The Jackpot

24/07/2022

A fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park exploded in size on Saturday into one of California's largest wildfires of the year, prompting the gover...

24/02/2022

Latest updates: Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defence minister, describes several attacks, including Russian troops trying to get to Kyiv

25/01/2022

The klept isn’t criminal, because the klept writes the laws.
This is how The Jackpot starts.

Novelist Cory Doctorow tracks Britain's domestic scandals back to the capital’s reliance on laundered money from overseas, and the feasting of so many professions on the proceeds

20/11/2021

The Jackpot wants to destroy your brain.

The cases have prompted a row between health officials who deny the sicknesses form a true ‘cluster’ and medical experts looking for a link

07/11/2021

"Here is what we know. We know that our lives are entirely dependent on complex natural systems: the atmosphere, ocean currents, the soil, the planet’s webs of life. People who study complex systems have discovered that they behave in consistent ways. It doesn’t matter whether the system is a banking network, a nation state, a rainforest or an Antarctic ice shelf; its behaviour follows certain mathematical rules. In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse."

Instead of focusing on ‘micro consumerist bollocks’ like ditching our plastic coffee cups, we must challenge the pursuit of wealth and level down, not up

09/10/2021

It's running out of time.

The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive.

10/09/2021

Mismanagement and the push for renewables are degrading the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid.

09/09/2021

Expect more of this.

The blocking of the canal by the Ever Given led to major disruption for the global shipping industry.

09/09/2021

The moment everyone started worrying about global supply chains.

It took 10 years and 1.5 million workers to build the waterway in the 19th century, and one day and one giant ship to clog it in 2021. The vessel has been refloated, but the disruption could linger.

09/09/2021

I've been neglecting this page. The Jackpot is still happening though. More soon...

05/08/2021

Tornado in Barking, East London, United KingdomNatural disaster on June 25, 2021On the evening of June 25, a tornado hit Barking in East London.Shocking foot...

05/08/2021

Read by Russel BrandRIP Mark

29/12/2020

Even fans are trying to kill us!

The maker of a line of ceiling fans previously sold at Home Depot stores has issued a recall on more than 190,000 units after discovering the fans' blades can "detach while in use."

29/12/2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55474230

A magnitude 6.4 earthquake strikes the town of Petrinja, with reports of many injuries.

13/10/2020

"There have been at least 33 of the bizarre attacks in northern Spain, in the Strait of Gibraltar and off Portugal since July, in which the orcas surround small craft and deliberately ram the ships’ rudders, and attempt to tip them over. The attacks have caused severe damage — and in some cases, disabled the ships."

https://amp.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/killer-whales-target-boats-in-revenge-attacks-in-spain/news-story/dd077c51a47e9cf7246443f83cfa4a9a

Forget Jaws — this time it’s personal … for orcas.

13/10/2020

“Asian giant hornets this time of year start going into what we call the slaughter phase,” said Sven-Erik Spichiger, a department entomologist. “They will visit apiaries, basically mark a hive, attack it in force, removing every bee from the hive, decapitating them, killing all of the workers and then spending the next few days harvesting the brood and the pupae out of the hive as a food source.”

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/murder-hornets-invading-u-s-are-about-to-enter-slaughter-phase/

Six "murder hornets"have been caught, trapped or reported since Sept. 21 in the Blaine area.

29/06/2020

The wrath of the Hindu Gods?

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/150-killed-in-mp-lightning-strikes-in-last-2-months/articleshow/71768617.cms

18/06/2020

Anti-China protests spread in India as people vented their anger about the death of 20 Indian soldiers in a brawl between Indian and Chinese forces along the countries’ disputed border.

01/05/2020

A viral disease that causes honey bees to suffer severe trembling, flightlessness and death within a week is spreading exponentially in Britain.Chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) was only recorded in Lincolnshire in 2007. A decade later, it was found in 39 of 47 English counties and six of eight Wel...

24/04/2020

President Jair Bolsonaro is moving aggressively to open up the Amazon rainforest to commercial development, posing an existential threat to the tribes living there.

17/04/2020

What the coronavirus outbreak reveals is not the unreality of our present moment, but the illusions it shatters.

17/04/2020

Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus was first reported in December 2019, now reports a further 1,290 people who died after contracting the virus.

17/04/2020

Seems a bit redundant, tbh.

The project, still in development, could get a straight-to-series order

17/04/2020

A megadrought that's more severe than some of the worst droughts of the past 1,200 years, is underway in a 10-state region of the Southwest.

17/04/2020

https://twitter.com/GreatDismal

The latest Tweets from William Gibson (). Author of Neuromancer, The Peripheral, Agency. Meticulous detailer, in quarantine, of a convection stovetop etc. Vancouver

17/04/2020

Your humble host, dressed for the occasion.

17/04/2020

September 2019

Hurricane Lorenzo is the strongest hurricane ever recorded so far east in the Atlantic Ocean. While no immediate threat to the land, it could threaten the Azores Islands by the middle of next week.

17/04/2020

From August 2019

The ongoing destruction of the Amazon is taking place because of policy choices made by those who now rule Brazil

17/04/2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is an abnormal phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear, leaving behind a queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees.[1] While such disappearances have occurred sporadically throughout the hi...

17/04/2020

Like COVID-19, water insecurity is set to hit the most vulnerable the hardest.

17/04/2020

Information on COVID-19 including epidemiology, virology and clinical features.

17/04/2020

William Gibson is best known as the man who coined the term "cyberspace". But he may be known in the future as the man who named the Jackpot.

Midway through his career, the inventor of “cyberspace” turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.

17/04/2020

In writing “The Peripheral,” [Gibson had] been able to bring himself to believe in the reality of an ongoing slow-motion apocalypse called “the jackpot.” A character describes the jackpot as “multicausal”—“more a climate than an event.” The world eases into it gradually, as all the bad things we worry about—rising oceans, crop failures, drug-resistant diseases, resource wars, and so on—happen, here and there, to varying degrees, over the better part of the twenty-first century, adding up to “androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad sh*t” that eventually kills eighty per cent of the human race. It’s a Gibsonian apocalypse: the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed. One character reacts to the jackpot equivocally: “Either depressing and scared the f**k out of me or sort of how I’d always figured things are?”

“I had real trouble coming to that,” Gibson said. “I couldn’t really think about it. I just had to get to the point where I could write it really quickly. Afterward, I looked at it and was just . . . It was the first time I’d admitted it to myself.”

Home  »  Critical Essays • Personal Essays   »   Facing the Jackpot with William Gibson Facing the Jackpot with William Gibson Author: Rachael Nevins | Jan202020 Posted in Critical Essays, Personal Essays No comments After the 2016 presidential election, I had the uncanny feeling that we...

17/04/2020

It's already happening.

Answer (1 of 3): It’s already in progress. Over and over, wars over nothing but dominance over global economics has led to slow, silent genocides in every corner the world. The tension between resistance and counter-resistance now dominates every aspect of politics and our personal lives, whether....

17/04/2020

The Jackpot

"And first of all [the Jackpot] was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns, looking like Burton and his posse, or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. Not like that."

"It was androgenic, he said, and she knew from Ciencia Loca and National Geographic that that meant because of people. Not that they’d known what they were doing, had meant to make problems, but they’d caused it anyway. And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had f**ked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late."

"No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there."

--William Gibson, The Peripheral

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral)
(William Gibson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GreatDismal)

17/04/2020

The Jackpot is the mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner. “If the Jackpot is going to happen,” Gibson says, “it’s already happening. It’s been happening for at least 100 years.”

Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. Take the pulp space opera Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, in which an inept, “babbling” protagonist called Boris Johnson goes to war against a technocra...