The instrument, opened
Methodology
Last revised 1 July 2026. This page describes the system as it runs today, not as we hope it will run someday. When the engine changes, this page changes, and this date moves. If the page and the number ever disagree, the page is wrong and we will say so.
What the Dread Index is
The Dread Index is one number, 0 to 100, computed once a day at 06:00 Panama time.
It does not measure how dangerous the world is. It measures how far today sits from normal — where "normal" is defined by each signal's own recent history, not by our opinion. Each input (news tone, disaster reports, market stress, public attention to catastrophe) is compared against its own last 90 days of stored values. The deviation is expressed as a standard statistical score, capped at three standard deviations, and mapped onto the 0–100 scale. No deviation maps to 50.
A reading of 50 therefore means "a normal day on Earth." It does not mean no danger exists. Wars continue at 50. What 50 says is that the world's fear-adjacent signals are behaving the way they have behaved for the past three months.
What it is not
It is not a prophecy. There is no forward-looking model. Nothing here predicts anything. The index is a mirror held up to today, and a mirror is only useful if you know it is a mirror. A high reading means several independent signals are unusually elevated at the same time. It does not mean an event is coming.
The signals, as currently live
| Signal | Weight | Source | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| World news tone | 35% | GDELT Project | The average emotional tone of global news coverage mentioning war, crisis, disaster, collapse, or pandemic. Tone falls, the score rises. |
| Conflict & disaster load | 20% | ReliefWeb (UN OCHA) | Disasters newly reported in the trailing 30 days. Currently dark: our data-access application was submitted 1 July 2026 and awaits approval. Until then this signal reports MISSING and its weight is redistributed — the page says so. |
| Market fear | 20% (hard cap) | FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis | Three series: the VIX volatility index (10%), high-yield credit spreads from ICE BofA (7% — derived scores only; the raw licensed values are never published), and the St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index (3%, weekly). |
| Public dread attention | 15% | Wikimedia pageviews | Daily reader traffic to a fixed basket of six English Wikipedia articles: World War III, Nuclear warfare, Global catastrophic risk, Survivalism, Doomsday Clock, Societal collapse. |
| Slow structural anchors | 10% | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists · NOAA · V-Dem Institute | The Doomsday Clock setting (85 seconds, 2026); the growth rate of atmospheric CO₂ from NOAA's Mauna Loa record (the growth, never the raw level); the share of world population living in autocratizing states (V-Dem, 2025). Fixed documented mappings, reviewed yearly, near-constant by design. |
Market signals are hard-capped at 20% of the composite even when other feeds are down. One bad day on Wall Street cannot own the world's fear needle.
Honesty mechanics
- Dead feeds shrink the panel. A feed that fails, goes stale, or is still accumulating history gets weight zero, and its status is published: OK, STALE, WARMING, MISSING, ERROR, or DISABLED. No value is ever carried forward as if it were fresh.
- Confidence is disclosed. It is the share of designed weight actually live: high, medium, or low. If nothing is live, the index is null and the page says "instrument dark." A blank instrument is published, not papered over.
- Every value carries its own date. A Sunday reading of Friday's market close is labeled "as of Friday."
- Day-over-day change is only claimed when yesterday was actually published. After a gap, the change reads null. A four-day drift is not allowed to look like an overnight spike.
- The all-clear rule. "All clear" can only be claimed when confidence is medium or better and no live signal sits 1.5 standard deviations above its norm. A mostly-dark panel is not permitted to say all clear.
- The misses ledger. When the index spikes and nothing happens, or stays flat before something that mattered, the miss goes in a public ledger, dated, in both directions. Failed readings are receipts, not embarrassments to be buried.
- Every published day is auditable. The exact figures shown each day are stored permanently; reconstructed history is labeled as reconstructed.
The spike protocol
This is published here so that changing it would be publicly visible. When the index is elevated, all commercial surfaces on this site freeze. Nothing is sold, promoted, or linked while the needle is high. In its place, free grounding content ships: base rates, what is known and not known, and what the elevated signals actually measure.
What we will never do
- Sell safety. No product on this site will ever claim to protect you from what the index measures.
- Upsell on fear. A high reading stops our commerce; it never starts it.
- Map fear onto peoples. The index measures systems — news flows, markets, atmospheric chemistry, institutional drift. No ethnic, religious, or national group will ever be its subject.
Attribution
Data: the GDELT Project · ReliefWeb, a service of UN OCHA · FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (VIX; ICE BofA high-yield option-adjusted spread, derived scores only; STLFSI) · Wikimedia Foundation pageview statistics · NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory · Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists · V-Dem Institute. None of these organizations endorse this index or are responsible for what we do with their data.
— The Watch
— The Watch