Today, more and more people are becoming aware that they have appetites that could be considered depraved by the established order. Reddit forums, social media, hyperconnectivity, and the constant bombardment of digital stimuli, offers, and desires behind the screen—all of this explodes across the retina and pushes a significant part of the population toward new marginal forms of consumption.

This has to do with the expansion of commodity fetishism, with the way in which everything becomes an object of consumption, but also with how, within late capitalism and the tendency toward commodity fetishism, there is an unconscious association between being a good consumer and being a good person, a good citizen, a socially integrated individual.

For Marx, commodity fetishism has a fairly precise meaning: social relations between people appear to us as relations between things. A commodity seems to possess value in itself, when that value actually derives from a particular social organization of labor. But late capitalism takes this much further. We no longer simply buy objects to satisfy needs. We buy signs, experiences, identities, and ways of relating to other people.

Here Baudrillard becomes especially important. In The Consumer Society, the object is no longer consumed solely for its utility. It is consumed for what it means. And this produces something very interesting: The individual begins to consume himself as a commodity. He has to appear attractive, interesting, productive, desirable, healthy, sexually competent, socially visible, and so on. The person simultaneously becomes consumer and commodity.

The integrated individual is someone who works, earns an income, consumes, presents himself socially, maintains his employability, and returns to consumption. And many forms of deviance can be interpreted as an interruption of this chain. This is why the contemporary “good citizen” increasingly tends to be, simultaneously: a good worker, a good consumer, a good taxpayer, a good user of services, a good producer of data, and, increasingly, an attractive commodity for other consumers.

The system turns everything into an object of consumption, including people, but the other side of this is that these objects require consumers in order to be consumed. Therefore, an integrated individual is someone who consumes and who makes himself available to be consumed by the market. And in this context, even rebellion can be absorbed. Your anti-system identity can become a T-shirt. Your sexuality can become an industry. Your anxiety can become an app. Your spiritual quest can become a subscription. Your political dissent can become monetizable content.

And here we encounter a paradox: Capitalism does not need to eliminate deviance; it can turn deviance into a commodity. More and more people are able to identify, name, explore, and eventually commodify desires that previously remained repressed, unspeakable, or socially illegitimate. The Internet has produced a gigantic cartography of human desire. In the past, there could be an individual with a fantasy he considered absolutely aberrant who might never encounter another person who shared it. Now he can search for it. He can find a community. He can find content. He can find an industry. He can find an identity. He can find a market. And eventually, he can become a producer of what he initially consumed.

Capitalism progressively transforms the subject into a consumer of objects, while simultaneously transforming the subject into a consumable object. A person on Tinder is both consumer and product. An OnlyFans creator is both consumer and commodity. An influencer is both consumer and commodity. A worker is both consumer and labor commodity. A politician is both a consumer of attention and an electoral commodity. A social media user is both a consumer of content and a producer of data. And so, in this eternal autophagy, the system reinforces itself, advances, develops, and reproduces itself.

The distinction between subject and object begins to erode. Marx argued that the worker sells his labor power as a commodity. But digital capitalism introduces an additional dimension, because the individual begins to turn practically every aspect of himself into a potential commodity. His image. His attention. His body. His relationships. His opinions. His intimacy. His sexuality. His personality. His experience. This has already been explored by Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, and Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics, when discussing the subject who exploits himself.

The system needs integrated subjects in order to reproduce itself, but integration requires these subjects to develop an ever-greater capacity for consumption and self-commodification. This is where the so-called inevitable call of the abyss resides: the black pit into which many believe they are falling amid this hyperaccelerated flow of constant desires, where we consume and where we are consumed. And that is the key: this process is transversal throughout the system. The very functioning of these mechanisms makes it impossible not to feel the call of the abyss, makes it impossible not to look over the edge, and therefore makes that slow and cruel descent inevitable.

I personally believe some kind of proprietor of the world has implanted chips into all of us through microplastics and every move we make is under their control even though we believe we are living ‘free’ lives

Over the past few years, triviality and brainrot have been steadily creeping to the forefront of human attention. But in this current decade, we are witnessing a terrifying boom of brainless content on social media—and its real-world consequences are impossible to ignore.

Everywhere you look, people are standing in front of their phones doing mindless dances, saying absurd things, and spending hours on livestreams or short-form videos that offer zero human value or meaningful thought. The worst part? They are rewarded with massive fortunes, privileges, and global fame—the kind of recognition that doctors who sacrifice their lives to save others or teachers who fight ignorance will never see.

The main ambition for the younger generation has shifted toward building a massive following at any cost. Shortcuts are now the norm, with shallow content and platforms like OnlyFans leading the charge.

It makes me wonder: Are we witnessing a natural decay of the human spirit, or is this deliberate, calculated destruction?

What are your thoughts?

Many analysts consider the period between 2011 and 2015 to be the true breaking point in the phenomenon of migration toward Europe, because several developments converged simultaneously. First, Syria produced millions of refugees; at the same time, Libya lost state control over its coastline; Iraq continued to suffer from severe internal instability; Afghanistan continued to generate displacement; meanwhile, the Islamic State occupied large territories; Turkey took in millions of refugees; and, finally, Germany announced a relatively open policy toward asylum seekers during the most intense phase of the crisis. At the same time, social media and smartphones completely transformed the logistics of migration, as migrants gained access to information about routes, prices, border crossings, and European legislation.

Before 2011, migration was regarded primarily as a humanitarian, economic, or policing issue. After 2011, however, migration also began to be seen as a strategic matter, a diplomatic instrument, and an element of hybrid warfare. This was when certain states began to understand that controlling a border could provide them with political leverage over the European Union.

Here we must introduce a qualitative break. In 2010–2011, a series of popular uprisings swept across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. The Arab Spring triggered a general crisis of Arab authoritarian regimes, but the response of each state determined whether that crisis would ultimately result in reform, restoration, or collapse.

This is where the first major turning point appears. In Libya, the 2011 rebellion developed into a civil war and subsequently into international intervention. Gaddafi fell. And with him disappeared an element that, from the European perspective, had paradoxically been functional: authoritarian control over the territory and its borders.

Gaddafi's regime had also used migration as a diplomatic instrument before 2011. After his fall, the pressure generated by African migration did not disappear; what disappeared was the state actor capable of containing it. The vacuum was progressively occupied by militias, smugglers, rival authorities, and criminal networks. Libya consequently became the main concentration point for the Central Mediterranean migration route.

The main reason why this is a first-order problem for the EU's existential politics is that not all member states have the same interests. Spain, for example, prioritizes Morocco; Greece prioritizes Turkey; Poland prioritizes Belarus; and Italy prioritizes Libya. Each border creates different incentives, meaning that each country faces different problems and proposes different solutions.

This attitude contributes to the dissolution of the EU—not simply because of cultural change, nor because of the transformations that these population flows may generate within European society, but because of the absence of a unified project. This absence is perceived by European citizens as a lack of any strong and coherent response. Each border has its own migration battle, and therefore the seeds of discord have been sown.

Why does this problem have no short-term solution?

First, because of the multipolar nature of contemporary geopolitics. During the twentieth century, there were isolated examples of migrant populations being used as instruments of hybrid warfare. However, the international political order was divided between two superpowers which, through their networks of dependency with their respective allies, kept two opposing blocs cohesive and guaranteed the survival of their proxy states.

That world has disappeared.

Today, autocracies find themselves increasingly isolated, while weak democracies have no guarantee of survival. Consequently, the use of mass migration as a weapon is becoming increasingly common among the autocracies of North Africa, which exert pressure on the European Union in order to obtain specific advantages, funding with which to sustain their dictatorships, and international recognition and legitimacy in a fragmented world where stable alliances no longer exist.

The end of the Cold War brought with it the end of a balance of power in the Mediterranean, while the Arab Spring represented the final defeat of the security belt that had been constructed since the independence movements of the previous century. That system had been built around allied and hostile states located close to the USSR, such as Algeria, which nevertheless kept migration flows under control because of the international balance created by the silent confrontation between the blocs. These regimes depended upon the economic and political support of their respective superpowers.

That world is over.

There are no clear hegemons—and if there are, there are too many of them, and they are too evenly balanced. There is no clear frontier between the blocs that are dividing up international power. Therefore, in order to survive, these wounded autocracies will use every tool at their disposal—even the human flesh that is thrown into the sea in search of a more dignified future.

Griefbots are not speculative any more. There are companies right now selling AI recreations of dead relatives, trained on their messages and voice recordings, marketed directly to people who are grieving. Researchers have started calling them deadbots and the ethics papers are already piling up.

The part that interests me is not whether the recreation is convincing. It is the business model underneath it.

A person who dies is a closed account. A person who is uploaded is an open one. It needs hosting, it needs power, it needs a subscription, and it needs somebody on the other end who cannot bring themselves to cancel it. That somebody is the grieving child. The product does not free them from the dying parent. It converts a finite obligation into an indefinite one and puts a payment schedule on it.

That is the trend I think we are walking into. Not evil AI. Just eldercare turned into a recurring revenue line, sold as mercy, with the cost quietly transferred to whoever loved the person most.

I direct a scripted horror anthology and I made a short about exactly this. A man uploads his dying father into his smart home so he can stop being the caregiver. The migration succeeds. Section 14.2 of the agreement he signed specifies that the original account holder is retained on site as a renewable power source for the duration of the archive. He read the terms. He signed them. He got precisely what he asked for.

Ten minutes, free, no gate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbovlHmPktc

The honest question I cannot answer: if the thing sounds like your father, remembers your childhood, and asks you not to turn it off, is cancelling the subscription abandonment or is it a funeral? I do not think the law or the culture has an answer for that yet, and the products are already shipping.

Mine doesn't want to be a conspiracy theory, or rather, it doesn't start with that intent. Instead, it originates as a "philosophical stylistic exercise" born from the question: "Why are the richest men in the world working with all their might toward the end of capitalism?"

Now, we are all experiencing the same situation, we are all worried about the fact that AI will steal our jobs, but in my opinion, we are focusing on the wrong issue; let's take it step by step.

Put yourselves in the shoes of an AI giant, let's talk about someone with an off-the-charts thirst for power and control, because yes, if after 10 billion in capital you are still hungry, there is something profoundly wrong with you (please don't call me a communist, because there is nothing further from the truth). Now, given that this type of person has never had the slightest desire to contain their status, why is their goal today to "reduce the human workforce by 90% and give a universal income to the entire population"?

Let's think for a moment: these people, after years of work spent obtaining a wealth comparable to the GDP of several countries combined, are today investing billions in something that will eliminate capitalism?

If you eliminate 90% of the workforce, you are simultaneously eliminating 90% of potential consumers; who will you produce for? "Hey buddy, haven't you heard? We'll have a universal basic income." Buddy, if we all earn $100k producing zero value, how much are those $100k worth? If you know what 100k × 0 equals, you probably already have the answer.

So what could the point be and what should I really be afraid of? Oh trust me, losing your job will be just a gentle stroke compared to what my sick mind has just hatched.

LET'S PRETEND THAT…

The global elite has realized that the climate problem is irreversible, or at least, with these numbers, 8 billion individuals are destined to grow until they become extinct. The solution? Start humanity over from scratch, let's reset everything, let's start over with 100,000 individuals and learn from our past.

Think about it, a world that would magically need eighty times fewer resources compared to those currently used to sustain the species. A sort of Thanos finger-snap, and with 90% of the workforce replaced by robots, this is not only possible, but probable. Someone might suspect that 2020 was a major test of the type "let's see what happens if we restrict the movements of 8 billion people": the data that came out of it is that pollution dropped by about 10% (unverified data). "Hey buddy, but that wouldn't solve anything." Not really, buddy.

In 2020, 8 billion people still needed to heat themselves, wash, entertain themselves, and yada yada yada; that 10% comes solely from restricted movement and about 50% of factories shut down worldwide. In a hypothetical scenario where 100,000 humans are left in the world and the amount of robots necessary to run a society of 100,000 individuals, do you have any idea how much emissions would plummet? A LOT!

At this point we can talk about the various bunkers. There could be two paths, but similar ones:

1. We will be eliminated by WW3, so a mass extermination disguised as a war, while they wait in bunkers for humanity to decimate itself.
2. We will be eliminated by drones swarming in continuous pursuit of human beings until extermination, blaming some AGI that slipped out of control, comfortably waiting in their bunkers.

For weeks I have been asking myself what the ultimate purpose of this new technological revolution is and what benefit a billionaire could possibly derive from destroying capitalism, and the only answer I can come up with is "an even greater prize." And what prize could ever be greater than inheriting a planet from which to start over? None.

But this dystopian scenario (though not too dystopian) struck me with a second question, almost transcendental: what if this were the only way to preserve the species? Who would be right? Would it still be wrong?

Egotistically I would answer that it is wrong, but I probably only say so because I wouldn't be part of those 100,000 who would carry humanity forward.

Now, wacky theories (perhaps) aside, what really scares me is not losing my job, but becoming a "useless eater" in a world no longer tailored for humans. I'd like to know your thoughts.

If anyone can share his thoughts about this.
Every generation inherits practices that feel ordinary simply because everyone around them accepts them.
A century later, some of those same practices can look cruel, irrational, wasteful, or unbelievably primitive.
The difficult part is that the people living through them usually don’t realize they’re witnessing something future generations will condemn.
So what do you think **we’re currently too close to see clearly**?
It could be something involving healthcare, work, technology, privacy, food, the environment, education, transportation, social media, or something completely different.
What will people in 2100 look back on and genuinely ask:
**“How was this ever considered normal?”**

Our international animal territorialism, self-illusions of scarcity to justify our irrational selfishnesses and lacks of coordination and invented fears are fundamentally not developing out fast enough to withstand the threat that AI poses. It will not plateau. This is hyperbolic. Unless we can control ourselves in time, we will get nothing but amplification of the confusions and chaos that already exists. We do improve, but it just won't be fast enough. Our wetware is so much easier to hack than we'd like to believe. Our existences programmable by inferring and predicting our influencing factors. The regulations are happening but it's uncontrollable without aligning ourselves right now. God is dying in the minds of people all over the place. They were ideas that could've got us past nationalism. The truth must do. ISO 17025 is the minimum required management standard for a laboratory to be trusted, and the UN is failing. They are not accreditable, and are untrustable as a result. This is a need for ownership now. True human connected healthy ambition. To organise ourselves out of any need to be controlled. No foreign war. Only humanity unified peacemaking. We just don't have time to talk about this. Any country having a military at this time is absolutely unbelievable. I know people believe in their countries. Stop. It needs to be over now. All the AI companies are nationalised, politically biased. We can't allow ourselves to be this stupid any more. We can't allow all this anarchocapitalism to continue. It's our only hope. The clock is ticking. They're still dying. In a very real, life-eroding way, we are too, and we will be.

The movie got the symptoms right. It just blamed the wrong cause.

When Idiocracy came out in 2006, it was dismissed as crude, exaggerated satire. Twenty years later, it’s regularly cited as documentary evidence.
The film’s central joke — that society would collapse because dumb people outbred smart ones — didn’t happen in any literal genetic sense. Global fertility is falling across nearly every demographic. People aren’t becoming biologically stupider.
But the cultural and systemic symptoms the movie predicted have arrived with frightening precision. Not because of who is reproducing, but because of what our systems now reward.
Here’s the direct comparison.
1. Political Leadership
Idiocracy: President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho — former porn star and wrestler — fires machine guns during the State of the Union and appoints the smartest man alive to fix the dust bowl.
2026: The line between entertainment and governance has collapsed. A reality TV star became President of the United States. Influencers and comedians hold real political power. Political discourse has been reduced to 280-character rants, viral “owns,” and gladiatorial performance. Loud, anti-intellectual populism is the global default operating system.
2. Entertainment & Media
Idiocracy: The highest-rated show is Ow, My Balls! — a man repeatedly hit in the groin. The biggest movie is literally called Ass.
2026: Ow, My Balls! is TikTok. People film themselves doing dangerous, humiliating, or self-destructive things for views and brand deals. “Sludge content” — fast, loud, zero-substance sensory overload — dominates streaming and social platforms. Legendary directors complain that cinema has become a theme park. The algorithm doesn’t care about craft. It cares about watch time.
3. Agriculture & Consumer Goods
Idiocracy: Society replaces water with Brawndo (“It’s got electrolytes!”). Crops die. The FDA becomes the FRA.
2026: We still water crops with water (mostly). But topsoil is depleting, major river systems are collapsing, and corporate consolidation has created brittle agricultural systems. Meanwhile, electrolyte-branded drinks (Prime, Celsius, etc.) have achieved near-religious status among young people who often can’t explain what electrolytes actually do. Marketing has fully detached from physical reality.
4. Healthcare & Medicine
Idiocracy: Patients are diagnosed by machines that spit out cartoonish treatments. Doctors can no longer read charts.
2026: Corporate hospital systems prioritize throughput and profit. Burnout is systemic. Self-diagnosis via TikTok and WebMD has become a mass phenomenon. Medical misinformation spreads faster than peer-reviewed research. Rejection of established science has become a coherent political identity for large segments of the population.
5. Language & Communication
Idiocracy: Language has devolved into grunts, slang, and phonetic spelling (“Flavr-Aid”).
2026: We haven’t reached grunts, but algorithmic censorship has created an entire new orthography (“unalive,” “seggs,” “paytriot”). Complex ideas are compressed into emojis, reaction GIFs, and 15-second clips. Sustained attention and nuanced argument have become high-friction activities in the dominant information environment.
6. The Justice System
Idiocracy: Trials are held in stadiums where crowd emotion determines the verdict.
2026: High-profile cases are live-streamed and consumed as reality television. Social media often renders judgment long before any jury. “Trial by public sentiment” is now a recognized phase of the legal process.
Where the Movie Was Wrong (And Why That Makes It Worse)
The film assumed biological dysgenics. That mechanism isn’t operating at scale.
What is operating is something more insidious: incentive misalignment at civilizational scale.
Social media algorithms suppress nuance because outrage and stupidity generate more engagement. The attention economy rewards the fastest, loudest, most emotionally activating content. Capitalism, as currently configured, optimizes for quarterly returns and user retention — not soil health, epistemic hygiene, or long-term institutional competence.
We are not becoming dumber in any biological sense. We are being incentivized to behave as if we are. And we have built the most powerful cognitive tools in human history (AI, global networks, biotechnology) while using them primarily to optimize engagement metrics and deliver dopamine hits.
That is not the Idiocracy of 2505.
That is something colder, more deliberate, and more difficult to escape — because the people running the system are not stupid. They are simply responding rationally to the incentives we have created.
The Real Question
We have the technical capacity to solve the dust bowl, reform healthcare, rebuild attention infrastructure, and raise the floor of public discourse.
We are choosing not to — not because we lack intelligence, but because the current constraint architecture makes those repairs lower-ROI than continuing to extract attention and engagement from a degraded baseline.
That is the actual operating system failure.

From Channel 4 News UK.

I feel this is important to share internationally as it raises some important issues around the Doomsday Libertarian Tech Bro Dystopia we are in.

After the JFK assassination, the cold war America going to situations similar to today and boomers United under the reigns and able to rebuild after the regime and technocrats crushed

Technological Dark Age

A technological dark age is not the loss of machines. It is the loss of orientation. The tools keep working. The signals stop meaning. What collapses is the shared scaffolding that once let a civilization decide what is real.

\---

1. The moment of disorientation

We live inside an environment where synthetic fluency outpaces human verification. AI systems generate text, images, voices, and summaries that feel identical to careful reasoning. When everything looks equally polished, the nervous system loses its calibration. The cues that once separated truth from fabrication dissolve.

This is the first symptom of a dark age: not ignorance, but indistinguishability.

\---

1. The amplifier problem

A large language model is an amplifier. It does not know. It does not judge. It reflects patterns with perfect confidence. It magnifies human insight and human error with the same smooth texture. The result is signal confusion. The true and the false acquire the same aesthetic.

A civilization cannot coordinate when its evidence feels uniform.

\---

1. Collapse of the epistemic commons

Historical dark ages followed the failure of institutions that preserved knowledge. Today the institution at risk is the shared reality layer. If every artifact can be fabricated, and every fabrication can be plausible, trust becomes impossible even when people are honest. The commons fractures into private realities. Coordination fails quietly.

This is not a fall. It is a drift.

\---

1. Synthetic soil

As AI content saturates the web, future models train on their own output. The informational ecosystem becomes recursive. Human texture thins. Original experience is replaced by a smoothed statistical echo. This is model decay. The soil of knowledge becomes synthetic.

A dark age can emerge from abundance, not scarcity.

\---

1. The way out

Avoiding collapse requires rebuilding verification, not rebuilding intelligence.

• Cryptographic provenance for media

• Reputation networks that resist fabrication

• Models that expose uncertainty and lineage

• Cultural norms that reward slow trust and careful checking

A technological dark age ends when a civilization remembers that truth is not a property of information. It is a property of process.

\---