Tightening the Leash
extrapolating the inexorable: technocrats, geopolitics, and the dark road ahead
It’s been hard to keep up with the onslaught of misery that has plagued our everyday lives for the last *check notes* 6 months?
But I’m hesitant to act like this a new phenomenon, lest we forget the nightmare that was 2017-2021.
Yet, I can’t help but say the quiet part aloud…Everyone knows something terrible is on the horizon.
Or rather, something MORE terrible than the already terrible things that are currently transpiring.
I’ve had a myriad of friends and confidants reach out to me recently and ask if I’m feeling this trepidation as well.
“Do you think something is going to happen?”
In the bluntest sense possible, yes. I truly do.
Now, this is not meant to rile up conspiracies (hell knows we have enough of those), nor is it to HOPE for the worst things imaginable to come. Not by any stretch.
But as an Anxious AF 24/7 Individual, it’s coded into my DNA to always extrapolate the worst case scenarios, and play them out in long term Game Theory to see how to gauge expectations and preparations.
And now, more than ever, we ought to be prepared for the worst of the worst.
As I’ve discussed before, the current administration is bound in multiple directions by several different leashes held by several different owners. Financially, they are beholden to the billionaires — particularly those that amassed their fortunes through Silicon Valley — and are now in a dead sprint to liquidate the country’s assets (parks, buildings, etc.) and host a fire sale in the hopes of balancing checkbooks and repaying the debts they owe to the 1% who bought them their positions in power. Politically, they are slaves to several dictatorial nations, i.e. Russia, China, and Israel, who each have considerable leverage over the administration and the way they conduct foreign affairs, both fiscal and militaristic. And then of course, there’s the leash of the people. This administration is now at the behest of their own amped-up insane rhetoric, which has stirred ~25% of the country into a bloodsoaked frenzy that can never be quelled, but may be temporarily satiated with the horrendous, inhuman, and immoral treatment of their fellow Americans.
It is the administration of concubines, cannibals, and cowards.
Pathetic men in positions of power, whose only option when pressured is to point the finger and hope the buck can be passed for another day.
And when people in positions of power operate solely on fear and negligence, something catastrophic is bound to happen.
It is now common knowledge that this administration is hellbent on selling the public lands owned by the government. This is for several reasons:
Allegedly to balance the country’s checkbook by literally selling countless acres of open land to corporate entities that will (allegedly) reward America with more offices and factories to stimulate the economy
The tech-bros who effectively controlled the narrative around the election now seek greater influence via large scale social media models operated by “AI” (again, see previous posts) that will require MASSIVE data centers that currently cannot be built with the land the CEOs currently have at their disposal
There is a not-so-secret desire between the richest class to start the construction of “smart cities” or “sovereign cities”, i.e. municipalities completely independent of government oversight and owned/controlled by corporate entities. This is both increase greater growth potential for their bottom lines, but also as a selfish means to offer the 1% safe harbor if and when either hammer of justice — the people’s or mother nature’s — comes knocking.
Given the amount of influence and leverage the billionaires had in swaying this past election towards a certain individual, it can be no surprise now that this administration is bending the knee VERY QUICKLY to the corporate overlords and offering them as much land as possible for pennies on the dollar.
The punchline to this scenario is perhaps the grimmest.
Data centers, namely those used for A.I., consume more energy and produce more heat than any other technological development in the history of the planet. Combine this with the fact that we (Americans specifically, but Earthlings overall) have done virtually NOTHING to combat climate change, and the endgame becomes the inevitable scorching of the planet in a very immediate future. Whatever extraordinary changes we’ve seen in the weather over the last few decades would be a pittance compared to the hellscape that comes as soon as these data centers are operational, given the resources they would consume, the greenspaces they would replace, and the waste they would produce.
Furthermore, the construction of a “sovereign city” would certainly spell the death of the nation — the literal deconstruction of United States by all definitions — but even worse, it would be strongest force that pushes the country into a full blown civil confrontation, as a sort of invasive species takes hold of the country from within and would exist solely to divide society.
The goal of these sovereign cities, on the surface, is to offer a new opportunity for Americans under the rule of benevolent CEOs with no guardrails. Based on the test cities that exist in places like Honduras, the move would be to either enlist the locals that already live near the new city, or to create financial incentives for other Americans to move to these locations. Job offers, housing, transportation, etc. would draw people in, and then binding contracts and legalese would ensure no one ever left.
But of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the Great American Scam of the last century, you know how this story ends. With indentured servants, test subjects strapped to metaverse devices, and mass graves filled with the casualties of bad business practices.
Meanwhile, outside the imaginary lines of the United States, tempers are at all an time high. The Doomsday Clock inches towards midnight, and there is not an adult in sight who may help mitigate the issue.
This administration is in DEEP with Russia. To an extent that I suspect most of us don’t even know the full truth yet. There are endless stories and loose threads that confirm the alliance’s existence. To that end, you may find yourself wondering why that possibly matters — and up to a point, I’d understand.
But that understanding changed the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia has since declared itself the enemy of the west and a sort of ‘madman’ who would be willing to do anything to reclaim the former glory of the U.S.S.R. On its face level, we can at least assume that the Cold War fears of nuclear genocide are back on the table, and the administration’s alliance with Russia over Ukraine bodes VERY poorly for the possibility of peace between nations anytime in the near future.
And unfortunately, those sorts of horrors are only amplified when we play the conflict out over time, as things have gotten drastically worse just in the last few months.
While the U.S.’ involvement with Israel’s genocide in Gaza was already a massive issue in and of itself, the problem has since grown exponentially since Israel effectively declared war on Iran. It took little time for the conflict to escalate to a full scale aerial assault between the two countries, and this administration was quick to shove their dicks right in the middle of the competition.
Americans seem to be worried about a draft, as if the goal of the administration is to send thousands of young citizens into the Middle East to die for no good reason. But that’s not my biggest concern. As proven by previous conflicts, our primary modus operandi in the modern era is primarily drone-operated assaults. Which means that the more Israel and Iran fight, the more the U.S. will be carrying out aerial bombings, and exacerbating the terror over the region.
It cannot be overstated how much more this expedites the issues at hand.
Iran is one of Russia’s top assets. Israel is one of the U.S.’.
To that end, it may just sound like another proxy war between two superpowers, using their satellite allies as a means to measure each other’s arsenals. But consider that Russia is currently backpedaling after significant setbacks in the war on Ukraine, AND Russia is currently witnessing Israel (their enemy) succeed in their depraved desire to eradicate the West Bank. Russia soon becomes not just a madman with a button, but a cornered animal with only one option left on the table.
The situation only gets worse when other superpowers like China and the EU try to step in, not just complicating the issue but often times flaring tempers on all sides. Once we include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt’s push for more violence in the region for the sake of expanding their control of oil and currency in the global marketplace, the entire thing becomes a powder keg that I’m amazed didn’t go off anytime in the last 20 years.
One huge lesson our generation learned from the War in Iraq is that, simply, War Is Good For Business. And I have zero doubt that the Israel/Iran conflict is a huge boon for so many defense contractors and investment firms focused solely on oil, firearms, and weapon developers. But I think there’s a critical fear that the psychopaths at the top refuse to acknowledge, which is that we now have anywhere between 3 and 6 nuclear superpowers, all engaged in a pissing contest for no reason other than see which idiot will back down first.
We must also unfortunately take into account what apocalypses await us internally.
What madness encroaches the longer we remain dormant, insular, and hopelessly online? (HE SAYS AS HE USES 4 A.I. GENERATED IMAGES FOR THIS BLOG POST)
There is a truly harrowing evolution occurring within the collective zeitgeist. One that isn’t getting much attention, and it won’t get much more until it’s far too late.
Necropolitics. Brainrot. A.I. Slop. God From The Machine. Terminally Online.
Regardless of the naming convention, there is a new sort of neurodivergence that is developing within so many psyches across the country. Namely those of younger people, but I’ve seen it take hold of those my age or older as well.
Those who are so devoted to the internet that they can no longer be called dorks, influencers, trolls, or even incels. But in fact, zealots.
Internet culture crossed the rubicon into cult behavior a long time ago, but now it’s on a precipice.
In the wake of the pandemic, in tandem with the garbage marketing strategy that is “slap A.I. onto everything!”, we’ve fostered a digital culture of reliance — to the point of worship. The internet does everything for us now, to a fault. It doesn’t just tell us what to think, it does the thinking for us. And it often times thinks with very, very bad and very, very incorrect information. Everyone is being fed bullshit, now more than ever. No one is operating on a simple or grounded understanding of reality. (I refer you all to this very blog post!) And that lack of common understanding is the basis for all mania, depression, and subsequent lashings out at our fellow humans.
The internet is no longer a tool for knowledge, nor a medium for pornography, nor a means of establishing relationships on social accounts.
The internet is now a vast, vacuous, all-consuming, solar object that preys on the minds and attentions of all those who gaze at for it too long. It is a weaponized blackhole that means to envelop everything in its wake. It is a ruse; the promise of a Collective Consciousness and a Singularity, but the truth that it constantly returns is merely hollow and extremely deadly.
In more literal terms, the internet is radicalizing everyone.
And that may sound obvious to any Millennial who watched this happen to their friends in college who spent too much time on 4Chan, but I cannot stress how much worse it’s gotten — especially for people younger than ourselves.
The internet is now only one of two things
“Graveyard” content, i.e. algorithmized slop or poorly generated data used for deceptive marketing ploys or misleading thought manipulation. This makes up 90% of what we’re seeing most days and is the reason for the Dead Internet Theory. The potential harm from this sort of information is simply a dulling of the senses. The complete dehumanization of everyone online, the refusal to believe anything you see with your own eyes, and the nullifying of empathy writ large.
Hateful, thriving communities that feed off one another’s vitriol and purposely ensnare onlookers into engaging with the darkest parts of their id, in the hopes of forming a sort of grotesque unity built on bigotry, violence, and self loathing. These forums and boards are expanding more every day, and are always recruiting the youngest minds possible before they are old enough to develop the skills to resist the dark urges. Without going into graphic detail, these places thrive on forcing young minds online to engage in predatory, violent, manipulative, and exploitative behavior for the sake of likes/clicks/aura; assuring them that they’ll never know what consequences are for these actions once implemented in the real world.
We have stared into the abyss for too long.
Politically, this is one of the administration’s strongest tools. They now have a large constituency online (be they genuine Americans who were swindled, Russian and Iranian troll farms, or A.I. bots generated by corporations) that are not only willing to vote in favor of everything they say and do on a whim — not because they agree with the politics, but because their only role in life now is to enrage and hurt others — but will eventually be willing to act on the administration’s behalf.
The administration’s personal gestapo that are currently attempting to deport citizens from their homes are nothing more than troll farms brought to life. The people who stormed the capitol in 2021 are just dark-forum users who have been caught in the regurgitating machinations of hate-bile for too long. Those who attempted to thwart ongoing peaceful marches and protests are just the inevitable results of the A.I., reinforcing their worst inclinations every time they go online and worship at the altars of ChatGPT.
To me, the worst case scenario here is homegrown terrorism. We won’t have to wait for a nuclear affront from Russia or Iran. We won’t have to wait for the corporations to level our parks and relocate us into their sovereign nations as indentured servants, operating on data centers as either technicians or digital test subjects. The destruction will come from within, and will come with a horrifying body count.
There is of course the most pervasive and upsetting of realities: that all of these horrors work collaboratively to usher us into one mortifying hellscape of which there is no return. Considering that there is a constant villain behind all of these situations — oligarchs, and namely those tied to Russia — there is a substantial argument to be made involving:
- The utilization of the dead or malevolent spaces on the internet to activate a portion of the American populace into either abiding by acts of extreme violence or even enabling said acts themselves, and soon
- The weaponization of Iran and its nuclear program (which as of now still seems like a viable and operational system after it was revealed that Israel and the U.S.’s strikes on the region did not succeed) against both Israel and the U.S. in a cataclysmic disaster that at the very least subjugates the global population into pandemonium, and could even escalate into the territory of worldwide annihilation
- The opportunity for the wealthiest chucklefucks to seize as much land and influence as possible in the wake of the chaos to establish their new world order (for lack of a better term) while nation states are left weakened or dismantled
It is with no creative joy that I share my thoughts on this matter. In fact, maybe I share my feelings on this simply because the anxiety has kept me up so often for these last few months that I could no longer stand to think it on my own. Every day, as more news trickles in regarding the expansion of A.I., the denigration of the country at the behest of billionaires, and the escalating conflicts in the middle east, the more all these theories start to seem rational. And the more it seems like something truly abhorrent is just around the corner.
There was a strange, macabre sense of solace when people started asking me if I also felt that something terrible was on the horizon. It made me feel less alone. Not less worried, but comforted by the notion that worry is something that can be shared.
And if worry can be shared, so can happiness. So can triumph. So can hope.
I don’t know where we’re heading — and there’s always a slim chance that maybe tomorrow we’ll wake up, and things will somehow be just a little bit better. But as it stands, much of the last 10 years has been a downward spiral, pulling us further and further towards something none of us are prepared to face.
But sometimes, I wonder if avoiding the abyss’ gaze is really the right solution.
Sometimes, I wonder if we can stare at the abyss for long enough and hard enough that it blinks first.