The Creature in the Machine
In this week’s episode, Nate reflects on his experience with knee surgery and being a “creature in the machine” (the Superorganism).
The winners take the most
From 2018 to 2020, the top four seed and agro-chemical firms controlled 60-70% of the global pesticides market, and 50-60% of the $45 billion global seed market. How did this happen?
How Can Scientists Resist the Climate Status Quo? A Conversation Between Fernando Racimo and Frederik Appel Olsen
Knowledge is important, sure, but if we don’t do anything with that knowledge, if we don’t organize for collective action, then all claims that science is a positive agent for change are just empty talk. Science can help us transform society, but only if we dare to transform science itself.
Redesigning Utopia: Why Free Money for Everyone Would Not Solve the Polycrisis
In the interests of both local and global sustainability, we need to redesign the economy by recognising two separate spheres of exchange, representing two different kinds of values.
The slow forces behind this year’s fast crises
Systemic risk analysis allows us to fully comprehend the long-tail of all the crises peaking this year. But it also reveals how we can turn these exponential curves around, accelerating just as fast and as far in the opposite direction.
The Empire Crumbles: Part I—The Big Picture
Don’t cower in front of your screen. Get out and join with others in projects to make your town stronger and more socially and environmentally sustainable.
By the Rivers of Babylon: debating agrarianism with Tom Murphy
There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.
Ditching Dualism #10: Determinism
One major hangup in subscribing to a physics-based universe of material monism is that it appears to remove human agency as typically conceived in our culture. If atoms and their interactions are making everything happen, abiding by rules they (or we) cannot violate, is there any room left for human intervention or free will?
Crazy Town: Episode 118. Choose your AI Adventure: Immiseration or Extinction
Jason and Asher replace Rob with a much more humane and humble co-host, Elon Musk, to explore the feasibility of harnessing the entire sun to power AI superintelligence. We come away perplexed that not much of the excellent reporting on the environmental, energy, and financial risks of the AI boom address the googleplex-sized elephant in the room – that both AI success and failure lead to immiseration.
The Being Way of Degrowth
For those of us seeking post-capitalist futures: rather than burning ourselves out Doing — the energy of the capitalist system we are trying to topple — why not try Being, the energy of degrowth?
Plants and the great cognition debate
If Calvo is out at the front, all the same, he’s not there on his own. Colleagues in the field also believe that the ‘machine metaphor’ of body and brain is getting in the way of understanding—even preventing us from seeing what’s in the data we see in front of us.
After Decades of Deflection, ExxonMobil Moves to Reshape Global Climate Accounting
An ExxonMobil-backed initiative, Carbon Measures, is pushing to reshape how the world does the math on climate change. Their system, outside analysts point out, leaves consumers holding the bag.
