The check engine light on civilization just flickered. Not enough to pull over, but enough to make everyone, including me, a little quieter. It’s freaking annoying. There’s a mood shift happening that’s hard to pin down, less fear than unease, a sense that my background assumptions aren’t holding as firmly as they used to. It’s not one event, and it’s not even especially dramatic. It’s accumulation. A gathering of unidentified particles. Conversations drift there without meaning to. Jokes land differently. Certainties feel provisional. People nod more slowly and thoughtful when you say things that used to sound obvious.
It looks like a bad dream, after a booze heavy Texan night. Donald Trump is turning American democracy into episodic South Park television with cliffhangers and tantrum ad breaks, Vladimir Putin is still trying to redraw Europe with artillery, and China is playing a cat and mouse game around Taiwan that has the entire Pacific Rim holding its breath. Iran keeps testing the tensile strength of the Middle East, Canada is discovering that politeness has load-bearing limits, and the European Union reacts like a startled librarian who has wandered into a gay biker bar. There is debate whether to turn Gaza into a 39-hole golf course, a carpark, or an elderly home for retired presidents. Even Greenland has stopped being scenery and started behaving like a chess piece, slowly melting its way into geopolitics. Meanwhile a class of obscenely wealthy tech bros are finally paying the toll for years of self-mythologized testosterone, going theatrically feral on live television, right up to gestures we were all told belonged to history books from a not that long time ago. From where I’m sitting in Belgium, under a sky so uniformly grey it feels like an angry God sent the colors back, the pressure cooker is audibly hissing.
This is what systems sound like right before they give way.
We are watching the status quo sour in real time. I keep coming back to George Orwell, the English writer who spent his life dissecting power, language, and comfortable lies, and I get the deeply unpleasant sense that he wasn’t writing dystopian fiction so much as assembling a field manual we arrogantly assumed we’d never open. When politics turns into theatre, language turns slippery, and strongmen start performing masculinity like it’s a competitive sport, bad things follow with boring reliability. 1984 and Animal Farm, remember? Climate systems are actively trying to evict and kill us, the economic engine is sputtering like it’s out of road, crazy smart technology is flooring it without (anyone) checking the map, and geopolitics has decided to join the pile-up. These forces are all hitting the accelerator at the same time, which is rare, destabilizing, dangerous… and historically loud. We’re mid-metamorphosis as a civilization. The old world is dead. It just hasn’t stopped moving yet.
For the last thirty years, we lived by a script that was comfortable, boring, and -admit it- mostly wrong. We assumed globalization would deepen until we were all holding hands and buying the same silly overpriced sneakers while singing kumbaya. We assumed liberal democracy was the default setting for humanity, and that one day, soon, eventually, everyone would just “get it.” We assumed technology was inherently good, and that tomorrow would basically be today, but with slightly faster Wi-Fi and better delivery apps. That script is now crumbling in our hands. Markets aren’t lifting all boats; they are building superyachts for three guys in Silicon Valley and leaving the rest of the world to tread water in a rising tide. The “Long Peace” (sic) under American leadership has been replaced by proxy wars, resource grabs, and cyber conflicts that don’t respect borders, genders and values. The assumptions that held the post-1991 world together -that trade prevents war, that the arc of history bends toward justice-are being challenged all at once, and the cognitive dissonance is giving everyone a throbbing migraine. Conspiracy theories aren’t just peripheral entertainment anymore; they are the new folklore for people who have realized the official narrative is full of holes. When the truth feels curated, people start building their own reality, usually out of fear and glue, including lizard people and armed penguins guarding the ice wall around a flat earth.
A glitch? It’s a reboot!
To understand why this feels so raw (and wrong), you have to zoom out far enough that spreadsheets start to sweat. Societies don’t snap because of one election, one technology, or one loud idiot on a podium. They destabilize when pressure accumulates quietly over decades. Inequality widens, in money but -more worrying- in dignity and values. Wages stall while expectations keep climbing. Elites multiply faster than the number of meaningful seats at the table, so they start biting each other while telling everyone else to be patient. Trust thins out, institutions feel captured, and everyday life begins to feel rigged in ways people can’t quite explain but can definitely feel. That’s the pressure cooker. You can keep the lid on for a long time, especially if the economy throws off enough comfort to distract people, but the physics never change. Eventually a shock hits, a war, a crash, a technological lurch, and all that stored tension looks like sudden chaos even though it’s been marinating for years.
The Industrial and French Revolutions weren’t, Instagram-able historical lightning bolts, they were the moment a medieval system finally exceeded its stress limits after centuries of quiet strain. Peasants didn’t wake up one morning craving guillotines, cake, revolution and steam engines, they woke up tired of rules that no longer matched the world they were living in. Old hierarchies promised protection and meaning, then delivered scarcity, arbitrariness, and humiliation at scale. New tools changed how fast work moved, cities swelled, time itself got chopped into shifts and schedules, and timesheets… and the social contract simply couldn’t stretch that far without tearing. When it went, it didn’t go politely.
The post-war order came from a similar place, just with fresher scars. Welfare states, international institutions, managed (and managing) capitalism, all of it was built by people who had watched entire continents burn and decided that chaos was too expensive to repeat. Stability became the product, obedience the price, and for a while it worked. You showed up, followed the rules, kept your head down, and in return you got predictability, dignity, a small yearly raise and the sense that tomorrow wouldn’t randomly erase you. That deal wasn’t exciting nor noble, but it was functional.
What’s breaking now is that same bargain under completely different conditions. The rules are still written for a slower, more legible world, while technology accelerates everything and concentrates power with frightening efficiency. Work fragments, identity splinters, information floods, and the old institutions respond with forms, middle (r)aged men, waiting rooms, and slogans. People are asked for obedience without being offered stability in return, and systems are surprised when loyalty evaporates. We’re trying to run a 21st-century society on mid-20th-century rules and software, and the friction isn’t abstract anymore. You can smell it.
This is why the political landscape looks like a fever dream. We are seeing a hard shift to the political (ultra) right across the globe, and it isn’t just because people suddenly decided they hate foreigners. When the ground starts liquefying beneath their feet, scared humans don’t reach for complex policy papers on intersectional economics; they reach for a shouting strongman and a sturdy fence, to keep the baddies out. It is a reptilian response to uncertainty. There are three drivers here. First, anxiety about identity in a world where culture feels like it’s dissolving into a global sludge of TikTok trends and English menu options. Second, a genuine, white-hot anger at elites who benefited from the old order while everyone else got squeezed by inflation and stagnation. And third, a primal fear of disorder. When the existing institutions -the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, your local town council- prove impotent against global inflation, burning forests, or (mostly perceived) migration crises, people vote for the guy holding a sledgehammer and/or a flag. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and right now, half the world is overdosing on it, hoping that if they close their eyes hard enough, it will be 1995 again.
Then you throw the “Coming Wave” on top of the bonfire. Mustafa Suleyman, one of the people who helped build DeepMind back when it was still a research lab and not a profitable line item inside the Google tech empire, wrote a book called The Coming Wave that a lot of people buy and (suspiciously few seem to finish). (You should finish it, hype or not, he is mapping pressure.) His argument is simple and unsettling: we are unleashing a surge of capability, synthetic biology, autonomous systems, machine intelligence, and black box magic that keeps getting cheaper, faster, and easier to wield. Tools that once required all-powerful states, secret labs, and limitless budgets now fit inside startups, garages, and eventually pockets. For most of human history, intelligence was scarce, embodied, and expensive. Thinking power lived inside skulls, institutions, dusty scrolls and slow-moving hierarchies. That constraint is gone. “Smart” is becoming abundant, disembodied, lightning fast… and close to free.
We’re feeding that capability straight into institutions that already struggle with basic digital hygiene. Governments that can’t secure an email server are expected to govern autonomous systems (and self-driving cars). Legal frameworks built for factories and filing cabinets are asked to referee algorithms that move at machine-on-cocaine speed. Forget about chatbots doing homework or automating slide decks (hello Gamma!): it’s about raw unchecked intelligence (often feeding on stolen IP ☹) detaching from consciousness and spreading sideways through society, amplifying whatever incentives and biases happen to be in place. In a world already strained by inequality and elite competition, that amplification doesn’t land evenly. Power pools where the servers sit, where the data flows, where the capital stacks, and everyone else feels the floor tilt. We’re uncomfortable because every unresolved tension we’ve been politely ignoring accelerates…. until it is too late.
What this forces on the table is beyond cool-aid or another patch job. The old social contract was written for an era where work was legible, power was slower, and borders still meant something operational. That paper is yellowing fast. Security can’t just mean soldiers and hardware when health systems, climate shocks, and information breakdowns knock societies out of the water without firing a shot. Fairness can’t be defined purely through wages when algorithms and capital outrun human labour by orders of magnitude. And boundaries stop being philosophical once machines start occupying spaces that used to belong to judgment, care, and meaning… that used to belong to us.
The wave is coming whether we feel ready or not. The only real choice left is whether we redesign the container or wait for the pressure to decide for us.
We’re trying to metabolize all of this while running on fumes. There’s a kind of long Covid of the soul hanging over the room, a background fatigue that never quite lifts. A whole generation is carrying unprocessed shock, pandemic years, economic whiplash, permanent alertness, and is somehow expected to perform normally inside systems that are themselves wobbling under debt, inflation, and denial. People feel tired in ways sleep doesn’t fix. That exhaustion matters, because it’s the water we’re all swimming in while the rules of work quietly dissolve.
The old promise is already a museum piece. Study hard, get a degree, work for forty years, retire, then politely disappear. It’s a cassette tape in a streaming world, still technically functional, but completely out of place. Automation isn’t just eyeing factory floors anymore, it’s coming for the white-collar, knowledge, strategic and creative roles we told ourselves were “safe.” The mid-level manager who lives in spreadsheets. The copywriter who digests reports. The analyst who rearranges information into confidence. Those roles thin out fast once intelligence becomes cheap. Surviving this isn’t about taking a course on weekends (readily available on LinkedIn) and calling it reskilling. It points to a life where learning is continuous and expected, as normal as eating, not a temporary detour before going back to “real work.”
But even that doesn’t go far enough, if you ask my humble -but very correct 😊- opinion. We’re drifting towards a world where jobs stop being the main way we distribute income or meaning. That’s the part that makes boardrooms go very quiet. What happens to organizations when large parts of the workforce are software? What happens to a consumer economy when wages no longer do the heavy lifting? At that point, ideas like Universal Basic Income (or revolution) stop sounding like ideological experiments and start looking like plumbing, a way to keep socio-economic circulation going when the old pipes crack and split.
Retirement will need a rewrite too, regardless of the protests in the streets of Paris. The notion of a hard stop at sixty-five makes little sense when lives stretch longer and the economy mutates every few years. Most of all, we’re going to have to pry human dignity loose from the idiotic 9-to-5 grind. If self-worth stays chained to economic output in an age where machines outproduce us by design, the psychological fallout won’t be very subtle. We’ll need a new answer to “what do you do?” that doesn’t require a fancy job title (or a BMW company car) to justify existence.
This isn’t… a future problem. It’s already banging on the door. We can hear the steam escaping the tired valves…. the sound of the old systems taking time to die.
The next few months and years aren’t about optimization or hitting your KPIs (which does not mean you shouldn’t). They’re about rewriting the rules of the game while the match is still in progress, and the drunken referee has already left the field. The social contract doesn’t get updated gently by default. It either evolves through deliberate, uncomfortable reform, or it gets rewritten the loud way, under pressure, after something snaps (often the neck of the ones recklessly wielding power). There is no neutral option where we wait, observe, and remain unaffected that I know of.
We’re at the moment where the shape of the next century is still soft enough to be pushed, nudged, argued over. That window never stays open long. History has a habit of slamming it shut once people convince themselves they’re too tired, too busy, too angry or too late to matter. Stop waiting for stability to return. It isn’t coming back in the form you remember.
Pick a side. History already has.
