I’ve stopped trying to keep track.
There’s too much.
The thing that happened Tuesday. The other thing that happened Wednesday. The article I bookmarked and will never read because twelve more things happened by Thursday. Executive orders. Court rulings. Agencies. Programs. Protests. Headlines that sound fake until you realize they aren’t.
I’ve started describing it to people as “gestures broadly at everything,” and they immediately know what I mean.
We all do.
And lately, I keep thinking about a line from Person of Interest:
“We’re fighting a war that’s already over. All this mayhem? It isn’t some plucky underground resistance movement. It’s an extinction burst.”
The line lands because it sounds like doom.
In the show, it basically is doom. Everything is collapsing. People are dead. The enemy (an Artificial Super Intelligence – not kidding!) appears to control everything. It feels impossible that the protagonists could survive, let alone win.
And yet the line reframed the chaos for me.
Because extinction bursts don’t happen when reinforcement is working.
What is an extinction burst?
An extinction burst comes from behavioral psychology – operant conditioning, specifically. Put simply: if pressing a button gives you a reward, you keep pressing the button.
And if the button suddenly stops working?
You don’t calmly accept the new reality on the first try. You press it again. Then faster. Then harder. Frantically. Because for a long time, pressing the button worked.
The escalation isn’t irrational. It’s what happens when something that was consistently reinforced suddenly stops getting results.
Eventually, if the reward never comes back, the behavior dies out.
But before it does, it often gets louder.
Extinction bursts SUCK.
Extinction bursts feel like escalation because they are escalation.
If you’re on the receiving end of one, things really are getting worse.
But the burst is also a sign that something fundamental has stopped working.
You don’t see extinction bursts from systems comfortably getting what they want.
You see them from systems losing access to the thing that used to sustain them – and refusing to accept that reality.
Is this just false hope?
I’m not telling you that’s definitively what this moment is.
I don’t know.
I’m pattern-matching in real time like everyone else, with incomplete information and too many browser tabs open.
But the sheer intensity of everything lately – the volume, the speed, the relentlessness of it – keeps making me think about extinction bursts.
Because systems that are secure in their future usually don’t behave like this.
An extinction burst is still dangerous.
The damage is real while it’s happening.
Person of Interest was honest about that part. The cost was real. Some of it will be permanent.
I’m not offering a happy ending.
I’m offering a frame.
Because sometimes a frame is enough to keep moving.
Show up anyway.