Cold hard truth right here-- we are all currently swimming through an accelerated period of collapse and fighting not to drown. The systems we've all relied upon, at least here in the West, for the decades that we've existed on this planet are now undergoing a period of collapse at the hands of billionaires. A handful of oligarchs, broligarchs and a failed businessman cosplaying as President are destroying the systems that have enabled this great American experiment called Democracy for several centuries.
No, our systems are not and were not perfect. Yes, there's a plethora of bureaucracy and bloat in our government agencies. Yes, they were created by a managerial class that surfaced after the world almost destroyed itself-- twice. Does that mean we allow these dark triad broligarchs to sweep in and torch the entire system? No.
People are and will die directly from the actions of this dark triad of power. Our loved ones are spending sleepless nights wondering how they will replace their social security, their medical care, their jobs or even their homes. Our neighbors are worrying that their next paycheck might evaporate without notice, their cancer treatments may disappear because research grants were frozen or the next devastating wildfire might destroy their entire town because there's no one left to extinguish the flames.
Even writing this essay and publishing it onchain, a permanent record of dissent, brings with it a layer of risk. Does free speech still hold in my country? No, it does not.
What can we do during this moment in history? We don't know how long this chaos will last, what the ultimate goal of the broligarchs truly is and if we will survive long enough to help rebuild a better society where dark triads can no longer seek to destroy the very essence of our humanity? What do we do now?
We build.
We are Builders. Makers. Creators. Visionaries. Engineers. Artists. We are the ones who see a better way of living, a more true and just way of walking through this world. We are the stubborn ones who look at the corporations who hijacked our technology to fill their bags and play their "big boy" politics and say Fuck You. Want to cosplay God with our lives so your bags can pump while you manipulate the markets using the very technology we KNOW is the future? Fuck You. Want to help wanna-be authoritarians create money laundering coins for political favors, to grease the wheels of war or obtain a pardon for your crimes? Fuck You. Want to use my tax money as exit liquidity for centralized shit coins like Ripple, Cardano and Sol because some privileged patriarch in a suit has bags filled with shit he needs to offload? Fuck. You.
We are the misfits. The deviants. The chaos engineers.
We show up for our DAO families, day in and day out, to build towards a mission that we have no idea is even viable in a world of collapsing infrastructures. But we can see what's possible once the dust settles. We know what the generations behind us can do with our collective wisdom preserved in Knowledge Gardens and tended for the future to grow the sustenance they need to correct the mistakes our generation allowed to occur at scale.
We are the Storm. Some Storms are afternoon showers bringing beautiful rainbows and helping the flowers unfurl and bring forth their beauty. Some Storms are full on hurricanes leveling the colonial structures of our past so we can build equitable and just structures for a solar punk future.
We build. So we can survive. With our sanity (hopefully) intact and with a map for those traveling behind us.
I have multiple visions for what the near future will deliver and honestly, they aren't good. They're downright terrifying. And large portions of my country voted for this reality because they chose not to question the information the algorithms spoon fed them and they landed right in the heart of one of the most destructive cults I've ever witnessed or studied in all my years as a journalist and documentarian who studied conflict and cults. I've spent time photographing the results of authoritarian rule and the absolute devastation it wields on the communities caught in the midst of the dark triad's violence. I never thought I'd have to live through it in my own country and bear witness to the inhumanity of my fellow countrymen. But here I sit, doing just that.
So-- I build. Everyday. I build. And for now, in this slice of history, I'm building a podcast and knowledge garden with my brilliant colleague Taylor. We're exploring the intersections of humanity and emergent technology and the impacts on society within and beyond our Ethereum ecosystem. We're experimenting with knowledge gardens, along with my JournoDAO fam, to create a permanent archive of the collective wisdom we gather through our podcast to create a map for those traveling with and/or behind us.
We are chaos engineers and we will build our way through whatever dumpsterfire these dark triad powers throw our way. Anchored at the heart of what we're building is hope. A hope that once we survive the collapse we'll be able to rebuild in a manner that celebrates our collective humanity and allows us all to thrive without extractive capitalism or narcissistic power structures.
Want to build too? Create your own knowledge garden. Lean into Ethereum Localism or any hyperlocal movement in your community. Become a sponsoring producer of our podcast. Share our work with your community if it resonates. Build with us. In community.
We are the Storm. Make it rain with us.
*with love & fire, cstreet
Let’s get real. We’re not just witnessing collapse—we’re living inside and through it. The structures we once relied on weren’t just faulty; they were rigged and corrupted at the point of inception. Now, the cracks have given way to fissures, the scaffolding is buckling under the weight of high-perversion, and we’re staring into the blissful abyss of what comes next.
We can clutch our pearls, write think pieces, and gnash our teeth about the unraveling of democracy, the death of institutions, the corporate-sponsored strip-mining of our digital and physical commons. Or—we can build towards a human layer hyperversion.
Because that’s what good engineers do.
We don’t worry or mourn the collapse. We study the wreckage, map the failure points, and construct something stronger, smarter, more resistant to the parasites that fed on the old world like bloated ticks.
As a fellow journalist and chaos engineer once said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
But here’s the kicker: the real work isn’t just about the tech. The tech is scaffolding. The real work is building a shared humanity—the trust, the culture, the alignment that makes something worth preserving. Without it, we’re just trading one crumbling empire for another.
In an era of digital neofeudalism, where the landlord class plays god with our data, our economies, our identities—our resistance is in the stories we tell and the networks we build. Self-sovereign, permissionless, interwoven like a mycelial net. Networks that don’t just react to threats but adapt—learning from attack vectors, rerouting energy, reinforcing weak nodes, be it atoms or bytes.
The old systems were never meant to serve us. They were built to extract. The only way forward is to stop trying to reform what was designed to fail and instead engineer at the edge.
So—I build. I build everyday. And for now, in this slice of history, I'm building a podcast and knowledge garden with my brilliant colleague Crystal. We're exploring the intersections of humanity and emergent technology and the impacts on society. We're experimenting with knowledge gardens, along with the JournoDAO fam, to create a permanent archive of the collective wisdom we gather to create a map for those traveling with and/or behind us.
And yeah, it’s messy. It’s chaotic. But the unspoken reality we all know to be true is that chaos is the birthplace of emergence.
The systems of the past operated on control. The systems of the future operate on care, kindness and resilience. And like love, resilience isn’t static—it’s dynamic. It’s the storm that clears the rot and makes way for new growth.
I don’t have a neat little TED Talk ending for you. No five-point plan to fix the world. I have only this: We build, not because we know exactly what comes next, but because we refuse to be passive participants in our own destruction. We build because collapse is not the end—it’s the inflection, or what some might call the schelling point.
We build because someone has to lay the foundations of the next civilization before the last one finishes burning. So let’s build. Let’s experiment. Let’s engineer systems, communities, and hyperversions that don’t just survive collapse but thrive in its wake.
We are the architects of the aftermath.
And if you’re ready to get your hands dirty, you know where to find us.
with truth and trust,tayken
