The Rupture.

When I was a much younger writer, long before I’d been paid for my first ‘professional’ piece—thirty bucks for a review of all the late-night greasy eating joints in Brisbane, of which there were three back then: the venerable old Windmill cafe, which is still with us; Lady Di’s, which sadly, like the eponymous princess, is not; and Kadoo’s Belly Button, where I can confirm everything tasted like it had been slow-cooked in Kadoo’s actual belly button—I was very poor, which meant I ate at Kadoo’s and lived in cheap sharehouses with a lot of idiots.

One particular place I remember, the idiots were uniformly left-wing activists, or as they styled themselves, ¡activistas! – the revolutionary upside-down exclamation point of the gallant Nicaraguan resistance movement being considered quite chi-chi at the time.

I recall one day they were all sitting around complaining about the system. You know, “fuck the system this”, “overthrow the system that”, and then there was a pause, and one of them remarked quite mournfully, “Man, I wish the system would hurry up with my dole cheque.”

Oh, how we laughed.

But eventually the system did cough up his unemployment benefit, and he went out to spend it on rice and grungy fish heads and the cheapest South American beer he could find in sympathy with the struggle of the brave Nicaraguan campesinos.

The system, in other words, worked, despite how much they all hated it.

But that was a long time ago in a paradigm far, far away.

Increasingly, I think we can agree, our systems are failing, or being actively sabotaged by people who regard the destruction not as a regrettable side effect but as the whole fucking point.

When systems don’t work, they create friction. Even when they do function well, there’ll be some level of friction native to any system—“Man, I wish the system would hurry up with my dole cheque,”—but when it’s working, the results are worth the heat. You’re getting somewhere despite the resistance. When systems begin to fail, though, friction stops being a manageable cost and becomes the dominant feature. Energy accumulates with nowhere to go, building pressure until something breaks. And when it breaks, it breaks catastrophically. Political systems, social systems, mechanical systems—the process of cascade failure is consistent.

AppleTV’s For All Mankind love-love-loves cascade failure.

The alternate history sci-fi series is superficially about what might have happened if the space race had continued. But it’s really all about what will happen when the smallest things go wrong, as they absolutely, inevitably do because human beings are wilfully stupid.

Climate change is cascade failure at global scale. The climate, not just weather, but the entire interconnected system of systems that generates our weather, is being overwhelmed by human inputs. As it breaks down, you get what you’d expect: increasingly frequent catastrophic failures. Wildfires. Superstorms. Once-in-a-century droughts rolling around every couple of years. Last year’s cyclone tracking as far south as Brisbane was my flatmate’s dole cheque not turning up. The next cataclysmic bushfire that threatens a large metro centre is our space station, undergoing rapid, unscheduled disassembly.

While climate change is a pretty mild phrase for the accelerating collapse of the natural systems that keep us alive on this planet, we don’t yet have a word for the violent discontinuity now driving that acceleration, the unravelling of our political and economic systems that we seem to forget sit atop the natural world, recalling A.D. Hope’s imagery of a ‘vast, parasite robber state.’

Or at least we didn’t have a word until Canadian PM Mark Carney gifted it to us this week.

We are now deep inside The Rupture.

Carney spoke eloquently at Davos of the failure of the international system. He spoke honestly about it, too, characterising the change not just as a systems failure, but systemic destruction. Great powers, he said, including what he called ‘the American hegemon’, have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

For a few hours there, the discontinuity between the old system and the new threatened to turn legitimately violent, with Trump and his enablers contemplating the armed seizure of Greenland. What forced the climbdown wasn’t just the well-publicised arrival of NATO forces on the island—small in number but undeniable in meaning—but also a parallel revolt in the bond market, where investors dumped US Treasuries and a Danish pension fund publicly announced it would sell its US debt, threatening the financial infrastructure that funds America’s tens of trillions in borrowing. This is less of a stressed system rebalancing itself than a ruptured system cascading towards failure.

Rupture, too, emerged closer to home, with the collapse of the Coalition an unanticipated second-order effect of the Bondi massacre.

I’ll bet good folding money that when Sussan Ley and Josh Frydenberg and the legion of ghouls swarmed into the aftermath of the Bondi massacre to try to knock a few points off Albanese’s lead in the polls, they didn’t imagine the His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition would be the first casualty.

But that’s what happens when systems break down.

Chaotic, fractal disorder suddenly spins off in all directions. The friction which has always existed between the Coalition parties is no longer ‘a manageable cost.’ With the rise of the Teal indies and One Nation, that friction is now the dominant feature. The malign energy of competing for a shrinking electoral base has accumulated with nowhere to go, building and building until something broke. Catastrophically. The gross opportunism we saw after Bondi didn’t create this latest crisis, the rupture. It simply triggered the detonation of systemic stressors that have been growing for years.

Why? Because everything is breaking down. Everything is failing, whether from natural attrition or malign intent, it hardly matters because it’s all part of the same process. Why are Nazis marching in your streets? Because climate change is cascade failure at global scale. How did a demented psychopath come this close to starting a war between the United States and, er, Denmark? Because Elon Musk is a terrible dad.

It’s all very Yeats, especially the bit about the best lacking all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.