A Seneca cliff is an easily understood phenomenon. It is the moment when society, having depleted its commons, suddenly collapses. Decline tends to be historically very sudden. I regard myself nominally a transhumanist, in the same manner a cheerleader is nominally involved with team sports. As a Transhumanist I am supposed to focus on the golden future, where we all live centuries in space colonies, surrounded by servile AI and automated systems. But increasingly we understand the confluence of global wealth disparity by elites, as well as vast over-exploitation of the planetary resources is almost certainly leading to a very painful collapse.
A very painful collapse doesn’t mean all of humanity dies. We might not even see half of humanity die, and there may still be cities and universities and internet – but we might see endemic unemployment, frequent mass starvations, mass migrations, half the world countries being slave states, religious extremism, never-ending brush-fire wars, terrorism, extreme weather events, mass nihilism and other similar collapse related visions. In fact – it is easy to see a scenario where humanity will still grow precipitously and for centuries after this “collapse”, making it a very different beast than for instance the collapse of Rome.
But for those who live, it will be hell on Earth.
This can happen as soon as 20 years from now, and that would make it a bit easier for me to just shrug (I’ll be old then) and move on with my everyday life. I might as well take a little pleasure from telling people “I told you so” and just make hay when the sun shines. Everybody else is doing it, I might as well enjoy these last years of relative civilization on this planet.
There will be however a moment, a watershed moment so to speak, when the younger generations fully realize what’s in store for them. And when they do, they will get organized very fast and unleash a reign of terrorism on this planet like we have never seen.
Think of it – if you are 20 years old right now you are already fucked in most countries. You will probably have massive student debts, be part time employed in a shitty job for low wages while at the same times the elites are exhibitionistically getting richer. Once you realize with certainty the world will have collapsed to a much more barbarous and impoverished new world order, say 20 years from now, you have incredible incentive to want to do something about it. Voting or such clearly won’t do shit, as we can see from the obscenely self-evidently stolen elections in the United States. The only alternative left is to become active in terrorist cells.
And there is a lot of work to do for these largely hypothetical radicalized kids. The new angry generations will have a lot of unambiguous targets all over – rich people, bankers, industrialists, sell-out politicians. A well organized and smart movement can cripple the economy of a major western power, as long as it succeeds in escaping the government drag nets. Suicide terrorists who target all of the above have it easy – soft targets everywhere.
I can now properly be accused of nihilism and defeatism. I don’t know what to say or do. I have my personal wish list on how we can ‘save the world’ but I will be the last person anyone will listen to.
For those who are still reading this extremely depressing article realize that what I just said is true – you can fairly easily order Nembutal. Nembutal is a sleeping agent that, when taken with alcohol, is painlessly deadly. 12 gram is plenty for a healthy person and prices for a lethal dose are dropping quite fast (recent I found one seller for as little as 300$). You can easily order powder pharmaceutical Nembutal with some research online from Mexico or China so if you need an easy way out there it is.
But I’d rather prefer you end your life end in a more meaningful manner.