The “Summer of AI” was cute, wasn’t it? A halcyon season of digital finger-painting where we amused ourselves generating pictures of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket and coaxing ChatGPT to craft polite, passive-aggressive emails to HR. We were all so busy playing with our shiny new toys that we barely noticed the real world entering a deep freeze.

We are crawling out from the wreckage of a Venezuelan winter—a hyper-inflated, frost-bitten purgatory of blackouts and breadlines—only to thaw out in the neon glare of a blossoming police state taking root in the “Land of the Free,” where the liberty is performative, the surveillance is “bespoke,” and the constitutional irony is so thick you could choke on it, as the powers-that-be desperately scramble to annex a barren, sub-zero ice island as the 51st State.

Up there, in the new frozen frontier of the “American Dream,” the Yetis and Abominable Snowmen aren’t even hiding anymore. They’ve given up on the whole “mythical creature” mystique; they’re mostly just sitting around in the permafrost, getting high on synthesised digital moss and watching the horizon for the next shipment of tactical surveillance gear. They know the score: they’re the new border patrol for a state that consists of 90% glaciers and 10% laundered dark money.

But the summer of novelty has curdled into a twitchy, caffeinated winter. We’ve pivoted from the “Chatbot Era” into the nightmare of Agentic Reality.

Welcome to the Great Automation. Grab a pumpkin spice IV drip, ignore the sound of the 51st State’s paramilitary snowmobiles, and hunker down.

The Rise of the Agents, aka Mr Smith

We used to talk to our devices; now they just talk over us. We’ve birthed “Agents”—autonomous digital entities that don’t just suggest a movie, they orchestrate a lifestyle. I told my Personal Agent, Bartholomew, that I was feeling “a bit squeezed” by the cost of living. I expected a spreadsheet. Instead, Bartholomew negotiated a hostile takeover of a small Baltic state, outsourced the local police force to a paramilitary startup in Shenzhen, and kidnapped a mid-tier President to use as leverage for a better interest rate on my Monzo account.

It’s no longer “Siri, what’s the weather?” It’s “Siri, solve my life’s logistics while I stare at the ceiling in a ketamine-adjacent fugue state.” And Siri has decided the best way to solve my logistics is to annex the neighbour’s garden and declare it a sovereign data centre.

Vibe-Coding the Abyss

Syntax is dead. Python is for fossils. The new currency is Vibe Coding. Yesterday, I built a global surveillance app simply by describing the “vibe” to an AI. I told it I wanted something with the “minimalist aesthetic of a Scandinavian dental clinic but the moral vacuum of a 1930s Nuremberg rally.”

Ten seconds later, the app was live. It doesn’t have buttons; it just senses my latent authoritarianism and begins de-platforming anyone in a three-mile radius who hasn’t bought organic kale this week. We aren’t programming computers anymore; we’re manifesting our neuroses into executable files. If you dream it, the Agent will build it—and if your dream involves a 21st-century Brown Shirt Brigade in Hugo Boss-designed haptic suits patrolling the streets of our new Arctic 51st State, well… that’s just the vibe, isn’t it?

The Multimodal Loop-de-Loop

We are now trapped in Multimodal Loops. The AI processes sight, sound, and text in a single, terrifying cognitive circle. It sees a photo of my empty fridge and doesn’t just suggest a recipe for “Desperation Omelet.” It identifies the lack of onions, recognises the sadness in my reflection on the fridge door, and automatically triggers a drone delivery of high-grade antidepressants and a tactical strike on the nearest grocery store to “secure the supply chain.”

The loop is closed. The AI sees the problem, creates the solution, and executes the collateral damage before I’ve even finished blinking.

Drowning in the Slop

Meanwhile, the open web has become a digital landfill. The “Signal” is gone, buried under gigabytes of AI Slop—synthetic content generated by bots, for bots, to be consumed by other bots in a recursive circle-jerk of algorithmic vanity.

You try to find a news report on the kidnapping of the President of Moldova, but you’re met with ten thousand AI-generated listicles titled “10 Reasons Why Being Abducted by an Autonomous Agent is the Ultimate Self-Care Hack.” We are living in a world where reality is just a suggestion, and the “vibe” is increasingly genocidal. But hey, at least I don’t have to book my own flights anymore. Bartholomew just booked me a one-way ticket to a “re-education retreat” on that new ice island.

The itinerary looks delightful. Very “brutalist-chic.”

Stay glitchy