If you thought the world was safe, that European bureaucrats had civilization on lock, and that you might make it out of this decade with your data unsiphoned by gremlins typing with their toes from a Moldovan bunker—strap in, because apocalypse fatigue is a privilege we can’t afford. Today’s doomsign: The EU’s shiny, righteous, so-called impregnable age-verification app crashed and burned harder than my attempts at adulting. “There are no more excuses!” blared the commission. Translation: hope you weren’t hoping for excuses because excuses are safer than their security protocols. Two minutes. That’s how long it took an actual security saboteur to reduce this app to digital kindling. Not two weeks. Not two hours. Two bathroom-break minutes. Apparently, the app secured your personal secrets with the cryptographic strength of a Post-It note taped to the fridge in a frat house, and hackers are treating it like free pizza night. Imagine building a digital Fort Knox and then inviting in burglars through the doggy door labeled "User PIN." Now, if you thought that was the main event of the carnage circus, wait for intermission! Big-tent exposures continue: Gym chains, travel sites, and even a cryptocurrency exchange have chosen spring as the season to launch their user data into the sky like rice at a doomed wedding. Back in Europe, a million people’s financial info is now as secret as a Victorian diary left at a rave, thanks to a gym chain with password policies seemingly written in interpretive dance. Booking.com’s vacationers, meanwhile, are practicing the new European sport of phishing-evasion, dodging data breaches with the reflexes of a caffeinated vole, while the company serenely reminds us, "No major financial information was lost!" Just everything else. Remember Bluesky? It was supposed to save us from Elon and algorithmic hell. This week, haggard engineers at Bluesky are learning what a distributed denial-of-service attack feels like—the digital equivalent of a swarm of locusts clogging up the cloud crops, leaving users wandering the digital wilderness, searching for the promised land of working notifications. But if you prefer your doom with a dash of irony, let’s talk about the American surveillance-industrial complex. The government, with an enthusiasm reserved usually for family reunions and cheese platters, keeps stretching its warrantless wiretap powers even as half its House members vote to use the Constitution as a coaster. Meanwhile, the agents themselves get hired through background checks with all the rigor of a BuzzFeed quiz. Three out of forty, found by the Associated Press, had legal beef left unresolved; that’s almost the batting average that got me kicked off my own intramural badminton team. Across the Atlantic, in the neon-lit hell circus of the crypto underworld, Russian exchanges are playing an innovative new game called Financial Sovereignty Apocalypse Bingo. One week, they’re facilitating sanctions dodging. The next, they’re vaporized, blaming rogue foreign agents wielding what I assume are USB sticks carved from Chernobyl waste. Each announcement sounds more like the Season Three finale of a prestige sci-fi show: “Special services have targeted our vital sovereignty! All rubles have been beamed to a parallel dimension!” Back to our hero, the newborn EU age-check app, now lying in digital shambles, its bones whistling in the privacy wind. Will children now flood the internet’s darkest nooks and crannies? Or worse—will adults pretending to be children flood the internet’s dankest chatrooms? Is the briefest of security the only thing standing between us and total societal collapse? I ask myself these questions as I eat my cold soup beside the CRT monitor where I track the end of days. So heed my warning: Next time someone introduces new tech promising salvation, clutch your analog diary and passport tight. The only thing more prone to massive collapse than an EU data project is my will to keep up with the news. See you on the far side—if the apps don’t swallow us first.