Recipe: Apocalypse à la Mode – A Survival-Stress Soufflé

Serves 7.9 billion, with leftovers of existential dread.

Ingredients

    - 1 cup boiling planetary pressure

    - 3 tbsp finely chopped truth (organic, if you can find it)

    - 1 tsp dystopian seasoning (available in most late-stage capitalist supermarkets)

    - 2 whole restrained engineers, lightly beaten

    - 1 ½ cups frustrated scientists, drained of funding

    - A generous handful of educators, gagged with curriculum standards

    - ½ cup greedy stakeholders (substitute with "invisible hand of the market" if unavailable)

    - 4 tbsp corrupt politics, pre-lubricated for easier mixing

    - 1 dash of false hope (for garnish)

    - Optional: 1 broken moral compass (adds a rustic flavor)

Instructions

    Preheat society to a slow, unacknowledged burn. You’ll know it's ready when the glaciers weep and billionaires start hoarding bunkers.

    In a large, non-stick narrative, whisk the restrained engineers and drained scientists together. The mixture should be thick with good ideas, but barely able to rise due to systemic suppression. Stir gently—do not let them unionize.

    In a separate bowl of denial, fold in the corrupt politics and greedy stakeholders. Be warned: this mixture will overpower the flavor of logic. It may also gaslight your smoke alarm.

    Slowly combine both mixtures, adding the finely chopped truth one flake at a time. The batter may curdle, especially if truth has not been refrigerated since 1972.

    Pour the batter into a pre-oiled narrative spun by legacy media. Cover with a foil of distractions (celebrity scandals, micro-scandals, microwaved opinions).

    Bake in the heat of public apathy for 4–6 election cycles, or until golden brown and morally ambiguous. If it collapses, that’s normal. Just call it “deconstructed civilization.”

Serving Suggestion

Top with a sprinkle of humor, a drizzle of dark irony, and a sprig of radical honesty. Pairs beautifully with a glass of “We Told You So” vintage 2020.

Chef’s Notes

Refrigerate leftovers in a vault in New Zealand.

This dish is best consumed while staring into the void and whispering, “We really could’ve just funded the science.”

A small army of brave Hollywood stars could defuse his widdle terrorism. But _there's_ no one with their own guts so his kind will win. God damn Clooney and his Bene Gesserit.

> no longer governed by predictable law, but by the state of nature, where power and power alone will resolve conflict and disputes

It's not really power though when you fubar'ed and brainwashed tons of children and teens and then hook into the grown-up back doors and cracks, psycho-social biases, cognitive fallacies, primed emotions and anchored polarizations over and over and over and over later on ... it's a courtesy of all those "concerned burners" ...

... so do not fear, human, dance into the gentle twilight edging down and up into the rumbling night ...

> Not having no value, but being of less worth to investors and companies to invest in. This is simple fundamental economics, since game prices are not growing as fast as their input costs.

Economics that are not that old and that have been reinforced via a 'tailor made' customer culture. Marketing and business culture fucked up consumers beyond any recognition, then quantified them and keep optimizing via peer-flagellation and sociopathic feedback loops.

Economists and leadership's ways are ugly.

> It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone

Except that the quality of mass-farmed, labor-saving tech produced 'stuff' is approaching a level of literal shit and the methods have poisoned air, water and soil to a horribly dumb degree.

Will the same happen to the analog/digital soil, water, air in SWE, game dev and content creation? Likely. It started a while ago, before the big AI boom and that's what young creators and devs see in their youth and get inspired, stimulated and motivated by: toxic, low quality shit that they have to shove down their throats and into their minds. "I can do better" is not something we see a lot anywhere; not in cinemas, not on the news, not in SaaS and sure as hell not in VC culture or portfolio capitalism.

Next generations brains are wired and minds nourished by the current environment. And we've been fucking up for a while, even if we leave out politics, news, culture and how we systemically perceive, portrait, never defuse and always escalate conflicts in a slow burn fashion.

All that wires brains, reinforces behaviors and thought patterns and perception and nourishes minds.

I like the comparison to farming. The end game is displayed in movies and games alike and it's always dire, dry and satisfies no one.

There's no case against AI, though, but a momentous one against experienced, educated people who have witnessed the shit show long enough and don't need predictive algorithms to know what's coming.

How silly it is to 'let it happen', to 'let it be'.

start paying for your news. you won't regret it. three decades of free news leave you hanging bored and annoyed and misunderstanding humanity.

if you want to stay tethered to this reality, commit to the pot. it's recursive and cumulative. otherwise you are left to research from free sources which leave you in 'directed' narratives, divergent and polarizing, devouring your fallacies while feeding off your bias.

free beer is never a better of the available choices.

I agree we should pay but, I'm on the other side not paying because it's very hard to commit to so many subscription things. Back in the day I'd buy a bunch of magazines and would have subscription for tops 3 when I was really into the publication. Nowadays almost everything seems to want to be a subscription service and comes with some shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.

> shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.

Definitely not the only one, which is ground for discourse, and a source for content, money, critical thinking, improvement and cognitive and linguistic mechanics that help others find their POV ...

... it's not just what it is, it's mostly what it is not and if you can put it in words and or find creators with guts, turn it into a sweeper ...

Every source, free or paid, has narrative, bias, incentives.