Notes from the edge of civilization: January 4, 2026
Robot cities; fraud, the tie that binds; ketchup's just wrong; and money for nothing, presidents for free.
According to New York Magazine, city dwellers in America’s largest urban centers have finally recognized the insanely convenient, insanely optimized construct of the lives they lead. And it’s a pretty stark realization: they’re no longer humans.
In fact, they’re more like iPhone clutching, Door Dash-ordering robots. They don’t even handle cash anymore, it’s all digital, all effortless, all frictionless.
What’s the best way to recognize a diagnosis of creeping robotosis? Slap a cute internet name on the panic and write a 1,000 word how-to guide about reclaiming human life with the introduction of synthetic friction. Yeah, this is a real thing, and it’s called “friction-maxxing.”
Best quote:
There are some obvious places to begin your friction-maxxing journey. Stop sharing your location with your kids and your partner… Stop using ChatGPT completely… Let your kid experience a bit more independence than they did last year, and self-soothe while you worry about them until eventually you stop worrying so much…
Invite people over to your house without cleaning it all the way up. Babysit for someone who needs a night out... Send your kids to run small errands for you, comfortable in the knowledge that they will probably do a bad or incomplete job.
Each of these acts may be insignificant, but an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape.
No mention in the article of the possibility of moving to the countryside, getting some animals, planting a garden, and encountering actual friction.
This is where we’re at in America — contrived ‘hardship.’ You just gotta shake your head.
A long read in County Highway maps out how a once-high-trust state turned its social services system into an honor system cash spigot, enabling industrial-scale fraud, political patronage, and mutual silence.
Eventually, Minnesota quietly became a case study in how good intentions, identity politics, and zero oversight can rot a government from the inside out.
Best quote:
American urban history is a grand pageant of ethnic mafias: For the newly arrived immigrant underclass, community-wide criminal activity has always been an engine of wealth, social cohesion, and protection amid the exclusions of an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile society. The Somalis are following a trail that Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews all blazed. And what’s more American than fraud?
Apple pie. Coca Cola. And fraud. God Bless America!
A growing number of middle-class Americans, convinced the US is sliding into unaffordable, ethically bankrupt, proto-authoritarian chaos, are cashing in what’s left of the American Dream and quietly emigrating, according to The New Yorker, not for adventure, but for basic safety, dignity, and a functioning society.
Yes, many threaten to do so every four years, but what makes this moment different is that it’s no longer a performative election-year tantrum. It’s a sober, spreadsheet-driven exit strategy by people who have finally stopped believing the system will correct itself.
Best quote:
The Netherlands is a natural place for an American to seek refuge. The Dutch influence is everywhere in America: in architecture (barns, stoops, gabled roofs); food (waffles, doughnuts, tiny pancakes); and oligarchs, from the Vanderbilt dynasty to the Koch brothers. The language sounds like American English until you realize you don’t understand a word...
Culturally, the Dutch are sometimes known on the Continent as the Americans of Europe, owing to their large stature, loud voices, and blunt manners. This stops being true the moment actual Americans come to town and proceed to outweigh, outtalk, and generally out-everything the locals. Out-apologize, too: for blocking the bike path, mispronouncing a word, ordering the wrong condiment. “My husband gets so embarrassed when I ask for ketchup. Horribly embarrassed,” Sanchez said over fries at lunch one day.
[Sadly, Ms. Sanchez is reinforcing the stereotype of the ugly American. Europe’s low countries, including Belgium, never eat their frites with ketchup. If you need to dip french fries into something, it’s mayonnaise. And sometimes spiced mayonnaise. Hey — don’t knock it till you try it. —Ed]
We’d be remiss not to mention the rather dramatic fashion in which the New Year started in this hemisphere, beginning with the Venezuela operation.
We won’t opine on the precedents set or the international legality or any of that. Many before us have done so, and many more to come will no doubt give incisive illumination as to what precedent has been unlocked by the US government.
What did strike us here at Collapse Life however, was the $50 million bounty on Mr. Maduro’s head, which obviously is now off the table, or at the very least, on the debit side of the military operation balance sheet. Which then begs the question, what did this entire build up, one night raid, and transport back to New York cost us, the taxpayer?
We asked ChatGPT for a back-of-the-envelope breakdown. Take everything with a grain of salt, of course, because the sources may very well be politically motivated and thus exaggerated. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering the costs (which seem plausible), as follows:
Estimated cost of US force deployment in the region since August 2025: $600 million+
Rough estimate for keeping a carrier group on station near Venezuela: $6.5 million per day (carrier strike group)
Some external estimates (e.g., press analyses) peg high-end daily costs of the deployed forces: $200 million
Rough combined procurement value of major naval and air assets deployed in the operation theater (not a direct out-of-pocket cost, but a measure of the scale): $40 billion+ (hardware value)
(For comparison’s sake, X’s Grok was slightly more conservative in its expenditure estimate, by about $200 million. What’s a few hundred million between AI-chatbots, anyway?)
All of this comes into sharp, and perhaps ironic, focus when you consider the US debt situation, which now sits at $38.5 trillion. It took a military operation costing many times a $50 million bounty to prove that nothing is too expensive when we get to defer the reckoning to the future.
Much of the military cost is “sunk” cost. A carrier group costs the same in the Mediterranean as the Gulf of America. The operation was still expensive but not to that level.
The friction-maxxing thing is interesting because it's people trying to engineer struggle back into their lives. I've noticed this too,where convenience gets so extreme that it starts feeling hollow. But prescribing synthetic friction feels like another optimization which sort of defeats the purpose doesn't it?