S is HTF in Johannesburg

SS: No water in large neighbourhoods for weeks; tankers are running out before everyone gets water even after waiting hours; water employees striking for not getting paid in full; protesters closing road, and unrest building up. We are witnessing a political failure leading to infrastructure collapse.

All of these articles are from today or the last few days:

https://allafrica.com/stories/202602100415.html

>•WaterCAN says Johannesburg residents already live in Day Zero conditions, with areas experiencing outages lasting close to 20 days.

>•The group calls on the government to declare Johannesburg a national disaster area and demands daily updates from Johannesburg Water.

>Johannesburg has run out of water, civil society group WaterCAN warns, as extreme heat makes the city's water crisis worse.

https://thestar.co.za/news/2026-02-10-johannesburg-water-employees-strike-over-bonus-disputes-amid-water-supply-crisis/

>Johannesburg Water has been hit by an unprotected strike by members of Cosatu-affiliate, the SA Municipal Workers' Union (Samwu), over performance bonuses not fully paid in December, as the city's water crisis deepens.

https://www.ewn.co.za/2026/02/10/watercan-demands-disaster-declaration-as-johannesburg-water-crisis-deepens

>"This is not a drought issue; it is a failure of infrastructure planning and accountability. Everyone has to take responsibility for the situation we're in right now. People are now queuing for tankers, fighting for water, and the vulnerable are being left with nothing."

SS:

https://www.joburgetc.com/news/midrand-water-outage-protest/

>Officials point residents to water tankers, but accessing them is far from simple. Without a car, collecting water can mean hours of waiting or relying on neighbours and friends. Some residents say they arrive at advertised tanker points only to find no trucks, no water and no updates.

>On the ground, even Joburg Water officials admit the problem. Tankers refill from fire hydrants in Midrand, but there simply aren't enough trucks to serve the growing population.

>On social media, anger has spilled over. Residents have shared images of long queues, empty buckets and even illegally opened fire hydrants a risky but desperate move by people who say they've been left with no alternatives.

https://allafrica.com/stories/202602100548.html

>Families in RDP housing in Arla Park Extension 2 and 3 of Nigel shut down the busy Balfour Road on Tuesday, demanding water be restored to the community immediately.

>Residents gathered from 7am. They were monitored by a large police contingent, and a few warning shots were fired. However, protesters said they would not leave until a representative of the Ekurhuleni mayoral office addresses them.

>According to residents, water supply has been unreliable for the past five years.

This was published today on Phys. It concerns a new study also recently published in Nature Communications.

I think the last sentence shows why this is collapse related -

"The widespread slowdown may indicate that the internal engines of biodiversity are losing momentum due to the depletion of regional life"

The researchers are very worried about shrinking species pools - a polite way of saying global bioviversity is collapsing.

The failure of food supply chains over the past decade is usually explained as logistics snarls, bad policy, or profit-driven actors. Those narratives are comfortable. They miss the structural truth: our dominant food system is designed like a centralized nervous system, optimized for speed and control, not resilience. When one critical node fails, the whole system seizes. That's collapse by design.

In my recent analysis, I use mycelium networks - the decentralized fungal webs that naturally distribute nutrients and information across an ecosystem - as a structural model for what a resilient system actually looks like. In contrast with brittle, linear chains, mycelial structures absorb shocks, reroute flows, and adapt without a single central brain.

Key points that align with collapse theory:

▫️Centralized control equals fragility.

▫️Traditional supply chains depend on narrow, optimized pathways. ▫️Disruption anywhere propagates system-wide failure.

Distributed networks endure. In ecosystems, mycelium reroutes around local damage, redistributes resources, and keeps the organism functioning. This is anti-fragile behavior in real biological systems.

Food as infrastructure. Food systems are not just markets; they are physical and informational networks. When infrastructure reliably moves food laterally across regions and scales, shock intolerance declines. When it doesn't, shortages become cascading failures — not anomalies.

The piece grounds this framework in real rural experience, showing that local capability is not the missing variable, connectivity is. It also reframes common assumptions like "local is too expensive" as artifacts of industrial design, not inevitabilities.

If collapse is about systems failing under stress, then understanding why current models break is a prerequisite for imagining what comes after. This does not offer utopia; it clarifies mechanics: decentralized, adaptive networks are more resilient than top-heavy, optimized chains.

The failure of food supply chains over the past decade is usually explained as logistics snarls, bad policy, or profit-driven actors. Those narratives are comfortable. But, they miss the structural truth: our dominant food system is designed like a centralized nervous system, optimized for speed and control, not resilience. When one critical node fails, the whole system seizes.

That's collapse by design.

In my recent analysis, I use mycelium networks - the decentralized fungal webs that naturally distribute nutrients and information across an ecosystem - as a structural model for what a resilient system actually looks like. In contrast with brittle, linear chains, mycelial structures absorb shocks, reroute flows, and adapt without a single central brain.

Key points that align with collapse theory:

▫️Centralized control equals fragility.

▫️Traditional supply chains depend on narrow, optimized pathways.

▫️Disruption anywhere propagates system-wide failure.

Distributed networks endure. In ecosystems, mycelium reroutes around local damage, redistributes resources, and keeps the organism functioning. This is anti-fragile behavior in real biological systems.

Food as infrastructure. Food systems are not just markets; they are physical and informational networks. When infrastructure reliably moves food laterally across regions and scales, shock intolerance declines. When it doesn't, shortages become cascading failures, not anomalies.

The piece grounds this framework in real rural experience, showing that local capability is not the missing variable; connectivity is. It also reframes common assumptions like "local is too expensive" as artifacts of industrial design, not inevitabilities.

If collapse is about systems failing under stress, then understanding why current models break is a prerequisite for imagining what comes after. This does not offer utopia; it clarifies mechanics: decentralized, adaptive networks are more resilient than top-heavy, optimized chains.

Read the full analysis (systems perspective on food collapse):

https://roguemediasolutions.com/mycelium-vs-the-machine-why-our-food-system-keeps-breaking/

I'm working on a piece of fiction and trying to think through the scenario of a collapse in realistic way.

In the story, it's revealed that the global system (governments, corporations, education, finance, etc.) is secretly run by a deeply corrupt and pedophilic ruling class. The population eventually realizes something very uncomfortable, that they are the cogs in the wheel that keeps this whole evil system operating.

Once the illusion breaks, it is clear that the people in charge don't actually run anything, they sit at coordination points controlling the people below them who do the actual work. Truck drivers, nurses, retail workers, teachers, line cooks, IT workers, warehouse staff, office managers, farmers, doctors….

Suddenly everyone notices that the people at the top don't grow food, fix infrastructure, heal bodies, or keep water running. They coordinate extraction and that's it. It becomes apparent that every "institution" is just layers wrapped around human labor they get to extort. The moment people stop donating their time, energy, belief, and compliance, would the machine explode or simply stall out?

Would it be realistic to think that in a dramatic scenario people could come together and actually make a change for the better? That neighbors could pool resources, food and tools, workers could continue essential roles without corporate ownership, and care can be given without profit layers, where skills becoming currency instead of money, and trust forms locally because it has to.

I'm not pitching a fantasy where everything's easy and they all skip off into the future. I'm more interested in the eerie realization that the system's biggest threat was never rebellion, but it was masses of people uniting, not by revolt- by-force, but by population themselves pulling the plug. I don't know just an idea.

This was published on Eurekalert about an hour ago. It is a brief summary of a new study concerning arctic tourism.

The main author of the study argues that this activity is not "raising awareness" and is actually making the problem much worse. Collapse related because the number of people who took luxury arctic cruises in 2025 more than tripled from the year 2024. This year it could easily be over a million people - next year perhaps millions.

These cruises generate a shitload of waste (literally) as well as black carbon - soot that settles on ice, darkening it, accelerating melting.

The noise from these ships is very damaging to ocean ecosystems. The noise pollution interferes with migration, feeding, breeding and communication.

The article ends with a stark reminder that 60% of global ice cover will likely be gone by the end of the century.

That's 74 years from now. 74 years ago was 1952 - the year the world's first passenger jet service began. Time flies, ice melts and the world keeps on turning...

Relates to collapse because it shows how the global elites only care about protecting and benefitting each other. They normalise crime against women and girls just like they do with thier financial crimes and crimes against the planet.

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https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a70202293/human-population-miscalculated-study/

A news recently appeared suggesting that the world population may have been underestimated.

First, underestimation carries the risk of failing to accurately capture the true extent of the population explosion, leading to delays in preparation.

In the case of overestimation, even though the population is large, it may be less crowded than expected, and the harmful effects of overpopulation may be less noticeable, creating the illusion that even a large population is acceptable.

There is no evidence yet that the world's population is overestimated, but it exists locally and is well-founded.

(https://www.reddit.com/r/overpopulation/comments/1qvmt6v/what\_countries\_official\_population\_figure\_is/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=mweb3x&utm\_name=mweb3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button)

Therefore, both are harmful.

That's why we need to be wary of blindly trusting statistics and examine them with a critical eye.

Those of you in the social sciences will immediately recognize this. For those who don't know - there is a famous study called The Marshmallow Test.

I will you one marshmallow now. You can eat it, or you can wait and I will give you two more. You don't know how long you must wait - but you will. If you want to double up.

That is what this article talks about, philosophically. Instant gratification is warping our minds and sending us down a very dark path. When the leaders of the world have no concept or appreciation for this idea of delayed gratification - things get bad.

I'm not pro-China by a mile, but recently a Chinese investor was interviewed and he said, in no uncertain terms, that the west is run by narcissistic sycophants that have no understanding of science and no loyalty to their fellow countrymen.

I could spend hours criticizing the CCP but that would be an useless distraction. The dude was right. This is no longer a nation of engineers, physicists, chemists, doctors... it is a nation of law and business degrees.

Why do you think our infrastructure is crumbling before our very eyes? We are punishing smart people for stupid political reasons and we are, more or less, shooting ourselves in the foot. This is insane.

This video is a little over a year old, and while it bears relation to NZ (it was running in an exhibition about climate change), the majority of the statistics and figures relate to our global society. If you want something of a baseline for how bad things were at the end of 2024, this is for you, and then you can compare this with how bad things are right now! Woooo!

Why is this collapse related? Well it collects around 60+ topics that feed into collapse, presents a novel way of visualising these within a metacrisis umbrella, and then attempts to provide a crash course illustrating how so many of the problems we face interlink and affect each other. It provides a lot of facts and exciting data, all in a colourful and eyecatching video so as to appease our dopamine hungry gods. Wooo again!

I think it's a good way of introducing people to the complex reality we are facing. Again, if you ignore the NZ aspect, you'll still get a lot out of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIm8gfExJ8

Not sure if this belongs here but I believe this could open up some meaningful discussion and perspective, an open new perspectives for me as well.

So what is life? The pain that circulates every being? Or the moments of release we experience through our downtime. Life is beautiful, yet unrelenting. Everything is an existential crisis, yet every crisis we experience has beauty. It all loops back, the same thing for every person to experience sentience on this planet. Preform an activity that creates the ability to live, wear out the resource that gave us that ability, and repeat. The constant is the downtime we experience between the activity of which sustains us. The view of a blue sky, the sound of waves crashing against the rock on the shore, the connection of those close to us, these are the things that breathe meaning into our lives. The rest is buffer to let us experience these surreal phenomenon another day.

Creativity is the sentience of the world breathing. A mere painting can bring you to a place of stress free existence and bliss, yet the moment after you dropped back into an unrelenting world of pain, suffering, and grind. These escapes we experience through art are the very glue that keeps hope alive, the hope of a better future, the hope of release from the prison of materialistic belongings and a light onto a more fulfilling form of media such as the arts. A way to express ourselves without needing to worry about the next meal we put on the table. Yet we come back to that reality.

Every day we grind and disregard our personal state of being for the primal instinct of staying alive for another day. Every day we feel the weight of being that modern day has created for us. Gone are the days of scavenging for our sustancence through wildlife and scenery. Now we fight for our existence through a wage, through hours spent behind spreadsheets, or grills, in a building that blocks and connection to nature, that blocks any connection to the raw, beautiful, and uncertain wilderness

Stress used to be a tool of survival, it was a tool that would awaken our senses to immenent danger, possible threats in the vicinity. Now it triggers for deadlines. This world that we built ourselves from is gone. We have built a new world based on fear, desperation, and scarcity. Housing is more and more unaffordable to the average person, good healthy food is a luxury only for those who are wealthy, or willing to sacrifice quality of life in other fronts, and physical and mental well-being are put behind a pay wall to access services such as a gym, or a therapist.

Our world built on capitalism is not built for the sustainability of the human species. Instead, the goal is to milk profit for people who already have enough wealth to provide for a whole nation, as their greed knows no bounds. Is this what we evolved for? To work for the predatory man who's only goal is to raise the pillar that already oversees the rest of us, already drowning in a world of which is a battle to continue existing for the common person?

So we fight through media, we fight through voice, and we fight through art, to bring back a world which was once equal ground for everyone. We fight in hopes for a better future of which may not ever reveal itself, while we drive ourselves into a global crisis with all the resources to sustain a healthy life just out of reach, all because a few hundred people out of countless billions decide that life itself should be monetized.

So we push, we strive another day to create the stress free future of which may never arise. We obey and continue feeding into the same system that brought us into both an existence that provides just enough to keep us alive, but not enough to let us live. An existence that feeds off of our instinct to survive, exploited to create profit, all for the pursuit of happiness. This cycle is life, but those moments of beauty are living.

If we strip away the top 1% (billionaires and multi-millionaires) to see the "real" America in 2026, the traditional "Middle Class" has essentially split into distinct survival tiers.

Using Median Account Balances and Debt-to-Income ratios, here is how the classes actually look for the remaining 99%:

The "Invisible" Class (Bottom 15%)

• Median Bank Account: $0 - $100
• The Vibe: Deeply impoverished, often working "under the table" or relying entirely on government assistance (TANF/SNAP).
• Debt Status: "Defaulted." They are often Judgment Proof—meaning creditors don't even bother garnishing them because there's nothing to take.

• The Reality: They exist outside the traditional banking system.

  The "Fragile" Class (Bottom 40%)

• Median Bank Account: $600 - $1,200

• Debt Status: "Underwater." Credit card debt often exceeds total liquid savings.

• The Reality: This group is one flat tire or one 25% garnishment away from homelessness. They are the 56% of Americans who cannot cover a $1,000 emergency.

• Primary Stress: Housing and food inflation.

The "Working Fragile" (The 51%-85%)

• Median Bank Account: $500 - $4,000
• The Vibe: The backbone of the service and labor economy.
• Debt Status: Revolving credit card debt and high-interest car loans.
• The Reality: This is the group where the 56% of Americans who can't find $1,000 live. They are currently being crushed by 2026 housing costs.

• Garnishment Impact: Lethal. This is the group most likely to be garnished for medical or credit card debt.

  The "Treading Water" Class (Next 40%)

• Median Bank Account: $5,000 - $9,000

• Debt Status: High "Lifestyle Debt" (Mortgages, Student Loans, Car Payments).

• The Reality: They look "Middle Class" on paper but have zero "real" wealth. Their account balance is a temporary pass-through for bills. If they lose their job, their "median" $8,000 in savings lasts exactly 5 to 7 weeks.

• Primary Stress: Job security and the cost of childcare or eldercare.

  The "Comfortable 19%" (Top of the 99%)

• Median Bank Account: $45,000 - $150,000

• Debt Status: Manageable or "Positive Net Worth."

• The Reality: These are the high-earning professionals (Doctors, Tech Leads, Dual-Income managers). They are the only group with a "Safety Net." They can survive a garnishment, though it would hurt their retirement plans.

• Primary Stress: Tax brackets and maintaining their Standard of Living.

• The "Safety Net" Class (Top 2%-10%)

Median Bank Account: $150,000 - $400,000 (Liquid)

• The Vibe: These are the "Rich, but not Wealthy." High-end specialists, corporate VPs, and successful small business owners.
• Debt Status: They have debt (luxury mortgages), but they have the assets to wipe it out if they had to.
• Garnishment Impact: Rare. They usually have the legal retainers to block it before it starts.

The "Math" of the Split

When you remove the billionaires, the "Average" U.S. wealth drops by trillions. You're left with a Dual Economy:

1. The Capital Owners (The 1%): They own the debt.
2. The Debt Payers (The 99%): They spend their high salaries paying interest to the 1%.

well shit.

Compounding this bogus sense of popularity, video content creators and streamers can deploy bots to inflate their numbers. Indeed, the 'dead internet theory' posits that most of the internet's users are bots unknowingly interacting with other bots, not real people. Only recently, a rap-battle-worn Drake was accused of helping to promote an illegal gambling operation and funnelling the proceeds "to a third party, in Australia, to invest in bot farms that illegally boost Drake's streaming numbers". Bot farms are cheap and scalable. Other techniques propagandists can make use of are coordinated posting schedules where they pay loads of people to post about something at the same time. Such mercenary posters and bots can then practise comment flooding to boost the engagement velocity, artificially convincing people to believe something is a trending topic. A campaign that uses all the aforementioned techniques to create consensus is known as 'astroturfing', which creates the illusion of a grassroots movement.

https://open.substack.com/pub/rorykiberd/p/if-the-algo-feeds-you-who-feeds-the?r=srz3t&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Friends, this article will be very short:

We are currently seeing a situation where a black swan event could occur by March or later this year.

Look for yourself: there's inflation worldwide, and you probably feel prices rising, but at the same time, unemployment is also rising. This is called stagflation. The most dangerous thing is that if you take all cryptocurrencies—you can check it yourself by setting the EMA 116 and the weekly chart—you'll see that, whether it's Bitcoin, Solana, or any other currency, the price has broken below this line and is below it.

This isn't a correction, but capital flight. Large capital first withdraws its funds into USD and then into cash.

This situation is abnormal and is a sign of a major crisis, and capital is fleeing to sit on its heels. Normally, when inflation rises, high-risk assets rise first, as crypto did during COVID in 2019. But now the picture is different, and it's either a 1970 crisis or, even worse, a global crisis similar to 1929.

I won't bore you with complex charts; you can see for yourself. If Bitcoin falls below 50k, it will signal a global crisis. The maximum duration of this crisis should occur before 2029. These are 10-year cycles, and it will now coincide with the halving, which I expect to begin in March. Crypto is simply a canary in the coalmine.

Incidentally, I mentioned this decline three months before; you can see the link to the article.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/1p2ozio/the_math_behind_the_crash_why_87k_is_a_trap_and/

link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProjectZeroPoint/comments/1p4lh8g/archive_the_math_behind_the_crash_why_87k_is_a/

Hypernormalization, plastic pollution, Islamist attacks in Nigeria, the end to a nuclear treaty, and famine in (South) Sudan.

Last Week in Collapse: February 1-7, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can't-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 215th weekly newsletter. The January 25-31, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

In Memoriam: Fellow Substacker (The Crisis Report), r/collapse member, and Doomer, Richard Crim, passed away on November 23, 2025. A post from the subreddit last week announced his passing, and also collected tributes from the Collapse community. Crim was an accessible, good faith, honest communicator, especially on issues relating to environmental science and climate change. RIP.

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It was a mission filled with promise, but fumbled near the finish line. A research team studying Antarctica's mighty Thwaites Glacier (almost twice the size of Iceland) was collecting samples from just over one kilometer deep into a small borehole last weekend. A large chain, used to carry the sensors, was lowered deep into the hole, probably got stuck on the side of the hole, where it refroze in place and got permanently stuck. Weather and pre-arranged ship departures prevented the first-of-its-kind experiment (9 years in the making) from continuing. Preliminary data suggest that warm water is flowing deep below part of the Thwaites, although the necessary data to make informed predictions as to the Collapse of the Thwaites is lacking. It may be years more before we have the information.

Fundraising is ongoing to raise $10M USD to build a sea curtain around the Thwaites, which, when fully melted, is expected to cause sea level rise of more than two feet (61 cm). Prototype "sea curtains", made from a "reinforced tensile fabric" are being tested over the next three years near Norway.

As Central Asia's water security worsens, and the region warms twice as quickly as the global average, countries like Kazahkstan are pushing for early warning systems to prevent a breadbasket failure from catching Eurasia off-guard. A study on groundwater depletion in the Himalayas and Tibet found that "47% of GWS {groundwater storage} variability {is attributed} to direct climate drivers and an additional 15% to cryospheric processes, while human activities contribute up to 38% of declines." 69% of the region experienced GWS declines from 2003-2020. "These basins are characterized by persistent groundwater overexploitation, compounded by increasing evaporative demand under warming conditions. Totally, net groundwater loss across all basins amounts to −24.2 Gt yr−1….This decline indicates the vulnerability of downstream water systems, where storage and recharge is increasingly insufficient to offset intensive extraction and evapotranspiration losses."

On Tuesday, a group of agricultural leaders submitted a 4-page letter warning the U.S. Congress about a future "widespread collapse of American agriculture"

"Farmer bankruptcies have doubled, barely half of all farms will be profitable this year, and the U.S. is running a historic agriculture trade deficit….By placing tariffs on farm inputs -- from fertilizer, to farm chemicals, to machinery parts -- the Administration's tariffs have increased prices for farm inputs and have pushed the cost of production well above commodity prices….Today, whole U.S. soybeans represent just 24.4% {of the world soy market} - a 50% reduction in market share….mass deportations, removal of protected status, and failure to reform the H-2A visa program are wreaking havoc with dairy, fruit and produce, and meat processing…" -selections

A photo essay captures the horrors of the 2020 wildfires in Brazil's Pantanal, the largest wetland on earth (comparable in size fo the island Java). Estimates on Amazon deforestation predict 30% more deforestation by 2045, because a collection of multinational corporations has withdrawn from an agreement not to grow soy in part of the rainforest.

Why did atmospheric methane increase so much from 2019-2023? A study in Science says that it was due to a large drop in 'hydroxyl radicals," an OH free radical that helps to break down CH4 in the air. This side effect was partially caused by COVID lockdowns and temporarily reduced CO2 emissions. Also, a long La Nina wetted the tropics, leading to above average methane production in tropical wetlands.

The U.S. Virgin Islands felt its hottest night for February. Several parts of the UK felt their wettest January on record. The daily sea surface average temperature at the end of January was 0.15 °C warmer than 3 years ago. A flying fox colony in Australia was 80% killed off by a vicious heat wave. Storm Leonardo began battering Iberia, forcing evacuation of 100,000+ people and sweeping away one girl in the floods. Cyclone Mitchell escalated into a category 3 storm before striking the northwest coast of Australia.

Two weeks of heavy snow in Japan, bringing as much as two meters in some places, resulted in over 45 deaths and hundreds of injuries, as well as 1,700+ homes losing power. Gabon set a new February heat record at 35.7 °C (96 °F). A February 14 deadline looms for Colorado River Basin states to negotiate a new water-sharing agreement. Greenland ended its warmest January on record—almost 8 °C above their average January from 1990-2020.

A Nature Geoscience study concluded that "future West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat is likely to decrease carbon uptake in the large Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean" because the iron delivered to the Southern Ocean from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is in a form which makes it not easily able to be processed by nearby algae. The nearby waters may therefore not sequester as much carbon as predicted during the melting of the ice sheet, leading to another feedback loop in the region.

Climate disasters, global warming, and the resultant growing costs of buying a house have led 49% of Americans to consider moving—although 41% of that 49% is only considering relocating within their community or city. But surveys say 16% of U.S. homeowners are "extremely concerned" about climate change and/or extreme weather, 33% are "very concerned," and 29% are "moderately concerned." Hawai'i's 8-page annual climate report says the state had its second-driest year in over 100 years (after 2010).

——————————

A study of fish & microplastics in the Pacific found particularly high rates of microplastics (75%) in the fish off the coast of Fiji (pop: 935,000). A study from January indicates that bottled water (in the U.S., anyway) unsurprisingly has a higher concentration of microplastics than most tap water. "Bottled water had a high abundance of polyamide (PA), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and polyethylene (PE), while treated drinking water was most abundant in PA and polyesters (PES including PET)."

A Nature op-ed argues that a new global plastics treaty may still be agreed upon—although its adoption requires surmounting hurdles relating to the "full life cycle of plastic," procedural issues, aligning national & corporate interests, as well as the interests of rich and undeveloped countries & minorities. In other words, it probably ain't happening.

Despite gloomy attitudes about the present & future economy, Americans are spending more, and the stock market continues to rise. Consumer sentiment has now dropped to lows lower than the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the value of the USD has fallen to 4-year lows. Other writers warn about mass unemployment resulting mostly from AI proliferation and the hollowing out of cognitive labor jobs (call centers, paralegals, programmers, etc). What follows when most of today's white-collar jobs have dissolved?

Research into Long COVID and smoking determined that tobacco use results in some worse symptoms. Cigarette smokers "showed significantly higher odds for chest pain, dyspnea, and fatigue, while HTP {vape} users for dyspnea and sexual dysfunction." Other recent research suggests that COVID exposure to babies in utero (especially during the 3rd trimester) increased the chance of a "neurodevelopmental diagnosis" by about 7%. Small amounts of COVID can cross the placenta and also be present in amniotic fluid.

A pre-publication study in Nature Communications looked at the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which lies dormant in about one third of humans. They found that—in mice, anyway—the parasite causes cysts in which the parasite may grow inside these cysts and re-emerge when immune systems are weakened. The parasite can theoretically only reproduce inside felines but can be spread to nearly any warm-blooded mammal. Symptoms begin similar to the flu. Malawi declared a polio outbreak.

A study in Science Advances estimates that, from 2006-2020, "Wildfire smoke PM2.5 was responsible for ~24,100 all-cause deaths per year in the contiguous {lower 48} United States….projections showing a global increase of extreme fires up to 50% by 2100." Another study suggests that the "urban heat island" effect (cities generally warm faster than other land) will cause ~81% of cities' land to heat up "faster than the surrounding area…Under a 2 °C global warming scenario….in India and China, mean LST {land surface temperature} is projected to increase by an additional 50-112% above ESM projections of the surrounding area."

Some economists are saying that Trump is positioning the economy for a Second Great Recession, triggered by many of the same causes. Home prices are rising, and would-be buyers are again turning to subprime loans to finance their homes. What's more—the current SEC Chair, and also former SEC commissioner in the years leading up to 2008, is pushing similar deregulations for banks to lend mortgage money again. Adjustable rate loans may surge back, destabilizing people's finances and leading to financial ruin. U.S. home prices are up more than 50% since 2019. Others believe spiraling government debt (approaching $39T in the U.S.) will set off a financial crisis leading to worse inflation and/or austerity policies. Also, U.S. unemployment claims his 2-month highs for the end of January, with 231,000 new unemployment claimants.

After SpaceX absorbed Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, Musk's wealth jumped to over $850B. The ongoing release of the Epstein Files has implicated many of the rich & famous in their associations with Jeffrey Epstein—including visits to his notorious island.

Bird flu was found in London's swans along the Thames. Over a thousand crows died from bird flu near Chennai (metro pop: 13M) in the first 5 weeks of the year. Over 4M birds in the U.S. have been affected by bird flu or subsequent cullings this year.

A flood at a wastewater plant in Wellington (pop: 430,000), New Zealand, resulted in sewage flowing directly into the ocean. Repairs are expected to take months. One person was confirmed dead from Nipah virus in Bangladesh.

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162+ villagers were slain in western Nigeria in a couple jihadist attacks, allegedly after refusing commands to affirm their allegiance to sharia law. Assassins in Libya killed the son of Muammar Gaddafi in his home. A photo essay from Myanmar shares images from Myanmar's ongoing 5-year Civil War. Pakistan is intensifying operations against Balochi separatists behind recent suicide bombings; a couple days later a suicide bombing at a mosque in Islamabad (pop: 1.3M) killed 31 people, injuring 160+ others.

The U.S. shot down an Iranian drone near a U.S. aircraft carrier. Negotiations between both powers fell apart, and were then patched back together, to deal with Iran's alleged nuclear program.

President Trump's moves to cut off oil imports to Cuba (by threatening tariffs on countries selling oil to Cuba) is aggravating economic and energy unrest, and moving the country closer towards regime change. Moves to rescind protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians have hit resistance from federal judges, for the time being. European leaders are conceding that the United States is changing under Trump, and will not easily shift back in norms following the end of his presidency.

Russian strikes again targeted energy infrastructure in Kyiv on Monday, cutting off power to a large part of the city. The Russian economy is finally starting to sag, after many months of a mid-War boom. The UK and other European nations are getting more serious about checking and apprehending Russia's shadow fleet of oil tankers sailing through the Baltic Sea. President Zelenskyy claims that, in 2025, Russians were killed at a 47:1 ratio when compared to Ukrainian soldiers, of whom he says about 9,000 died in 2025—believe it if you want. The expiration of a key nuclear treaty has also raised the specter of future nuclear posturing, and conflict. "For the first time in more than half a century, we face a world without any binding limits on the strategic nuclear arsenals {of the U.S. and Russia}," said the UN Secretary-General. Watch the last known nuclear test of the U.S. here, from September 1992.

Strikes in Rafah, Gaza killed 18+ near a border crossing. Observers fear that Ethiopia will spiral back into War following the rebel Tigrayan forces (TPLF) attempting to occupy former Tigrayan lands within Ethiopia two weeks ago.

Fighting is reportedly escalating in South Sudan, and a 12-boat aid convoy was attacked and looted on its way to deliver some 1,500 tonnes of supplies to the hunger-stricken region. Not far away, in southern Sudan, thousands are fleeing towards the mountains to escape rebel forces (and bandits). All major supply routes have been severed. An RSF drone strike killed 24 people fleeing. Famine is worsening.

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Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-The Collapse is Hypernormalization, if this popular self-post from last week is accurate for you. The system keeps grinding on even as the world around us spirals into breakdown. Or do things feel very much abnormal?

-You are underestimating the dangers from microplastics, according to this self-post from r/immortalists , a subreddit about health and longevity. Since (micro/nano)plastics aren't going away, and are projected to increase in number, you ought to inform yourself earlier rather than several years from now.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, AI news, weather forecasts, off-grid maps, complaints, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don't want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

In 2013, before AI and bots worried us, a man named Edward Snowden shocked the world. To the silicon valley tech bros this wasn't that shocking, but it certainly was to the general public which, in all fairness, is technologically illiterate. And apparently the world has a short memory.

In 13 years the conversation around Snowden seems to have died. We can talk about Stuxnet, flame, duqu, crouching yeti - all the famous malware. But the internet itself is the virus. Blame social media, politics, AI. Blame whatever you want.

If you take extra steps to conceal your identity on the internet, you are extra interesting to the NSA, GCHQ, FSB, Mossad. To think you can actually hide in the modern world is absurd. This is collapse related because mass surveillance is a fact of life and it has been for decades, yet everyone keeps pretending to be surprised.

There might be 20 million people worldwide that know the future of markets and foreign policy and good for them.

Meanwhile billions of us are powerless, ignorant and irrelevant - as far as they're concerned.

Edward Snowden will never come back to America. The CIA and several "anonymous" sources in the intelligence community have said explicitly that they will kill him if he ever comes back.

He's a traitor and Donald Trump is president.

We are so fucked.

Submission statement: The article introduces Homogenocene as a complementary term and idea to Anthropocene, overviews its history of formation, and thus provides a broader perspective on the crises the world is currently facing.

Feudal economies will always undermine democratic government, but a democratic economy might render democratic government sustainable and break the Cycle of Anacyclosis.

we are in 2026 and my friend genuinely requires a source for McDonald's being human meat despite the fact that if the general public had any sort of source for something like that there would be mass hysteria. Word of mouth is the only way this will get around before the tipping point of things and yet it's like speaking to a brick wall. i can't make him understand and i never will

I saw this on Ethos this morning and figured I'd share. Collapse related because landfill pollution is a major contributor to climate change and waste as a whole contaminates soil and waterways across the world.

From the article:

Recycling and reducing myths feed our latest obsession — that we can achieve truly zero-waste status. Certainly, earnest efforts matter, but assumptions that we're not making trash because we bring reusable flatware and straws with us don't make it so.

Our waste problem has us cornered — both up and downstream — and it's big business.

The article did make one error. It claims the garbage industry is worth nearly 70 billion dollars. That is not true.

Its closer to 150 billion dollars.

Submission Statement:

You can find this post verbatim on my substack, but I post there once a year at best and I think moving forward maybe even less - because frankly, what is the point?

Another month, another hot off the presses paper bucking the gag orders which have stifled academic honesty for decades, and stating the blunt reality we need to accept: we are facing the global collapse of civilization within ten years. This time from Hansen, the esteemed and irreproachable elder for the darker truth of emissions science.

Some choice quotes:

We inferred that global temperature, after reaching a minimum about +1.4°C in the first half of 2026, will rise to about +1.7°C in the first half of 2027, as spurred by even a moderately strong El Nino.

The graph begins in 1979 because upper 300 m data only goes back that far, but the trend rates of global temperature and Nino3.4 are nearly unchanged when their data begin in 1970. Global warming begins to diverge from the linear trend in about 2015. The magnitude of this gap is the source of befuddlement for climate models, especially those with low climate sensitivity. This persistent, seemingly growing, gap implies an increase of the net climate forcing.

If we characterize this forcing change with a single "turning point," that turning point is in the range 2010 to 2015, probably closer to 2015. Thus, in finding the best linear fit to accelerated global warming in Fig. 1, we show results with the linear fit starting on the trend line for both choices: 2010 and 2015. The latter, more realistic, choice results in global warming reaching 2°C in the 2030s.

Hansen of course ends on a polite note, because he has to if he wants to keep his job:

Don't be too pessimistic as the evidence for high climate sensitivity grows. Realistic understanding of the climate situation, and public recognition of that, is the essential first step toward successfully addressing climate change. Progress in climate science during the next 5-10 years is needed for the development of effective energy and climate policy because the pressure for policy action will grow along with climate impacts as global temperature approaches +2°C. The current flippant attitude - 1.5°C isn't so bad, we can deal with 3°C - of people who should know better will dissolve, if we can improve understanding of the danger of passing the point of no return. Yes, we know, this all sounds very theoretical. That is the world we live in. Politicians cannot see past the end of their nose, the next election. Young people understand that and have the potential to affect the future. It will be an interesting story.

Left unspoken, for those with reading comprehension, is how this paper is entirely about acknowledging that we passed a critical (still unidentified) tipping point for the rapid acceleration of warming 11 years ago, and have done nothing except keep the gas pedal flat-out ever since.

Hard Talk:

Those few who are still paying attention to the science for the past three years, instead of sitting around jerking themselves off with one-line jokes and AI-generated bullshit which have come to dominate the white noise of this subreddit however, can understand what this represents. Last years "Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly" paper lays the math out of the trajectory out very clearly:

• At the current 0.4~ degrees of warming per decade we will hit +2 degrees of warming globally by the early 2030's, potentially in 2030. With this will come the catastrophic disruption of critical systems we rely on to maintain our civilization, which we are already witnessing worldwide. The rate of warming will, of course, continue to increase dramatically over this period. It is a self-feeding cycle now.
• We will reach +3 degrees of warming globally by the early to mid 2040's, and what remains of the core systems for our civilization at that point is going to very rapidly fall apart. The actuaries paper among others has not held back on the impacts of a +3c climate regime. With only a rough idea of what feedback loops will be triggered in this timeframe, the rate of warming - having doubled from +0.2~ since 2015 - would if progressing linearly be 0.8~ per decade by 2035 and +1.6~ per decade by 2045.We are no longer experiencing a linear pathway of warming. It is very clear: we left that behind in 2015.
• Speculating on 2045 and beyond is, to be blunt, irrelevant. If you are lucky you will be dead, everyone you know will likely be dead, and the period of 2050 onwards will feature a handful of scavengers sifting through the choking dust of a world in chaos - one which burns and freezes without any cyclicity while unprecedented storms ravage it. It is evident now that for over a decade we have been locked into a progressive regime of accelerating warming and feedback loops - from which we have no way out other than pleading for technology which does not exist, which fundamentally cannot exist, and is thus little more than magical / religious thinking. The science which would have revealed this situation was suppressed by governments, we have all kept the party going while knowing consciously and subconsciously that things were getting worse every year, and now it's all falling apart. I'm not really interested in arguing the point with the quality of poster on this subreddit anymore, if you can't understand the math that's your failure.

In Closing:

For the better part of the past year and a half I've been experiencing terrible writers block, while trying to write something about "How To Live While The World Is Dying". I gave that up, and after friends kept asking me to explain my position it morphed into trying to tie together all of the existing cutting edge science on the situation in a digestible form for the layman. I thought I had a respectable draft together and had sent it to Richard Crim in early January for feedback and ideas, only to find out this week he has passed away. Forgive my rage here: I'm pretty pissed that we lost one of the few who could cut through the bullshit and see this situation for what it is, and present it in a coherent fashion, in an era when most of the humans left on the internet seem to have half a brain per half million of them.That essay has been ready to go for months, really, but every month a new paper drops with a bombshell and I have to re-write a huge chunk of it to reflect what we now know.

At the end of it all, after all these words, what we know is that we are fucked, cooked, totally shitfucked with no hope of recovery. We're all gonna die, quite miserably, decades before we should have, and any hope of stopping this process ended definitively over a decade ago. All that remains is to witness the end out of morbid curiosity for how it plays out, because we damn well know how we got there.

So stop fucking around on this godforsaken brainrot, touch grass before it burns, and do something meaningful with the last five to ten years of your life.

For the crowd who are just here to post uneducated doom because you yearn for the end of the world to release you from your shitty miserable lives, good news:

You're already dead.

I was driving through rural areas this weekend and realized something that's been nagging at me for a while. My windshield was completely clean. Not a single bug splatter.
I remember as a kid in the 90s and early 2000s, road trips meant stopping every couple hours to clean the windshield because it would be absolutely covered in dead insects. You couldn't see through it. It was gross but it was normal.
Now? Nothing. I drove for 6 hours through farmland and countryside and my windshield looked like I'd just washed it.

This isn't just anecdotal either. Insect populations have collapsed by something like 75% in the last few decades. And nobody's talking about it. Everyone's focused on climate change (which is obviously critical) but the insect apocalypse is happening right now and it's going to devastate ecosystems in ways we can't even fully predict.

No insects means no pollination. No pollination means crop failures. It also means the entire food chain collapses because insects are the base of so many ecosystems. Birds, bats, small mammals, amphibians, fish they all rely on insects. When the insects go, everything else follows.

And it's not like this is some distant future problem. It's happening NOW. We're living through a mass extinction event in real time and most people haven't even noticed because it's been gradual enough that we've adjusted to the new normal.

I see people talking about prepping for economic collapse or supply chain issues but ecological collapse is going to make all of that look like a minor inconvenience. You can't eat money. You can't grow food without pollinators.

When's the last time you saw a firefly? When's the last time you saw a monarch butterfly? When's the last time you heard crickets at night?
We're fucked and nobody's paying attention.

I just wanted to put this out there, but that creeping sense of cognitive dissonance you get when you go to supermarket and still see full shelves, no matter how out of whack the prices have gotten? That sense of disquiet but acceptance when you see kids on phones following their parents around like zombies? How every day that the internet is still on, but it keeps putting out cycle after cycle of outrage and falsehoods trying to top the falsehoods of yesterday?

None of that is normal. All of that is hypernormalization.

We cannot envision a viable alternative to an unsustainable system, and so we quietly go about our daily lives because most of us can afford to be insulated form them. For now. But the rot creeps in.

We are living in a ghost story, a purgatory, and the best we can do is make our own little preparations until the other shoe drops and the bright blinding light of collapse hits.

So we got to talking at my job this morning and quite frankly everyone is kind of freaked out. I am under the impression that what I currently see on my feed is fed to me by an algorithm that won't allow me to see things that they are seeing as I used my phone to decompress. I am not saying that our government isn't in line for a complete collapse but they are speaking in terms of everything that we know. As like a world order is going to throw us under (think 1984 George Orwell) So I would love to hear what y'all have to say and sources I can fall into heavily. Talk to me like I'm a child that knows nothing. I'm trying to gather information the best I can. I've always mentally prepared for a horrible future but this seems worst than what I've ever thought.

I dig a well on my property. Now I have water. But it lowers the water table below the depth of my neighbor's well.

I didn't do anything wrong. Neither did my neighbor. We both made reasonable choices. And now one of us doesn't have water.

This is how the commons dies. Not through villainy, but through everyone optimizing correctly, one reasonable decision at a time. One well becomes a subdivision, becomes industrial agriculture, becomes the Ogallala Aquifer dropping a foot a year across eight states. Nobody's wrong at any step. The aggregate is catastrophe.

Now scale it up.

We strip-mine rare earths — two thousand tons of toxic waste per ton extracted — to build AI data centers that consume more electricity than some countries and drink millions of gallons of water a day for cooling. We build them as fast as we can, because the quarterly targets demand it, because the competitors are building theirs. Each step is rational. Each step is someone's optimized business case.

And what do people actually use this machine for?

According to Harvard Business Review, the top uses of AI are therapy, life organization, and finding purpose.

We hollowed out the commons — the water, the air, the earth itself — to build an optimization engine so powerful that people mainly use it to ask why they feel so empty. The machine doesn't know. It's a next-token predictor reflecting our own confusion back to us in comforting paragraphs. But people are so starved for the conversation that they'll take it, because the chatbot has time, doesn't judge, and costs less than the therapy that the economy they live in has made unaffordable.

We destroyed the village well to build a machine that people use to ask why they're thirsty.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/06/deepfake-taking-place-on-an-industrial-scale-study-finds

"AI content for scams can be targeted at individuals and 'produced by pretty much anybody', researchers say"

The implications of this are that no one can trust anything any more, and since so few people have critical thinking skills, these scams will cause a great deal of suffering. I've been working around computer security for 25 years (I'm a tech journalist), and have seen many types of threat, but these are by far the most serious I have ever seen. (Okay, with the exception of zero-click exploits...)

Btw, it's

Yemen might be the first country to actually run out of water

I just made a video about Yemen and honestly learned some pretty disturbing stuff.

The country was already running out of groundwater before the war even started. This was not drought. It was decades of pumping ancient aquifers faster than they could recharge. Wells got deeper, water got more expensive, and people without money slowly lost access.

By the early 2000s, experts were warning Sana'a could become the first capital to physically run out of water.

Most of Yemen's water goes to farming, especially qat, which only sped things up.

Once water disappears, everything else follows.

The war did not cause this. The water crisis made Yemen fragile.

I made a short documentary style video breaking it down if anyone's interested. Just wanted to share because this feels like one of those slow disasters we do not notice until it is everywhere.

The last nuclear treaty between Russia and America has expired and neither Congress or the Duma have any interest in renewing or reformulating.

We (he) pulled out of the climate accords, later than we wish his father would have pulled out.

But I wanna talk about another issue, one that seems to be flying under the radar lately.

This recent article from Foreign Policy is primarily concerned with flagging - that is to say, when a ship uses literal false flags to operate in protected or contested waters. This may not immediately conjure images of collapse but it seriously compromises the estimates of the IPCC and other NGOs that are basing their models on the beautiful idea that nobody lies.

This is collapse related because just like methane and plastic pollution - this is yet another variable that is not taken into account or, perhaps, intentionally ignored.

Things are bad. That might be the most honest thing you can say about this decade. But they are far worse than what is presented by the "official" figures and studies.

*"It is worse - much worse than you think" *

• David Wallace-Wells

Drought and wildfires continue to adversely affect US beef production. Ground beef prices specifically continue to rise. Since hamburgers are a fundamental part of the American diet and a god given right, the President is taking action to ensure that demand is met. Rather than admit that this is a direct result of climate change and adapting our consumption we'll just import more from Argentina.

Collapse related because this is how it's going to go, isn't it? As wealthy countries lose the ability to produce their own food due to climate change we'll just buy it from other countries. It'll be fine, right?

Like are people genuinely delusional enough to think that we're going to somehow magically escape this planet and all the destruction our civilization has directly caused and just start from scratch elsewhere? It's hilarious. Comical even. Terraforming a place like Mars would take centuries. It isn't practical. The universe is too vast.

I'm all for going into space and developing new technology like reusable rockets and so forth. But it feels like so much of this hoo rah, go team! hype is just artificially created to distract people from the grim reality here on Earth: increasing environmental destruction, technofascism, erosion of basic civil liberties and rule of law. Like a bunch of sycophants endlessly obsessing over rockets like a dick measuring contest and the "good ol days" of the 60s and 70s Space Race which was the result of a unique geopolitical climate that will likely never be repeated.

It just seems pointless to me. We have at best 30-40 years (very generous estimate) before things get very bad and unbearable here with climate change. We're not going to do anything significant in space within that time period. Sure, we might send more advanced satellites out. But this whole idea that we're going to colonize other planets or moons I just don't think is realistic. Why not focus all this effort and endless media sensationalism towards solving all the real, dire problems here on Earth first?

Like is this just a situation where the psychopathic, neo-Nazi, tech billionaire CEO oligarchs are attempting to ultimately create some new subspecies or master race of elite, obedient worker drones to build and thus join the new colony, leaving everyone else behind to die from either nuclear war or climate catastrophe? It seems that way in my view. They clearly know this planet is cooked, hence them building bunkers in remote locations. Hence them investing all this money and time into anything relating to space travel. Hence them buying governments and creating an alternate reality using social media where everyone who serves their interests is allowed to afford a somewhat decent life, and everyone else is doomed to a life of poverty.

Even if we miraculously manage to do all this in that time, what's the point? What's the point in starting from scratch on another world if the way our society views energy consumption now is still stuck in the 18th century? If our entire society is still based on primitive ideology? We're literally just going to destroy that place too. Like a cancerous tumor. What do we do then? I highly doubt this new colony would have a sustainable civilization separated from capitalism (socialism, etc), since that'd in turn diminish the need for and power of the oligarchs entirely. They'd be incredibly stupid to not continue hyper unregulated capitalism/fascism on this new planet too.

Curious to hear what other people think about this. This kind of stuff truly keeps me up and night, and I can't really talk about it with most of my friends irl.

This forum should not be tool of patriarchy.

Capitalists want you to believe that competition and death is normal.

That patriarchal violence is the default for humanity, and that it's always "dog eat dog."

Think where you first learned that, my brothers.

Who taught you that? A bully, a father, a coach, a religious leader? An abuser?

Take a breath.

Feel emotions.

Open your eyes.

Life is a circle, a cycle.

Fear is the mind killer.

❤️❤️