September 19th, 2026Kyle’s Rant
It feels like the world is closing in from all quarters, and I don’t think it’s just me. There’s a collective unease out there, a low-grade hum of anxiety that seems to be getting louder as we all shuffle a little closer to what is possibly the next ELE. Extinction Level Event, for those not yet fluent in doomsday language.
But before we get too swept up in the tsunami of news exploding into our living rooms, let’s take a breath, a pause or maybe stop for a cup of tea.
I was reflecting the other day when I heard an emerging phrase “AI clusters”. Gangs of AI agents working together, which is, depending on your frame of reference, either the most exciting development in human history or a Terminator film opening.
But the phrase sent me somewhere else entirely. It reminded me of the jump from dial-up to broadband. A mate of mine was the first in our group to make the switch, and at the time it felt genuinely alarming. I remember asking him whether he could turn it off or whether it was just permanently on because the thing about dial-up was that you had to physically opt in. You connected, did your business, and you disconnected. So the idea of being just, always on, felt like a significant loss of control and was a privacy concern of the day.
That was around the turn of the century; the same time a group of us headed to a place in the mountains to see in the year 2000. Car boots stuffed full of supplies -well, booze mainly on the off-chance the Y2K bug actually bit and civilisation briefly collapsed. But it didn’t, we survived, slightly worse for wear after a night dancing to Who Let the Dogs Out by Baha Men and Smooth by Santana among other 2000 bangers and the world kept turning.
More recently there was the pandemic. I’ll be honest, six separate lockdowns totalling 262 days, roughly nine months of cumulative time under stay-at-home orders between March 2020 and October 2021, did put the fear of God into me. Crossing the ring of steel through army and police checkpoints to get to Glenlyon, and getting shoulder-charged over a four-pack of lavender-scented toilet paper were not my finest/funniest hours. But we got through that too.
Which brings me back to the current line-up of existential concerns, and it is, admittedly, a full card. The usual skirmishes and wars grinding on around the globe. Microplastics turning up in places from your balls to your brains and everywhere in between. CEOs of major AI companies now calling for the brakes to be applied to their own technology. Like trying to stop a tidal wave with a kitchen sieve because that particular genie is not only out of the microplastic-infused bottle, it has made friends with a lot of other genies, and as we speak they are plotting the next move.
To add insult to what may yet result in serious injury, a super El Niño is making its way toward us, with sea surface temperatures running roughly two degrees above average. And there is the likelihood of major, widespread weather disruption, droughts, floods and temperature records falling like dominoes. And a new phrase is “flash drought”. You will have heard of “flash flooding”, a “flash drought” is a dry fire-prone landscape that can develop in as little as a couple of weeks due to the heat, wind and low precipitation.
So yes, as a species, we are facing a bit of a moment. Possibly more than a bit. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to when I run through the list. The broadband panic passed. Y2K fizzled. The pandemic ended. We are, as it turns out, a fairly resilient mob, occasionally self-destructive, prone to panic-buying toilet paper, but resilient. Whatever’s coming, I suspect we’ll muddle through it the same way we always have. As the saying goes: “When you are going through hell, keep going.”
Fear rant over…
