Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 5/10/25
1,280 Day Report Card edition
Everyone here in Bunker Administration would like to announce that our annual 1,280 Days Report Card has been issued by the citizens and dwellers of the NTAB. We are, I’m pleased to report, right on target for meeting our 2025 and beyond goals. All of the Bunker Command Substructure got high marks, and Administration received the highest marks of all, with the exception of the Division of Media Review, which marked us down as “Needs Improvement.” This is obviously fake news, scandalous, not-very-nice, and just horrible and failing and so sad, you know, because we’re all in this little metal can together, and by the way, did you know this? They smell really bad down there, because they’re in the dark all the time and it’s damp and they grow like mushrooms, you know, mushrooms, did you ever eat those? I like mine on a pizza, but no other vegetables, not on my pizza. Anyway, we’re crushing it. Everyone says so. They’re all talking about it.
A Gentle Reminder
The NTAB Commissary is up and running, and some of you may find solace in one of the shirts I have for sale. There will be other designs but sometimes basic is better.
Genies Go Back in Bottles
One of my least-favorite idioms is “that Genie is out of the bottle,” usually applied to a situation so vast that it has expanded beyond the confines of its vessel and it can’t be contained or controlled by normal means. A cute way of saying “This problem is too big to solve.”
The Internet is a dump. It’s Madripoor after dark. It’s Vienna post-WWII, all black markets and con men, built on lies and indifference. And it needs fixing. There’s plenty of evidence, both empirical and anecdotal, that the Internet is a dangerous place for kids and social media is the worst onramp to the digital bad part of town for them to access. It’s led to a rise in scams, particularly among the elderly, trafficking, pornography, a proliferation of hate-groups and fringe conspiracy theories, bullying, teen suicides, sudden onset narcissism, celebrity culture, influencers, and widespread division and the near-complete erosion of trust in institutions we used to prop up. And we’re doing nothing about it. There’s a real disconnect between “It’s just computers, you know, no big deal, he’s just playing Minecraft with his friends,” and “Y’all, I saw online that they’re talking about the Democrats eating babies! I was going to say more about it, but I got my identity stolen because someone convinced me I was talking to Amazon customer service.”
I mean, sure, there’s some good to come out of the Internet, right? This newsletter you’re reading is a great example of that. It’s not all bad. We can do a lot of things online that make life easier for us. It is a great means of remaining connected to friends and family. Yes, yes, all this, and more, blah blah blah.
Until it isn’t great. Then it’s a horror show. The problem is, you don’t think like a scumbag. It’s okay that you don’t, most of us are just as naive. Over the years, as new scams were reported and we heard about the rise of the Dark Web, and all of that stuff, my first thought was usually, “Damn, I never even considered that.”
Most people don’t. We’re not set up to scan for danger, not anymore, and certainly, we don’t expect our toys to betray us. When computers were first presented to us, back in the seventies, it was for playing chess. That was always the ad in the magazine; some dad hovering over a birdshit gray spheroid console while the kid grins vacuously at the Sargon Chess game displayed on the black monitor. Vector graphic chess. How thrilling!
Very quickly, the computer became a game machine for geeks and nerds. That’s what sold personal computing to parents for the longest time. Not homework, that was too expensive. Dot-matrix printers? Please. What am I, a NASA technician? If I’m going to load twenty-four cassette tapes into a Trash-80, I want to play Ultima afterwards. Going online to a BBS was the height of cool, but you didn’t want to hang out in boards with people you didn’t know. That was stupid. The most noteworthy problem of the age was trying to figure out how to play Dungeons & Dragons on the computer, a solution that has been solved by a multi-billion dollar a year industry.
I remember when the World Wide Web was first launched. I was at work, and we were looking at this for the very first time. It took a while to find a website we could look at that wasn’t a “Coming soon” or some Usenet server site. I think we ended up at Geocities, and when it finally loaded, looking simultaneously very cool and completely underwhelming, we all had the same thought: why? Why is this even a thing?
No worries; the private sector figured it out soon enough, and there was this weirdly heady time when people were scrambling to monetize what they had discovered. It was always presented as a novelty, though. The new thing. The next thing we’re all doing now. MySpace. LiveJournal. All of that stuff.
The thing is, whenever a new medium is invented for the masses, the two groups who always seize the opportunity first are the con artists and the pornographers. The history of porn is pretty much the history of mass media. In the earliest days of personal computing, people were drawing 16 bit nudes and passing them around on message boards like Tijuana bibles.
I knew that, at the age of fifteen. Did you? If you’re my age and you owned a Commadore 64, you probably did. There was a text-based game called Leisure Suit Larry. It was like The Oregon Trail with badly-rendered boobs. That was in the 80s, and odds are even-steven that most of the parents back then had no idea about ASCII-illustrated dick pics.
The current Internet is a giant tire fire, both visible from space and trying to kill us with toxins. In order to get online, you need to buy a computer and set up some access point like your phone line, and then you’re good to go. Unless you want to protect your identity and your privacy and your children from the brigands and thieves online. You need online protection, a digital condom built by a third party to ensure your computer doesn’t become infected with the digital clap. You will also need a Virtual Private Network for when your virus protection software fails you. You need strong, two-party encryption for every single place you visit or do business, because if you don’t, they can access your bank account from the other side of the world(!) and empty it. And you’ve also got to do it every two years because your computer was built to become obsolete by then. All so you can pay the electricity bill. An entire second industry (cybersecurity) sprung up to deal with all of the problems that the first industry (personal computing) wouldn’t address or solve.
Getting online wasn’t essential for so long, and then all of a sudden, it was. And there’s nothing being done to get a handle on it. We’ve treated it like a novelty, a one-off, something that “the kids” do, and not something we need nearly every day in this post-modern world. I realize that if a teenager wants to see porn, he’s only as sheltered as the least-parented kid in the class, whose parents gave him a cell phone at age twelve "for safety” and also because all of the other kids had one, too. Kids can get around child protections, using many of the same tools you use to keep from getting trafficked by Nigerian princes.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it seems to me that a lot of problems could be solved by heavily limiting the Internet for kids ages 13 and up, and not allowing them full access to the Dark End of the Street until they are, oh, I don’t know, 18 or 21. That way, their brains would have a chance to normalize before you go dumping all of these poisonous and intentionally misleading lies and schemes into their heads.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t have phones, but they don’t need to be that smart. They just need to call for help, right? I mean, that’s why the eleven year old girls have it, right? Why isn’t social media restricted to seventeen year olds and up? You want to scare away the pedophiles? Pull every child out of social media. That won’t fix them, but it’s one less thing to worry about.
We know this already, right? This isn’t news to anyone. It’s just that, when I see people like our Senators and Representatives, all in their 70s and 80s, trying to get their heads around the speed with which all of this develops, I’m reminded that Future Shock is here, and in fact, it happened pretty much like Toffler predicted back in the 1970s. Maybe the first thing we need to do is get people into the Senate who are closer to the American experience in 2025, not 1965.
I don’t want to take the Internet away from anyone, except maybe kids. But why is it too much to ask the people who are providing this online experience for help with the monsters that are waiting just outside our digital door?
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: we stand by our assessment of Administration. They know what they did.
Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld and sure, Andor Season 2, why not (Disney)
Following Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire, Dave Filoni serves up another anthology series using the medium he knows best.
If short, punchy serialized stories in the style of The Clone Wars is your jam, then you won’t want to miss this one. This is my favorite of the three series, because it’s all of the interesting folks who are trying to figure out how to live in this world of Rebels and Imperials. It’s worth noting that, despite the shortened length of the series and the animated fare, the stories have heart and deal with more complex relationships.
Maybe I’m overthinking it, but Tales of the Underworld is a pretty good segue into Andor’s more complicated storyline. The Rebel Alliance is not fully formed in Andor. They are a bunch of disparate groups trying to find common cause to work together. If Season 1 seemed like a slog and was all talk, no action, Season 2 fixes all of that. Kudos for them playing the long game and showing, very deliberately, how people can be full of hope, loyalty, and other laudatory qualities and still be working for the Empire. Compartmentalization is a theme for both the Rebels and the Empire in Season 2.
And for those of you who may have seen some indignant chatter from online spaces: Star Wars just got really, pointedly political. They placed a scene in Andor that makes it crystal clear how their fiction lines up with our reality. And yet, it’s also inherently Star Wars in nature. Season 2 outlines the problems with getting a bunch of people together with different agendas and also the dangers of sitting in a pot of water that is slowly getting hotter. By the time you (the Imperial stooge) realize it, the damage has been done.
Despite how it sounds, Andor is a complicated and nuanced show and I love season 2 in all of the ways that I was underwhelmed by season 1. And for some reason, they are dropping episodes in clumps of three, so it’s about to be over and done with. Go catch up now if you haven’t already. Use Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld as a palate cleanser if it gets too intense. I want more stuff like this. Star Wars as a concept is large enough to contain both high-octane serial cliffhangers and thoughtful, deep dives into the politics behind the movies themselves.