Hot off the press for Friday the 13th, this article in The Guardian intersects directly with some comments from a thread here in the community from yesterday. Specifically in regards to xAI and how, as u/notislant sarcastically put it, "[g]ood thing laws only apply to the poor."

This is collapse related because we see how the gamble on AI in terms of its frantic infrastructure build-out is directly threatening the health of citizens, yet the agencies and institutions that are allegedly in place to protect them are playing a game of obfuscation, misdirection through deflection of responsibility, and plain old negligence.

Yet again we see how industry takes precedence over people even when there are supposed to be protective measures in place to prevent industry from harming the people that live in the wake of its operations. The collapse of civil society is accelerated when the obligation of government to work for its citizens is neglected and the capacity for the hyper-wealthy to shirk the rules is enabled and, it seems, encouraged.

World Weather Attribution published this article on Wednesday. Climate change is posing an imminent threat to the world's oldest trees. Collapse related because we are destroying ancient biomes at an incredible rate.

Researchers from Argentina, Chile, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States undertook an attribution study on the fire weather conditions as well as the preceding dryness.

Their findings suggest unprecedented drought conditions and monocultures are fueling this environmental disaster.

The article provides a link to the full study (PDF) for anyone interested.

As things get warmer, one thing I will miss is a snowy Christmas as much as I hate driving in snow and cold. This was taken in Indiana on Christmas, it was almost 50 degrees that day, and not a lick of snow cover.

Despite the pathetic lack of accountability, the Epstein files changed the calculus. What used to be dismissed as a niche conspiracy theory turned out to be a global system of trafficking involving people at the top. When a secret that large is proven true, the "mad" theories start to look plausible. What other huge lies are we being told? What else exists behind the curtain?

We see a pattern now. A group of powerful people shape the world to fit their needs. They tell the public to "move on" while they build doomsday bunkers in remote locations, private security forces, and tech replacements for human labor.

The amazing thing is they are building all this right in the open, and we're like, "nah, they cant really be planning for half of us to die, are they?"

This started about a century ago. When the Great Depression hit in 1929 there were some hard hitting films. In 1930 the Motion Picture Production (Hays) Code was introduced. It was not really followed or enforced until 1934.

I thought old movies were a sign of some creepy puritan way of life, but it a code forced upon the creative folks. It's like history has been unveiled for me after watching a couple of these movies - I quite liked Five Star Final by Mervyn LeRoy. The ending was quite relevant to our current times.

The word czar is being used again. A sad little man wants to make Hollywood great again. There are puritan laws being put in place, or are simmering. I hope I live long enough to see some better parts of history rhyme.

Here are a couple of articles talking about Pre-Code films:

As a result, some films in the late 1920s and early 1930s depicted or implied sexual innuendo, romantic and sexual relationships between white and black people, mild profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions. For example, gangsters in films such as The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Strong female characters were ubiquitous in such pre-Code films as Female, Baby Face and Red-Headed Woman, among many others, which featured independent, sexually liberated women.[1][2] Many of Hollywood's biggest stars, such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Edward G. Robinson, got their start in the era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Once the Code took hold, criminals had to be punished. Sex had to be implied, not shown. Topics like abortion, drug use, and interracial romance were completely removed.

https://filmdaft.com/what-is-pre%E2%80%91code-hollywood-meaning-history-film-examples/

Submission Statement: This video presents a novel way of understanding just how bloody complicated the Metacrisis is. Although it is titled with NZ, you can comfortably ignore that detail as most of the content relates to the global predicament. The graphic in this has been designed to try and capture as many of the issues we face, including about 60 topics ranging from "Finite Planet", "Psychological Drivers", "Deforestation", "Ice Melt", "Food Insecurity", "Civil Unrest", "Resource Depletion", "Health Problems", "Pollution", "Insect Decline" and so on. I think the video provides a pretty good introduction to the Metacrisis/Collapse/what-have-you, and then goes on to present a number of horrifying statistics, facts and figures highlighting the state of the planet, and showing how different factors and drivers inter-relate, all while using the graphic to illustrate this. Although it's from 2024, if you just imagine that things have only gotten worse since then, you'll be fine... oh wait you don't have to imagine that! If nothing else it does provide a good baseline for comparison so we can see how bad things are now, vs how bad they were back then. Here's a backup link to the video in the event of other technical issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIm8gfExJ8

I have been worried about zoonotic disease since COVID19 and I know - duh, we all have - but before the pandemic I never gave it much thought. Now its easily in my top 5 concerns. This article talks about the growing population zones of one of the deadliest creatures humans have ever known.

Zoonotic disease in general is terrifying.

One of my favorite books is Rabid. It covers, well, rabies.

Another great book on this topic is Spillover, practically a companion to the famous collapse book Overshoot by Catton.

The Hot Zone was also great, dealing mostly with Ebola but with a general warning - this is going to happen again, far sooner than we will be ready. There's a TV show by the same name if you want more drama than detail.

New vaccines and new methods for producing them are very encouraging. I get every "jab" I'm told to every year. I may not think too much about my own life but that is no excuse to put others in danger.

At the very least - get vaccinated so you can live long enough to keep criticizing vaccines lmao

To what extent do you think the next crisis will be caused by government debt? I've done my own calculations, and it turns out that global debt growth is 1.8 times faster than the economy. This can't possibly work in the long run, can it? For example a country like Japan the debt even grows 3,2x times faster than the economy (followed by countries like China, France and The United States with also numbers above 2x), who is paying for all of this? And how will it end?

Former US Congressman Ron Paul warns that a monetary shift made more than five decades ago is now reaching its breaking point.

In a new interview with Tucker Carlson, Paul revisits the moment in 1971 when President Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility into gold and warned that the consequences are still unfolding.

https://www.capitalaidaily.com/ron-paul-warns-bad-stuff-is-coming-for-america-as-us-debt-and-gold-flash-alarms/

We've reached a strange point in the simulation where we are obsessed with documenting "the real" precisely because we are losing our grip on it.

You've seen the videos: the grainy filter, the slow pan over a family dinner, the old men playing dominoes in white plastic chairs, the caption reading "THIS is culture." It looks beautiful. It feels nostalgic. But there is a silent tragedy happening behind the lens.

The moment we frame a tradition to "show it off," we have fundamentally altered it. We have taken a living, breathing ritual, one that used to exist only for the people in the room, and converted it into Social Capital. We aren't just sharing a moment; we are feeding the algorithm the raw data of our souls so it can sell a "vibe" back to us.

Jacques Ellul warned us that Technique would eventually move from our factories into our private lives. He was right. We have turned our heritages into "cores" and "aesthetics."

-Culture is a way of being.

-Content is a product for consumption.

When we commodify our upbringing for the For You Page, we flatten the texture of our lives. The algorithm doesn't care about the weight of your grandfather's stories or the specific smell of the coffee; it only cares that the "aesthetic" generates a 10% higher retention rate.

We are watching the "washing out" of humanity in real-time. We are trading the messy, slow, unpolished reality of community for a high-definition simulation of it. We are becoming a society that knows how to look like we belong, while we sit increasingly alone, heads buried in phones, watching videos of people pretending to be together.

The only way to save a culture is to let it be invisible again.

Real culture is inefficient. It is slow. It is often boring. It doesn't have a soundtrack, and it certainly doesn't have a "share" button. If you want to find the "real thing," you have to put the camera away. You have to sit at the table, drink the coffee, and play the game without needing the world to validate that you were there.

Hi r/collapse -- I recently spoke with David Wengrow on his best-selling book "The Dawn of Everything", co-authored with the late David Graeber. Our conversation spans a vast historical survey that highlights many instances of human societies voluntarily disbanding their hierarchical forms of sedentary agriculture; sites like Poverty Point or cereal farming at Stone Henge. In particular, we focus on the the expansion of empire during the early stages of globalization. The authors question the conventional wisdom of today's socioeconomic forms to open up new and unexplored pathways for human society.

There's a feeling of powerlessness we all feel while staring into the climate/war/violence abyss of our smartphone screens. We tend to ask "What can I do?" before succumbing again to despair and distraction. This is becoming more and more fraught as civil liberties are being taken away and surveillance reaches new technological highs.

I wrote the following arguments as one answer to the question "What can I do?" I would love to hear others' thoughts.

Please note: I know that individual needs vary tremendously. The scale of this strategy is obviously different for everyone (e.g. those with dependents, those with disabilities, etc).

Voluntary participation in capitalism

1. The powerful perpetuate systemic misery through the voluntary engagement of people in Western markets.
2. Voluntary engagement continues because we all tend to desire what capitalism provides - comfort, convenience, entertainment, numbing. Capitalism has also walled off or monetised many previously free activities, thus fostering dependence.
3. Obviously, some participation in the system is needed to 'get by' - to support ourselves with food, shelter and medicine, particularly because these are only available through the system. But we participate far beyond this - we partake in luxury, comfort, entertainments.
4. This voluntary engagement is a massive contributor to the global crises we see. An obvious example is social media - the common people build the wealth of the owners of these platforms through their voluntary engagement. Less obvious is fossil fuels - much of fossil fuel use is for necessities such as food production or medicine, but we also make these businesses even more powerful through unnecessary consumption.

Necessities and strategies for change

1. The current state of the world demands some sort of behavioural change from the average person. Either this occurs voluntarily, or change will be involuntary and far worse, 10, 20, 30 years hence.
2. Challenging state and corporate power directly has become ineffective, if not suicidal, due their fusion with eachother (centralisation) and with technological advances. Protests and even democratic processes are largely akin to therapy to assuage the feelings of powerlessness and guilt of the participants. They do little to cause real-world change at the scale needed.
3. Non-violence must be essential in any opposition, from both an ethical and tactical standpoint. The violent will be killed and their violence will be used in state propaganda to destroy any movement.
4. The only leverage that remains, therefore, is a mass of people removing themselves as much as is feasible from that system. This is the only way to undermine globalized capital, slow the economy and ease environmental destruction.

Non-participation as a strategy

1. Non-participation is a strong, ethical, and necessary use of one's agency for collective purposes. At scale, it is also effective for changing the future in a positive direction.
2. It is similar to a strike. However, unlike a strike, there are no demands as there is no belief that the current system in place can provide what people really need. We are not looking for higher wages to buy things we don't need. We are looking for freedom from exploitation, and to have agency over our lives. Additionally, unlike a strike, it can be done individually. One does not need to wait for others to get on board to start living in a better way.
3. An underlying principle is the recognition that the system largely does not provide what we need, after basics are met. It fills our time with work or vapid entertainments and isolates us from those around us. Once one lets go of capitalistic dreams of 'success' or 'fame' or 'wealth' or even Hollywoodized 'love', one is free to change one's lifestyle to something more aligned with reality. Much of this is simply ending behaviours that we already know are destructive.
4. Self-removal from the system can include:
   • Reduced work hours as much as possible
   • Reducing most luxury consumption
   • Reducing debt (e.g. refusal to enter the housing market)
   • Ceasing most or all social media use
   • Engaging in lower-stimulation leisure activities (e.g. art or reading or socialising instead of gaming, social media and Netflix)
   • Refusing to work for national or multinationals corps
   • Living in sharehouses instead of alone
5. Self removal at a collective scale opens up more options such as rental strikes, boycotts, community planning and mutual aid.
6. Such behaviour change would require or lead to the dismantling of remaining habits, belief systems and dreams that keep one tied to the system. Such beliefs include:
   • My safety can be guaranteed by wealth (e.g. in retirement)
   • Money/success/fame will lead to my satisfaction or happiness or wellbeing
   • My prime value in life is how much I earn or own
   • I need [insert addiction here] to function (e.g. alcohol, social media, online gaming)
   • I need to be working to be useful or worthy or 'deserving'.

Benefits

1. Mass non-participation, paired with thoughtful use of one's individual time, would have unbelievable benefits on the mental, physical and cultural health of individuals and communities. Given the unpredictability of future society, the strength of one's circle and wider community may be the biggest factor in determining one's outcomes in the decades ahead.
2. Mass non-participation would wreak havoc on the economy and productivity, forcing a response. One option that the powerful could take would be to force people to consume and work. While this is not out of the question, it is anathema to the principles of capitalism's mythical "free market", and could destroy any remaining credibility in the past system.
3. Mass non-participation would lower energy use and climate destruction.
4. Even solo non-participation is a far healthier and happier lifestyle than the alternative (speaking from experience!)

The Environmental Protection Agency has approved pesticides containing PFAS "forever chemicals" for widespread use on American crops, and scientists, environmental advocates, and public health experts are sounding alarms about what this means for food safety and environmental contamination.

Since the Trump administration took office, the EPA has already approved two PFAS pesticides and is looking to give the thumbs-up to a total of five before the year is out. The newly approved pesticides, cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram, will be used on a wide range of food crops.

https://open.substack.com/pub/hrnews1/p/trumps-epa-green-lights-forever-chemicals?r=1t17zr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

This article from 2023 is collapse related because it poses social and philosophical questions about how ordinary people might eventually respond to climate breakdown and global pollution. The main cast of the movie is a group of young people with fairly diverse backgrounds, yet all sharing a common goal.

The movie is loosely based on the premise of a book with the same name, written by Andreas Malm in 2021. Malm is currently an associate professor at the prestigious Lund University in Sweden.

This article is not advocating violence or destruction of property in any way and neither am I - that would break the rules. It merely wonders how bad things must get before ordinary people begin doing what was previously unthinkable. It considers what the rationales and criticisms could be based on what happens in the movie.

Something subtle but significant is happening across the U.S. economy, and it looks less like normal market evolution and more like an early-stage collapse dynamic.

Brands that were explicitly built to serve price-sensitive consumers, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, and much of fast-casual dining and domestic travel, are steadily pivoting away from affordability and toward higher-income customers.

This isn't just inflation. It's a customer base shift.

The average consumer can't absorb the price increases required to keep stock prices growing. Shrinkflation and quality degradation are largely exhausted. What remains is the widespread push toward "premium" tiers, add-ons, and pay-to-access basics as the final lever to extract more revenue.

The result is increasingly clear:

Affordable, dependable, and healthy options are becoming rare especially for lower-middle and middle-income households that don't qualify as poor, yet aren't wealthy enough to weather constant price increases.

What's left is a hollowed-out market:

• Luxury and convenience for the top
• Bare-minimum, low-quality options for the bottom
• A rapidly shrinking middle where "good enough at a fair price" used to exist

From a collapse perspective, this matters because social stability depends on predictable, affordable systems, food, transportation, and everyday services, that people can rely on without chronic financial stress. When those systems are reoriented toward higher earners, resentment grows, trust erodes, and people feel quietly excluded from normal participation in society.

This isn't a sudden crash.
It's managed degradation.

We're still early in the process. Collapse doesn't happen in a single generation, it unfolds gradually, and it looks like this:

Today

• Lower class: Losing access to affordable, suitable options
• Middle class: Forced to pay more for what used to be standard

Tomorrow

• Lower class: Systemic failure and exclusion
• Middle class: Those unable to climb into the upper-middle are absorbed downward, as the middle effectively disappears

Excerpt:

The Federal Judicial Center has been established by statute as the "research and education agency of the judicial branch of the United States Government." As part of that role, it prepares documents that can serve as reference material for judges unfamiliar with topics that find their way into the courtroom. Among those projects is the "Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence," now in its fourth edition. Prepared in collaboration with the National Academies of Science, the document covers the process of science and specific topics that regularly appear before the courts, like statistical techniques, DNA-based identification, and chemical exposures.

When initially released in December, the fourth edition included material on climate change prepared by two authors at Columbia University. But a group of attorneys general from Republican-leaning states objected to this content. At the end of January, they sent a letter to the leadership of the Federal Judicial Center outlining their issues. Many of them focus on the text that accepts the reality of human-driven climate change as a fact.

"Nothing is 'independent' or 'impartial' in issuing a document on behalf of America's judges declaring that only one preferred view is 'within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge,'" the letter complains, while ignoring many topics where the document does exactly that. But the objections are only about one specific area of science: "The Fourth Edition places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and 'attribution.'"

Recently I learned of the Late Neolithic Collapse and think it has some interesting similarities with the current and near-future human situation. The wikipedia pages of Neolithic decline, 4.2-kiloyear event and the papers 'Repeated plague infections across six generations of Neolithic Farmers' and 'Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline' are some interesting sources.

I summarise the similarities as:

1. General technological slowdown and stagnation. The Neolithic Revolution slowed down or completely stopped in the Late Neolithic period, while the Moore's law failed around 2015. Since 2015, technological advance has become more marginal, speculative and much less paradigm-shifting. SpaceX just delayed Mars mission in February 2026.

2. Rise of a non-productive 'priest' class who discourage innovation and try to monopolise knowledge and power. The priest class dominated Late Neolithic city states and monopolised power by controlling knowledge and written material. Unfortunately we have a rising techno-feudalism who strives to achieve similar goals. They have been fairly successful in manipulating popular opinion by social media and algorithms.

3. Potential global crisis of climate and plague. Bubonic Plague spreaded through Late Neolithic Europe and Middle East and wiped out the majority of Anatolian Neolithic Farmers aka Early European Farmers. The 4.2-kiloyear event of global cooling was the final nail in the coffin of EEF, Longshan and Liangzhu culture. We seem to be safe from another devastating global plague but the antivax movement has gained momentum. The 2025 Texas measles outbreak can be partially blamed on decreasing vaccination rates.

4. Idiocracy: dumbing down of population due to significantly higher fertility rate of Ultra-religious and anti-science people. The plagues caused more devastation in the more educated Late Neolithic cities than the countryside, because the cities had higher population density and more foreign contact. The Bolivian Mennonites and Israeli Haredim have fertility rates of 6-7 and they mostly refuse to learn modern science or serve in the military. Places like Inner Melbourne have 1.0 fertility rate. The conversion rates of these Ultra-religious groups actually decreased so we can't count on them gradually assimilating into the urban population.

The following article was published yesterday by the University of Sitrling.

Reforestation is a noble endeavor but it seems to come with a lot of practical issues. As much as I want to rant about monoculture and the death of old growth forests, the article is actually talking about the loss of carbon-storing soil.

Soil stores roughly 2,500 gigatons of carbon - compared to 800 gigatons in the atmosphere and nearly 600 gigatons in terrestrial vegetation. But you can't see it happening, not really, so it is often ignored by climate models and even environmentalist groups.

Collapse related because our tree planting schemes are failing - to say nothing of fancier methods of CCS - and this is likely to cause major environmental problems for future generations.

For years we have known that pollution is making us dumber, extreme heat is making us more violent and we can directly connect several historical revolutions to the price of grain.

Now a new study has been shared by Afro Barometer and the results are not encouraging. The researchers found that increasing drought in Africa is linked to a similar rise in intimate partner violence and eventually child abuse. This is collapse related because climate change is causing a ripple effect of violence throughout the world, from the individual to the societal scale, and often going quietly unnoticed, comfortably hiding in the privacy of the home. The most oppressed group in all of this is, and always has been, children.

For once I can ask the question without the slightest bit of sarcasm - won't someone actually think of the children?