Total narrative collapse
Send more explosions, Michael Bay!
The world is facing down a global cultural problem these days: by and large, the crop of leadership birthed in the 1960s and 70s have the moral quality of criminals.
You can observe this at any level you like, and from many different cultures too. I know of many Americans my age whose parents are fully resigned to auto-pilot, either crashing out deadbeat in economic failure or towering themselves up in hybrid work-from-home benzodiazepine-fueled children’s stories doing fake jobs and/or mooching off HELOCs. I know of many Indonesians my age who follow similar stories, subbing out the bumming for BNPL-fuelled gambling addictions and the spectres of success taking more banal forms through things like deep withdrawal into television and social media. Countless parents are brazenly failing their offspring who are languishing in early adulthood now with no relevant lessons imparted and no fallback support structure that doesn’t come with a heaping helping of contempt, spite, sabotage or some combination thereof.
If you’re living in the same reality as the rest of us, that all rings very true without question. But for the rock-dwellers among us or even—heaven forbid—the architects of contemporary disgust who may have the aesthetic pain of happening upon this article, there is also a wealth of empirical evidence for the criminal quality of world leadership today. For example, the narrative collapse of the Iran conflict in 2026 is met by the admin with firing rampages, which makes sense when one has spent their entire adult lives threatening and torching their way through problems while ordinary people bear out all of the kindness and labour needed to make up for it.
Or take the ongoing AI datacentre fraud as another example. Even if you’re hog ignorant of the hot mess that is, you can see plain as day that there is no originality or imagination about what’s going on here anymore. There’s no earnestly new thing that some actual person discovered that stakeholders are jumping on to foster. It’s just a bunch of assholes pouring money on the same tired fantasies that had them starry-eyed when they were in their twenties: Hackerman this, Space Odyssey that, to the tune of trillions of dollars that don’t belong to them. The most pathetic part is they don’t really give a shit what anyone thinks about this or what it accomplishes. They just see the matter as “well, it’s my toy to fuck.”
China is also similarly bankrupt in quality, albeit this is a more established trait of theirs by the political climate of today. Tallest bridges, longest bridges, most kilovolts on an HVDC line, and so on. China has ample land like the US to build more originally and functionally but they make empty skyscrapers anyway just to prove a reactionary point against their own sense of inferiority. It would be more evil if it wasn’t so pathetic.
It’s far from an American problem, though I lead with it as it is my nation to reference. I think the most infamous exponent of this very same lifestyle of pissing on reality is none other than the recently assassinated Ayatollah.
The Ayatollah is dead, his family is dead, and his one son took a piss break and God rewarded him with being maimed for life and shooed into serving as the absent figurehead of the country’s preeminent criminal syndicate instead of being taken into the next one and out of this sorry existence.
I’ve heard a lot of abstract bullshit from people around the world about this when it gets brought up. They often say shit like “I don’t care about the religious conflicts,” or some conventional gotcha about the Israeli regime, American folly or the Chinese government. This is how you know they’re living on cloud nine with Elon and the rest of the turds.
The Ayatollah dying presents a disgustingly simple and direct refutation of that entire mode of being: he obviously had every insurance policy available to him enacted against this exact sort of outcome, and it did him no good. All the loyalty and illicit funding and secret nuclear programmes he ever wanted and he still got blown up by a conventional Israeli airstrike.
If you are somebody whose first reaction to events like this is to parsimoniously frame it into your ongoing mental map of geopolitics, or more pathetically an ideology you faithfully subscribe to, you are exhibiting the very failure mode that brought the Ayatollah to his untimely death. It’s also the same failure mode that is bringing Trump’s administration to tatters about their handling of the conflict, and the same failure mode that leads your parents to treat you like shit. Loyalty over competence. Aesthetics over substance. Someone else always picks up the pieces. These are the hallmarks of Lucifer.
I wrote about this before in a much more exploratory fashion. I called this archetype the ultimate coward, and I still think today the name is quite fitting:
The new angle this year is that this kind of person is becoming ever more central, important, and unavoidable in the course of bearing out the suffering of our lives today. We have to deal with this type of person, and like, now. Leaving the situation on autopilot is essentially guaranteeing World War III.
I made a video during the course of my campaign where I attempted to complete the puzzle started by GEN, explaining why the ‘AI bubble’ is not actually a bubble but a black hole.
The thing the public still does not quite understand is that the veracity of ‘AI’ or any other use of the datacentres does not matter beyond getting key stakeholders—who are very, very corrupted by the way—to sanction the buy. Once the buy happens, the game is won: the sole point of these endeavours is to seize and consolidate control. The ‘AI taking your jobs’ pretext merely needs to be barely true enough for neurotic regulators and sleepy lawmakers to turn a crossed eye, because in spirit it’s a completely false pretext to snap up lots of land and infrastructure just so it can be possessed. It’s best thought of as a kind of soft coup under what remaining pretensions of capitalism still hold cachet with the somnambulant public.
But regardless of how that whole sham pans out, at the end of it you’re still faced with the same ugly, personal problem: self-appointed leaders with massive maturity deficits are dragging us down the road to hell and making us pay for it every step of the way. The IRGC executed a 19-year-old wrestler for protesting. Trump handed Congress a $1.5 trillion ask for defense spending alone with fantastical projections about economic growth countermanded by every active public policymaker of relevance to the matter. As I explained in my previous treatment of this, you can’t run from it. But what are you going to do?
In pursuit of finding a complete answer to that, I think it’s helpful to frame the problem in detail. Being poetic yet precise about what is ugly and wrong, and correctly identifying the species and malignancy of the sickness, helps people identify on their own what the weak spots may look like so they can better attack it should they have the courage to.
A recent instance of this exact therapy has surfaced in the form of Apple TV’s first original production: the bombshell hit show Your Friends & Neighbors. Now, I’m a famously unplugged person, lacking cable since I was eight years old and I didn’t ‘cut the cord’ into a streaming service addiction as in that corrupted pop culture refrain. But I got clued into what this was about by a friend and let me say it’s important to what we’re all kind of suffering through, because it’s a first-person journal detailing the escapades of the architects of today’s living hell.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of work is simply a matter of putting down the self-destructive impulses so many still cling to as vice. But when that is not at hand, being constructive, imaginatively and creatively, is vitally important. I hope I gave you a better picture of what we’re up against so you are at least more inspired—if not more informed—on how to attack it. With no honest living in sight for many, what else is there to do?