2026 feels like a new era

published: 2026-01-30

It’s been a few months since my last blog update. A lot has happened in that time. Far too much of it feels like a descent into something worse than what came before.

The year barely began when the United States launched a military operation against Venezuela and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were kidnapped by U.S. forces and taken to New York on trumped up federal charges. Many analysts and legal experts argue this seizure violates basic principles of international law, since one state cannot lawfully enforce its laws inside another without consent or UN Security Council authorization.

That same period saw a brutal escalation of federal immigration enforcement on U.S. streets. In Minneapolis, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were publically executed by federal agents during ICE and Border Patrol operations. Video evidence, public outcry, and independent scrutiny have made it clear these were not isolated incidents. There is a growing trend of deaths under controversial circumstances at the hands of both masked and unmasked immigration officers.

The official narrative around these deaths has been chaotic and contradictory. In Pretti's case, the Justice Department is now investigating the shooting by immigration agents after public pressure and video evidence challenged early accounts. Meanwhile, for Good’s death, no parallel inquiry has been announced, even as state legislators and city councils condemn both shootings as violations of basic democratic values.

All of this occurs against a backdrop of increasingly aggressive surveillance, immigration enforcement, and political repression. People are being labeled as threats for dissenting views. Protest movements are growing in response to federal actions.

Last year felt dark; maybe the darkest year yet. But 2026 isn’t just a continuation. It feels like a new era of state power unleashed with fewer restraints. We now have military operations that openly disregard international norms, law enforcement actions that kill civilians in broad daylight, and a political climate where truth itself is contested and weaponized.

If the cyberpunk novels I grew up on taught me anything, it’s that dystopia doesn’t arrive with neon signs and clear villains. It creeps in through normalization and through “routine” law enforcement, through “necessary” national security measures, through a public conversation that focuses more on spin than accountability.

In those stories, the only people left capable of pushing back are the ones who understand systems from the inside out:the hackers who can see through opaque power structures and find the weak points in them.

If this truly is a new era, then it’s one where hackers might be among the few with the tools to resist and with the ability reimagine new tools for what comes next.