagined future, technocracy is neither a failure nor a frightening future prospect. It is more like a partial success.

A One World government doesn’t crush everyone under its boot. Rather, it solves things like toothaches and infectious disease. It organizes leisure, labor, banking, food production, energy, and even weather into a single planetary management system. That’s why Holz is happy when he wakes up from his cryogenic freeze, pleased to know the future is not a nuclear wasteland, but a sanitized solution.

But that’s also exactly why it’s so scary.

The price of all this competence is that everything is a point of administration. Money, work, rest, health, weather, history, patriotism, even death. All of it something to be planned in cooperation with the system.

This fake Boston Globe newspaper is not warning us about a future where technocrats get everything wrong. The real warning is that they get just enough of it right, so that resistance looks irrational, dissent look dangerous, and freedom looks sentimental, obsolete, and maybe even selfish.

The New World Order will not look like the tyranny of old. It will look like benevolent management at planetary scale. It will entice people with the promise that experts can remove suffering, disorder, risk, ignorance, scarcity, conflict, and pain — if only we surrender enough of our memory, sovereignty, and moral agency to let them do their job.

Alexander Holz wakes up and blesses world government because his teeth no longer hurt. And fair enough. Toothaches are awful.

Yet the real question remains: isn’t a cage where no pain exists still a cage?

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Read more: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/24/metro/bicentennial-predictions-of-tricentennial/