Get unlimited access to everything VICE has to offer.

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

Turn off all ads on VICE.com

Exclusive New VICE Documentaries

Member Exclusive Features & Columns

4 Magazines Delivered to Your Door

We Didn’t Start the Fire—This Week On VICE: Members Only

Self-destruction, Kool Aid, AI, “Let Data Reign,” Lou Reed, a tech-right Substack… and other stuff behind the paywall this week.

Share on X (Opens in new window)X

Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Facebook

Share using Native toolsShareCopied to clipboard

To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)

This summer, I almost lost my damn mind. I was sitting in my parents’ backyard in South Wales, staring at a screen-blue sky, while bits of burnt, blackened bracken rained down all around. Acrid smell in the air. It’s a densely wooded area and most of it was on fire to varying degrees of seriousness. Some started naturally, several deliberately by kids with nothing better to do, and others by people who spend most of their time on carpet, keen to Instagram their visits to natural beauty spots without having the common sense to know that you shouldn’t put a disposable BBQ directly on the ground.

Whatever the catalyst, the land was a tinderbox because the country was in the midst of the driest summer since Met Office records began 190 years ago. It was the same across Europe. Record high temperatures. No rain. Apocalyptic footage of wild horses fleeing down concrete roads in France and Greece with the background in flames. I watched ash drift over the roof, like snow in hell, and read several different news stories about Welsh council members walking out of or refusing to take meetings with local residents complaining about enormous data centers being built in their constituencies. While only tangentially........

© Vice