Israel is currently bombing hospitals and killing 100 children a day in Gaza. More ordinance has leveled apartment buildings and cratered the soil this week alone than in the entire first year of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. In a linguistic hijacking of truly Orwellian newspeak, the cyclical violence that erupted again this week after 75 years of brutal ethnic cleansing and illegal occupation is labeled “unprovoked”, collective punishment via offensive airstrikes is called “defense”, and any kind of resistance is “terrorism”. That callous settler colony Israel has a long history of this kind of disingenuous twisting of common sense – there in the world’s premier apartheid ethno-state, the free license to colonize is the “right to return” and war criminals build their bloodthirsty “democracy” on the overgrown ruins of a displaced, permanently disempowered subclass. Behold the future: an inverted world where “freedom” is ensured by ubiquitous surveillance and control technologies perfected in open-air prisons like Gaza and Xinjiang. After play testing in the sandboxes of their internal colonies, these new imperial toys are ultimately pointed back at Western consumers whose every desire is already predicted by an algorithm and whose movements and words are siphoned off and fed into an omniscient, centralized database. Meanwhile, the world’s taxonomic diversity is converted into the biological equivalent of identical concrete architecture, with the erasure of not just individual structures, but entire blueprints of life. Somewhere a petroleum executive’s third home is erected while a koala burns to death in a eucalyptus grove. The post-apocalypse is not coming, it is already here. A tracker in every pocket and an ATM on every street corner, shiny gadgets everywhere, but no food on the shelf and no hope left in the human heart.