$crying in the $ludge
a futurist's word vomit during a post 25' clown summer-recession-core-autumn turned jackass revival spring '26
Time manipulation. AI gang stalking. Celebrity deaths in threes. Dead Internet Theory. Alien machinery. Cerebral narcissism. False memories. Spiritual psychosis. War. Data doubles. Pornagraphy. Blackmail. Babylonian buttons.
TIME: Are they really fucking with time or is it just getting faster? You’ll find hundreds of videos on tiktok about timeline manipulation and dimensional time travel. It is the new age equivalent of The Secret or just another form of manifestation? Time does appear to scientifically be getting faster. Could this be because our solar system is existing at the event horizon of a black hole? Holographically refracting a simulacrum? we get it. Living in a simulation is so last year. Time distortion. Zero Points. Retro-causality. Mandela effects. But I am probably just misremembering, right?
THEM: Who are they, they all keep talking about? the conspiracists theorists keep blaming “them”. The other sides are blaming them, as in each other. Well they, of course, are the Military Industrial Complex, the Vatican, and the Banks, of course! blaming a them scenario on a race, religion, or particular group of people is just not the nuanced full story, nor okay! it takes two to tango and it takes three very systematic and old institutiones to run the world.
war + religion + money = power
USA: As an American, in the last year I have witnessed a continued genocide online, unexplainable events both politically, pop culturally, and supernaturally— like those few weeks last year when the drones/lights/UAPs were in the sky that were quickly bypassed. I yearn for a railroad that intersects the domestic states of America so that I could affordably travel across the United States and visit the various peoples and landscapes. This would connect states, unite people, and boost the economy. I long for America by her 400th birthday to have a functional railroad system across the country for civilians.
REALITY TV: So, reality tv reflects the collective zeitgeist. The cultural barometer is in the confessional. Fear Factor is back and Johnny Knoxville is the host. I am sensing a resurgence of Jackass like edglording that will follow the big beige micro-trending out of 2025 and into 2026. Reality television metabolizes collective anxiety, ingests the ambient dread of any given historical or cultural moment, strips it for nutrients before spitting it out as entertainment. And a lot of us are sipping the excerements like hamsters sucking for a droplet of anything that will balm the existentialism with some form of satirical relief. Fear Factor, like many other reality tv shows, are rituals for suffering that are supposed to posture and bolster the subject into—what used to be their 15 minutes of fame—but is now the launch of a potential influencing career. Bravo introduced us to women whose financial lives exceeded excess while the majority of the country was going through the entire arc of the housing crisis. While mortgage backed securities were imploding, we were loyally tuning into what Prada shoe would be worn to which Real Housewife event. Fear Factor was pre-traumatic stress rehearsal. The Housewives were Xanax for a foreclosure crisis. And now The Traitors is what happens when the SEO needs a little pushback and everything else has graduated from anxiety to epistemological collapse.
AI & UAPs: The architectural landscape of reality is changing because of the rapid and vapid evolution of AI technology and because of UAPs. There is either a major lapse in our current understanding of physics—which would cause a major repositioning of our systems—or there are technologies we have yet to encounter as civilians, that have the abilities to transverse the solar system in ways we can but imagine. Or maybe both, because two truths can exist at the same time.
PORN: Porn is not inherently bad. But a soceity deprived of connection that turns to erotica in the form of digitality can have its consequences. It is undeniable that men are evolving neurologically differently than before because of the mass flooding of long and short form porngraphy. In 50 years we will have the advantage of looking back and accessing just how things like microplastics, cell phones, porngraphy, glp-1s, etc. affect the body on a long term basis. Couple this with the advancement of technologies that propagate the elimination of third places, community, vulnerability, and individualism and we are in for a real treat analyzing the pro and cons of the effects of the world we live in today. The USA blasts us with sexuality but many of us do not know true erotisim. The USA corrupts us with capitalistic individualism but there are those who lack an infusion of beauty in knowing one self’s sense of sensuality.
SUMMER OF 2026: The summer of 2025 was filled with activism, clowning, and the build up to war. The summer of 2026 is ripening with the manosphere going mainstream. It was largely neither accepted nor rejected :/ While there will be a brief surge of fascist ideologies trying to bubble to the surface, those of us with the gills of our ancestors are treading underneath ready to utilize every choice point as a form of revolution. If 2025 was about high visible absurdity, performative measures that ‘look natural‘, like the clean girl aesthetic, and democratizing the jester archetype, summer of 2026 is pivoting toward an aggressive more tactical social friction point. Pranking is going global. With the president utilizing Truth Social tweets as leverage on Poly Market to tip the scales in his favor to the continued rise in high stake nihilism that the tech bros are showcasing deadpan. The trad wives are using hostile minimalism and liminality trying to prove that even poop can be instagrammable. We have poisoned the craft of community online. And some of us our sucking venom out with a straw and spitting. Think about Justin Bieber’s Coachella set: it is a perfect example of the high stakes nihilism and nostalgic excavation. His rawity and the back to basics showcase is exactly the shift we are feeling after last year. This summer will be defined as asymmetrical social warfare. People will be trying to be indexed by their peers, while remaining invisible, as cogs in the machine of the very systems that bind them.
US: So, what about it, what about us? There are a multitude of ways to lean into this energy for a better quality of life this summer. Gear up with tactical authenticity, and prepare to strategize with sincerity. Flex your vulnerability by using radical transparency as a social weapon. Lean into fashion with a sense of utility. It is the equivalent of wearing a non-Newtonian silhouette that creates illusion with high spec outdoor gear to the dive bar. The form of usefulness and survival are going Technicolor and data poisoning can’t come. We haven’t has the luxury to remember what it is like to not have to monetize all hobbies or crafts into side hustles. Gather with those who understand this and socialize on the public domain. Glitch-core is making a comeback and this is a remember that that thing you think is ugly, not finished, or nobody will like is what we all need rn. We are all getting a little weirder and goofier as it is more important than ever to bust out of the algorithmic box and “un-optimize.”
2025 Clown-Recession-Core-Summer | 2026 Jackass-Utility-Revival Summer
“Everything’s is a joke.” | “The joke’s over.”
big social performative groups | small circle adventures
industrial insincerity | tactical authenticity
“LOOK AT ME!” (please watch me!) | “Did you just see that?” (please watch over me!)
digital maximalism | analog obsession
being loud for attention | being silent and commanding the room
performance for the digital dopamine | friction for the experience of neuroplasticity
“the world is a circus” | “the world is a warehouse”
the year of the punchline | the year of the staredown
Big yes on the rail system