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."