State of the World 2026 with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky

    
Welcome to the 2026 State of the World conversation, our 26th annual
exploration of the chaos and complexity of the rapidly-spinning,
always-evolving planet Earth and the odd bipedal and quadrupedal
creatures variously crouching and wandering on its surface. We are
observers of this world, sharing our observations here with no claim
of extraordinary expertise. We do hope that you'll be stimulated by
our observations, or that you will, at least, find them
entertaining. And we invite you to contribute either by posting
directly on the WELL, if you're a member of this online community,
or via email to inkwell (at) well.com, if you're not a member.

It's a chaotic time, but we'll try not to be chaotic.
  

    
Your co-hosts and lead commentators are author/journalist/design
maven Bruce Sterling and yours truly, Jon Lebkowsky, digital culture
maven and aging dharma punk. This is our 26th annual State of the
World discussion. We tend to be more micro than macro in these
discussions, which makes sense given that the actual state of the
world is slippery, fluid, hard to assess reliably.
  

    
We've been doing this State of the World routine for so long that I
think we might as well just make "the claim of extraordinary
expertise."  What are we trying to hide at this point?  If you're
here again, then you know.

Commonly, in these State of World discussions, I like to offer some
provocative and far-out stuff, because the state of the world is
commonly boring and normal.  I probably won't be doing much that for
02026 because the general tenor of discussion worldwide is so
chaotic and near-dementia.   It's not that world events themselves
are all that violent or nasty historically-speaking, but that a lot
of what is said about events is not even human in origin. It's
algorithmically distributed  instead of reflecting any human
benefits and interests.  
  

    
Contemporary political, financial, even military language has a lot
of language-model rhythms in it.  It generates tangled chains of
catchwords without the consequences of their meaning anything.

It's not that every human being has magically turned into an AI,
more like AI-slop is setting the pace for human discussion.  You get
this algorithmically-assisted churn fodder that's extreme and
anodyne at the same time, sometimes fantastically erudite but also
treadmill-like, forgotten by Tuesday, a new kind of dessicated
bullshit that can't even bother to lie. 
  

    
I don't want to "debunk" stuff or "fact-check" stuff, because I
think that activity's part of the general problem, but this year I'm
feeling a new and different sensibility.  Obviously the trend-lines
are horrific in many ways, and there are battlefields and explosive
gray-zones that are frankly grisly, and yet for me personally the
year 2025 was one of the calmest and quietest years I've ever
experienced.   Next-to-nothing  is going as I would prefer it, and I
probably ought to be coming out of my skin with anxiety, but I was
also in a state of near-serenity, quite a lot of the time.  It felt
like being the Cheshire Cat in a world ruthlessly pseudo-dominated
by a screechy and senile Red Queen.  
  

    
Once again I'm logging in from Ibiza.  I wouldn't say I've gone
native, but I've been here long enough to get it.  This is not a
fierce, grind-it-out, Silicon Valley society; even Austin Texas,
that wellspring of slackerdom, has a harsher work-ethic.   This
little Mediterranean island with some genuine Lotus-eater aspects to
it -- the island of the Lotus Eaters was supposed to be Djerba over
in Tunisia.

According to the Odyssey, you sail  there, you partake of the Lotus,
you go kinda blotto and everything's groovy.  You're not supposed to
succumb to  this sweet and easy life, of course.  Captain Odysseus
makes everybody get back on the boat and recommence rowing for
Ithaca.   A few hundred Greek verses later, every blue-collar guy is
dead and only Captain Odysseus is left to manage his narrative.
  

    
Maybe Lotus-land deserves some general re-assessment.  I admit that
I'm laid-back, indolent and not doing much here in Ibiza, but I'm
getting more accomplished  than anybody in the US Congress.  Those
guys are Lotus-land 10X.  They've got great health-coverage and
limos and such, but if you consider yourself an ambitious,
fully-briefed, take charge kind of guy and you're also in the US
Congress, you're a decorative lotus-plant in 02026. 

You could mount a podium and declare your sentiments  about the
State of the World, and nobody anywhere would grant you even  a
shred of credibility.  Your own kids would scoff and return to their
TikTok feed.
  

    
While Bruce is hanging out in Ibiza, I'm still in Austin, pondering
the Texas weather, which is famously fickle but increasingly hotter.


But it's not just Texas that's getting hotter. The state of the
world in 2026 is feverish: global temperatures continue to rise;
2025 was among the hottest years on record. The world is close to
excceding the 1.5 °C threshold set by the Paris Agreement within
the next decade if not sooner. Greenhouse gas concentrations and
ocean heat content are at or near historic highs, driving stronger
extreme weather, sea-level rise, melting ice, and stressed
ecosystems. Currently the Trump administration in the USA dismisses
renewable energy sources, instead boosting fossil fuels, and
weakening or eliminating emission controls. Climate science warns
that, without deeper sustained cuts to emissions and broader
implementation of mitigation strategies, targets of the Paris
framework are slipping out of reach. It's like the house is burning
down around us as we sit on the couch watching episodes of "Stranger
Things" and munching popcorn, as though everything was status quo.
Elon Musk, of all people, has a relevant quote: "We are running the
most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how
much carbon dioxide the atmosphere can handle before there is an
environmental catastrophe."
  

    
Meanwhile Donald Trump told the United Nations "this 'climate
change,' it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in
my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and
many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by
stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given
those same countries no chance for success. If you don't get away
from this green scam, your country is going to fail."
  

    
I thought I was "retiring" into a Lotus-land, but I'm busily doing
rather a lot of stuff.  For a guy of my advanced years, I'm quite
curious, inventive and active, only none of it has anything to do
with wealth or fame. I don't make money from it and I don't demand
attention for it.

It took me a while to realize that this is a general and traditional
Ibizan cultural problem: "I'm a drop-out European hippie on a small
rural island, only somehow-or-other, I want to be very elegant,
put-together and philosophical Walter-Benjamin about that."  That's
engrossing, but it's not consequential.  On a bohemian island you're
quite literally "isolated."  They don't come-and-get-you, which is
good,  but you're also out-of-sight, out-of-mind, which can get
rather Robinson-Crusoe.

It's a Ibizan sensibility similar to the Austin "golden rut," or
what Austinites have consistently referred to as their
good-old-days.  High quality of life -- eventually, you leave.
  

    

When I first visited this island it was much more frenetic than it
is now.  In an era of deglobalization and hostility to immigrants,
Ibiza clearly wants to knock it off with its long career as a
sex-and-drugs disco and become a gerontocratic yachts-and-mansions
European suburb.  I'm not sure this Monaco-style business model will
work for them, because rich people, or at least their wives and
children, get very bored in exclusive gated-community compounds.  
Ibizan new-arrivals on their rich-guy yachts are by no means natural
seafarers.  They get especially bored.  You can see them step off
the gilded gangplank onto dry land with a look almost of
desperation, as if they'd emerged from submarines.

"Where's the action?!"  It'll take some nerve to tell them that
there isn't any, that you're tired of providing it.
  

    

I'm not sure what it is I'm personally trying to achieve here in
these local circumstances, but I have some ideans, and  Stewart
Brand's new book about "Maintenance" was a cheerful thing to read. 
I blurbed it.  It strikes me that our State of the World conclave,
after 26 years of it, is "maintenance."  "Maintaining" old  and
cherished things is not the same as being conservative about them,
or being reactionary or backward-looking.   It's more about kicking
the tires and checking the oil; warming up the motor before the
year's strange trip.

Also "maintenance" is all about a frank awareness of very genuine,
pervasive, entropy, failure and decay, which is an honest thing to
acknowledge and confront when you're over 70.
  

    

It couldn't be the WELL State of the World without some tech
forecasting, but in 02026,  I don't believe anything said by
Washington or Silicon Valley.   Not an LLM word of it, not a
generated jpeg.   So this year I plan to get around to discussing
some *Chinese* tech forecasting.  I don't believe that stuff either,
but I was impressed by how much the Chinese themselves seemed to
believe their own forecasting.  So some tall Chinese weeds will be
in order in the discussion this year.
  

    
I am struck by the growing "serfication" of the world. Hundreds of
thousands (millions?) of displaced Palestinians waiting on their
Lords to provide relief, or at least a path forward. The vanishing
American middle class, shrinking further because their healthcare
(and other government services) are sacrificed for more tax breaks
for the truly wealthy. The lack of pretence that the poor of
Venezuela matter as Trump arranges for cronies to tap into
Venezuelan oil, bypassing the people (already bypassed by
Maduro)....

Then there is the regularly schedule destruction in Sudan, the
ongoing war in Ukraine, etc 

I'd like to think that the Mamdani's of the world will find their
voices, and success. I feel uncomfortably skeptical that many people
are thinking of change, as opposed to slowing the pace of
Enshittification. And I watch NYC, and the huge, "he's a monster
anti-Semite" slur distract from anything else.

Not feeling optimistic this morning, even though, for me personally,
life is relatively peachy.
  

    
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wrt #10, bruce, is the monaco-ization of ibiza being driven by too
many white yachts in the world and not enough ports of call? those
traditionally seeking out ibiza for fun and games ---- have aged
out? can no longer afford?

just curious...
  

    
Ibiza is an indicator as regards Europe so it depends on where you
think Europe is at.  They're aging more rapidly than, for example,
the US (that's largely due to US immigration which Trump hasn't yet
been able to completely roll back) and Europe's economic model is,
now, in many ways broken.  That's largely a question of Germany
since I regard, for example, Poland as a low-wage back office to
Germany.

So the Germans aren't getting cheap energy any longer from Russia
but, also, the Chinese now compete with them, at lower prices,
across pretty much all industrial categories.  The Germans seem to
have thought that they'd always outdistance the Chinese.  That isn't
what happened.  Europe's not in a good place and I'd expect that
reflected across the board including in Ibiza.

Oh yes, then there's this business about Trump, Greenland, NATO and
so on.  Multi-crisis, right?

Maybe these aren't unusual times.  Maybe most of history has been
characterized by more violence, more war, and more economic
inequality.  So this would be reversion to the mean.

There are though at least two new things: 8+ billion people in the
world and the climate is unravelling.  Interesting to watch the
(large) threads of the climate getting blown in every possible
direction.  Who knew that the poles would heat up more first?  One
thing I wonder is if all the political disarray is being superheated
by an subconscious presentiment of impending disaster.  Or at least
the fear of such.
  

    
Thanks for returning and maintaining *this*, Bruce & Jon.

I'm thinking about the young/old divide as it relates to and
shapes politics and culture. Two examples or touchstones. 

Tim Burke speculated a couple of months ago about reasons for the
relative paucity of young folks at No Kings protests, for example.
One of several explanations he noted was something like "MAGA is
their frame of reference for politics now." One was, basically,
fatalism about politics. One was along the lines of they are working
on their own political solutions but they aren't telling you about
them because they don't trust the olds. He had ten or a dozen
possibilities, but they all had to do with there being fundamental
differences between young and old views of … things.

And then, I'm reading *Apple in China: The Capture of the
World's Greatest Company* by Patrick McGee just now. It mentions
how the guy tasked with opening the first Apple Store in Beijing was
struck by a sharp generational divide as he interviewed job
candidates. 

"Those born after 1980 were the first Chinese cohort after Mao's
death. They grew up in the 'reform and opening up' era . . . .
They embraced once-forbidden ideas . . . . Anyone aged thirty-five
and above … Don't question, don't ask, just do as you're
told."

It seems there's a divide like that among younger and older folks
today in the U.S. and in other places, too, but with the young at
once more open to doing things differently and at the same time more
cynical.

Not sure that characterizes it quite adequately, but I bet you two
have reflected on this and have good thoughts to share. 
  

    <scribbled by jonl Tue 6 Jan 26 13:09>
  

    
> Multi-crisis

The term I've been hearing is polycrisis - there's even a website
devoted to the concept, <https://polycrisis.org/>, set up by the
Canadian Cascade Institute (https://cascadeinstitute.org/about/),​;
which focuses on "anticipating pernicious cascades" and "triggering
virtuous cascades." I think polycrisis is just the right buzzword
for 2026, and we should all be thinking about what it means to have
multiple complex chaotic crises colliding and no truly effective
leaders to sort 'em out.
  

    
Yes, you're right - polycrisis.  I thought the origin was historian
Adam Tooze but when I look it up what I'm told is Edgar Morin in
France in the 1990's.

"[problems] intensify one another, creating outcomes that cannot be
understood or managed in isolation."

Nevertheless, we largely work by reduction.  Scientists and
engineers only?  No I think politicians operate in that fashion as
well.  Except the very best politicians however there don't seem
many of those on the ground at the moment.  Still though, Napoleon
did say things to the effect of: men are nothing; circumstances are
everything.
  

    
@Loris:  wrt #10, bruce, is the monaco-ization of ibiza being driven
by too many white yachts in the world and not enough ports of call?
those traditionally seeking out ibiza for fun and games ---- have
aged out? can no longer afford?

just curious...

*It seems to me that a lot of cosmopolitan tourist centers --
Barcelona, Berlin, Venice worst of all -- they feel trampled
underfoot now.  They didn't used to mind the "overtourism" of
mass-globalization and cheap jet-travel, but the social mood changed
and now they're abidingly upset about it.
  

    
Ibizans don't actually *like*  the oligarchs on yachts, but the rich
do drop a lot of money in a short time, and they're not physically
around much.  The rich tend to buy-up the landscape, which is
annoying, but since the rich have other villas elsewhere, a lot of
the time there's nobody there.  More "don't trespass" signs, but the
landscape looks roomier.

Ibizans actually have a positive birth-rate.  They're one of the few
islands in Spain with more newborn people than dying people.  Events
are  somnolent at the moment, but nobody thinks the calm will last. 
Ibizans seem to have an intuition that the presence of the rich
might somehow protect them in future.  That when disaster strikes,
their reputation as a pretty holiday rich-spot means that they won't
be abandoned to the tender mercies of  pirates, storms and plagues. 
They'll get rebuilt. Somehow.
  

    

Watching the Canary Islands get blasted by volcanoes was edifying if
you live in Ibiza.  That was an interesting disaster because nobody
was trying to spin it or derive any power-benefit from it; it wasn't
denied or polarized, it was just a  big natural disaster.  The
Canary Islands are literal volcanoes.  You can't have the Canary
Islands without  the volcanoes.  The volcanoes ferociously burned
and blasted a lot of one island -- and  it also made the island
bigger.  There was some mild-power struggles when Canary Islanders
were trying to figure out who owned the new volcanic real estate.  I
wouldn't say that they are "resilient," but a truly dramatic and
dreadful event happened there, and they forgot about it.   Till next
time.


A Gulf-of-Mexico hurricane struck Ibiza last year;  "Gabrielle"
crossed Spain and whacked the island.  I went to inspect the
supposed mayhem.  A typical Greenhouse rain-bomb, a lot of garbage
washed around; it looked like the aftermath of Woodstock.  They
picked up the debris and forgot about it.  The yachts were back in
two days.
  

    

In Ibiza I'm keenly aware that I'm part of the general problem. 
Global-nomad, laptop-typing guy, obviously I don't deserve any seat
at their paella-pan.   Neither does most anybody else here, though. 
They were overwhelmed by hippie migrants two long generations ago;
it's like trying to rescue the authentic aboriginals at the Anaheim
Disneyland.  

Anti-tourist sentiment in Ibiza is mostly about former tourists not
liking new tourists.   Nobody, including tourists, "likes tourists"
now.  It used to be that tourists were sometimes considered kind of
sexy --  free-spending and fun, exotic people, half-dressed people
who you might want to pick up at a bar, or hospitably help-out in
some way.  In a world of eight billion, there's something about mass
tourism that grates the nerves.  "Crimea, the clean, sunlit tourist
beaches of the Soviet Union!  C'mon down, everybody, enjoy!"
  

    

I caught Covid in Ibiza and survived it.  Twice, actually.  I'd have
to say that my attitude toward my own remaining lifespan has been
quite a lot more fluffy and lemon-meringue, after that.   The
committed struggle to grind and bake one's daily bread, well, this
is the tiramisu course, for me personally.   Ethically, I shouldn't
scoff callously at other people' anxieties, sufferings, and
dwindling prospects, but my own feel less bothersome to me.  Likely
I should not have lived this long, but people in Ibiza commonly
reach their nineties.  Maybe because they fret less than they might.
They make no grand visible effort to live a long time, they just
persist.

I benefit from their graciousness and  relaxed attitude, although I
don't much belong here.  I've also come to understand that I've
picked up some of their deeper cultural problems.  "Challenges," you
might call them, not "problems."  It's sounds cheerier to call them
"challenges," there might be funding involved.  Sticky-eyeballs. 
Tourist-bait.