The Jackpot is science fiction author William Gibson’s term for a slow-motion apocalypse that serves as the backstory for his novels The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020). Rather than a single catastrophic event, it’s a multi-decade cascade of overlapping crises that drastically reduces human population and reshapes civilization. This concept has become something that haunts my thought as I move through time, so I’ve decided to track things that make make me think “that seems like it might be part of the jackpot.”
From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams
If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.
Yeah.
Discovered via E-FLUX Review 220
Polybius: The Authoritarian Consolidation Index (John Ganz) — An interactive poli-sci app that uses Claude to evaluate recent news against theoretical models like Linz’s “Perils of Presidentialism”, Gramsci’s hegemony, and de Tocqueville’s civil society to compute a score that measures the health of a given democracy. The app is pre-loaded with the USA’s “authoritarian consolidation index” score, but with your own API keys, you can run the analysis on any country of interest.
Here is the score when I checked today (31st of January, 2026). If you click the link, you’ll get a lot more information.
Via Manton Reece (@manton)
Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞
OMG!
My immediate first ass association is to the concept of “the jackpot” from the recent William Gibson novels.
For those who may not be familiar with the “jackpot” as a term/concept:
The Jackpot is a term coined by William Gibson in his novels, particularly in The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency. It describes a gradual, multi-faceted apocalypse rather than a single catastrophic event. This concept reflects ongoing crises that humanity faces, primarily driven by climate change and societal issues.
Ironically, the quoted text above came from the AI generated summery when I searched for the term via DuckDuckGo.
