Modern life — 2026 (C2)

The 2026 US public discourse has a distinctive vocabulary that did not exist in stable form even five years ago. Half of it emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and its long aftermath (the new normal, remote-first, RTO, long COVID, vibecession, post-pandemic economy). Another quarter came from the generative-AI explosion (foundation model, AGI, the alignment problem, AI labor displacement, prompt engineering, vibe coding). A quarter came from the long arc of attention-economy critique (Tristan Harris’s Time Well Spent, Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, the brain rot / doomscroll vernacular). The remaining slice is the polycrisis / metacrisis / longtermism critique / effective altruism aftermath register that organizes serious thinking about the present civilizational moment.

This lesson is the most time-stamped of the C2 vocabulary themes: a third of these terms didn’t exist or weren’t widespread in 2020, and a third will likely shift by 2030. The C2 reader’s task is to handle the current register fluently — what Slow Boring, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, Aeon, The New Inquiry, Noahpinion, Astral Codex Ten, Marginal Revolution, Stratechery, and Lawfare sound like in 2026 — while knowing the genealogy of each term enough to read it skeptically.

The structure: (1) the post-pandemic economy and labor, (2) AI and labor displacement, (3) the attention crisis, (4) the polycrisis/metacrisis framings, (5) longevity and transhumanism, (6) effective altruism’s afterlife and longtermism critique.

The post-pandemic economy and labor

The economic vocabulary

• the post-pandemic economy — the umbrella for 2022-onward US conditions.
• the K-shaped recovery — diverging outcomes for different classes.
• the vibecession — the felt-recession-without-the-data; popular discontent despite headline economic strength.
• the affordability crisis — housing + healthcare + childcare + education simultaneously straining household finances.
• lifestyle inflation — costs of normal middle-class life rising faster than CPI suggests.
• price gouging vs greedflation — corporate-margin expansion as inflation contributor; contested.
• shrinkflation — package-size reductions without price changes.
• skimpflation — service-quality reductions.
• wage compression — narrowing gap between entry and senior wages.
• the labor market — supply and demand for workers.
• labor force participation — % of working-age adults in or seeking work.
• the prime-age employment rate — 25-54 cohort; the cleaner-of-cycle measure.
• the wage-price spiral — inflation expectations feedback loop; mostly didn’t materialize in 2022-24.
• the soft landing — taming inflation without recession; arguably achieved 2024-26.
• the immaculate disinflation — same idea, rhetorically stronger.
• stickier inflation — inflation components slower to fall (services, especially housing).

Work and remote work

• WFH (work from home) — pandemic acceleration.
• RTO (return to office) — the post-2022 management push.
• the RTO mandate — formal in-office requirement.
• remote-first vs hybrid vs in-office-first.
• the 5-day RTO — full return.
• the 3-day hybrid — three in-office, two remote.
• the quiet return — employees gradually drifting back without formal mandate.
• anywhere work — fully location-agnostic.
• the digital nomad visa — many countries’ post-pandemic offerings.
• geographic arbitrage — high-salary remote work + low-cost-of-living location.
• the office vacancy crisis — commercial-real-estate problem stemming from remote.
• conversion to residential — office-to-housing conversions (slow, expensive, but happening).
• doom loops for downtown commercial districts — feedback of empty offices reducing foot traffic reducing retail.

The post-pandemic labor culture

• the Great Resignation — 2021-22 wave of quitting.
• quiet quitting — doing one’s job description and no more.
• quiet firing — making someone want to leave through neglect.
• rage applying — applying widely after frustration.
• bare minimum Monday — week-pacing slogan.
• loud quitting — public/announced quitting.
• conscious leaving — therapy-language version.
• the side hustle — secondary income work.
• the side gig — same.
• polywork — multiple part-time roles.
• overemployment — secret holding of multiple full-time jobs (an extreme form).
• the four-day workweek — pilots and movement (Iceland, UK trial, US adoption).
• the right to disconnect — legal/cultural movement.
• burnout — chronic occupational exhaustion; WHO-recognized syndrome.
• moral injury — particular to professions where ethics-and-system collide (healthcare, education, journalism, military).
• compassion fatigue — caregiver-side burnout.

“The vibecession was the rare economic phenomenon where the official statistics and the felt experience diverged for years. By 2025 the data finally caught up to the mood — which raised the harder question of whether the official statistics had been measuring the right things all along.” — The Atlantic, 2025.

AI and labor displacement

The 2026 AI register

• foundation models — large pretrained models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama) usable across tasks.
• LLM (large language model).
• multimodal model — handles text + image + audio + video.
• generative AI — creates content.
• the frontier model — state-of-the-art at any moment.
• the open-weight model — model weights publicly released.
• the closed model — proprietary, API-only.
• the small/large/frontier model tiers.
• the scaling laws — performance gains predictable from compute and data scaling (Kaplan et al.; Chinchilla).
• the compute overhang — the surplus of training compute over current use.
• inference — running the model at use time.
• training — building the model.
• the pretraining / fine-tuning / RLHF pipeline.
• RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) — the alignment-via-preferences technique.
• DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) — RLHF alternative.
• constitutional AI — Anthropic’s approach.
• the system prompt — instructions setting model behavior.
• the context window — model’s input-length capacity (now millions of tokens).
• the chain of thought — reasoning trace prompting.
• agentic AI / AI agents — multi-step autonomous task execution.
• tool use / function calling — model invoking external tools/APIs.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) — Anthropic-introduced standard for tool/context interchange; now widely adopted.
• the hallucination — model generating false content as if confident.
• the jailbreak — bypassing model safety.
• prompt injection — injecting adversarial instructions via user content.

AI labor displacement

• AI labor displacement — workers replaced or augmented by AI.
• augmentation vs automation — assisting vs replacing.
• the augmentation thesis — AI raises productivity without replacing workers; the optimistic case.
• the displacement thesis — AI replaces workers structurally; the pessimistic case.
• the polarization thesis — AI hollows out middle-skill jobs (Autor’s pre-AI thesis, now restated).
• white-collar displacement — the 2024-26 unprecedented hit to knowledge work.
• the cognitive automation wave — automation of knowledge tasks (writing, coding, analysis) for the first time.
• the AI productivity premium — output-per-worker gains from AI use.
• AI literacy — competence with AI tools.
• vibe coding — programming primarily by directing AI rather than writing code; coined by Andrej Karpathy, viral 2025.
• the prompt engineer — short-lived 2023-era job title; mostly absorbed into general AI literacy by 2025.
• AI orchestration — managing multi-model multi-tool workflows.
• the human in the loop — human review at critical steps.
• the human out of the loop — fully automated.
• the AI-augmented worker — worker using AI tools for productivity.
• the AI-native company — built around AI use from the start.
• the AI-first strategy — strategic prioritization.
• the AI overhang — gap between current capabilities and current deployment.

Policy and economic vocabulary

• the AI-and-jobs debate — current policy focus.
• the reskilling agenda — training workers for AI-resistant tasks.
• technological unemployment — Keynes’s term; once-fringe, now mainstream.
• the Luddite reading — the original Luddites had a point about labor displacement; sometimes invoked as serious framework, sometimes ironically.
• the automation tax / the robot tax — Bill Gates’s proposal; controversial.
• UBI (Universal Basic Income) — Andrew Yang’s signature; now seriously discussed beyond pilot.
• the negative income tax — Friedman’s variant.
• the job guarantee — Modern Monetary Theory variant.
• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) — human-level across domains.
• the AGI timeline debates — disputed; predictions ranging from 2027 to 2055+.
• the existential-risk framework — Bostrom-derived; covered in M20.
• transformative AI — AI producing transformations comparable to the agricultural or industrial revolution.
• the AI alignment problem — covered in M20.
• the AI safety field — covered in M20.
• the AI governance umbrella.
• the EU AI Act — 2024 EU regulation; the regulatory model many countries are following.
• the AI Bill of Rights (US OSTP) — 2022 framework; nonbinding.
• the executive order on AI (Biden, 2023; partially rolled back 2025 transitions).
• the Compute Treaty discussions — international compute-governance proposals.
• export controls on advanced chips — the US-China tech competition’s hottest front.

“By the end of 2025 the AI-jobs debate had moved past ‘will AI take your job?’ to a more specific question: ‘which tasks within your job?’ — and an even more uncomfortable question for white-collar workers: ‘is the remaining task bundle still worth your salary to the employer?’” — Stratechery, 2025.

The attention crisis and the digital-life vocabulary

The attention-economy critique

• the attention economy — Herbert Simon’s 1971 formulation, now mainstream; attention as the scarce input.
• the attention crisis — the cumulative cultural diagnosis.
• engagement maximization — platforms optimizing for time-on-app.
• engagement-bait — content designed for clicks/comments regardless of value.
• rage-bait — content designed to provoke anger for engagement.
• outrage-driven engagement.
• the algorithmic feed — non-chronological, optimized.
• the algorithm — colloquial term for any platform’s recommendation system.
• algorithmic amplification — content boost beyond organic reach.
• algorithmic suppression / shadow-banning — content reduction.
• the recommender system — technical term.
• for-you-page culture (TikTok’s FYP) — push rather than pull discovery.
• the brainrot vernacular — chronically online content effects (Skibidi Toilet, gyatt, rizz, etc.).
• the attention residue (Sophie Leroy) — task-switching cost.
• deep work (Cal Newport) — focused cognitive labor.
• shallow work — low-cognitive-load distraction-prone tasks.
• flow state (Csíkszentmihályi) — optimal absorbed engagement.
• monkey brain vs rational brain — Tim Urban’s popularization of dual-process.
• second-brain systems (Tiago Forte) — externalized cognitive tools.
• information overload — older framing.
• infoglut — overproduction of information.

Doomscrolling and digital-life vocabulary

• doomscrolling — compulsive consumption of negative news.
• doomscrolling fatigue — exhaustion from same.
• the dopamine economy — neurochemical framing.
• dopamine hijacking — colloquial for engagement-loop design.
• the slot-machine variable-reward schedule — psychology of platform engagement.
• screen time — colloquial and OS-measured.
• digital detox — periods of disconnection.
• digital minimalism (Newport) — selective use.
• JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) — counter to FOMO.
• FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) — established.
• information diet — curated consumption.
• the algorithmic bubble — personalized filtering effect.
• the filter bubble (Eli Pariser).
• the echo chamber — same idea, social-not-algorithmic.
• the rabbit hole — algorithmic descent into extreme content.
• brainworm — popularized term for ideas that lodge and persist (Substack, Slate Star Codex vernacular).
• enshittification (Cory Doctorow, 2023) — platforms degrading after capturing users; now widely cited.

“Doctorow’s enshittification thesis — that platforms decay through a predictable sequence of capturing users, then capturing business customers, then capturing value at the expense of both — accomplished something rare: it named a familiar phenomenon in a way that made everyone immediately recognize it.” — The Atlantic, 2024.

Polycrisis, metacrisis, permacrisis

The 2020s framings for the multiple-overlapping-crisis condition.

• polycrisis — Adam Tooze’s term; multiple simultaneous interacting crises (climate, pandemic, finance, war, supply chain, geopolitical). World Economic Forum picked it up 2023.
• metacrisis (Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Hall) — the underlying coordination/cognition/values crisis generating polycrisis.
• the sense-making crisis — Schmachtenberger framing.
• permacrisis — permanent crisis state; Collins Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year.
• wicked-problem condition (Rittel & Webber) — interlocking ill-structured problems.
• the meta-problem of coordination — fragmented response to shared threats.
• the collective-action problem — game-theoretic underpinning.
• the prisoner’s dilemma at civilizational scale.
• moloch (Scott Alexander, via Allen Ginsberg) — the personification of multi-agent coordination failure; viral term since c. 2014.
• molochian dynamics — race-to-the-bottom multi-agent dysfunction.
• the great convergence — multiple negative trends converging.
• the great unraveling — Joanna Macy’s term, post-pandemic mainstream pickup.
• civilizational risk — beyond country-level.
• catastrophic risk — high-impact, hard-to-recover.
• existential risk — threats to long-term humanity (covered in M20).
• the brittle world (BANI vocabulary, covered in M19).

Specific component crises

• climate emergency — preferred over climate change in activist register.
• the climate crisis — common journalistic.
• biodiversity collapse — sometimes-paired with climate.
• the sixth extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert).
• the polycrisis vector — any specific contributing crisis.
• the great-power competition — US-China; the 2020s framing.
• the new cold war — applied to US-China tensions.
• the multipolar moment — diffusion of geopolitical power.
• deglobalization vs slowbalization — partial retreat from integration.
• friend-shoring — supply-chain shift to allied countries.
• near-shoring / on-shoring / reshoring — bringing production back.
• economic statecraft — economic tools for geopolitical ends.
• the debt-and-demographics problem — aging societies, high debt loads.
• the population implosion — declining-fertility worry (China, Korea, much of Europe).
• the silver tsunami — US aging-population framing.

Longevity, transhumanism, and the radical-life-extension register

The longevity vocabulary

• the longevity movement — David Sinclair, Aubrey de Grey, Peter Attia.
• healthspan — years of healthy life; vs lifespan.
• biological age vs chronological age — methylation-clock-based estimates.
• the epigenetic clock (Steve Horvath) — DNA-methylation-based age estimator.
• the hallmarks of aging (López-Otín et al., 2013, updated 2023) — the canonical list (genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, etc.).
• senescent cells — non-dividing, inflammation-producing aged cells.
• senolytics — drugs that selectively kill senescent cells.
• mTOR pathway — central metabolic regulator; rapamycin target.
• rapamycin — the most-studied longevity drug candidate.
• metformin — diabetes drug with longevity hypotheses.
• NMN / NR — NAD+ precursors; longevity supplements.
• caloric restriction — the canonical longevity intervention.
• intermittent fasting — popularized; mixed evidence.
• time-restricted eating — Satchin Panda’s framework.
• autophagy — cellular self-clearing; fasting-stimulated.
• mitochondrial dysfunction — aging hallmark.
• cellular reprogramming — Yamanaka factors; partial reprogramming research.
• the Yamanaka factors — Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc.
• biotech longevity startups — Altos Labs, Calico, Retro Biosciences, BioAge, etc.
• the longevity dividend — argued benefits of life-extension research.
• the immortality discourse — the popular framing; mostly hyperbole.
• mortality optionality (cryonics, biostasis) — preservation-for-future-revival proposals.
• cryonics — the Alcor/Cryonics Institute tradition.
• biostasis — newer term for preservation-for-revival.

Transhumanism

• transhumanism — the philosophical-cultural movement for human enhancement.
• posthumanism — the more radical sibling; post-biological humanity.
• enhancement — broad term for beyond-typical capacities.
• cognitive enhancement / neuroenhancement.
• moral enhancement (Persson & Savulescu) — controversial proposal.
• the morphological freedom principle.
• brain-computer interfaces (BCI) — Neuralink, Synchron.
• the BCI ethics literature.
• mind uploading — speculative; thought-experiment in philosophy of mind.
• whole-brain emulation — same.
• the singularity (Kurzweil) — recursive-AI-driven civilizational discontinuity; once-fringe, now contested seriously.
• the singularity is near vs the singularity is far — current 2026 disagreement.
• the technological singularity — full name.
• biological enhancement — gene editing, drugs, prosthetics.
• CRISPR therapeutic — current clinical wave.
• germline editing — heritable; mostly prohibited but contested.

Effective altruism’s afterlife and longtermism critique

The EA project, briefly

• EA (Effective Altruism) — covered in M20.
• earning to give — high-earning to donate.
• strong longtermism — far-future moral primacy.
• AGI x-risk — EA’s flagship cause area by 2020s.
• wild animal welfare — second EA cause area.
• global health and development — EA’s earlier focus (GiveWell).
• animal welfare — third major cause area.

The 2022-26 EA crisis

• the FTX collapse (Nov 2022) — Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange implosion.
• the SBF trial (2023) — fraud conviction.
• the EA reckoning — institutional and reputational.
• the trust collapse — donors and adjacent communities.
• the Going Infinite book (Michael Lewis, 2023) — controversial sympathetic biography.
• the Caroline Ellison testimony — the cooperator’s testimony.
• the dependence on SBF money — the structural critique.

The longtermism critique register

• the longtermism critique — the family of arguments against strong longtermism.
• Émile Torres — the most visible critic.
• TESCREAL (Torres & Gebru) — Transhumanism + Extropianism + Singularitarianism + Cosmism + Rationalism + Effective Altruism + Longtermism; the umbrella the critics name as a coherent ideology.
• the secular eschatology critique — longtermism as quasi-religious.
• the bait-and-switch critique — using broadly appealing claims to justify narrow conclusions.
• the population ethics objection — Parfit’s repugnant conclusion and total-utilitarianism issues.
• the catastrophism-as-control critique — claiming x-risk authority to justify present-day allocation.
• the elitism critique — longtermism as ideology of high-status technocrats.
• the technological-determinism critique — assuming inevitable technological pathways.
• the techno-optimism critique — recent right-leaning techno-optimism (Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, 2023).
• the e/acc movement (effective accelerationism) — pro-AI-acceleration counter to AI safety; partly online culture, partly serious advocacy.

“TESCREAL is either a productive analytic framing or a paranoid umbrella term, depending on which essays you’ve read most recently — and both readings are defensible. What’s not defensible is the once-common pretense that effective altruism is a neutral analytical framework rather than a developed ideology with its own positions and exclusions.” — Aeon, 2024.

Climate-discourse 2026

• climate emergency vs climate crisis vs climate change — register choices.
• net zero — emissions balance.
• carbon neutrality — same.
• negative emissions — pulling carbon out.
• carbon removal (CDR) — umbrella.
• direct air capture (DAC) — engineered atmospheric extraction.
• carbon capture and storage (CCS) — point-source.
• geoengineering — large-scale climate intervention.
• stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) — most-discussed solar-radiation-management.
• marine cloud brightening — another SRM approach.
• the climate-tipping-point literature — Lenton, Steffen, Rockström.
• the planetary boundaries framework (Rockström et al.).
• the safe operating space — within planetary boundaries.
• degrowth vs green growth — competing economic frames.
• the just transition — distributionally fair climate transition.
• climate adaptation — adapting to inevitable change.
• climate mitigation — reducing emissions.
• loss and damage — UN framework for irreversible climate harms.
• climate anxiety / eco-anxiety — psychological framing.
• solastalgia (Glenn Albrecht) — distress from environmental change.

Identity, ideology, and the 2026 culture-war vocabulary

• woke / wokeness — left-cultural-political stance; almost entirely now pejorative; rarely self-applied.
• anti-woke — explicit positional opposition.
• the great awokening (Matt Yglesias, c. 2014-2020) — left cultural-shift period; arguably ended c. 2022-23.
• post-woke — claiming to be past the moment.
• identity politics — politics centered on group identity.
• wokeism / wokery — pejorative.
• DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) — institutional category; under retrenchment.
• the DEI backlash — 2022-26 corporate and legal pushback.
• the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling (2023) — ending affirmative action in college admissions.
• the post-affirmative-action university.
• the academic-freedom debates — both directions politically.
• cancel culture — the discourse term; contested.
• the chilling effect — speech-suppression.
• viewpoint diversity — typically right-coded.
• the heterodox — Heterodox Academy, etc.
• the Discourse (capital D, ironic) — online cultural-political conversation.
• the discourse cycle — issue-emergence to outrage to thinkpiece to backlash to fatigue.
• the takes-economy / the take economy — viral commentary.
• the hot take vs the cold take vs the lukewarm take.
• the thinkpiece — characteristic genre.
• the longform — Atlantic-length essay.
• the explainer — Vox-style explanatory piece.

AmE-specific 2026 vocabulary

Collocations

• a polycrisis moment / framing / lens
• a metacrisis diagnosis / framing
• a structural challenge / pressure / shift
• a generational shift / cohort effect
• a civilizational stake / risk / question
• a defining moment / question / fight
• a transformative moment / technology / intervention
• a paradigm shift / change
• an inflection point — junction moment
• a tipping point — irreversible threshold
• a watershed moment / event
• a hinge moment — pivotal
• the front-line worker / community / region
• the bleeding edge — most advanced
• the cutting edge — same
• a leading indicator vs a lagging indicator
• a canary in the coal mine — early warning
• a signal vs noise
• a tail risk — low-probability catastrophic
• a fat tail — heavy-tailed distribution
• to grapple with — engage seriously
• to reckon with — confront and account for
• to wrestle with — engage difficult question
• to take seriously — assign weight
• to call into question — challenge
• to upend — overturn
• to disrupt — Christensen-influenced
• to displace — replace
• to augment — assist without replacing
• to scale up / to scale back
• to dial up / to dial back
• to triangulate — converge from multiple angles
• to operate at the speed of {AI / culture / politics}

Phrases and locutions

• the new normal — post-COVID
• the post-pandemic moment / world / economy
• the K-shaped recovery — diverging outcomes
• the vibes are off — generalized cultural unease
• the vibes are immaculate — opposite (ironic-positive)
• the discourse is bad — current online conversation is unhelpful
• logged off — disengaged from internet
• terminally online — chronically internet-embedded
• based — admirably honest/independent (originally AAVE)
• mid — mediocre
• W / L — win / loss in slang
• cope / coping — denial-framed
• the cope is real — pejorative for self-deception
• let him cook — let someone proceed
• just like the simulations — meme acknowledging predictability
• everyone is so back — recovery framing
• the simulation must be glitching — collective response to absurd news
• black-pilled (despairing) vs white-pilled (hopeful) vs gray-pilled (cautious)
• doomer vs doomer-optimist vs bloomer (cautious optimist)
• the future is unevenly distributed (William Gibson) — common citation
• the long now (Stewart Brand) — long-term framing
• history doesn’t end — counter to End-of-History

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. *Actual* for current/relevant. Catastrophic false friend with актуальный. Actual in English = real, in fact (the actual cause, the actual amount). For Russian актуальный (= currently relevant, topical, in vogue), AmE uses current, relevant, timely, topical, of-the-moment. The actual problem is climate change in Russian-influenced usage might mean “the currently relevant problem”, but native speakers read it as “the real problem”. Distinction critical at C2.
2. *Concrete* for specific. Russian конкретный maps awkwardly. Concrete in English physical sense (material) or abstract (specific instance: concrete examples); but as adjective meaning “specific” or “definite” it’s slightly stilted. AmE prefers specific, definite, particular, defined. Give me concrete recommendations is fine but slightly bookish; specific recommendations is more native.
3. *Perspective* as default for prospects/future. Russian перспектива is broader than English perspective. Perspective in English = a point of view, an angle of analysis (from a historical perspective). For “future prospects” use prospects, the outlook, possibilities. The perspective is good in Russian-influenced usage might mean “the future looks good”; native speakers will not understand. The prospects are good or the outlook is positive is right.
4. *Pretend* for try. False friend with претендовать. Pretend in English = falsely claim (she pretended to be sick). For Russian претендовать (= aspire to, claim entitlement to, apply for), AmE uses claim, lay claim to, apply for, aspire to, seek, be a contender for. He pretends to the presidency is wrong (and weird); he seeks the presidency or he is a contender for the presidency is right.
5. *Decade* stress and meaning. Russian декада means “ten-day period”; English decade means “ten-year period” (and stresses /ˈdekeɪd/, not /dɪˈkeɪd/). The first decade of October in Russian-influenced usage might mean “the first ten days of October”; in English it makes no sense (October doesn’t have decades). Use ten-day period or rephrase.
6. *Realize* ambiguity. Russian реализовать often means “carry out, implement, accomplish”. English realize primarily means “come to understand” or “make real/actualize” (the latter is a secondary, business-ish use). He realized the project is ambiguous in English — native speakers will read “he understood the project” not “he carried out the project”. Use carry out, execute, implement, complete, deliver for реализовать.
7. *To be in trend* for trendy. Calque of быть в тренде. AmE: trendy (adjective), on trend (less common AmE; mostly BrE), trending (specifically about online activity — trending on Twitter). For “in style”: in vogue, in fashion, popular, hot, having a moment. Vibecession is in trend is wrong; vibecession is having a moment or vibecession is trending is right.

Summary

• Post-pandemic: the vibecession, the K-shaped recovery, the soft landing, RTO mandates, the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, the right to disconnect.
• AI and labor: foundation models, AGI, agentic AI, the alignment problem, AI labor displacement (white-collar wave), vibe coding, AI orchestration.
• Attention: the attention economy, doomscrolling, brainrot, the algorithmic feed, enshittification, the FYP culture, deep work.
• Polycrisis vocabulary: polycrisis (Tooze), metacrisis (Schmachtenberger), permacrisis, moloch, wicked problems.
• Longevity / transhumanism: healthspan, biological age, senolytics, rapamycin, caloric restriction, the singularity, transhumanism, BCI.
• EA aftermath: the FTX collapse, the SBF trial, TESCREAL (Torres-Gebru), the longtermism critique, e/acc, techno-optimism.
• Climate 2026: net zero, carbon removal, direct air capture, the planetary boundaries, the just transition, degrowth vs green growth.
• Culture-war 2026: woke / post-woke, the DEI backlash, the Discourse, the take economy, the explainer-thinkpiece-takes chain.

The C2 Vocabulary themes module ends here. Next module: M03 Phrasal verbs at C2 — the opaque-PV inventory, legal-political PVs, journalistic PVs, literary PVs, and the archaic/dated PVs needed for full-spectrum recognition.