A LESSON IN A LIE

Does the new tech order have your back?

Photographer: LeManna (Shutterstock)

It started in an upmarket restaurant, where the privileged dined beneath a centuries-old fig tree, gazing out across the blue, clear waters of a sheltered bay. A destination to consume.

A spark in an old fuse panel jumped to dried grass left too tall and too close to the kitchen building, staffed by an overworked and transient backpacker crew. Within minutes, fire raced up the hill. Within an hour, it had engulfed it. An hour after that, the entire firefighting force of our island community had descended.

This story is a departure from my normal climate chaos narrative, but there is a connection. I promise. This fire wasn’t caused by nature. It wasn’t even directly caused by climate change. It was fuelled by negligence—by the relentless pursuit of profit, by untrained staff with no connection to the community, and by properties designed for aesthetics over safety.

Our island has a proud history of firefighting—an inherited fire lore written in the blood of burnt, weathered hands. Generations have built a deep, instinctive knowledge of fire’s rhythms and dangers. They know that no one is coming to save them. They turn up without complaint and without pay, reading the wind, the hills, the gullies, knowing how this land burns.

Geoff and I are incomers, but we’ve earned our place inside that fire lore. So, on the first night of the fire, Geoff and another firefighter, Bill, spent hours hauling tanker loads of water—7,000 litres (1,850 gallons) at a time—up the hill to fire trucks scattered along the crest, doing everything in their power to stop the blaze from spreading.

By the time they'd moved 140,000 litres (37,000 gallons), the potable, drinking water in the cab had run out. They were dehydrated and spent. So, they left their well-worn path in search of the other kind of water—the safe for humans, thirst-quenching kind—following a driveway to a holiday cottage high on the hill. Maybe there’d be an outside tap, they thought. Instead, they found a family standing on the front porch, staring blankly at the valley below, watching the fire move around them.

Shocked to find people still inside the fireground, Geoff, covered in ash and charcoal, fell from the truck with a collection of empty bottles cradled in his arms. ‘Can you fill these for me?’ he coughed and gasped at the two adults standing frozen with two young children clutching their legs. ‘We’ve run out of water in the cab, and we desperately need a drink.’

Before he could even register their movement, the children had snatched the bottles from his arms and disappeared into the house with one of the adults. Almost certainly feeling deeply alone, likely in shock, the other adult stood still, looking across the valley. Working out what to say to this lonely, frightened man, but also exhausted from hours of emotional adrenaline, Geoff turned to follow the other man’s gaze. That’s when he saw the family had placed two small sprinklers on the grass in front of the house—woefully insufficient for the fire threatening their lives—and his breath caught in his throat.

The impossible position for this family slammed home. They were in danger, and had been for many hours, but had no idea what to do or where to go. Anger burned in Geoff's chest that the city-based owners of that holiday house hadn’t prepared the property or their guests better, nor told them to leave while they still could. Now it was too late. The firestorm surrounded them, and they just had to ride it out.

Geoff was confident if the fire got much closer, a fire truck would be at their doorstep. But that man didn’t know this, and those two ineffective sprinklers were all he could manage. He’d been abandoned by the system that had brought him here—his connection point was an algorithm, not a community. No one in our community had checked on him because no one knew he was there.

A sudden bundle of noise broke Geoff’s dark reflection. He turned to see the children tumble from the house, arms heavy with bigger drink bottles now filled with cool, clear water. Rushing towards him they pressed their precious cargo into Geoff’s arms. They had emptied their own bottles of soda to fill them with clean, cool water for this wild man they didn’t know—only recognising that his need was great, and water was the cure.

Bending to acknowledge their gift, his eyes swelled with tears as he looked into the innocent face of a little boy, preciously wide-eyed at seeing his first fire truck, still full of innocent enthusiasm, but also a hint of fear. As he thanked the children for their generosity, the little boy beamed. His tiny chest swelling. Chocked with emotion, Geoff ran back to the truck to continue the punishing rounds up and down the hill for another twelve hours that night. Each time he and Bill barrelled past that driveway, a lump caught in his throat as he thought of all that family was feeling.

When he did come home, Geoff was silent for nearly half a day. This story was the first he would share in the days that followed. That moment and those two small children have remained etched in his chest for the past decade.

Tourism is no longer about connection. Once, the time- and resource-wealthy travelled to explore the world. They were clueless and stupid, privileged and entitled, but they were bufferd from harm because thier travel was into and served by communities. Now, tourism is sold to the masses as a self-propelled journey into a curated, hollow space—managed remotely, owned by absentee landlords and the tech utopia. Unwitting modern travellers are often just as clueless—frequently also privileged and entitled—understanding little about where they are going, but believing themselves safe because an app fakes a sense of connectivity. They book a ‘venue’ through a faceless app. If they need help, the app reroutes them to a call centre half a world away, where no one even knows whether the sun is rising or setting at the call destination—let alone whether a fire is racing up the hill towards their clients.

This family thought they were safe because no app had told them otherwise, and they'd lost the capacity to assess for themselves. No one told them to leave, so they stayed. They didn’t recognise the danger, so they stayed. They believed the world would always protect them, so they stayed. They were wrong. Their reliance on a digital illusion—the false promise of a seamless, connected world—nearly cost them their lives. Their experience is a brutal lesson in a lie: that tech has your back.

Too many people rely on someone else to tell them when to fight, when to flee. Modern society has outsourced its survival instincts to algorithms, placing blind faith in apps, automation, and invisible networks with no accountability. We trust GPS over our own sense of direction, assuming it will always lead us safely home—even when it sends drivers into flooded rivers. We rely on processed food from across the world without considering the fragile supply chains that keep them running, never questioning what happens when those systems break. We assume emergency alerts will warn us of danger, yet they fail when cell towers burn, power grids collapse, or an app’s flawed programming decides the risk isn’t ‘urgent enough’ to spoil the user’s experience. People let tech mediate their reality, believing a five-star review guarantees safety, that a customer service chatbot will solve a crisis, or that a digital map will show them a way out of disaster. They are, in effect, bending the knee to a new techno-feudalism order, and it does not have their back. When the power cuts out, when the network goes down, when disaster strikes—there’s no ‘help’ button to press. Just the cold, brutal reality of a world people are no longer prepared to navigate without a screen telling them what to do.

I will keep beating this drum until people hear the message: prepare yourselves. Step out of your digital dependence. Stop communicating and operating your life through a system that ultimately sees you as nothing more than a transaction; a resource for the uber rich to make ever more money. Invest in real-world skills, knowledge, and connections. Get face-to-face. Build the trust and shared action you’ll need to weather what’s coming.

Take a page from people like Dana Portwood, who reports on libraries loaning out books about the politics of our times, or Kristofer Goldsmith urging people to create Antifascist Book Clubs to connect with local communities and learn about the rise of fascism and corporate authoritarianism. Maybe, dive into

Justin McAffee

’s Collapse Curriculum for real-world skill building or

Nate Tonnessen-Marler

about how to de-tech your life. Whatever speaks to your soul. Just do it. Please.

Don’t sit, passively, waiting for rescue. And, don’t trust tech. Because when climate chaos roars up the hill at you, that app you love so much won’t save you.

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I honestly can’t do justice to the depth of information about the rise of techno-feudalism that threatens our future. It’s not my lane. I prefer to lead you to others far wiser.

I am currently on my own deep dive into the world of Mike Brock and his Substack: Notes From The Circus, as well as Gil Duran and his Ghost: The Nerd Reich. It is chilling.

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