watch this space!

Some things on the regular doom scroll can still give me pause. Not because they’re particularly horrible, or somehow hastening my own desensitisation to every turn of the screw in the decline of liberal democracies around the world. I’m used to that. But it’s the occasional lone voice or appeal from one of the decks of the sinking ship that just stands out. In this case it was a TikTok video of a BBC science show presenter who was tired of being told to keep quiet about things that have no bearing on his ability to educate or entertain.

On Friday evening in Manchester, the audience at a live recording of Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage heard something they were not expecting. They heard an ending. Not of the show. Not yet. Series 35 is still set to broadcast early next year. Should it continue afterwards, it just won’t be with Robin Ince. After 16 years of co-hosting the show he named and developed with Professor Brian Cox, the comedian is out. There is no punch line here. Just a punch to the gut.

Instead of repeating what he said, here’s the video. You can get it first hand.

This kind of departure will become more common. It rarely happens with a formal dismissal. It begins with pressure. Quiet meetings. Warnings about tone and conduct. Requests to be careful, to be quieter, to keep certain views out of sight. In this case, Ince was asked to self censor about his support for trans people, his criticism of Donald Trump, and other views that were deemed to somehow be incompatible with his role as the comedy relief portion of an educational radio programme. Considering the U.S. has leadership that regularly dismisses science whether it’s about vaccines or climate change, it would seem to me that Ince has been remarkably well behaved. Just not enough for the BBC.

He was offered a choice: Obedience, or departure. He chose to leave. It hasn’t been the first, and it won’t be the last.

This moment does not stand alone. It arrives after sustained pressure on the BBC, particularly from the U.S. president as of late. Loaded allegations of bias from the White House have been amplified by the right wing publications in the UK, and a noticeable lack of comment by the government here. The same “impartial” memo cited by the Trump White House to accuse a BBC Panorama documentary of fabricating that Trump’s own words may have encouraged the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021 (it didn’t) had more to say: It accused (without basis) the BBC’s Arabic service of showing systemic anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the war in Gaza. It also alleged that the BBC was promoting a pro-trans agenda.

Robin Ince would not recognise that characterisation. Neither would Gary Lineker, the long-standing Match of the Day presenter, who was forced out of his role over his views against Israel’s war crimes and acts of genocide in Gaza. Not even the recently resigned director general Tim Davie should agree with this characterisation, having personally stepped in to suppress the documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. The 100 BBC staff who signed a letter alleging the public broadcaster had constantly given “favourable coverage to Israel” certainly would have a different take.

This memo on BBC’s supposed leftwing bias seems to have been written to be leaked, and that would make sense. Its author is the lobbyist, Michael Prescott, whose company receives large sums of cash from technology and media giants in the U.S. who are also on the Trump campaign’s large donor list.

It was money well spent.

The language was familiar. So was the intent. Discredit the institution. Intimidate the people who work within it. Force conformity through fear. It’s working. This isn’t censorship by law. It’s something quieter, more corrosive. It asks individuals to narrow themselves to survive. It rewards conformity with the chorus, tolerates silence, and punishes empathy when it becomes inconvenient or is aimed at the wrong people.

I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn’t pamper myself with the luxury of silence. — Robin Ince

Institutions do not collapse all at once. They are hollowed out. They lose the people who give them texture and trust. When presenters, editors, and producers conclude that honesty carries too high a price, the public is left with something thinner. Something that can seem safer, but is in substance less reliable. Something less true.

The BBC will continue, for now. The programme may or may not resume after season 35. But there’s been a signal. A warning about the cost of speaking plainly in an age that claims to value openness while punishing those who practise it. In his own words, spoken to his audience on his final night, Ince explained why he could not stay: “I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.”

McCarthyism is back in vogue, and it’s increasingly globalised. We have to wonder, how much editorial policy of the nation’s public broadcaster should be outsourced to American political circles across the Atlantic? These are “meet the moment” times, and we’ve already seen a lot of them go unmet. Eventually, the clock runs out of them.

“The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry."

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:

1. Increasing debt and decreasing income that leave a majority of national economies fucked and unable to invest in ‘going green’
2. 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.
3. 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."