!Epic Tomorrows

Silence

August 20, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

Originally published on the blogsite, thingsfromsomewhere; republished with permission.

The solid state of silence stands between two people like a wall. It separates them, drives them apart.

But it also acts as a shield, protecting you from words of others that rain down on you like bullets.

The liquid state of silence is dirty water in which accomplices are submerged up to their necks. It is suffocating, foul-smelling, and shameful.

But it is also a warm, clear lake where two people swim together, its water caressing both their skins at once.

The gaseous state of silence is the void where words knot together. It makes one uneasy. It is an anxious wait.

But it is also the cool air that fills our lungs as we float through it alone, as light as a feather.

Two men kissing on a rooftop with a burning city behind them

Collapse chats & diaries, Ecology of the absurd, Germany, Popular & established authors, Reflections

Collapse utopias: the last gay kiss

August 15, 2026August 15, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By Tadzio Mueller; originally published in German on the blog Peaceful Sabotage. Republished with permission.

Tadzio Mueller has been sharing extracts on his blog, in German, from the unedited draft of his next book, titled Together Against Fear: Solidarity-Based Collapse Politics. He has kindly given me permission to republish his extracts on COTW in English. Below I have included some of his introduction to the extract originally published on his blog on the 2nd of July 2026, with the extract following the intro:

…What you have before you here is the actual ending of the book; these will be the final pages, paragraphs, and sentences. The first draft isn’t finished yet; I’ve missed all sorts of deadlines and still have a lot to revise and rewrite (including this final section). But I think I’ve got the gist of it.

Take a look at the ending and let me know if you get the same impression. Oh, and this time I’m not really asking for critical feedback – I’d be happy to give that next week. Today I just want to celebrate having come this far in two months of writing. 220 pages, 7 chapters, a story that I hope you’ll find interesting.

So here it is, as a teaser and for the “hey Tadzio, that sounds really good” fishing for compliments: the conclusion of my second book. Together Against Fear: Solidarity-Based Collapse Politics, to be published in October 2026 by Mandelbaum Verlag.

Enjoy.

*******

Don’t go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

The last gay kiss

…Now, in a left-wing political book, this would usually be the point where the “ visioning ” section begins, because every grand left-wing narrative—and this book would at least like to be one—needs a utopia, because without utopia there is no “utopian warmth.” Without utopia, the political perspective I have presented here wouldn’t necessarily differ from that of an average volunteer fire department somewhere in the middle of Germany. When I explained the “SoliPreppen” strategy to an old friend and comrade a good two years ago, he asked me, somewhat smugly, whether “shoveling sandbags in the flood” had really become the sole horizon of my political thought and action—and if so, whether I, as a communist, wasn’t ashamed of that.

Of course, it was mostly friendly banter at first, but the question stuck with me; I quoted it in almost every reading and public event because it preoccupied me for a long time: what exactly is the “radical” core of my narrative? Does it even have one?

What has always distinguished the “radical” left from the “moderate” left—I deliberately avoid using historically specific labels like “revolutionary” or “reformist,” firstly because they are too imprecise, and secondly because, as explained above, the term “revolutionary” no longer has any meaning and therefore cannot function as the counterpart in a pair of concepts—was utopia. In concrete workers’ struggles, for example, social democrats and communists get along well; both wanted wage increases. But for social democratic workers, wage struggles were truly about wages, whereas struggles within capitalism, for example, about the relative distribution of surplus value between the two competing and mutually dependent classes, could only ever be a step towards better organization for the revolution for communist workers: utopia, that is, assumptions about the future, determine the meaning of things in the present.

Which means that without a vision of the future, the present isn’t entirely meaningless in a political sense, but if I’m sitting in the present, wondering what to do tomorrow, the only way to make that decision meaningfully is to have some idea of what the day after tomorrow will look like. Strategies are lines, and to keep these lines from going all over the place , they need a vanishing point. Traditionally, for the radical left, this vanishing point is “the revolution.” Later, when it became clear to most thinking leftists that the Leninist revolution had become about as realistic as the idea of a cavalry squadron winning a naval battle, we called it “transformation,” which really just meant “a whole lot of reforms that will eventually become a revolution”—in essence, nothing at all.

There is essentially no radical-left utopia left, apart from the modernist fever dreams of the “accelerationists,” whose strategic position was summarized in * Empire *—a book widely received within the anti-globalization movement and representing the central theoretical framework of the radical left in imperial centers during the 2000s—as follows: ” We’ve got to push through *Empire* and come out the side .” In other words: capitalism to the limit, then a magical transition to communism, and everyone’s happy. Fully automated luxury communism as the last false utopia of capitalist modernity.

But there is no longer a progressive bourgeois utopia either, because at its core, it would always have resembled the world of Star Trek/“Starship Enterprise”: democracy everywhere, technological hyper-progress everywhere, no wars, no poverty… in the bourgeois utopia, it’s simply that everyone has become a citizen, because the way our lives (and now I mean specifically: my class) ideally look – prosperous, peaceful, endowed with rights and political power – is what all lives should be able to look like, right? This idea is now just as realistic as the Leninist revolution, or indeed the victory of Kublai Khan’s cavalry in the Peloponnesian War. The long-observed “brutalization” of the bourgeoisie – which I analyzed in my last book as “assholeization” – is also a reaction to the repressed realization of the impossibility of everyone in the world living like the bourgeoisie in, for example, Germany, and therefore the bourgeoisie also feels that its privileges will not necessarily last. It’s possible that someone else, sometime, might do to us what we, of course, used to do to others, elsewhere: defeat militarily, occupy, rob, kill. That this isn’t particularly realistic is a given. But perpetrators of violence are themselves so traumatized by their own acts of violence that they are never again able to look at the victims of their crimes and aren’t afraid that they, too, will one day suffer the same fate they inflicted on others.

It is clear that there can be no ecological, no green utopia in a global ecological collapse. But left-wing and bourgeois, humanist utopias also cease to function in a collapse. The collapse sweeps away the vanishing points of modern capitalist politics, including the left , because these were always high on the Y-axis of societal outcomes: ” the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice .” Since only net negative societal outcomes are conceivable in a global ecological collapse—because the material conditions of human life on the planet will change so rapidly and so drastically that “chaos” is the most likely macro result—new vanishing points, new progressive utopias, are needed.

Border utopias in collapse

But can utopias even exist in a collapse? A brief look back: ever since Thomas More wrote the first “utopia” in the early 16th century, the utopia (simultaneously a “non-place,” and the “happy place”) has been a non-existent place, outside of reality, from which one can criticize reality. Everything that is bad in reality is good at the utopia (the non-place), and remains good. The utopia is a stable place of goodness, if not perfection, and collapse is precisely what makes all places unstable . No matter where you live, the more ecological collapse escalates, the faster it has effects on Earth, the fewer stable places there will be. That’s why the super-rich are building so many spaceships: because they’ve understood this.

Okay, so if there can be no true utopia in the classical sense, do we really need one? I mean , I’ve been resisting every bit of “hopium” in the climate and collapse debate, and I get incredibly annoyed when my comrades try to sneak magical thinking into our strategy discussions through some back door – do I really want to be the one who brings utopia back into the collapse debate?

The answer will surprise you: yes, that’s who I want to be. My experience during my “future depression,” that phase of utter meaninglessness in my life when there was no escape except ” get high and get fucked ,” showed me that I can’t function without an “escape route.” I need the idea of a goal that lies outside the present, a situation I can work towards, a ” horizon state ,” something that can never be reached, but in which direction one can always move.

The concept of “direction” is also emphasized by what is probably the most famous formulation of the function of “utopia” in the history of the global left. The Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano once wrote this: “Utopia stands on the horizon. I take two steps toward it, it recedes two steps. I take ten steps and the horizon retreats ten steps. What is the purpose of utopia? To enable us to move forward.”

Moving forward. That’s precisely what I’m talking about: that we move forward, keep going, keep fighting, keep loving, keep going… That’s why I still need utopia. But utopia in the classical sense is impossible in a collapse, because, as I said: a utopia is a stable place from which we can criticize the existing order, but since in a collapse “stable places” are not only “far away” but actually impossible , we have to adapt the concept to the collapse. If there can be no stable places from which we can criticize the existing order, and which can represent our strategic points of escape, then we need a conception of “utopia” that is not static, that can always and everywhere work, regardless of how good or bad the situation is in which we act. The “utopia” then doesn’t describe a perfect place we’re striving for, but rather an action, an intervention, intended to create a temporary state: it consists of an action working towards a goal; it’s a utopia that consciously focuses on “moving on,” no matter how bad things get in reality. Frankly, that sounds totally abstract, so I’d rather make it concrete and tell you about my very personal collapse utopia.

Important note: this will differ from your own collapse utopias. How exactly we imagine the collapse and our role in it is a totally personal matter, just like our fears – I’m terrified of my HIV medication running out, most of you probably aren’t, so different plans and strategies emerge, which makes perfect sense . My collapse utopia starts with me, with my fears, my needs, my abilities, which is why it might only motivate me – but that’s fine, because that’s precisely what it’s meant to do: motivate me, enable me to keep going. So I’m not necessarily inviting you to make my collapse utopia your own; it’s quite niche. Of course, I’m happy if it inspires you, but actually, by telling this last little story, I want to invite you to formulate your own collapse utopias. In my narrative, Nazis and communist queer people appear, as well as sex-positive parties in dark Berlin basements, fights, or shootouts with fascist combat troops. My own private utopia stems very much from my own imagination, and when someone once asked me if I couldn’t formulate a less “private” utopia, one potentially for everyone, for example, one that included children, my answer was: nope, my utopias are about fighting and kissing; children simply don’t fit into that. If you want children in your utopias, then include them. That’s what the collapse movement is about. Do it yourself. Because, firstly, your utopia is there for you; it’s meant to help you move forward: that’s much, much more efficient if you create it yourselves. And secondly, because the “collapse utopia” you formulate will always also be an answer to the question that also drives this search: who do I want to be, who will I be in the collapse—and of course, I have absolutely no idea what that looks like for you in concrete terms. And once we all have such a utopia in front of us, a path we can continue on, then it would be exciting to put them in relation to each other, for example within the framework of a solidarity-based collapse movement.

My own private collapse utopia

But we’re not there yet; there’s still a long way to go, through increasingly contested terrain that’s becoming ever more difficult to navigate. When I first became aware of this new terrain, I despaired because I couldn’t find a way through the thicket that loomed before me. And why should I even bother fighting my way through all that muck if defeat is the most likely outcome anyway, if the dangers are so great, if the other side is so strong? Why fight if we’re most likely going to lose ?

But then I realized that I don’t function as a human being unless I feel like I’m moving forward strategically, taking action. Finding a way through the thicket became a matter of survival for me— literally : I had tried to distance myself from “politics” and “the struggle,” and what I was and did during that time… well. I’ve had better days —and as we all know, in the service of our own survival, we often become quite creative.

This is how I see it now: while we are in a poor strategic situation compared to 10 or 20 years ago, others, elsewhere, were in far worse situations and still fought. There are many examples I could cite, and each carries its own risks: whether I cite indigenous struggles in the Americas, which have been undermined by Europeans for over 500 years, or the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which, despite its lack of success, enabled affirmative, fighting Jewish life in a hell designed to destroy Jewish life, I would always be citing struggles and situations significantly different from ours. I would always be in danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from the experiences of others, based on my own privileged position.

So I’ll try it without historical comparisons: the agenda isn’t all that complicated: No matter how bad things get, we don’t have the right to give up, and that also means we don’t have the right, as most of us still do, to escape into comfortable lies, into one of those hopium stories where China, Norway, or some enlightened aliens can still save us from ourselves. No matter how dramatically the situation deteriorates here at home, the classic queer strategy of “getting up, straightening our crowns, and fighting on…” applies.

Fight on until…? Until when and where? My collapse utopia begins, appropriately , in a dystopian situation, which might sound strange at first, but is functional in the context of collapse: if the future becomes dystopian, then the utopia that allows me to “keep going” in this future despite everything must also make sense in a dystopia, no matter how dark it is. Therefore, collapse utopias should always start with a “worst-case scenario” and locate something inspiring within it—something that motivates one to “keep going.”

In my mind, it looks like this: the global ecological collapse has, within just a few years, led to the violence, destruction, and social chaos that we previously exported now arriving in the wealthy, externalizing societies of the North. Fascism is armed; in most countries of the “old West,” it also controls the state apparatus; and Germany has once again become world champion. For the second time, we hold the trophy for “greatest fascist assholes of all time” in our hands; we are, as always, the biggest bastards.

Some cities withstood the attacks from the more rural regions for a while, but one after another they fell under the onslaught of the brown hordes (if you hear echoes of Lord of the Rings here: sure. We’re telling stories, aren’t we? ). All cities? No, Berlin, populated by indomitable migrants, queers, and communists, was the last city to hold out—until very recently, when the fascists surrounded the city, cut us off from our forward defense positions (formerly: “commuter belt”) and food production enclaves, and, with the support of collaborators in wealthy West Berlin and fascist Southeast Berlin, began to advance toward the Berlin Ring. The mythical “Last Battle”, the communist Ragnarök ( except that we traditionally hoped we’d win – the old Vikings were more realistic, they knew the good guys would lose in the end) is brewing on the Tempelhof Field, not because urban warfare spills into open field battles, but because my mind can stage it better there.

The final battle doesn’t interest me: I’m part of the Pink Panther Brigades, whose task is to organize—and, if necessary, fight for—temporary but safe spaces for queer life in the socio-ecological hellscape that the world, including its formerly wealthy parts, has become in collapse, where brown hordes have taken over almost all of Europe, where people perceived as migrants, leftists, queer people, and people with disabilities have to hide. We know defeat is coming. That’s precisely why we’re throwing all our remaining resources into our core mission: enabling and defending queer life. We’re retreating to the city’s catacombs, to the many cellars and tunnels beneath Berlin that we’ve developed and interconnected through years of proactive preparation.

Messages are going out to our allies beyond Berlin: the world’s major cities have fallen, but everywhere—remember Independence Day: the aliens destroy the cities, people retreat to caves, deserts, and forests—radical queers still live, and everywhere people want to throw one last awesome queer party before going into permanent exile, to a camp, or… as Rosa Luxemburg once put it: “I will still hopefully die at my post: in a street battle or in prison. “

The Pink Panthers’ final battle, therefore, is not the (in this dark utopia) hopeless fight on Tempelhof Field against the advancing masses. It is the fight in the catacombs for affirmative queer life, for queer life as it should be: free, ecstatic, communal, awesome, supportive, loving, sexy, euphoric, human… The party is a riotous celebration; there is no longer any distinction between the darkroom and the dance floor. Everywhere there is kissing, sex, eating, drinking, crying, dancing, bondage, whipping, love, and laughter…

I’m not at the party myself. I’m part of the Panthers; our job was to make the party possible, now it’s our job to defend it. I hear the music, I hear the groans and the laughter. I’m not there, and yet this moment fills me completely, because I know exactly what I’m doing, why I’m standing here: at one of the entrances to the catacombs, where I can already see the first vanguard of fascists advancing towards us. I know: the party won’t last much longer. The enemy is already here.

But I also know: the longer we stand here, the longer queer life will continue. So let’s throw everything into this final moment, truly sacrificing ourselves. For what has become the meaning of our lives in recent years. The defense of queer life, the active, the proactive creation of spaces where queer and feminist and humanistic and supportive and loving and warm… where human life is possible as it should be. The kind of life that so irritates the assholes, precisely because it is so human.

In my dystopian vision of collapse, I, we, are capable of defending this last queer party against the advancing fascists until the last sixteen-year-old on this planet has shared the last gay kiss with the last eighteen-year-old. And as strange as that may sound, that’s enough for me as a “meaning of life,” enough for me as a goal for a fulfilling life in the midst of collapse. And if that isn’t enough motivation to imagine the space of catastrophe as a strategic space, then I don’t know what is. Because the agenda is clear, the path is clear—we just have to pull ourselves together and start walking it.

To be sure : we can achieve and fight for far, far more in this catastrophe than simply making a gay kiss possible somewhere. But my point is this: this thought provides orientation. Everything good that we can fight for is important, because if we don’t fight for it, don’t create it, then this good won’t exist in a world that will otherwise only get worse.

With increasingly exhausted greetings,

Yours truly, Tadzio.

Note: the featured image for this post was created using AI.

Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Reflections, Turkey

Life is a Dream

August 10, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By: an exciting new writer from Turkey; originally published on the blogsite, thingsfromsomewhere

They say that life is a dream. But life is not a single dream, it is thousands of dreams. Some are nested inside one another, like matryoshka dolls, and we wake up from one into another. Some are like potholes on our path, and we suddenly fall into them. From one pothole to the next.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections, Ukraine

Dancing During War (Ukraine travel memoir) #3: Thursday August 14, 2024

August 2, 2026August 2, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

Using my phone I read a few things about the war today including the surprise Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Russia. I also tried to learn more about the Air Alarm system so I could emotionally prepare for my first air raid siren. I joined an English-language Telegram channel, which was recommended for tracking potential bombing.

Then I researched queer Ukraine and learned about an amazing 2018 photo project and exhibition featuring queer soldiers within Ukraine’s “Anti Terrorist Forces.” The photo project affirms the presence of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians in general and heroic soldiers in particular. Despite the subjects’ identities being hidden, the photos bring queer visibility and pride into public space.

I went to two large old Catholic churches, both with extremely elaborate interiors. Murals, arches, wood and marble, tiled floor designs, statuary and icons, alcoves and pillars… The first one had a sign outside requesting prayers for Ukraine.

A little later, after visiting a couple second hand stores, I passed a church from which I could hear singing. I entered to a Catholic mass honoring “defenders,” which is how Ukrainians refer to their soldiers. Alongside the interior of the church were photos of hundreds and hundreds of deceased defenders. I had read that both sides were under-reporting their war dead to not weaken national esteem. But everyone knows someone who has died and even more who are physically injured, traumatized, and displaced from their homes.

In a small plaza outside the church I witnessed a combination of info display and memorial for the over 900 Azov brigade soldiers and crew still held in Russian prisons since 2022. The Azov brigade began as an independent “army” made up of predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were then assimilated into the Ukrainian National Guard and were the last line of defense in the terrible siege on Mariupol. They are highly regarded in Ukraine for their bravery and sacrifices, and there is a movement to keep pressure on negotiating prisoner release.

There’s a lot of follow up study if you’re interested in Azov, torture as a war tactic, and the siege on Mariupol including:

The extreme torture perpetrated against Ukrainian soldiers.
The critiques of Azov members with neo-Nazi affiliation, and the normalization of radical right Ukrainian nationalism.
The bombing massacre of a theater/cultural heritage site used as a citizen refuge in Mariupol.

Walking back to my temp rental I saw a young guy with his bandaged foot casually yet intimately supported by his buddy’s leg as they sat on a street bench. When I looked closer I saw that he was missing half his foot. I’d heard that I would occasionally see wounded soldiers including amputees with prosthetics.

My first appearance at the weekend Contact Improvisation festival organized around my visit was an informal lecture on the politics of dancing, and the political potentials of CI. My talk-discussion was attended by 35-40 people, including two people I’d met before, plus a small livestream audience in Kyiv. The talk happened in a very new studio run by a physical theater company in a renovated-gentrified factory complex of multiple buildings. Next door was a hip gym called Smartass whose logo looked like a tech startup’s.

My talk offered three ideas or frames for thinking about dancing as political engagement and political healing. Ideas and inspirations I’ve been working with for at least 10 years:

Gustav Landauer’s analysis of the state as a system of relationships, a mode of behavior, that cannot be destroyed as an object but rather needs to be replaced by contracting new relationships, by treating each other differently. I proposed the studio and CI jam as a research lab to develop, rediscover, and practice these new relationships.
I introduced a few women from US Black feminism whose work considers and responds to oppressive power and state violence. Quoting Audre Lorde and adrienne marie brown I encouraged them to consider self and community care during a multi-year invasion by one of the world’s biggest military empires as “self preservation” and “political warfare,” and supported care-tuned dancing with brown’s “we learn to love by loving.” Using the touch and change prayer from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, I offered some fresh ways to understand touch and consent as tools of social
transformation.
My final idea was to propose solidarity as an ethical goal of these dancing, caring, loving, touching experiments. Identifying the radical right, neofascist, and anti-democratic movements around the world as an intensification of neoliberalism’s crisis of solidarity, I proposed CI as empathy training that might expand our capacity for solidarity, to care for those we don’t know, those who are different from us.

After each idea the circle was opened up to comments, questions, discussion. Several of the questions circled around the gap between the studio and the world, the counter cultural gap, the power gap, the hopelessly small scale of the CI network. At one point, even though I had decided to not critique nationalism given how it was functioning as a primary tactic of Ukranian survival and defense, we got into it. I suggested that nationalism is resonant with the tactically effective yet dead-end strategy of identity politics. This was the edgiest thing I said. One person pushed back and said it was crucial to their survival right now. One person thanked me for bringing it up. One person said let’s move on. I apologized. One person responded, we forgive you, because you dared to come here.

After the talk there was an open CI jam. Approximately 30 people stayed to dance. As usual I watched more than danced but I had a couple of lovely dance connections. The floor was hard but new.

Will there be dancing during wartime? Yes. There will be dancing.

At the jam’s closing circle one person praised that there were dancers from at least 7 different cities including a few from Kharkiv and other places experiencing active bombing. They were so grateful to have Ukrainians from around the country dancing together at a jam. One of the long term CI teacher/organizers in Ukraine reported that she could feel love in her dancing tonight, maybe for the first time in over 2 years. A young enthusiastic guy finished his comments by saying, “Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine.)” Someone asked for a moment of silence for the “defenders, without whom we wouldn’t be dancing.” The “moment” lasted six full minutes. It was intense and reverent.

After the jam a young dancer came up to thank me for talking about nationalism. She said she was from the Eastern part of Ukraine, in the contested Donbas region. Speaking Russian as a first language she felt excluded from Ukrainian nationalism despite her identification with Ukraine and critique of Putin’s Russia. I asked her where she was living now and she replied, Krakow (in Poland), describing it as “heaven on earth.”

A couple people including my main host took me out for pizza where the conversation continued for another hour. A young man explained why he hadn’t registered for the draft and how he was prepared to defend his refusal to military recruiters who sometimes pick up young men in the street. He felt that his family had served enough already. His older brother was at the front for five years and is now disabled. His father, a former journalist previously jailed for criticizing the army, was now serving in the Ukrainian air defense. He said, “It happened in late 90s. My father wrote about government crimes in a newspaper. One evening, he was illegally abducted by the police. Without a trial and unlawfully, they held him in the forest for half a year. We didn’t know if he would return alive.”

It was getting close to the midnight curfew and we were all tired so we hugged goodnight.

Collapse chats & diaries, DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors

The hottest day

July 27, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By Tadzio Mueller; originally published in German on the blog Peaceful Sabotage. Republished with permission.

Dear people,

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:27 a.m. I’m sitting in the kitchen, a small pot of green tea beside me, my laptop on my lap, writing these lines. This isn’t my usual routine; when I work on a Saturday, I usually don’t start until 10 a.m., after I’ve had a bit of a lie-in and finished reading the morning paper in bed. But today is supposed to be one of the hottest days in Germany since records began. Yesterday, a weather station in Saarbrücken recorded 41.3 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever measured. Today, this record will likely be broken; 39 degrees Celsius is forecast for this afternoon in Berlin, the highest temperature I’ve ever experienced in Germany. Neither my office nor our apartment has air conditioning, and I’m under pressure to finish this book, so here I am at 6:46 a.m., already hard at work, because it will simply be too hot from midday onward. It will be too hot to work, too hot to think, too hot to tell stories. It will simply be too hot for everything. End of June. In northern Germany, not in Ecuador.

And this heat wave is just the beginning. The world’s oceans are warmer than ever before, or at least not within the context of a stable, human-friendly climate. In the Pacific, the “Godzilla El Niño” is gaining momentum, and in the North Atlantic, the “cold blob” is causing alarm, already influencing the monsoon in India and representing the first clearly visible sign of the coming collapse of the AMOC, which will one day trigger a climate catastrophe of its own in Europe. When? We don’t know, but the date is getting closer and closer since I started reading the studies on the subject.

It’s the last weekend in June, normally a weekend packed with festivals, Pride marches, village celebrations, and whatnot – and news is pouring in from all over Germany that most of them are being canceled this weekend. My good friend and fellow collapse enthusiast Scully wanted to go to the Christopher Street Day (CSD) in Ilmenau: canceled because of the heat; I had considered going to the CSD in Bernau with Wolf, like Scully, to make sure there were more of us there than potentially disruptive fascists: canceled because of the heat.

Yesterday, the hottest day in Germany since records began, roads collapsed, people died, and Berlin felt like a ghost town; nobody wanted to be outside, nobody wanted to be in the sun. About an hour north of Berlin, the left-wing alternative music festival Fusion is taking place this weekend, as it always does at the end of June. Around 50,000 hedonistic holiday communists are partying there exuberantly for several days, a significant number of them drunk, stoned, or high on amphetamines. I myself spent many a sleepless night there in my younger days. For several years now, I haven’t gone to Fusion myself, but every year when I’m not there, I experience FOMO, or ” fear of missing out .” Someone else might be having more fun than me.

This year I’m not worried about missing out. This year I’m worried that people will collapse there in droves, possibly even die of heatstroke. I’ve read *The Heat Will Kill You First * and * Ministry for the Future *; I know how, in extreme heat, our bodies dissolve in on themselves, how our insides turn to scrambled eggs. I’m afraid of the heat, and this year it will reach up to 40 degrees Celsius at Fusion. I’m afraid that people will simply die a miserable death while partying because, as a society, we’re just not prepared to live in *Hothouse Earth *, as an influential paper described it a few years ago.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:28 a.m. Today will likely be the hottest day in Germany since records began. And tomorrow the record might be broken again. As the well-known meteorologist Özden Terli reminded us in yesterday evening’s news: we are emitting more greenhouse gases, not less, and as I predicted a few years ago, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we care about climate protection.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:29 a.m., and the last report on Deutschlandfunk radio before the 6:30 news is about the lack of civil defense in Germany. I didn’t hear everything; it’s still early, and I’m just making my green tea. A middle-aged man is asked when he last experienced a siren alarm: he replies that it must have been quite a while ago, perhaps 40 years? I promise myself I’ll listen to this report again later; maybe I’ll find a few more good quotes in it.

Quotes that are supposed to prove something? That I woke up on June 27th in a different world than the one I described in the last chapter. A world where “disaster preparedness” is something to be ridiculed, something to be dismissed as “fascist prepperism” with all the self-assurance of those who have never had to react to a disaster themselves. A world where it’s becoming increasingly clear: disasters are coming, in fact, they’re already here. You can prepare, or you can’t—but if you don’t, then things are going to go wrong.

June 27, 2026, is one of the few days I’ve experienced that truly feels like this: like a world on the brink of collapse. A world where everything is falling apart. A world that, in a crucial sense, is coming to an end. And this is casting its shadows. Shadows that many are still ignoring. But the exciting and dangerous thing about heat is: it’s hard to ignore, and expensive. So we now have a brief window in which we’ll talk about heat waves, climate collapse, and civil protection. The window will close again quickly because of our society’s tendency to deny the truth. But perhaps it will stay open long enough for me to finish my book about collapse and preparing for collapse. Cognitively, that would be stupid, because heat makes you stupid. But symbolically, it would fit. And stories are all about symbols. So here we go : the world is ending, this book will soon be too, let’s wrap it up, people.

With diligent but heat-worried greetings,

Yours truly, Tadzio