Who is Thanos? - On the inevitability of our downfall.

Infinity Gauntlet, late-stage capitalism edition:

Space Stone - let's go to Mars instead of caring for the planet we have. Climate change, who is she? Let's build some more data centers.

Mind Stone - let's develop a hallucination machine and call it "intelligent". Drain people of their skills and critical thinking abilities, what can go wrong.

Reality Stone - let algorithms rule the online world, so people get stuck in a misinformation bubble and fill the void in their soul with shopping. What even is reality?

Power Stone - let's concentrate the wealth among a few awful people and let them get away with every evil plan they concoct.

Soul Stone - let's sacrifice people in the machine for more power and wealth for these awful people.

We have a couple of assholes on our planet being pretty close to Thanos-like powers. In case you didn't watch any Marvel movie, Thanos is an evil guy who collects all the infinity stones so he can put them in the infinity gauntlet and wipe out 50% of all life in the galaxy with the snap of his finger.

Now, this isn't literally possible for our Thanos cosplayers, the harm is quite a bit more indirect. Our Thanoses (how the fuck do you make this word plural) needed a few centuries to get the ultimate conditions in which they thrive.

But right now, the planet is boiling, more and more people are being fed to the machine, and my will to live is slowly being sucked dry. I don't see a direct way out of this mess other than the direct destruction of capitalism. It seems hopeless, and even that feels like giving the Thanoses what they want. A defeated version of me isn't exactly going to fight the system.

Get real.

But....there's a different lens through which to look at this, and it ain't pretty.

I had to do a painful reckoning with how the system served me, now that it no longer serves me. I think many of my peers have not done this reckoning yet. Life might still be comfortable for you, purely looking at the material side of things.

You know the planet is boiling, and yes, gas is expensive, but that doesn't stop you from driving a km less with your car. (To demonstrate that I am a hypocrite as well: I drove to France for a vacation this July, half of which was spent with forest fires very close by).

You know you already have enough stuff, yet you still place that order on Temu. It was cheap, after all, and you wanted to feel something.

You know people are suffering, perhaps close by where you live, but you just walk past them. What can you do for them, anyway?

Ten years ago, these problems were also present, but personally I was quite unaware of them; it was all easy to ignore. I had a nice house, my lease car, my 2-3 vacations a year (for which I often took the plane), plenty of money to buy whatever the hell I wanted. As a firmly middle-class person, it felt like my life was very cushioned from the harms of the world. This served me well! I could play my little version of don't look up.

Fast forward to 2026, and I personally cannot do this anymore. The hype cycle around genAI was my personal wake-up call. It should have been earlier, but it wasn't. And I know why genAI was my breaking point: because now I was finally impacted. Egoism, nothing more to it.

The rise of genAI and the madness that consumed so many of my peers left me bewildered, and angry: I thought we were doing good things at work or at least pretending to do good things and now that unwritten contract is broken. It was all just theater! Omfg. Office (tech) work is meaningless?

Now, my life truly felt threatened. Not literally, but the way I made a living and felt kind of good doing it is no longer possible. Panic! The realization that you are one of those horrible tech people who could look away is painful. "Am I a bad person?". To a degree the answer is: yes.

And then: "what are you going to do about it?" Before I answer that I want to take my argument home, however.

The problem I have is that it seems that plenty of my peers have not done a personal reckoning. They still act like everything is okay, that work is normal or even better with genAI, that this shit it not further cooking the planet. I'm not even talking exclusively about tech people, but all middle-class folks.

We all keep buying our comforts, our fast food, our stuff. It's all so hollow.

On my way to France, I was amazed at how extremely crowded it was on the roads and basically everywhere. No one wants to change their behavior, doing so would admit that something is wrong. We drive our cars in the heatwave like everything is normal, we eat the same amount of meat, we take the plane without a second thought. And again: I am NOT exempt from this assessment! But it just amazes me.

What is needed for.....all this to change? Who is actually the Thanos here?

Are we all little Thanoses, waiting for the inevitable to happen? Because surely, billions of people will die within the next 10 years if climate change keeps ramping up as it does currently. And I'm pretty sure it will because, on an individual level, people do not change their behavior. The ones that do are a minority.

What are you going to do about it?

The reckoning continues and it should take two forms:

• personal
• systemic

I know that it's popular to not blame individuals for climate change. Why sip your Starbucks drink through a paper straw while a billionaire flies their private jet everywhere, right? There's no point. I object to this logic. It seems to me, that if everyone changes their behavior at least a bit, this should yield some positive change.

Of course, this is problematic. COVID has proven that when you tell people what's good for them, a non-trivial part of the population does exactly the opposite. As an intellectual, I am entirely delusional here. I always thought that when you come to people with facts, they will "see reason". Extremely dumb, it doesn't work this way.

I'm afraid very few people will do the personal change as soon as it's inconvenient.

I mean, to keep the honesty going, the only things I do are:

• not eat meat every day (even though it would be better to eat a vegan diet)
• drive my car as little as possible, and cycle everywhere I can. (then, why did I drive it to the south of France?)
• live daily life locally, as much as possible, including where I work.
• don't buy crap I don't need. Works pretty well for clothes, fails for fountain pens, paper, washi tape.

That wouldn't stop me from taking the plane to Scotland or Japan again, when I get the chance in the future. All these climate change consequences don't truly stop me, if you get my drift. I lack conviction, even though the awful reality is slapping me in the face. Have I done my reckoning, or am I only halfway there? I see the awfulness, so now I can judge other people while my own behavior hasn't really changed. Yikes.

That perhaps leaves systemic change as the better option for all this crap to stop being inevitable.

On the data center front, the EU is failing us. They want to commit to building data centers while the continent is burning and suffering from intense heat waves. This boggles the mind. GenAI is the last thing we need to improve the lives of the population, it only makes things worse. The argument of "Europe will be left behind" is such bollocks, that is truly Thanos-like thinking right there. Even if there was a tiny positive tech advancement to be had from genAI, the cost isn't worth it, man.

We need different things that truly benefit the citizens. For example, where is the EU-wide high speed rail network? That would deserve our money! Get people out of their cars, by offering them an alternative.

A small anti-Thanos victory in my own city

I have one example of a thing that seemed inevitable, but was turned around in the end. A little anti-Thanos, if you will. It happened in my own city, and I lived through this. When I was a kid, we drove from our village to Utrecht once every year to go shopping in the "big city". Weirdly enough, you'd drive your car right into the city center via an insanely wide road. (Perhaps normal for you crazy Americans, but European city centers are often inaccessible by car).

This road was built at the end of the sixties, when we still thought driving your private vehicle everywhere was the future. Utrecht accommodated car traffic by widening roads in a lot of places, not just this high-way right through the center.

This is not a Not Just Bikes blog, so I'll skip the story of how the Netherlands became a bicycle friendly country. It happened because of this car-brained thinking, I can tell you that. Slowly but surely, over the decades, many citizens in the Netherlands started to hate how car traffic was facilitated so much. Protests happened, a new road design code was developed and bicycle infrastructure was encoded in our road design from then on and implemented everywhere.

And also in Utrecht, the city actually changed. That awful road, is now (again) a canal.

We spent decades accommodating individual car traffic over cycling and public transport, and now it takes decades to reverse it. And to be honest, there's still a lot of work to do in Utrecht alone. There are still large parking garages in the city center, for example, making it so that there can be a lot of induced traffic on a Saturday, the most popular day to go shopping. It should be abnormal to drive your car into the city, unless you have an insanely good reason for it. Those parking garages in the city center should be destroyed, and better Park + Ride options for visitors should be created.

Read the Utrecht transformation story from Bicycle Dutch here

All this anti-car change takes political will. I've said it before, but even in the Netherlands a large part of the population is extremely car-brained. And even though our road infrastructure is often excellent for walking and cycling (and for the cars!), our public transport is slowly going to shit. That is because it is expected to earn a profit, while the asphalt is allowed to be a money drain. Make it make sense.

So yeah, even though this example is ostensibly a positive one, I still see so many problems with it.

On a systemic level, there is also a complete lack of will to do the painful things that are needed to save the climate. Adding bike infrastructure is nice, but it's not enough. The amount of cars in my country is increasing, and these cars are getting bigger and bigger too. It's all so unnecessary.

I do blame the Mind and Reality infinity stones for this. In my metaphor, these stones are about genAI and algorithms. Because of big tech, people are increasingly leading more isolated lives, stuck in their own algorithmic bubble. Every short form video they consume or "chat" they have with an LLM nudges them further on a specific path. Depending on the person, that might even be in the progressive direction, but considering the popularity of the far-right, I fear that something else is happening. A mass brainwashing and dumbing-down of the population is happening, and this is yet more bad news for the climate.

If there's one thing I can truly say I DO NOT do, it's watching short videos. I truly do not understand the appeal. It such a trap, a time-suck, and a manipulation vortex. The same goes for chatting with an LLM. Talking to humans, yes. Talking to a computer that exhibits human-like traits: no, awful stuff.

A lot of words, but what am I saying

This might be my most depressing posts to date, or the most realistic, depending on your own point of view. The willful ignorance I had 10 years ago is gone, and a collapse-like mindset has nestled itself into my brain and whole sense of being. As a coping mechanism it sucks, because it is on the more hopelessness side of things.

Yet, I cannot go back to bury my head in the sand, and pretend all is fine. I can't look away, clock-work orange style. I do wonder why so many other people can look away, or pretend all is fine.

Yet, if I'm honest, on a personal level I don't do much. I barely changed my behavior, and I can't really give you a good reason why not.

The planet is going to shit, and if I observe the personal and systemic options of change, I don't see much happening.

Instead, there's this pervasive "we still have time" copium happening, that I cannot subscribe to. This is a hollow phrase, but for the alternative - quitting our emissions - there's simply no will. It's too painful for people to change their lives (with my own life as exhibit A), and it would be political suicide for anyone in power to attempt to do so.

So, we'll limp along. We'll build our data centers, some asshole will scream AGI is here, next summer is going to be hotter, the rivers will fully dry up, but everyone will still tow their camper (attached to a big ass SUV) to southern France to sit on the beach while the forest around them is aflame. At one point, food will be too expensive, world war 3 is officially a thing, gas for the SUV is too expensive, and then what?

What it means to be human in the 21st century is to conveniently consume, and to avoid at all costs to truly look up. I can't say I look forward to finding out the results of the reckoning that is decades in the making.

So yeah, perhaps we all have a little Thanos inside us. The self-destruction of humanity is inevitable, and perhaps around half of us will have to pay the price before something new takes its place.