I've been thinking about how two recent longreads that I've found interesting coil around one another.
The first is
this piece from Jack Herrera at Texas Monthly about the dire condition of the Rio Grande, the yearly loss of water, and the political boondoggle that makes preserving the river nearly impossible. It's not an unusual story, not anymore. But it's still terrifying:
"Farther downriver in the Rio Grande Valley, cities have been slower to adapt to the crisis, and they’ve run out of time. This year, when the multigovernment Rio Grande Regional Water Planning Group released its official 2026 strategy, local officials from across South Texas admitted that they had no plan in place for what happens if the drought continues to worsen. The report offered the weakest of excuses: 'The Rio Grande RWPG chose not to plan for uncertainty or DWDOR [drought worse than the drought of record] on a regional scale at this time because forecasting tools have not been able to provide the resolution needed for water planning on a regional basis.'"
The water crisis demands work: physical work, bureaucratic work, community organization work. It's too big, so it's just not being done. We can all see the disaster looming, but we can't, apparently, take action. Our structure can't bend to accommodate the reality.
Then, keep the water crisis playing in the back of your mind, and turn with me, to
Ian K. Duncan's recent writeup of the cultic world of AI boosters and "AI safety" nuts that spun out from freaking Eliezer Yudkowsky, of all nexuses. Who among us, sporking HPMOR on fandom wank comms in the mid-2000s, would have imagined that Roko's Basilisk would be the governing concern of the elites in the 2020s?
(And of course AI regulation is a fraught mess -- the "AI Safety" cultists were ginning up fantasies of a vengeful technogod years before chatbots were a thing, and their default response to basic concerns about wage theft and social equity is to spin out about how the technogod will kill us, yes, that's why we have to do everything we can to bring it about!!!)
The thing is, climate change doesn't interest the AI masters of the universe. Unlike a mad technogod, which *certainly* means the total extinction of mankind, it is explained to us, climate change isn't likely to pose a true existential threat, insofar as a few hundred people, surviving, could continue the species. What a mess of priorities and self-deception.
How does a person of goodwill continue to do work in this world?
I remember growing up alongside the Yudkowsky cultists. It was always clear to me that they smelled off, but they were familiar: autodidacts, fanfic people, kinksters, autists. It's not surprising to me that figures like Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, like me, brushed up against both LessWrong and the Straussians with their Great Books. In both cases, I dipped when I evaluated those communities as vanishing up their own asses. But isn't it weird that those communities are, in fact, seats of contemporary political power? If I had stayed in, started kissing up to the right lunatics, I coulda been a contender. lol. lmao, even.
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