Scanning the present through a polycrisis lens in early 2026

Greetings from northern Virginia, where a local version of winter is graying skies and keeping temperatures in the 35-50 F band. It’s not cold enough for snow or ice, although my decades of living in states with serious winter still cause my shoulders to tense up with anticipatory snow-shoveling and driving on ice reflexes.

I hit the ground in January running full tilt.  My new book, Peak Higher Education, appeared in the world (blog post intro; website) from Johns Hopkins University Press, so I’ve been talking with dozens of readers and interested folks while doing podcast and video interviews. I’m finishing prep for my spring Georgetown University class on gaming in higher ed (here’s the last time I taught it) while helping the program with outreach and application review.   Our American Association of Colleges and Universities AI Institute had its first big meeting of the year on Friday with hundreds of participants. I started working on two new book projects (posts to come) while organizing a series of virtual and in-person events through 2026.  And the Future Trends Forum turns 10 in a few weeks!

But today I wanted to share some thoughts on a different topic while trying something new.  I’d like to return to the polycrisis model I first mentioned four years ago, and to do so through a quick glance at the present moment. Consider it a sample of a futurist looking at the present.  I’ve been recommending that audiences study the polycrisis, so I should give some examples of doing that. If I have time, these notes will end up as a script for a brief YouTube video.

This polycrisis map is interestingly dated, from 2022.

So, to recap: the polycrisis idea is that multiple crises overlap, intersect, and can make each other worse and/or more complicated.  Some of the crises I track (as instances of trends, in futures parlance) include, briefly:

• demographics, by fertility, age, and race
• climate change in its many dimensions
• national and political geopolitical ambitions for status or expansion
• national elite strategies to maintain and expand their power
• macroeconomic shifts, from developing inequalities to financial flows
• the impacts of technologies.

Then we can cross-connect how these can intersect and exacerbate each other. Rising economic inequality or the ravages of climate change can weaken a nation’s ruling elite’s grasp of power. Demographic changes can drive foreign policy, such as opening borders to immigration or waging wars before the fighting-age population drops below a certain level.  Governments can use AI to strengthen their power, while opposition forces can do the same.

Turning this kind of thinking to current events of January 2026, I can see practical examples of these trends and their overlap. For example, protests have been growing across Iranian cities, despite governmental statements and repression. University students are in the streets and an internet blackout is now in force.  We can see a governing elite struggle to maintain its power in the face of such dissent, but also view itself facing down external, geopolitical pressures as American and Israeli leaders issue threats while supporting protesters. Iran’s leaders also suffer from their own foreign policies backfiring, as they lost the Twelve-Day War with Israel and also saw many of their client forces degraded or destroyed.

I would add a role of climate change which has worsened a horrendous drought so badly that the government has spoken of moving out of parched Tehran and that pollution has gotten worse. Then I’d also add a technological element, as protestors try to use Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals to evade the blackout.  As nations maneuver, the clerical state struggles to retain power, the deposed shah’s son angles for position, and dissenters organize and suffer you can see these forces intersect and overlap.

Midjourney considers: “The global polycrisis impacted by AI.”

A polycrisis lens lets us see recent immigration stories in a useful light.  In American, recent shootings by ICE, including the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, have elicited popular outrage and wild, fantastical responses by the Trump administration.  We can see this as a response to several demographic changes. First, rising numbers of primarily Latino immigrants, which peaked during the Biden administration’s welcoming years, have filled many jobs and also elicited conservative hostility , notably in the personal of Donald Trump.  Decreasing white population numbers have done the same, so we can see the demographic ferocity of ICE actions in that light (cf Noah Smith’s recent post).

The polycrisis lens brings in other factors. Technology plays a key role in the Minneapolis story, as mobile phone videos played a crucial part in bringing the story to a wide audience (as they did for the murder of George Floyd, just blocks away in 2020). I also infer a connection to anxieties about the demographic transition in the right’s doubling down on a fierce masculinity as part of traditional gender roles, with the call for women to have more children.  We can add an intra-elite competition as well, as the two leading American political parties fought over immigration policy.  Macroeconomic factors also powered this story, as sending nations’ economies offered fewer opportunities, while Americans tended to avoid the hands-on jobs immigrants perform.

Britain and the European region have gone through a related process, as their 2010s policies of encouraging north African and Asian immigration have shifted towards stronger border control.

Irregular arrivals of migrants to the EU recorded by its border agency Frontex dropped by 25 per cent in the 11 months to November 2024, and have been continuously declining since a recent peak of 380,000 arrivals registered in 2023.

New asylum applications have also decreased by around 26 per cent in the first nine months of last year, according to Eurostat data, as fewer Syrians are applying for protection since the fall of the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.

Again, we can see the demographic transition as work. Europe’s population has been aging and will continue to do so for at least decades, hence the desire to import a younger population from abroad.  Again, the presence of newcomers and perceptions of how national elites handled their advent elicited opposition, which in turn led governments to shift policies.  One difference from the American case is that the European economy has been struggling, which has enabled policies of restricting immigrants who can draw on famously strong social services.  And climate change plays some role as global warming increasingly strikes sending nations.

Similarly, a polycrisis view reveals multiple forces at play in the American seize of Venezuela’s president. Top of line is Trump’s desire to expand national power and influence with a focus on the Americas, as articulated in the administration’s recently published national security strategy.  Macroeconomic indicators include Venezuela’s sharp decline and the degradation of its oil infrastructure.  Demographics play a role here in the extraordinarily high number of Venezuelans who fled that nation. I would add climate change in a certain way, namely Trump’s hostility to a green transition in favor of making the United States the world’s leading petrostate.

One technological angle to add to the Caracas story: it’s not clear how the United States managed such a triumph in seizing Maduro. My guess is that there mere multiple assets and compromised figures in the government, but I’m also interested in any technological elements.  Did American forces conduct cyberwar to shut down radar, or use EMP to turn off local electronics, or use some other weapon which hasn’t been outed yet?

Let me pause here. There are plenty of other examples to address and more dimensions to draw out, but this is a useful starting set.

We can step back from these examples to see broader polycrisis dimensions. Some national governments are becoming more active in interstate competition; the American resurgence combined with focus on North, Central, and South America might encourage national elites elsewhere to follow suit. Climate change continues to hit the world with various impacts, no matter what a denialist administration avers.  The demographic transition continues, rucking up the political landscape. Technologies accelerate some political events; I haven’t had time to mention the impact of AI on the economy yet.

We could think of this in terms of increasing and systemic risk across the board. Starting a career, investing money in an enterprise, choosing a national policy, deciding where to live all seem increasingly fraught.

Overall, my sense is that national elites are struggling and sometimes failing to hold on to power and the polycrisis deepens.  I fear that this mega-development will, among other things, encourage people to focus nationally, locally, and not globally.

I hope this is of some use. Let me know your thoughts.  And I really should make an infographic.