The Doomsday Clock shifted to 89 seconds to midnight just a month ago, the closest humanity has ever come to catastrophic destruction since the clock started ticking in 1947.
As tectonic plates shift all around us, the ground beneath our feet feels less stable and unfamiliar.
Existential threat isn’t just nuclear warheads, it’s also collapsing biodiversity and climate chaos, the emergence of diseases and pandemics, the rapid deployment of AI and surveillance, and the degraded communication ecosystem rife with misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories.
We’ve become an existential threat to ourselves.
The irrational ‘mirror world’ of communications so eloquently described in Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, acts like a strange attractor with its chaotic dynamics.
People are drawn to its unreality as the coherence of humanity’s shared values and experience is lost. It’s a ‘bonkers blender’ that makes a ‘thought puree,’ to borrow Klein’s ideas.
Nothing screams ‘mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the evilest of them all?’ than tiny-handed Donald Trump posting a grotesque AI-generated video of ‘Trump Gaza’ to his Truth Social echo chamber in the wee hours.
It’s a megalomaniacal oligarch’s dream pasted over Palestinian blood and land, replete with a golden Trump statue and children happily carrying golden Trump balloons while Musk throws money in the air on the beach.
The only thing upsetting MAGA Christian nationalists about the abhorrent vision is the Trump statue because it’s idolatry. Do they choose to be so blind? They are hypnotised by their self-righteousness in the fractured part of the mirror they keep looking at.
The MAGA cult is to politics what the golden arches are to junk food and it’s looking to MAGAfy in a town near you. Bad for your health and designed to be additive, if you don’t stay alert and push back, it can swallow you whole and you start speaking in hashtags and memes.
It’s like a frightening Dr Who episode where an amoral virtual world takes over physical reality and the body politic. It steals humanity through their eyeballs glued to hungry devices and sucks out their data to feed rapacious AI models, taking down governments one by one.
Once it’s finished plagiarising us, a neurachip is inserted and we’re goners.
Xenophobic Daleks
Meanwhile, geeky ‘tech support’ Musk is preparing his xenophobic Daleks for a full-scale Earth invasion and the Dr is nowhere to be seen. Plot twist: we are the Dr we’ve been waiting for, if only we can ‘woke up’ and remember we’ve built immunity to Daleks before.
Dalek Donald is acting like the Russian asset everyone who didn’t vote for him thought he was.
Putin his puppet master is making him dance to bullets on the global stage. What hold does he have over him? Sleazy kompromat and money no doubt. When Trump’s matryoshka doll is unstacked, we’ll probably just find a tiny Donald in the foetal position.
On our own shores, parroting billionaire Clive Palmer with his ridiculous ‘Trumpet of Patriots’ is calling in the chaos and wants to do Australia DOGE-style.
Copycat Peter Dutton has announced his plans to drain swampy Canberra and take the public out of service by firing 36,000 people.
This is the only way we can see a doctor for free, he says.
Draining swamps is a political preoccupation of conservatives working under the mantra ‘private good, public bad’. But when you drain a swamp, you kill an entire ecosystem. It’s an ecological disaster. We know all about this in our swampy region.
It’s also true of human service ecosystems. They are complex networks of people and skills.
The human face of government.
Real people with lives, mortgages, kids and health needs who are now being terrorised and treated as ‘waste’ to be cut out with axes and chainsaws.
Robodebt disaster
Last time the Coalition gutted the public service it ended in a parliamentary inquiry into the integrity of private external consulting services, because that’s where the water from the swamp drained to. Taxpayers lost billions and private corporations won.
Remember the cruel Robodebt disaster? People have brain worms if they fall for that again.
Which brings me to RFK Jr who has fans in Byron Shire. I know he says things that might appeal, like banning glyphosate, and bringing back unpasteurised milk and measles, but it’s a pureed thought process if you think he’s willing, or capable, of achieving anything meaningful during a dictatorial coup of USA democracy.
Supporting him is like saying you’d cheer on Hitler, even though you don’t like all his ideas, just because he was a vegetarian and liked dogs.
The utterly shocking Trump Oval Office meltdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left the entire free world reeling.
How much closer is the Doomsday Clock to midnight now?
♦ Jo Immig is a former advisor to the NSW Legislative Council and Coordinator of the National Toxics Network. She’s currently a freelance writer and researcher.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
