Letters From the Hills by Dehemi Fabio

  "I believe we all died in 2020, and that we are all now in hell." There are two kinds of dread going around right now, and everyone assumes they're separate problems. The first is the AGI dread — the sense that something enormous just shifted underneath the economy and nobody voted on it. The second is the older, quieter dread — the sense that nothing in ordinary life holds together anymore: not marriages, not careers, not friendships, not even people's own sense of who they are from one year to the next. They are not two problems. They are one problem wearing two faces. And the deeper you look, the harder it becomes to believe the second one just happened to arrive at the same time as the first. The Contract We Were Promised Every generation before this one operated on an unspoken deal. The generation before you built the roads, the schools, the housing stock, the pension systems, and the entry-level jobs, and in exchange, you were supposed to do the same for t...

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." — Frank Herbert, Dune There is a comforting lie we tell ourselves about dystopia: that we will recognize it when it arrives. That there will be a boot, a face, a wall, a siren. That the moment will announce itself, and history will hand us a clear line — before, and after. Orwell never believed that, and neither did Frank Herbert. Both men, writing decades apart, arrived at the same conclusion: the dictatorship that actually gets built is not the one that terrifies you into submission. It's the one that makes submission feel like comfort — and by the time you notice, you're no longer sure there was ever a line to cross. You just wake up one day already on the other side of it, scrolling. I'm writing this a few days after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra and its own president stood in front of the press and said,...