[…] the world I’m living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup… I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.

— Charles Stross (Oct. 17, 2025) https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html