It is December, 2024. After doing some fairly simple math, I realized that at this point, by the average person definition where a decade starts when the last digit is "0", we are almost exactly half of the way through this terrible decade in human history called the 2020's.
For a while now, I have been solitarily referring to this decade as The Dire 20's. Because it's certainly dire as all get-out with all the geopolitical fuckery going on, but just in a way that some people don't see because it's insidious and spread out and moves very slowly. I don't think I need to remind anybody about the threats to democracy across the world or climate change, but here it is anyway. And now we have five years almost exactly until people start living in the 2030's.
I was surprised this month to find out that I have records of me coming up with "The Dire 20's" starting considerably earlier than I thought. The record is from August, 2019. Apparently at the time I was also getting a major kick out of exploring a "2020s" tag on social media, obviously to see what people were saying and speculating about the imminent decade of what was, at that point, the future.
Of course, people right now define the start of the 2020's as 2020 AD. Not 2021 AD. There seems to be a prevalent belief that it should be this way because it's "easier" and also that people who try to explain this change to 2021 being the beginning are "pedantic" and "buzz killers". I could object to that, as the lack of a year 0 and most mathematical nerves in my body and an ingrown hatred toward people being basic bitches are raging against this throng internally. I'm a programmer, and I believe in establishing logical systems, even when the system you're establishing is just pertaining to "something fun". But I see why on an instinctual and intuitive level the "2000" and "2020" marking - a zero at the end and all that - speaks to people.
The two digits at the end of "2020" start with 2. It was the first year since 2000 to do that. So people would be drawn to that. It's also a little weird sometimes to think about the "2010's" ending on a year that ends in "20". Also on a bigger scale, if 2001 (instead of 2000) was the start of the 3rd millennium, the 2K area would end around December 3,000, and that "3" on the end of the 3rd millennium would raise some questions, seeing as people were identifying it by THE NUMBER TWO. Plus when decades are defined in the popular way it only affects an inconsistent length of one decade: the first nine years of AD.
My personal preference would probably be to make 2020 the last year of The Dire 10's, as that pandemic was quite the finale and send-off to such a messed up time period. But from this point on in the post I will be using the average definition, the one where 2020 was the start of The Dire 20's.
2020 was actually a pretty good year for me. One of the best in my life, somehow. You might be surprised to read that. My mental health and social situation was just way better than it had been for most of years in all of my history. Things were rough already in The Dire 10's, but somehow an oasis of peace existed in 2020 from where I was situated. For quite some time the whole lockdown thing hardly affected me. But as the years after 2020 progressed, things got worse and worse. Not just in the world and ominous trends, but for me personally.
This post won't be the kind of article where I do heaps of research to provide strictly objective details, or even look many things up. This is simply going to be a long description of what I already know about the world and myself, and my opinions on it, based on what I've learned during my life leading up to this point. Both global happenings and personal experiences will make up this post.
Eight and a bit paragraphs in, let me be frank: this world we live in right now is a fucking nightmare. I want people living in the future who go on The Internet looking at posts both new and old, whether their world is good or not, to know that. I don't want them debating it or doubting it or trying to asterisk it saying "oh but maybe this thing will change your mind a little" - this world in 2024 is fucking scary, and the history of it needs to be told with brutal honesty. There are plenty of others like me. Lots of discontent about my world is to be found among people who live in it, and have seen either first-hand or second-hand what's been going down, especially in Internet memes. But sadly I wonder if history books in a few decades will actually take the time to represent these people, and how bloody important what they had to say was. I particularly like posts to the tune of "Bro wake up it's 2007". My 2007 saw me in a particularly annoying part of my life where I was in a toxic situation frequently and had little freedom or skill - on account of me being a child, which I can not go back to. But boy do I understand the sentiment behind it, in spite of my own personal 2007 life. That meme is a beautiful thing. There's also a nice image of a dog in a chair submerged partly in water that basically says "It's going to be OK, but it's going to be different."
Maybe your life if you read this in 2025 is fine, and you're happy, but that's not what the nightmare is about. It's about future threats that keep expanding until one day your life might not even stand a chance of thriving and being as free as it is today. Democracy is globally being worn down by corporations and corrupt people at the time of this writing, just not in a way that's explicitly obvious. But yes, for some people 2025 life will be tormented by immediate threats, not just things that are on the horizon. Some people in modern and wealthy parts of the world, in 2022 even, were having to deal with some messed up abuses of politics and capitalism. In just two years, I found it getting more scary and more in my face than ever.
Right now, after about two and a half decades of using personal home computers for recreation and productive ventures, I'm having to slowly and painful navigate through a personal exodus of all my files that I've ever kept up till now to a different operating system before everything is forcibly relegated to the cloud. I don't want to go into too many specifics, but I assure you that this has totally uprooted a huge part of my life. The things I have to do not just in the exodus but in the entire rest of the foreseeable future as I continue to use my new computers once I've saved them from hellish exploitations are a gigantic inconvenience.
I don't just use computers because they entertain me and I talk to people I know using The Internet, I use them because that's the only reasonable way I can distribute and make my video games and a lot of mediums' worth of art. Some of my greatest ever achievements exist only as software and data. Yet 2024 has seen me be the most scared of computers that I have ever been, and it's literally my own two computers. That belong to ME. I'm too scared to look videos about computers up, because they'll give me anxiety at this time, and I'm too scared even to look at some gameplay videos that have fun with random grungy graphics and deliberately retrospectively dated OS interface design. Because they'll make me think and worry about all the stuff that's going wrong. That could go wrong.
2023 was when something started to seem wrong with the operating systems to me, and 2023 was the same time that my thyroid just happened to absolutely flamethrower my psyche, making my mental health and fear of the uncertain doom hanging over me so much worse. (But I didn't exactly know I had to go on the hard drive exodus yet.) I used to describe some of my moments in 2023 as "being in my room and looking at the walls around me in sheer disbelief that it keeps going". Having a bad thyroid is nightmarish. I think I'd rather have a heart attack than have to go through that for several months again.
My thyroid is not nearly in the nightmare zone it was in back then, now that I'm most of the way through 2024 - and I have blood test results to prove it - but I will always remember 2023 as the terrifying year in which I felt devastated most of the time and turned for comfort to lots of Ren and Stimpy, of all things. And at this point, 2023 is a really long and undetailed blur. Some happy moments happened, and I could dig up some fond memories, but I can never be in a place like that again. Even if I found out I was remembering something pretty major about the time period wrong. I know how bad it was at its worst, and no month of 2023 was worth those parts of it.
I believe it was around 2021 that I started having my landmark epic dreams about climate change. These would be surreal dreams, and make stuff up, but they would speak to how scary climate change was - and still is - in their frequency and how haunting they were. Some pretty cloudy, fluffy stuff went on, but there was overall a lot of terrain destruction, familiar places being wrecked by high water, and downer endings. I particularly remember places in the North Island that looked highly like I recognized them being at a stage in time after years of sea level rise had destroyed them. Broken roads and ruined cityscapes, with the very water of the coastline being above parts of them. I have also dreamed about things like this in 2023, and last month.
These dreams can be fun to think about. One of the benefits of climate change is that - if you're safe from it - you get to witness some really epic and creepy scenes that have a very unique, apocalyptic atmosphere to them. It is quite a sight to behold. Though I don't particularly enjoy watching wildfires...
Climate change has been a major issue for a long time. Of course it didn't start in 2021, that's just where I found the earliest known record of me having that experience with my dreams and all that. It became obvious to the world I'd say about halfway through the Dire 10's, when natural disasters of an unexpected sort that were too extreme to ignore and good mainstream documentaries about this stuff came out.
Scientists already knew. Carl Sagan knew, and he died a few weeks after my first birthday.
Of course, 2019 and 2020 were particularly scary because at that time Australia had its worst wildfire ever. It turned places in Australia hellish and made the sky a terrifying shade of orange for hours in fucking NEW ZEALAND. Might I remind you, New Zealand and Australia are about three hours of plane ride apart. They're not close together.
It's Summer in my hemisphere right now, and every Winter I dread how much hotter the next Summer likely going to be than last year. I just know, logically, that the heat is going to be worse. Every time a yearly record of global temperatures comes out this decade, it sets the new world record for hot global temperatures.
I've always been a cold weather kind of guy. I hate the fascination with sunny weather and I've always been fond of overcast or "gloomy" weather. But above all I'd much rather the air around me be super cold than super hot.
Be honest about it: isn't it easier to make yourself warmer than it is to cool yourself down? And I don't want to hear about "going for a swim" or "taking your jacket off". You can cover yourself in as many layers of clothing as you want, but once you're naked, there's no removing insulation any more. You can't take your skin off. You can't just shave your body hair off just like that. At that point you have to start resorting to god-awful things like using electric fans if you don't have a heat pump. I have an easier time in Winter because piles of insulating bed and clothing material can increase without limit, especially when I'm trying to go to sleep, as bedtime lately has been a troublesome mess of taking blankets off and having to eventually put them back on. In the middle of this very December, I was struggling with stupid heat onsets at night that made me have to remove blankets and open my door. Other people I knew in my country were too. Even then it would normally be preferable to not open your door at night in Summer. I might decide the door should be open. The wildlife disagrees.
Now you might understand why climate change is slightly but particularly more annoying for somebody like me. Obviously I'm concerned about the whole planet's worth of human beings suffering and possibly dying in the not-very-far future - thousands of people have experienced far worse consequences than me that they are upset about, and they should be taken care of first - but as you can see it's that plus I hate having to deal with overly hot temperatures. So, kind of like an 8,000,000 + 100 scenario. It's coming to New Zealand, too. Even here, the mighty climate safe-zone, had some shocking floods actually quite near to me in 2023. And throughout my life I've dreamed (not literally) of coming into contact with domestic arrivals of snow, which in my whole life I've barely managed to experience once. While writing this, all of a sudden I wonder if I'll get to go to a place where it's snowing before it's too late. New Zealand doesn't have much snow, and in my lifetime it's always been like that. I don't travel easily, and the only other country I've ever been in is Australia. And non-literally it is a cool place...
I don't want to have to defend saying climate change is a real thing. Everybody knows that climate change is a "concept" now, lots of people don't believe it's real, and I'm sick of it. We are facing an existential and biodiversity threat to our whole planet, and people are dragging their feet or being manipulated by oil company cronies into thinking nothing's there because changing the transport and energy system is "too hard". If we were characters in just about any old-school fictional movie, we'd see that "the world is going to be destroyed" and we'd fucking fight it. We'd give a damn about saving people enough to actually fix it. It's beyond stupid. If climate change continues the way it has been from 2020 to 2024 with nothing to counter it, you are going to die. And no I don't mean of old age, I mean quite possibly - depending on your age - of heat exhaustion or starvation, or something worse. I think the future suffering and exposure involved scares me more than the extinction of humanity.
Of course, it's not just climate change. It's not just bad corporations, either, though they are a major driving force behind how screwed up everything is right now. There's also the rise of fascism and corruption in worldwide governments - even in France and fucking Germany, and weirder shit like nuclear threats, the suffering of the very Internet you're reading this on right now, pandemics - which science says we haven't seen the last of - and the horrific development of brain-interface technology. And I haven't even mentioned the multitude of issues with AI, which is a whole can of worms that I don't know if I want to get into here. Though you should know something about AI, regarding what I'll introduce to this article next.
This is a screenshot I took from a website run by an organization called Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Put simply, they keep track of world situations and describe them through use of an imaginary "Doomsday Clock" that is closer or further way from midnight depending on how close we are to losing our planet. It's not the kind of clock that keeps ticking perpetually forward, it's a symbol where the hands can somewhat unpredictably move. Or, it was unpredictable before this millennium, at least. "Two minutes" away from midnight means we're really close to everything being catastrophically destroyed. We were there before, in 1953. You know, that whole thing.
At the time, it was exceptionally dicey and the worst it had been. Now we've had 2018 and 2020 see it get worse. It's 90 seconds to midnight in 2024. 90 seconds to midnight is really bad. In fact it's the worst reading this symbolic clock has ever given us. And it just keeps being there, while - ironically - people seem to care much less about it than previous generations apparently did when the threat of nuclear war was upon us in the previous century. It just keeps going, too, like 90 seconds to midnight is just normal now. Also don't forget that mass surveillance and web user data collection is still happening in 2024 and a lot of people seem to think that this absurd breach of human rights is acceptable. It's quite a widespread narrative that an ad will play on some site with a ridiculously-timed relevance to something that the device user said near a microphone recently, making it obviously suspicious.
The article below where I took the screenshot is a "fun read". It describes a bunch of things that have been in effect this decade and says bangers like "ominous trends" and "danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation". It also mentions disruptive technologies, such as AI. That's what I was talking about. AI deserves a mention because it's in the fucking 90 seconds to midnight article by the Bulletin of fucking Atomic Scientists. If this link still works, you can read it yourself over here. If that link doesn't work at the time you read this, then we're probably in a lot of trouble because that link goes to The Internet Archive. I had to. There's currently no permalink. The Bulletin's article system on the official website is designed badly.
More advanced future AI that can become self-aware is scary, but there's also the more immediate and tangible threat of less-powerful generative AI being misused by us, which must be credible because the Atomic freaking Scientists were talking about it. We should trust scientists. It's a field that's not majorly motivated by greed or money like so many are, and to the best of my knowledge the leading driving motivation behind being a scientist is either curiosity or wanting to make the world a better place. Or both.
The Internet has been in trouble for a while now, even back in 2018, or earlier. Before generative AI actually became "good", people were already using some kind of much more inferior text model to mass-ruin web searches for just about anybody who wanted to look up information, with useless and suffocating fake websites written by non-humans.
A few years back there was also a disconnected string of badly-conceived government bills that aimed to "help" The Internet but really just would have destroyed it, if they had gone through. Remember SOPA?
Plus there's the way social media corporation tyrants are currently and have been wrecking what used to be open and well-designed places. I am absolutely disgusted at the amount of WebP images, walls put up around what should be free-to-read web articles, messages popping up to ask you about consenting to their cookies, difficulty getting basic fucking image links, and too many of the social media platforms increasingly telling you that you have to make an account just to view a page that was freely visible ten years ago. And don't even get me started on what happened to Twitter.
What's really messed up, however, is how this year The Internet Archive is in jeopardy. And in this time it has been attacked quite a lot.
On the 31st, as I type about it, the Archive is still online. But right now they're being sued for so much money that if they lose, the website will be burned out of existence. Seriously, we can not afford to lose The Internet Archive. I don't even want to think about how bad it would be. Even if somebody else backed up the Wayback Machine somehow - which hosts a treasure trove of functional history for web pages that are lost everywhere else - there are other important things on Archive.org, and it would still be an absolutely depressing loss. I know, The Internet Archive is "boring", but it's a very good, functional kind of boring. It's not ugly, for one thing, and stuff can be found there if it's something specific that you knew you wanted, and I think I should let researchers who use it speak for themselves. But I don't know how to do that, so I'll just let you know that a lot of people find The Internet Archive to be a critical useful resource for studying and researching for university papers and the like.
And now I'm tired, and would not like to burn through much more of the time I have left in the last day of 2024. The pacing of this article will come to an awkward end. There's bound to be much I missed, but I don't think I mind. I think the passion and the honesty is what counts. I'm no university graduate, and I've never been that good at documenting the world. But I know what's real. I know that Earth has been going through some really messed up shit in the third millennium. There's still hope in my day and age, but I don't know if good humanity will save the future. I'd like to think that climate action and sheer outrage can bring us back to the relative stability people had in the 90's, before I had a consciousness.
I've now seen almost all of the Dire 20's decade's first half, and soon I will start to witness the second half. One day I was at my computer and just kind of decided that I'd fight, and go into 2025 with two swords swinging.
Tonight I want to plant a time capsule.
If the world is totally oppressed and overly-controlling in 2124 AD, and art and being allowed to disagree is ruined, and a climate shockwave has wiped out much of what biodiversity I knew about in my time, and there's no place to live near the equator, and The Internet is just totally fucking ruined and impossible to find most information or history on, and nobody in the working class is allowed to make music, paint controversial art, make video games, play video games, swear, make adult-friendly content, get an income that can pay for essentials like water and cereal without being enslaved, imagine if somebody found this post.
If they, some rando in dystopian 2124, found this post, I want them to have a think about the world they grew up in, and be shocked. I want them to be pissed off, even. I also want them to suddenly become aware that some people in 2024 were a lot smarter than the reader a hundred years later expected or bargained for. You know, just some random Autistic adult, with thousands of others in the world a lot like him, and he reveals that people were surprisingly aware and knew what was up back then. There's a lot of us, even the neurotypical ones. If your Internet doesn't totally suck, you should be able to find a few of these posts. There are some amazing heroic speeches in some of my visited online places. People who saw the world slipping downward into disaster, and foresaw a ruination of the world.
Hello. I hope your world isn't as bad as I'm suggesting it is.
