Tepid Dystopia
Not my biggest clicks, but I can't help but include
There’s a section in my A-List that runs on instinct.
I call it Tepid Dystopia, and I’ve never had a working definition of what belongs there. I put things in it the way you move something to the corner of your desk, not because you’ve classified it, but because it feels wrong everywhere else. You know it the way you know your own car’s engine is wrong before you can name what’s wrong with it. Not sounds. Feels.
Looking at this year’s archives, two themes have emerged.
Structural Rot
The first is what I’d call structural rot. Items where an institution exists, performs the opposite of its stated purpose, and faces no meaningful consequence for doing so.
From Week 10: Americans exercising their First Amendment right to monitor ICE activity can have their Global Entry revoked.
From Week 11: open-plan offices, sold to management as collaboration tools, demonstrably increase the risk of workplace bullying.
The consistent logic isn’t that the system is broken. It works perfectly well, just not for the people it nominally serves. The varnish of legality is intact. The substance has been quietly filling its own pockets at your expense, and is surprised by nothing, least of all you.
Of course, the rascals look at their critics with long-faced holiness and claim to be the wronged party if they even respond at all.
The top Tepid Dystopia click this year came from Week 12: a story about an Israeli minister’s daughter, Rules for thee but not for me, in which Google apparently scrubbed search results related to abuse allegations for this powerful man. It got 10 per cent of my openers that week. Mid-pack in raw terms, but the highest Tepid Dystopia link for 2026 so far.
Make of that what you will.
Stuff like this makes me feel like the Joker in that film, burning that pile of money.
Years ago, there was a Hollywood gossip columnist called Rona Barrett. She said there were only three stories in her business: money, sex and power; it was just a question of the order. That wallpapering over of the abuse and death of that politician’s daughter was all three.
Ambient Creep
The second mode is ambient creep. These items belong in the section more by disappointment than outrage. No villain to hiss at, no smoking gun, just the steady sensation that someone has been quietly moving the furniture while you slept.
From Week 14: after 16 years and eight billion dollars, the US military’s GPS upgrade still doesn’t work.
From Week 13: Vizio TVs now require a Walmart account to use basic smart features.
Nobody’s rights were violated. Nothing exploded. It’s just that the world got a little worse in a way that’s hard to get purple-faced about, and that’s the point.
GPS doesn’t work? Hey, it’s only taxpayer money. Screwing you for subscription money? Well, you were only going to spend it on food and educating your children, right?
Things Going Wrong
Dystopia, in the original sense, doesn’t require a jackboot. It requires a gradual narrowing of what you can expect from your government, from your technology, from the people paid to protect you, and from each other.
Tepid is the right word. Not cold, not hot.
The temperature of something that used to be better, and has been on a slow, unannounced slide ever since.
Whether that makes it one section or two, I still can’t tell you.