Our political and commercial systems profit from the crises they perpetuate, rendering meaningful dissent unintelligible and civilisational failure commercially indispensable.
Tag: existential risk
As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
We have spent billions of years becoming what we are, yet our political and economic systems increasingly reward the destruction of the complex relationships that sustain us. What we stand to lose is beyond calculation, and the tragedy is how unnecessary so much of it is.
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How it all ends
Billions of years of planetary evolution, and here we are, contemplating our own self-destruction, along with much of the living world, in pursuit of wealth, power and other elaborate fictions we have mistaken for necessities.
We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.
Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.
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Ebola
Ebola reminds us that civilisation may not fail through drama, but through delay, distraction, and a pathogen moving faster than our institutional cadence and cultural expectations.
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Big Problems Don’t Fit in Small Boxes
Many of the critically defining problems of our time resist piecemeal treatment. Understanding consciousness, curing cancer, alleviating poverty, managing environmental sustainability, mitigating climate change without triggering new failures, securing digital infrastructure, managing geopolitical instability, slowing social decay, and containing the adverse effects of runaway technological growth are not separate challenges but tightly coupled dynamical processes. […]
Humanity is moving through a narrow and dangerous passage. Environmental damage, political instability, rapid technological change, and economic pressure are all rising at once. Energy use is climbing, ecosystems are under strain, information systems are flooded with polarising noise, and institutions are struggling to keep pace. A major driver of this acceleration is corporate greed […]
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Strange Days on Planet Earth
Extraterrestrial intelligence is extremely unlikely to help us. Not because its existence is impossible, but because if any such intelligence were already here, and in any sense benevolent, it would have intervened long before our crises reached the planetary scale they clearly have. Short of the darker possibility that it is they, rather than rogue […]
