On the eve of September 11th, 2026, NBC News said, “Hey Kara! Here, hold my iPhone” and doomscrolled scrolled on my behalf.
There was no thumb involved, no small act of consent repeated against a glass screen. I did not choose the next catastrophe because I could not resist finding out what came after the last one. The producers chose it. The anchor narrated it. The control room advanced the feed at guideline speed, and I sat there receiving one long, repetitive, sustained punch in the face of a broadcast.
It was curated, paced, professionally narrated doomscrolling on steroids, speed, and meth.
I started cataloging because the hour would not give me enough time to metabolize any one thing before it replaced that thing with another. I opened ChatGPT and began calling out each segment as it arrived. This was not passive viewing anymore. It was live transcription by a nervous system trying to construct guardrails around the experience.
The Plunge
Rick Springfield, the eternally boyish man from “Jessie’s Girl,” revealed that when he was eighteen and touring Vietnam with a band entertaining American troops, he was handed mortars during an attack. He fired them into an area the soldiers said contained no friendly forces. The next day, they told him he had killed someone. He has been carrying that knowledge for nearly sixty years.
I initially heard the story through the lyric lodged in the American brain: the guy that wished that he had Jessie’s girl killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. Wrong singer. Wrong place. Wrong motive. Johnny Cash’s Reno confession is fictional. Springfield’s Vietnam death was real, uncomprehended in the moment, and never fully resolved inside him.
Then President Trump offered every dooAmerican adult a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans retained control of Congress. Give my party the desired election result and I will give you money. The proposal would require Congress, cost roughly $1.2 to $1.3 trillion, and had no persuasive funding plan attached to it. It may not satisfy the narrow legal definition of buying an individual vote. It did not need to. $oylent Green: the medium was the message.
The fine print made the spectacle even cleaner. Trump floated payouts from tariff revenue and DOGE savings before; none became checks for the public. The one payment he can point to is the $1,776 “warrior dividend” sent to service members in 2025, and that money was repurposed from military housing funds rather than generated by tariffs as advertised. The earlier dividends never materialized. Only the patriotic number did, exclusively for the troops.
Enter fleeced-up hard-line conservative man to say he does not want Trump’s $5,000 because it is socialism.
Cut from an offer denounced as electoral bribery from one direction to socialist redistribution. Simultaneously too corrupt for the left and too wokely generous for the right, all while remaining imaginary for E V E R Y O N E.
Meanwhile, JD Vance used the Republican midterm convention as audition clip for 2028 presidential run. From a conditional cash promise to the choreography of succession: Trump asks voters to pretend he is on the ballot, Vance showing the crowd what might come next. Future stuffed into an Amazon box and shipped before the present offer had secured a funding mechanism.
BOOM FLOOSH: petroleum barge explodes in Mariners Harbor on Staten Island. The image of a burning barge the perfect for the tone of the hour if a real human being had not gone to work that day and failed to come home. Two firefighters were reportedly injured.
LOOK UP: FLASH WHOA - Then came the planes. Delta Flight 2311 descended about 27,000 feet in ten minutes after a pressurization problem. Oxygen masks dropped. The descent was frightening, but it was controlled: the crew did exactly what crews are trained to do when passengers cannot safely breathe at cruising altitude. Everyone landed safely. Bundle package with less dire Delta incidents cause apparently two, two plunging aircrafts are better than one.
Then the civilian planes are replaced by warplanes. Iranian strikes at an air base in Jordan damaged eight American F-15s and hit an A-10 Thunderbolt badly enough that it lost a wing. No one was reported killed in that attack. Nine American military aircraft damaged in an active regional war arrived as another item in the stack.
RUMBLE/SWOOSH - did you hear that? The ground gave way. A sinkhole outside Nicolas Cage’s Malibu house swallowed his driveway, broke the road, causing a gas leak. Thirty-one nearby properties were declared unsafe or inaccessible, and Nick Cage’s $10M lux pad is receiving mail after subterranean relocation to China.
Everything is losing the ground beneath it
The Machines
Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon handed in his notice and warned that the technology he built is racing to kill everyone.
Anthropic’s own threat report describes actors using Claude for weapon-related software, intelligence and procurement work, cyber operations, and sensitive biological research that could have military applications. Detected misuse, banned accounts, and strengthened safeguards. The demonstrated capability nevertheless exists.
I was using an AI to catalog the AI-extinction segment in real time. The horror movie is writing its at this point. 10 out of 10. No notes.
The Cost of Denial
Then Tom Llamas introduces 9/11 first responder Thomas Lenzo and his story of living with early-onset dementia. Never forget: Lenzo is currently fighting to have dementia recognized and covered as a 9/11-related illness by the World Trade Center Health Program.
The Boy at Sea
Parker, fifteen years old, the sole survivor of a three-person fishing party near St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Their skiff overturned in the frigid Bering Sea. His older brother Sidney became tangled and was pulled beneath the boat. Their cousin survived the first night but later entered the water and died. Parker remained kneeling on the overturned skiff for roughly three days without food or water, praying while the waves hit him, until rescuers found him.
The Towers Return
Then 2,977 drones rose over New York Harbor, one light for each person killed in the September 11 attacks. The machines arranged themselves into full-scale outlines of the Twin Towers above Lower Manhattan.
This was presumably the emotional release: remembrance, unity, transcendence. But it arrived after the warning that artificial intelligence could exterminate humanity and the disclosure that Claude is already used in weapons-related work.
Machines became mourners. Technology reconstructed in light what human beings had destroyed, while researchers warned that our next machines might destroy the human beings left to remember.
A Word From Our Sponsors
The commercials understood the assignment, and did not interrupt the theme: they monetized it.
Miebo arrived with relief for dry eyes
Fisher Investments arrived to protect the portfolio.
Metamucil gummies attended to the gut.
Morgan & Morgan offered legal rescue.
Another, Morgan (Freeman) enters the scene an Attruby commercial narrator rife with honey (killer?) bees and the promise that a strong hive protects what matters most.
Tell your doctor if you are pregnant or may become pregnant;
Attruby may cause diarrhea.
A later break offered Izervay - “I am taking action to slow my GA”
Pepto-Bismol said stop.
MiraLAX said go.
Xfinity promised a boosted mobile signal between them.
Caplyta offered treatment for bipolar depression, followed by side-effect fun
Next up Claritin followed by Always pads. I could have kept cataloging. The broadcast was still going. Nothing in the machinery was ever yield because I had absorbed enough.
Then came a promo for “The Traitors: New Blood.” After ninety minutes of institutional dread, television offered betrayal as recreation.
Protect your wealth. Protect your heart. Slow the loss of your sight.
Settle your stomach. Move your bowels. Stabilize your brain. Boost the signal.
Then came the promo: “9/11: America Remembers,” tomorrow morning.
A local Boston newsman assured us he was “on it” regarding the commute.
Humanity may be extinguished. Ground Zero toxins may erase your memory. The sea may eat your house. But local newsman is on top of traffic on Route 128 lol.
Farthest From Home
The sports turn offered LSU waving the white flag after threatening to add recently cut NFL players to a college roster. The SEC had contemplates sanctions and even expulsion.
Then came the buzz around the NFL’s Melbourne game: the farthest-from-home game in league history. The players, we were told, had not been given enough time to adjust to the travel and jet lag.
And that, ladies and gentlepeople, was the whole broadcast in miniature:
Go far. Absorb the damage. Perform on schedule anyway.
Tom Lllamas Signs Off: Thanks for Watching
Umm.. Your welcome, Tom, I guess?
Does what I just did technically qualify as “watching”?
Felt more adjacent to whiplash, but sure.
Ordinary doomscrolling gives us the illusion that we chose the next catastrophe with our own thumb. Here, NBC’s editors scrolled for us. Each story was compressed to its most alarming image, delivered with institutional calm, animated fervor, and replaced before the nervous system could complete a response.
By the end of the show, my apocalypse loyalty punch card was filled. One more catastrophe and NBC’s Doomsday Division owed me a free nervous breakdown.
I will no longer tease my husband that his post-apocalyptic themed Trump-haiku image generator web app is The Daily Bummer now that The Daily Bummer is reframed as a whimsical artisanal amuse-bouche and tonally less violent than the evening news.
I was done. I did not have the capacity for one more thing.
Then, almost immediately, the broadcast began replaying from the beginning.
Thanks for watching did not sound like a sign-off anymore. It was clearly a passive aggressive veiled threat.
“Stay with us,” the network said.
Hard pass, Tom. Easiest hard pass ever.