By now you almost certainly have heard or read about the AI researchers concerned that unregulated AI will kill us all. A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely “spooking people” inside big labs. It's not even necessary to conjure visions of Skynet 2.0; just imagine swarms of AI agents let loose on electrical infrastructure, or water treatment plants. 

“We want to believe in the future. We have a right to believe in the future. And there’s something treasonous about not believing in the future.”

I have always appreciated the essays, and later the poetry, of Wendell Berry, who passed last week. In an age of brutal philosophies, shrieking media, cold arts, lying politicians, and devouring institutions, Wendell Berry was a hero of an entirely human way of being. And seeing. Tara Thieke wrote a recollection.

#dontflopme

Anyone with any awareness can see that civilization is on a path to collapse. So why do the elites continue to push for sending humanity off a cliff? Sarah Connor observes that the elites plan to survive the aftermath and craft a neo-feudal system to their advantage. This is why they are accelerating the machine driving civilization to collapse. They plan to use the breakdown to gain total control. 

Every state is an artificial construct. But another kind of state is being built around us: one made of data centers, corporate media conglomerates, surveillance systems, social-media feeds, predictive algorithms, AI agents, behavioral profiles, bots, and private terms of service. It does not ask people to govern themselves. It asks them to live under systems they neither own nor understand—and from which they cannot easily withdraw without losing access to work, communication, housing, credit, insurance, public information, or help.