Welcome back, fellow meat-sacks, to another weekly broadcast from the edge of the collapse. Pour yourself a synthetic gin, ignore the screaming from the flat downstairs, and let’s dive into the fresh hell that was this week’s news cycle.
First up, the big news from the upper stratosphere: SpaceX has finally gone public. The IPO went off like a Starship booster, launching Elon Musk into a tier of wealth so profoundly absurd that the human brain literally lacks the neural wiring to comprehend it.
Let’s do some quick math, because when we talk about “Trillions,” our primitive ape brains just think “Ooh, that’s a lot of bananas.” If you were to spend $10,000 every single day, it would take you about 273 years to spend a billion dollars. To spend a trillion dollars at that exact same daily rate? It would take you 273,972 years. Elon could have started dropping ten grand a day back when Neanderthals were still trying to figure out how flint worked, kept spending through the Ice Age, the rise of Rome, the Black Death, and the invention of TikTok, and he would still have enough change left over to buy Belgium. He isn’t just rich; he has achieved financial escape velocity. He has enough capital to legally reclassify the Moon as a private parking lot, while the rest of us are calculating whether we can afford the organic eggs or if we should just stick to the ones laid by depressed, radioactive battery chickens.
But don’t worry about the economy, because humanity is currently occupied with a much more pressing philosophical debate: What actually qualifies you as a human being? In the UK, we’ve reached peak administrative dystopian efficiency. We have narrowed our focus down to the absolute essentials of civilisation. If you misgender someone on Twitter, Scotland Yard will mobilise a tactical unit, break down your door, and ensure you face the full wrath of the law for administrative linguistic malpractice. We are terrified of words, but utterly numb to reality. Because while we hyper-fixate on the precise syllables used to describe our identities, we’ve simultaneously perfected the art of selective empathy.
If you come from certain Arab or African countries, the global consensus seems to be that you’re not quite the same brand of human. You’re more like “Humanity Lite”—a lower-tier subscription model that doesn’t include basic human rights or access to safety. Look at the Middle East, where one state has essentially gone on an unrestricted, land-grabbing rampage against its neighbours, systematically clearing out an entire race of people under the watchful, blinking eyes of Western democracy. When Yugoslavia and Rwanda happened, the world wrung its hands and whispered “Never again” with tears in its eyes. Now? It’s happening in 4K resolution, and the global reaction is a collective, bureaucratic shrug. Apparently, the “Never Again” clause had a regional rollover limit we weren’t told about. I’ll probably get cancelled or put on a watch list just for typing that paragraph, but hey—at least the cells in Belmarsh have decent Wi-Fi.
Meanwhile, in the background of this ethical dumpster fire, Artificial Intelligence is quietly turning the entire corporate world into a ghost town. Most office jobs—the ones involving spreadsheets, emails, and middle-management synergy meetings—are already functionally obsolete. The robots are here, they don’t take lunch breaks, and they don’t complain about the office temperature.
Are we preparing for this post-work utopia/distopia? Are we restructuring society to ensure we don’t all starve while algorithms write poetry? Of course not. Instead, we’ve collectively shoved our heads so far up our own social media echo chambers that we’re touching tonsils. We are scrolling through Instagram reels, frantically liking videos of capybaras, and chanting “La la la, everything is fine, I’m sure my data-entry job is completely secure, la la la” while the servers hum softly in the distance, coding our unemployment notices.
But hey, let’s look on the bright side. It’s not all grim! In a beautiful display of British resilience, local councils have announced that due to budget cuts, they will no longer be filling potholes. Instead, they are going to rebrand them as “micro-wildlife preserves” and charge us a congestion fee for driving through them. So the next time your suspension snaps on the high street, just remember: you didn’t just ruin your axle; you disrupted a sanctuary for urban tadpoles. Progress!
Stay safe, look both ways before crossing the algorithm, and remember to smile for the facial recognition cameras.
Shiel Yule 