Notes from the edge of civilization: March 15, 2026
Stock up on Oreos while you can; donuts with a side of mob violence; the coming age of AI haves and have-nots; 'kill chain' blues.
If chocolate and chocolate cookies are on your list of civilizational necessities, you may want to start building a small strategic reserve of Oreos, Cadbury Dairy Milk, and Toblerone. Mondelēz, the conglomerate responsible for those snacks, recently invested in an Israeli biotech startup called Celleste Bio, which is working on producing cocoa butter from plant cells grown in stainless steel bioreactors.
The idea is to take a few cocoa cells, feed them nutrients in a lab tank, and scale production until those cells can generate the equivalent of tons of cocoa butter without ever touching soil, sun, or a farmer.
Of course, chocolate has already been quietly drifting away from its botanical origins for years. In the UK and parts of Europe, Cadbury Dairy Milk can legally replace up to 5% of cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable fats like palm or shea. In the United States, milk chocolate only needs to contain about 10% chocolate liquor to qualify as chocolate at all.
Call it progress if you like, but if your idea of chocolate involves actual trees that grow in dirt under tropical sunlight, you might want to enjoy it while it lasts. The future snack aisle is starting to look suspiciously like a chemistry set.
Earlier this week we were quoted as saying that collapse is not:
“a Hollywood-style Mad Max breakdown — cities on fire, empty highways, bands of spiky-haired marauders roaming a desolate and parched landscape with nothing but wanton violence on the mind and some apocalyse-adapted AMC Gremlin with a turret on top.”
With a slip of the finger, wanton was actually typed as wonton in the original iteration of the story, until we ‘fixed the glitch.’ (Note that no dumplings were harmed during the duration of the error.)
It turns out that wasn’t our only error. Based on news reports from Los Angeles earlier this week, collapse may in fact come in the form of gangs of marauders doing donuts on downtown streets and then bashing in the plate glass windows of luxury apartment buildings.
Would Tina Turner please report to Thunderdome… That’s Tina Turner. Thunderdome. Thank you.
Sam Altman has a vision for the future of artificial intelligence that may sound familiar to anyone who has ever paid an electric bill.
Speaking last week at a summit hosted by BlackRock, the OpenAI CEO said the long-term goal is to sell AI the same way utilities sell electricity or water — metered, billed by usage, and delivered on demand. In Altman’s words, “intelligence” itself will become a utility.
In practical terms, that means the infrastructure controls who gets access, and if supply is limited, the price rises — pushing the most powerful tools toward those who can afford them.
Electricity once separated industrial economies from everyone else. If intelligence becomes a metered service, the same dynamic could quietly emerge again — this time dividing the “augmented” from the “unaugmented.”
Of course, history also suggests that once a technology becomes essential to economic participation, governments and corporations tend to push toward universal adoption, often by making the cost invisible or bundled into other services.
Are we the only ones seeing the term “kill chain” explode in common parlance? Seems like such a sterile term, but it really means an oh-so-dark future for those of us whose eyes are open.
The definition of kill chain is: a sequence of steps a military force follows to identify, track, target, and destroy an enemy asset, including stages such as detection, identification, decision, engagement, and assessment of the strike’s effectiveness.
Just as drone warfare and robodogs are currently confined to the battlefield and security apparatus, it won’t be long until enemies of the state, dissidents, and anyone who the government sees as a ne’er-do-well is the valid target of an algorithmic kill chain.
Remember this — it’s all about the data. That’s why Silicon Valley tech bros are all over Washington like stink on a monkey, under the guise of making the government “efficient.” Vast treasure troves of data — on each of us — sit in disparate databases, among disparate agencies, just waiting to be merged into a single, all-seeing system.
Kinda like Palantir’s ‘Maven.’
Don’t take our word for it. Former UK Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, spelled it out clearly in a recent tweet. And the video he embedded is worth the watch… In it, the presenter with his smarmy smile, literally says: “left click, right click, left click — it becomes a detection” and the kill chain sequence begins.
Until signs and symbols are identified by most, we are all in big trouble as the cycle of samsara will only continue. If you look closely at an Oreo cookie, please spend some time understanding what symbols have been placed on them as I am not here to feed everyone with the answers but offer an opportunity for others to expand their own consciousness. Also, yes it is important to stock up on foods but rather than suggest processed corporate items, it might be better to suggest saving heirloom organic seeds as they will have more trading value if everything collapses. It should be also be brought to attention that many of the big brands are owned by corporations that do not have humanity's best interest at heart and may even be putting toxins into their products. Let real food be thy medicine. Let us think of creative ways once everything does collapse. Time banks. Trade your valuable time with each other for services and goodness. I ask everyone to use intuition, discernment and their heart in this reality as we are in a psychological battle. Nothing is what it seems yet the truth lies within.
"Reject all cookies"
heh.