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I was a little shocked by my own reaction to hearing Bill Gates, the famous face of the unelected world elite, push yet another omnicrisis on a prominent podcast. Especially for someone in the informal guild of prognosticators, the temptation is always strong to get caught up in what techies call “hyperstition” — and the rest of us call self-fulfilling prophecies. The urge to get swept up in the current wave of “futurist” forecasting can become almost irresistible when the tenor of the times tilts toward the apocalyptic.
But as most Americans know, we have been living under a state of elite-induced crisis for decades on end. Nuclear annihilation. Deadly pandemics. Ruinous climate change. The plot of “The Terminator” come to life. A catastrophic flip of the planet’s magnetic poles. It’s always something. And whatever it is, if you’re not running down the street clawing your face off, you’re not paying attention.
And what is a crisis, anyway? It is whatever authorizes the people with the most power to exert that power over you, personally, and ultimately anyone else, as they see fit. It’s genius!
Furthermore, if you’re not paying attention, you’re contributing to the real crisis, the one that somehow maps on top of whatever freak-of-the-week existential horror show is on the menu. Try to drop out of the apocalypse, and you’ll be deemed a moral criminal. People are suffering. It will get worse. What makes you think you’re special? How can you shirk your responsibility to the greater good? And after all, don’t forget, if you don’t cast the right votes, display the right signs, post the right expressions of solidarity, don’t be surprised when the angry mob — online and off — shows up at your door.
Because, well, we’re gonna send them. Because this is a crisis, and the only way we can ensure that it affects everyone is for everyone to believe they’re affected.
This, I think, is the principle hidden at the heart of the COVID-19 era’s inescapable hectoring that you must “believe the science.” We’re never told we have to believe anything when normal, healthy life is possible. We’re only told we must believe when the belief in question is absolutely essential to the propagation of a mass sense of total, all-consuming crisis.
And what is a crisis, anyway? Well, it is whatever authorizes the people with the most power to exert that power over you, personally, and ultimately anyone else, as they see fit. It’s genius!
Did I feel these feelings as my eyes glazed over at Gates’ all-too-convenient claims, the cure for which must surely somehow involve Gates flexing his unaccountable muscle over the Earth? No — I’m actually pretty sure I speedran that emotional experience five or six years ago.
This time, my reaction oddly made me laugh. Yes, I thought for a moment about those believe-the-science signs. But I quickly flashed on a form letter the management of my apartment building once posted in the elevators in the weird little era just before lockdowns.
It was, for its time, highly tech-saturated, but in a way that still had a lot of fluffy-bunny feelings attached to it. Founders were twee, logos were playful — the general attitude was: What could go wrong? But at ground level, where the streets had begun brimming over with abandoned scooters and bikes, the collective mood was already beginning to sour, and corporations adversely affected by all the “permissionless innovation” unfolding in tech-forward cities had begun to get wise.
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And so THE MANAGEMENT of my apartment building — a megacorp in its own right — posted a toneless memo in our elevators about its current policies regarding short-term rental apps. With all the low-effort audacity of what is now called the Gen Z stare, the memo explained that, per corporate policy, the apartment building, like all THE MANAGEMENT’s properties, did “not participate in Airbnb.”
I remember standing there with the feeling of having in fact to hand it to them. It was true — there were a lot of units in that brand-new building that were being flagrantly Airbnb’d, a scheme that especially seemed to benefit the many Chinese tenants. No hate, of course; that whole five-block radius of freshly risen high-rises was fueled by Chinese money and Chinese developers, and American locals such as myself reaped the benefits in the form of shut-up-and-take-my-money rental deals and round-the-corner access to some of the city’s most coveted reservations.
But I didn’t particularly want a revolving door of randos as my neighbors, and THE MANAGEMENT surely did not want tenants of any nationality cashing in on those move-in deals only to arbitrage their residence for big sublease cash. The corporation therefore decided simply that its buildings were just not participating in that reality any more.
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And like Gates’ onetime buddy and rival Steve Jobs, the corporation acquired what Jobs fans called a reality-distortion field.
Wow, I thought. I want a reality-distortion field …
Returning to 2026 reality, I noticed Gates also actually countersignaled himself on that podcast. “Let’s be like the Amish, and let’s only use AI for certain things,” he imagined certain future Americans agreeing. Later, he spoke of what people get from “helping each other or coming up with unique ideas.” What a concept — faithful families working together to strengthen one another in freeing ways?! It sounded like some sort of big old reality-distortion field.
Except instead of keeping out our given human reality, it was keeping it alive.
A little more clicking around the internet quickly revealed that many people, none Amish, are already choosing not to participate in crisis culture. “Constant warnings of collapse desensitize us,” Bruce Gilley writes in the Wall Street Journal. We “overestimate the likelihood of very salient threats,” according to the Financial Times. “Perhaps collapse is not, actually, a thing,” one can read in the New York Times magazine.
For once, it seems, the elites are becoming aware that overhyping crisis has led above all to a great populist longing, as the kids say, to “just not.”
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