“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
— Carl Sagan
Note: I’m reading The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and I’m futzing with the blockquote css on this website so wanted a test quote to experiment with on main.
The best doom reports from 2025
This was the year of Project 2025, a sort of dystopian teaser of coming attractions once the MAGA regime moved back into the White House after the Biden administration retired. It was published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation during the intermission between Trump sagas when one could suppose they had some time to kill, and was sort of a New Year’s Resolution shitty things the far right could get on with when it inevitably got back into position this year. And, say what you will, they haven’t been slackers. The Project 2025 Tracker estimates overall progress of dismantling liberal democracy in the U.S. is at 48%. In just the first year!
It’s only the middle of November, but I’m calling time with a list of the best (worst?) of the doom reports I’ve doom scrolled. If you, like me, are drawn to well structured and sourced reporting on The Situation as it is with your Saturday morning coffee, then you may have seen a few of these already. They’re my picks of the crème de la crème of dark reading from the year: covering the slow, grinding collapse of democracy, the fragmenting and increasingly closed, monitored or pay-walled internet, and irreversible damage to our favourite punching bag: the climate… Enjoy.
The Authoritarian Stack — Here’s how tech billionaires are designing the post-democratic America, and what’s coming for Europe in the coming years. It’s a grim, well-researched roadmap for how a handful of oligarchs are constructing parallel governance architectures nobody voted for. (A project led by Prof. Francesca Bria with xof-research.org)
Digital sovereignty or digital dictatorship? — It’s hard to imagine how things can get worse, and you don’t have to because the Kremlin is already on the job, mixing technological isolationism, intimidation tactics and regulatory hellscapes that make more people just want to shut up, leaving the state free to just get on with more war crimes in Ukraine. (New Eurasian Strategy Centre)
The 2025 Global Report of the Lancet Countdown — The people of earth have decided to double down on fossil fuels, ignore the 546,000 heat-related deaths and direct our efforts toward raising the transmission potential of dengue. Huge accomplishments. This report contains a fun scrollable summary of how we’re causing our own demise. (The Lancet Countdown)
The Internet Coup — This is detailed technical analysis and nightmare material about how a Chinese company (Geedge) is exporting components of the Great Firewall to its autocratic friends and neighbours need of a helping hand. It’s working disturbingly well. (InterSecLab)
Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market — I will forgive the Potterverse reference for this one. It’s harder than you’d think to make people care about the global spyware industry that’s targeting the world’s journalists, human rights defenders, environmental activists and opponents to despots and autocrats. This one features a neat interactive map connecting the dots between 435 companies and other organisational entities across 42 countries that make up the distributed panopticon of oppressive fuckery. (The Atlantic Council)
The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction — Disasters are no longer “acts of god” (always found that phrase odd) but rather an act of self-harm that humans do to themselves as a matter of course. While this one tries to put a positive spin on things with sections like a “hazardous future is not inevitable,” yeah it kind of is. All the solutions require everyone going along. Until the planet is essentially experiencing the story line of Pluribus, everybody never goes along. This report is neat in how it identifies three spiring conditions of doom that underpin our current shitshow, all of them economic:
- Increasing debt and decreasing income that leave a majority of national economies fucked and unable to invest in ‘going green’
- An unsustainable transfer of risk to the countries that are more intensely hit by the effects of global warming, meaning they’re spending more money on disaster related risk and less on intervention or mitigation.
- The respond-repeat cycle of disaster relief and humanitarian aid that has zero impact on sustained recovery let alone prevention.
We could fix this issue, sure. Easy. It minimally requires changing how we’ve evolved as a species to respond to literally everything. But I digress. Ignore me, it’ll be fine. Enjoy today, be kind to people around you. (UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction)
V-Dem Democracy Report 2025 — Democracy worldwide has regressed to mid-1980s levels but without the synth pop sound track and fashion trend that included far too many zippers. More people are now living under autocracies than democracies. Freedom of expression continues its slide. Essentially an autopsy of global liberalism. (V-Dem)
Freedom on the Net 2025 — The fifteenth straight year of global decline. Details the rise of “sovereign AI” censorship systems and increasingly militarised national internets. Information may in fact “want to be free” but its increasingly traveling along infrastructure controlled by states that have other ideas. (Freedom House)
CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2025 — Civil society is being sucker punched from every direction. This one contains a particularly bleak technology chapter around biometric surveillance, emotional-recognition systems (smile, don’t stop smiling), private-sector repression, and billionaire politics that continue their trend of just saying quiet parts out load around authoritarianism and other horrible beliefs. (CIVICUS)
International AI Safety Report (2025) — The first of its kind, lengthy, in-depth, nuanced, comprehensive, authoritative, contributed to by 100+ experts in their fields across 30 countries, and likely to be absolutely ignored by the government that commissioned it. While it has those boo-scary nods to how an AI might “misbehave,” there’s more on how it could perform very well as intended to help users with cyberwar efforts, develop bioweapons, further concentrate power, build smarter surveillance tools, peddle disinformation, build autonomous weapons, and just keep disrupting global systems in evermore destabilising ways. It’s got a lot of the elements of a Michael Crichton novel and none of the readability. (Commissioned by UK Government, led by Professor Yoshua Bengio)
How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy: The Fusion of Agentic AI and LLMs Marks a New Frontier in Information Warfare — Here is a fun one. This is an academic study outlining how coordinated AI agents could overwhelm information ecosystems, fabricate synthetic consensus, and destabilise institutions. A glimpse into a Fully Automated Luxury Disinformation future, except it’s already here. (citations: arXiv:2506.06299)
And that’s my list for 2025. Leave me a reply if you’ve got one or two that should be in the list.
In every book or article or show on how bad some existential threat is, there’s always that last section that I’ll call the “there’s still time” PSA. Every author who writes about climate change has an agent begging them to tack on a hopeful last chapter. Many of the reports linked to above have one of those sections as well. Comforting. Until I have agent representation I’ll spare you from the needless extra words, dear reader.
“Good night, and good luck."
(Testing a youtube embedding plugin. Here is the video for where it’s not embedding.)
Personal assistant oriented agentic AI is offering a convenience business proposition to create highly scaled MiTM attack vectors and surveillance opportunities.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…” — Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)
It sounds eerily familiar. He was 62 when he wrote it, dying from myelodysplasia, having had spent a life popularising science through the Cosmos TV series and books like ‘Pale Blue Dot.’ He wasn’t afraid of death, but of what was happening to America. He never saw smartphones, the rise of social media, Q Anon, COVID conspiracy theories, or AI slop. But he saw enough.
American sanctions are being used to memory hole Israeli war crimes: we need new platform stacks asap
YouTube wiped over 700 videos from its platform documenting Israeli human rights abuses from accounts run by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. This was due to the U.S. weaponising its sanctions regime against Palestinian rights groups.
The Intercept reported (linked above) that “the deleted videos range in scope from investigations, such as an analysis of the Israeli killing of American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, to testimonies of Palestinians tortured by Israeli forces and documentaries like The Beach,' about children playing on a beach who were killed by an Israeli strike.”
While Youtube caved in fast, it’s harder to wipe everything off the internet than some (zionists) would like, and a number of the videos remain scattered across the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Facebook pages, Vimeo, etc, but the damage is real. Several were only online via Youtube and each organisation’s channels represented complete online repositories accessible in one place, authenticated and easily accessed.
“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone. It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising. … They are basically allowing the Trump administration to dictate what information they share with the global audience. It’s not going to end with Palestine.” — Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)
Whitson may be shocked, but I’m not. Waiting for corporate tech to grow a spine when there’s not a clear profit motive to do so is akin to waiting for a bus you already know will never show up.
I’m a fan of the alternative platforms, particularly those running on decentralised systems. Media files can practically become like weeds on these given enough resources. Peertube, Torrent streamers, and so on exist. We can do a lot at the protocol level, but the protocol that’s really needed is chutzpah. It’s in really short supply these days. Building censorship resistant tools needs it. Depending on where you are, using them takes a little. Resisting illegal orders from powerful state agencies requires it.
There’s irony in this, as the U.S. tries to use sanctions to silence Palestinian human rights organisations, it’s threatening sanctions against the EU over its Digital Services Act, which the White House is concerned will silence “American conservatives” (this is not what the White House is really angry about and it doesn’t do that anyway). More and more, the concept of a free and open internet is on the back foot in various halls of power around the globe, and a few Big Tech companies are kind of excited by the business opportunities in shutting things down. Russia has its concept of ‘digital sovereignty’, China has its exportable firewall technology, America has sanctions. The results are the same: expanding control. We need ways and means that circumvent them all. The dumbest move is to appease any of them.
It’s not going to end with Palestine.
Long been a listener of the This is Not a Drill podcast, but Gavin Esler’s interview this week with Bruce Schneier, in “Big Tech, A.I. and the dictators – Inside the future of authoritarianism” is maybe one of the best episodes I’ve caught. It has the spoilers about how democracy ends. Enjoy.
Individuals associated with the federal government have, in defiance of a court order and without a trial or any form of due process, deported hundreds of people from the territory of the United States to El Salvador, where they will be held indefinitely in a concentration camp. — Timothy Snyder
The White House is currently transitioning the U.S. Constitution into a relic, replacing it with whatever the whims of the sitting administration demand on the day.
Hello yet again, cruel world
It’s a brand new blog on a new publishing platform. The jokes, however, are old.
Sci-fi is is commentary on real world events. It’s only escapism to people who already have checked out anyway.
Huwaida’s a political prisoner. Abducted by Israel’s occupation forces from international waters for nonviolent direct action against a genocide. #FreeHuwaida
“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.” — Angelos Arnis, in The infrastructure of meaninglessness
A guide for the America you got, not the one you want
If you’re in the U.S., potentially an activist on issues the regime is tetchy about, or just someone it thinks might be, a new resource by Activist Checklist called “Police at the Door” may prove to be one of the more important downloads you get today. Want a blog about it? Here’s a blog about it.
“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
The White House has, in no uncertain terms, declared war on civilians inside the U.S. when the president addressed the nearly 800 military leaders in Pete’s Department of War and Discount Goods.
That’s where we are.
NPR, still existing for the time being, reports
The Taliban has virtually cut off everyone in the country from both the internet and mobile networks in the last couple of days. These moves generally come before something a regime desperately doesn’t want the world to see.
This is amazing, considering from where the Gaza flotilla project originally began in 2010: A group of activists with a simple idea, very complex in execution, to just keep sending boats to Gaza, which never should have been blocked to begin with. It was ignored, criticized, and even assaulted many times over the years. This is perseverance.
“Tip for Civil Society: Never Negotiate. Always make them do the bad thing. Don’t help them do it, but make their choice either: do something really bad, or nothing at all” —Alec Muffett
There’s no middle ground in privacy preserving software development, this is a good short post by Alec on that point.
Playing with micro.blog to see how it pings across the different federated platforms. This is a test. There may be more.