Welcome to the Great Worsening

This website is a work in progress. My intention is to expand the points below, offering references and citations, and to build out a blog tracking the Great Worsening. For now, what you see is what you get.

What is the Great Worsening?

The Great Worsening is our present moment. The term describes an event that is simultaneously economic, ecological, cultural, social, political, biological, and technological, along with the promise at the heart of this event: that every single thing you experience will be worse than it used to be, in perpetuity, in ways beyond your control.

It’s the time we’re in, the sea we’re swimming in, our lot in life.

So it’s like the Great Depression?

Yes, if the Great Depression involved the total collapse of all worthwhile institutions you rely upon and also coincided with complete global ecocide.

The Great Depression certainly featured these elements that remind us of our time: criminal misallocation of resources and severe ecological damage, to name a few. Like the Great Worsening, it was spurred on by the appetites of the rich, modern colonial agriculture and political impotence.

Sure, there are similarities. But there are also differences. Social institutions were alive and well during the Great Depression: churches, urban missions, neighbourhood organizations, civic groups, freemasons and similar clubs, men’s and women’s organizations, ethnic societies, and sporting groups. The funny thing about such institutions, when they’re operating well, is they might actually help you if you’re down on your luck. Now, though, such organizations — if they’ve survived — are weak, scattered, and ill-focused. If they’re helping anybody, it’s typically themselves. In other words, they’ve worsened.

What else has worsened or is worsening?

Everything, If you aren’t ultrarich or don’t live in a place with some critical distance from market-driven capitalism. That’s the thing about the Great Worsening — the experience is all encompassing and in a constant state of acceleration. Everything is worsening and will worsen.

And don’t say, “But technology!” Technology is not only worsening — at this point it is a leading contributor to the Great Worsening through pollution, waste, strip mining, and rapacious power consumption. Generative AI is the worst of the lot, as well, failing to work very well while devouring more and more resources as the days pass. It’s a bubble and a stupid one, one that has shown and will continue to show incredible capacity to make absolutely everything it touches worse.

Good things happen every day. The Great Worsening isn’t about you and your experience with one particular aspect of life — whether you enjoy bizarre AI-generated images trained on stolen art or feel that ChatGPT has enabled you to spew out emails more effectively in your shitty job. The Great Worsening is about the average human experience. The average human experience is unquestionably worsening.

Consider:

  • Ecological collapse (climate change, topsoil loss, freshwater contamination, increasing disasters)
  • Resource depletion (oil, precious metals, sand)
  • Cory Doctorow’s enshitification of technology and Ed Zitron’s Rot Economy and the related mutations of social media
  • Collapse of healthcare systems and related declines in life expectancy and quality
  • The total destruction of journalism as a tool to describe reality, and all the malevolent things that vie to replace it
  • Drops in literacy and numeracy
  • Unaffordable housing, and the quality of new housing stock
  • The evaporation of retirement
  • Destruction of the workplace
  • Food systems produce literal garbage as food
  • Global pandemics and the likelihood that each subsequent response will be more useless than the last, along with the widespread abandonment of germ theory
  • The emergence of uniparty political systems which offer voters no sane alternatives to our present problems (but often many insane ones)
  • Erosion of education systems
  • Regular erosion

Aren’t these just bog standard liberal grievances?

No, they are actual things happening in the world that are easy to verify as facts. If you think these are liberal concerns you have been conned in two ways. First, you have been convinced these things are not real, in spite of your ability to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch the worsening of it all. These things are real and they are happening and they are awful. And overwhelming. I’m sorry.

Second, you’ve been convinced that liberals actually care about any of these things. They do not. If they did, they’d live differently and wouldn’t have spent the last several decades paying lip-service to hope and change while enabling the wholesale looting of common life.

So what are you going to be doing here?

Plans for the near future:

  • Develop a more coherent introduction for a more welcoming/less cranky homepage.
  • Move the above into a FAQ page and expand.
  • Create a blog section.
  • Collecting related articles and videos.
  • Avoiding all social media.