The 3 Things Nobody’s Building a Documentary About

We keep chickens. Every morning we’ll go out to the coop in the sort of heat that makes the word “morning” feel like a lie, and check on the birds who have absolutely no idea that somewhere north of here, a warehouse full of humans is being watched more closely than my flock ever will be. The chickens, for what it’s worth, unionised years ago. They just call it “roosting together” and nobody’s built an algorithm to stop it yet.

I mention this because it’s the kind of comparison that sounds like a joke until you sit with it for a minute. Then it stops being funny and starts being the whole point.

There are three things happening right now that deserve the sort of coverage usually reserved for a rocket launch or a royal scandal, and they’re getting roughly the coverage of a parish newsletter. Not because they’re boring. Because they’re slow, structural, and difficult to put a thumbnail on. Nobody clips a drought. Nobody screenshots an algorithm quietly deciding you’re a risk. So let’s do the unglamorous work of actually looking.

1. The Warehouse Is Watching You Think About Unionising

Let’s start with the one that should frighten anyone who’s ever clocked in anywhere.

For years the story we were sold about warehouse surveillance was efficiency. Track the parcels, track the pickers, shave a few seconds off every scan. Fine. Capitalism’s always liked a stopwatch. But the actual documented use of this infrastructure has moved well past “how fast is Dave going.” Leaked internal material from Walmart has shown methods for tracking employee conversations specifically around union activity, and Amazon’s Whole Foods division has used heat maps built on predictive analytics to flag store locations at high risk of union organising. That’s not a productivity tool. That’s a early warning system, and the thing it’s warning against is workers talking to each other.

Academic research into Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse found the company doesn’t merely repurpose existing surveillance tools when a union vote looms, it actively converts them into instruments built to suppress dissent, deploying what researchers called real-time unionisation risk maps that management could fire like weapons whenever they chose. There’s a lovely, chilling bit of jargon in there too: “algorithmic slack-cutting.” That’s when the electronic whip gets loosened right before a vote, so everyone feels a bit better about their overlords, then tightened again the moment the ballots are counted. It’s carrot and stick, except the carrot is temporary and the stick has a processor in it.

Here’s the bit that should really sit with you. A Teamsters director summed it up by saying Amazon has taken the old business of spying on workers and pushed it into understanding workforce behavioural trends and predilections in ways other companies haven’t matched. “Predilections.” Not actions. Predilections. We’ve slid from monitoring what people do to modelling what people are inclined to do, which is a different animal entirely and one with a much darker pedigree.

And before anyone tells me this is old news from the Bezos-hates-unions files, an Oxfam survey found the overwhelming majority of Amazon and Walmart warehouse staff report being timed almost constantly, with nearly half the women at both companies saying they can’t take adequate breaks, and the vast majority across both firms reporting insufficient bathroom time. Ninety-one percent of Walmart staff surveyed reported on-the-job dehydration. Read that again. Not “felt tired.” Dehydrated. At one of the wealthiest companies to ever exist, in a country with functioning taps.

Meanwhile, the state has been quietly building its own civilian-facing version of the same machine. Procurement documents show ICE soliciting contractors to run round-the-clock monitoring of social media, with staff assessing anyone flagged as hostile for their “proclivity for violence” using social and behavioural sciences and psychological profiles. Not “has this person threatened anyone.” Their proclivity. Their tendency. Their vibe, essentially, algorithmically assessed and filed. The same contract language wants weekly counts of negative sentiment about the agency tracked across the internet, which is not threat detection, that’s an ego dashboard with law enforcement powers attached. Fresh reporting on the expansion shows the plan involves teams working out of dedicated centres, cross-referencing social platforms against commercial databases of property records, phone bills and vehicle registrations, with response windows as tight as thirty minutes for the most urgent cases. That’s not investigating crime. That’s building a permanent, searchable weather system of who’s currently annoyed with the government.

Put the warehouse and the immigration agency side by side and you get the same underlying design philosophy: don’t wait for the act, model the inclination. It’s thought-policing with a procurement number instead of a jackboot, which somehow makes it worse, because nobody ever marched against a spreadsheet.

2. The Taps Are Drying Up and Everyone’s Talking About the Weather Instead

I live somewhere that takes water seriously because it has to. When you’re hauling it, filtering it, rationing it through a summer that regularly threatens to turn your cave into a kiln, you develop a fairly intimate relationship with the stuff. So it baffles me that back in the country that invented the phrase “as safe as houses,” people are watching their public water grid degrade and calling it a scheduling inconvenience.

The specific “48 of 50 states” figure that gets passed around online is a bit ahead of the current data, but honestly, the real numbers don’t need embellishing. As of the most recent federal drought reporting, well over half the contiguous United States sits under active drought conditions, with severe drought actively expanding through the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and Minnesota, regions that used to be the reliably damp ones. Earlier in the year, over half the combined area of every state plus Puerto Rico was classified as being in at least moderate drought, and the human number attached to that was more than 155 million Americans living inside drought-affected areas, rising by nearly seven million in a single week. That’s not a slow-moving trend anymore. That’s a population shift happening in real time, just without the dramatic footage.

The agricultural collateral is the part that should make anyone who eats sit up. Nearly the entire national peanut crop and the overwhelming majority of cotton production are currently sitting in drought-stressed territory, and winter wheat quality has fallen sharply year over year, dropping from just under half rated good-to-excellent to barely a third. Out west, Lake Powell, one of the two great reservoirs keeping the entire Colorado River Basin functional for cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, has been sitting at roughly a quarter of capacity, prompting emergency federal water-storage measures. Washington State declared its fourth drought emergency in a decade this spring, with officials stating plainly that drought is no longer the exception but the emerging pattern, described by the state’s own Department of Ecology as the new normal.

And that’s before we even get to what’s in the water that remains. PFAS, arsenic, nitrate: these aren’t new villains, but they’re compounding on top of scarcity in exactly the communities least equipped to filter, truck in, or litigate their way out of it. Low-income and rural water systems are absorbing the double hit of less water and dirtier water simultaneously, while the policy response, where it exists at all, treats each crisis as a local infrastructure line item rather than what it actually is: the slow unravelling of the single resource every other resource depends on.

Forest fires get helicopter shots and a grim-faced anchor standing in the ash. A dying aquifer gets a council meeting nobody attends. Same collapse. Wildly different volume.

3. The Library Is Burning, Quietly, One Algorithm at a Time

And here’s the part that should worry writers like me most, because it’s the mechanism by which the first two stories stop reaching you at all.

For two decades the deal was simple. You wrote something, Google sent people to read it, advertising paid the electricity bill. That deal is dead, and nobody’s holding a funeral for it because the killer wore a helpful, friendly, “here’s your answer instantly” face. Data drawn from Chartbeat and published in a major industry report found global Google search referral traffic to publishers fell by roughly a third year on year, with the drop hitting 38% in the United States specifically, and Google Discover referrals down separately by nearly a third. Independent research tracking real search sessions found that when an AI-generated summary appears at the top of a results page, the rate at which people actually click through to the original source drops by close to half compared with a normal search. That’s not a dip. That’s the floor falling out from under the entire economic model of reported, verified, human-written information.

The bit that ought to alarm anyone who cares about a free press specifically, rather than just publishers’ bottom lines, is who absorbs the damage first. It’s not the celebrity gossip sites. It’s investigative and specialist outlets, the ones without a Disney back catalogue or a shopping affiliate empire to fall back on, that get hit hardest by a system quietly deciding that a synthesised paragraph is good enough and a byline is optional.

Then there’s the other pincer, the one that doesn’t need an algorithm update, just a phone call. Independent outlets doing genuinely uncomfortable reporting keep running into the same wall on the platforms that supposedly democratised speech. Drop Site News, founded by journalists with a long history of exactly the kind of story mainstream desks tend to soften, has had its coverage of the Gaza war removed from Instagram, with the takedown notice citing alleged symbols or support of organisations the platform defines as dangerous. It’s also been formally banned inside Pakistan after exposing a military-run online influence operation, with state-linked officials responding not with a rebuttal but with an antisemitic and xenophobic smear campaign against the outlet’s funding. That’s the modern shadowban toolkit in full: quietly throttle the algorithm at home, formally ban the outlet abroad, and let the reputational mud do the rest.

None of this requires a conspiracy in the cinematic sense. Nobody needs a room full of men rubbing their hands together. You just need a search engine that quietly prefers not sending you away, a platform that quietly prefers not being associated with a war crimes story, and a state that quietly prefers its critics stay unread. The outcome is identical to old-fashioned censorship. It’s just achieved through apathetic infrastructure rather than a man with a red pen.

The Bit Where I Tell You What This Actually Adds Up To

None of these three stories individually looks like the end of the world. That’s rather the point. A camera in a warehouse. A dry reservoir. A traffic graph trending downward. Each one, taken alone, sounds like something a middle manager could fix with a memo.

But string them together and you get a coherent picture: the systems that are supposed to let a person work with dignity, drink clean water, and find out what’s actually happening in the world are all being quietly re-engineered by people who will never have to live inside the version they’re building. Not through some grand unified conspiracy, but through a thousand small, defensible, individually rational decisions made by companies and agencies who each, separately, decided that watching, rationing, and filtering was cheaper than fixing.

I’ll be honest with you. I sat outside my cave last night with a torch and a very suspicious chicken, thinking about how strange it is that the most dystopian stories of our era aren’t arriving with sirens. They’re arriving as quarterly reports and procurement documents. Nobody’s coming to save you from a spreadsheet. But you can still read the spreadsheet, which is roughly the last bit of leverage independent writers like me have left, so I intend to keep using it while the traffic still finds its way here at all.

Until Next Time