The state of 2026.

• War. CFR and ACLED Conflict Watchlist 2026; CFR Global Conflict Tracker; International Crisis Group. About 20 active conflicts; Sudan estimates near 150,000 dead and 12 million displaced.
• Economy. BLS CPI (May 2026); CNN and Cleveland Fed on record-low sentiment and the decade-wide wealth gap; Treasury, Census, and Morgan Stanley on housing.
• AI and labor. Challenger, Gray & Christmas; Stanford HAI; BCG; McKinsey. The EU AI Act compared with the United States federal preemption posture.
• Climate. Copernicus, WMO, and Berkeley Earth; World Weather Attribution on heat as the deadliest extreme of 2025.
• Overdose and suicide. CDC and NVSS provisional data: a peak near 110,000 in 2022, a decline greater than 25 percent in 2024, and further decline through 2025 toward about 70,000. Suicide totals at record highs in recent CDC data.
• DNA. 23andMe Chapter 11 (March 2025); about 15 million genetic profiles implicated in the bankruptcy sale; the Regeneron bid and state lawsuits; sale to the TTAM nonprofit (July 2025); the HIPAA gap for direct-to-consumer genetic data.
• Social credit. MERICS, Asia Society, and Yale's Jeremy Daum on the myth of a unified citizen score; the real corporate-credit and blacklist apparatus and surrounding surveillance; the March 2025 State Council directive.
• Fertility and loneliness. Global fertility near 2.2 (UN World Population Prospects 2024; Pew, 2025); below replacement in about two-thirds of countries; Lancet and IHME project 198 of 204 below replacement by 2100; declining sperm counts (Levine, Swan, and colleagues, Human Reproduction Update, 2022). The United States Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness.
• Trust. Epstein Files Transparency Act (November 2025) and the delayed, redacted, partial releases that followed (CBS, CNN, PBS). Whistleblowers: Ellsberg (1971), Manning (2010), Snowden (2013), Assange (WikiLeaks).

Intimacy and the commodified body. Institute for Family Studies analysis of General Social Survey data (2025): weekly sexual activity among United States adults aged 18 to 64 down from about 55 percent in 1990 to about 37 percent in 2024; year-long sexlessness among young adults roughly doubled to about 24 percent since 2010; in-person weekly social time among young adults more than halved since 2010. Read alongside the fertility and loneliness sources above, without assuming a single cause.

The lineage. R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) and Utopia or Oblivion (1969). Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (1982).