The Frontier of Collapse Is What Ordinary People Will Do: You Are a Scientist

Something in the world is breaking, and it has been breaking for a long time — perhaps since always. Each generation builds its life differently from the last, but the shape of that difference is not neutral. We have built a world where comfort and safety, and the industries that manufacture it, produce a populace, often unknowingly complacent to the disruption of those same industries on people who never had the chance to know ease. Not everyone has paid attention. To some degree, that is forgivable; we’ve been kept purposefully distracted by supposed innovation. While no single ordinary person designed this, the collapse has been permitted by systems aimed to accumulate power in the hands of a few. Today we face a world imbalanced, where only a collective awakening can dialogue with the root cause.

In the local beginning of the general crisis—at least on the American continent—it was Indigenous nations who first saw the collapse of the sacred bonds between humans. Through the depravity of gold-hungry tyrants, through mutilation, rape, displacement, and plague, a regional order led by Native Americans collapsed. Their sovereignty violated. Then the direction of not only the continent, but the world, began to be led by the newcomers — industrious migrants fleeing a collapse of their own adjusted the flow of resources to accumulate wealth amongst their communities, leaving Indigenous nations at the margins of their own continent.

Europe was already in a state of ongoing collapse when it reached the Americas. The Black Death had killed over half of the continent — the culmination of a crisis that had been building for centuries. In the long aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, competing economic systems built on colonial extraction and slavery had torn apart the remnants of Rome’s order and delivered power to landowners indifferent to the health of those who worked their land.

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium behind the Black Death, killed over 60% of the European population. When the same and other diseases arrived on our beloved American shores, it is estimated that 95% of Indigenous Americans died. The world we live in is a graveyard, the product of a great tragedy that was never truly processed; the world was too busy transforming. New crops, technologies, and culture spread. The industrial era came, global wars, and we began to work. Soon the internet arrived with the promise of bringing the world closer to peace, and today short-form content and advertisements contribute to a cognitive load that keeps us overwhelmed and hungry for meaning.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, argued that the primary motivational force in human life is not pleasure or power but to seek meaning. He called the experience of meaninglessness the “existential vacuum”—a state of inner emptiness that leads to boredom, apathy, and despair. Frankl and Western psychology aren’t alone in this awareness. Indigenous cultures across the world have long understood this phenomenon as soul loss—the detachment of parts of the psyche when we face trauma — leaving us feeling fragmented, disconnected, and not fully at home in our bodies.

Today the general crisis is reflected in our popular culture. Peter Parker suffering from the erasure of his memory in the minds and hearts of his loved ones; Duncan Idaho resurrected but without a memory, weaponized against his loved ones; Doctor Doom working to erase the minds of heroes who oppose him; The Odyssey, a story hinging on being remembered. Music carried the same weight differently. Ariana Grande’s ‘Hate That I Made You Love Me’ — a song about the people who feel entitled to her, who studied her, claimed her, and demanded she be grateful for the attention. Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away,” fifteen years old, became TikTok’s Global Song of the Summer 2026, used in over 42 million videos to soundtrack personal reflections on past relationships. Both are songs about looking back — at what was lost, what was never quite had, and what cannot be reclaimed. These aren’t just plots or lyrics. They’re symptoms of a culture asking: What is the point of all this?

Over the past several centuries, our agency has decayed — not by accident, but by design. The rich elite have long understood that a populace easy to manipulate is a populace that can be governed without consent. What began as physical extraction — land, labor, bodies — has evolved into something more insidious: the extraction of attention itself. We receive inputs: information targeting our insecurities, our fears, our doubts, our satisfaction reduced to cheap dopamine and monetary transactions. We scroll. We react. We perform. In doing so, we feed systems that were never built to serve us.

The perversity is structural. We live in an age where the technology to solve our problems exists, yet it is not applied because there is more profit in producing the problem and then selling the cure. The attention economy depends on this loop. Platforms engineer environments optimized not for human flourishing but for extraction, capturing attention and converting it into advertising revenue. Meta is the clearest case. The company publicly positions itself as a force for restoring human connection — Zuckerberg speaks of “bringing the world closer together,” of building community, of caring for wellbeing. Yet its business model depends on the very technologies that destroy connection: short-form video designed to hijack attention, algorithmic feeds that prioritize engagement over meaning, features like infinite scroll and intermittent variable rewards that strip away natural stopping cues and keep users locked in compulsive loops. Meta’s own internal research has shown that its products harm users’ mental health, and that when executives tried to prioritize wellbeing over engagement, the effort was shelved because it reduced time-on-platform.

This is what decay looks like in its mature form. It is not the crude repression of an earlier era. It is a system that profits from our disconnection while promising to restore it, that monetizes our loneliness while speaking the language of care. Today, a frontier of the ongoing collapse is our awareness — and the question is whether we can reclaim it before it is entirely converted into someone else’s revenue.

Recently, a friend I’ve met through Seattle’s art, culture, and nightlife scene said I was too political. I responded: “I don’t believe we are political enough.” Then I mentioned what I had seen — parents carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags. The subject changed. Not because they don’t care — I know they do, they have a kind soul — but because it is hard to respond to what is happening: family separation, detention, failing food systems, climate change, environmental disasters, genocide. Meanwhile, we are busy. With work. Trying to be good family members, good community members, business owners. Trying to be in our bodies while our attention is being hijacked. Trying to access joy.

Music is a landscape of transformation. It lets us drop into our bodies and feel. Dancing is liberating and it brings us back to ourselves. It’s no surprise that over the past several years, I’ve watched community-driven people become DJs. A career move, but also a form of reclamation. A desire to contribute to our communities, to help us access joy — a necessary force for resisting what plagues us.

I’ve felt that same dissatisfaction and calling, but in a different domain. Not music. Health.

I’ve watched loved ones suffer through cancer. I’ve seen communities I come from devastated by illnesses that don’t hit everyone equally — because our histories, our bodies, our environments were shaped by forces we never chose. Colonial medical frameworks didn’t just bring disease. They brought a way of knowing that treated our bodies as data points, our healing practices as superstition, our communities as subjects.

And somewhere along the way, a line got drawn. On one side: scientists. People who ask questions, run analyses, publish findings, are sources of trusted knowledge. On the other side: everyone else. Patients. Subjects. Communities to be studied. If you happen to be a community leader — someone who holds the trust of your neighbors, who knows the histories, who understands what people actually need — you are still, in the eyes of the institution, not a scientist. You are a stakeholder. A participant. A community partner. Something to be consulted, not someone who produces knowledge.

That distinction is not neutral. It was built. It determines whose questions get funded, whose methods count as rigorous, whose findings get cited, and whose knowledge is treated as anecdote rather than evidence. It determines who gets to sit at the table when decisions are made about the bodies of the people you love. And over time, it does something quieter and more damaging: it determines who sees themselves as a scientist at all. A young person from a community like mine who spends their life observing, questioning, and understanding the world around them will rarely call themselves a scientist — because the word was never offered to them. It was reserved for people who look a certain way, study and work at certain institutions, and speak in a certain register. The result is not a shortage of scientific minds. It is a shortage of people who believe they are allowed to have a scientific mind.

I’m building a toolkit for this. It starts with ancient DNA — how genes of the immune system, shaped by plagues, migrations, and famines, produced the public health disparities we live with today. I’m developing instructions to teach the foundational principles of bioinformatics research, so that anyone can follow the same path. But the principle is bigger than one gene. We can take medicine into our own hands and answer the questions our communities need answered. We can read the papers. We can collaborate. We can run the analysis. We can show our work.

Scientific inquiry is universal. Humans have been observing their surroundings since before we were human, even before we were primates. We see scientific inquiry behavior in all types of species. From crows, to whales, octopuses, and Mice. Even bacteria and fungi have demonstrated the capacity to problem solve. Scientific inquiry is a form of universal culture and access to it should not be stratified along a power disparity.

I’m thinking of my DJ friends, bar managers, club promoters — the people who produce art and culture in Seattle — when I say this:

You already know what it feels like to take a practice into your own hands. You didn’t wait for recognition to start mixing or developing programming. You learned the craft in your bedroom, played your first set and developed your first program to twelve people, and built something from nothing because the alternative was waiting for permission that was never coming.

I see scientists everywhere. In the club promoter or performer who reads a room and knows exactly when to shift the energy. In the bar manager who tracks the histories and habits of a neighborhood in their head. In the DJ who spends hours digging through archives and adjusting frequencies to make a set cohere. These are research practices. These are analytical minds. They just don’t call themselves scientists because no one ever handed them the word.

If you’ve made it this far, consider this label yours.

Lean in. Reconsider what you’re capable of. The tools are already here — the data, the software, the methods — and they’re free. We do not need permission.

You are a scientist.