PQC Doomsday: Every doomsday prepper believes they’re rational.

PQC Doomsday: Every doomsday prepper believes they’re rational.

They aren’t hoarding fear, they insist.

They’re hoarding optionality.
Canned beans, iodine tablets, shortwave radios—these were never about the apocalypse. They were about control. About outsourcing existential anxiety into shelves, checklists, and laminated plans that transform chaos into inventory.

Post-Quantum Cryptography preppers are no different.
They just stockpile algorithms instead of ammo.

The PQC prepper doesn’t fear Q-day itself.
They fear waking up late to Q-day—scrolling LinkedIn while someone else posts “We migrated last year” with a tasteful checkmark emoji.

So they rehearse collapse in PowerPoint.

They speak of harvest now, decrypt later the way survivalists speak of EMPs: vague, inevitable, and always just far enough away to justify another purchase order. They imagine a future adversary—faceless, patient, almost mythological—quietly recording today’s traffic like jars of rainwater buried in the yard.

It’s not paranoia if it has a roadmap.

What fascinates me isn’t the technology.
It’s the psychology.

PQC prepping is a moral performance masquerading as risk management. A way of signaling seriousness in an industry addicted to urgency. It offers absolution in advance: When everything breaks, we’ll be among the ones who warned you.

Of course, most preppers never leave the bunker.
They just keep reinforcing it.

The apocalypse, after all, is less frightening than ambiguity.

And nothing soothes the modern technologist like believing the end is scheduled—preferably after the next funding round.

In the end, whether it’s beans or Kyber, the instinct is the same:

If the future is unknowable, at least let it be well-documented.

Listen to the god damn podcast :-)