Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this episode, Nate is joined by Nora Bateson and Zak Stein to explore the multifaceted ways that AI is designed to exploit our deepest social vulnerabilities, and the risks this poses to human relationships, cognition, and society.
Once we recognise the principles of commoning, we start to see them everywhere: neighbours sharing childcare or tending a community garden. Local repair cafés and tool libraries. Digital communities building and maintaining open-source projects on the Internet.
Relationality is ultimately not a work of social science or politics, but a biologically and spiritually informed vision of life.
The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?
Community-scale and bioregional-scale responses to the Great Unraveling invite personal action and lead both to convivial social arrangements and to the discovery of ways to live more in cooperation with, less in domination of, the web of life.
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.
Across Sudan, women are resurrecting nafeer, an ancient practice of communal solidarity, adapting it into a decentralized network of survival that functions where the state has collapsed.
If successful, this work will lead to improved accessibility of home renewable energy systems for people all over the United States. This would help counteract some Trump administration efforts to remove renewable energy incentives, while laying the groundwork for rapid growth of renewables when the national political environment shifts again.
The food garden revolution that is stirring in South Africa is quiet, but it is rooted in dignity, agency, and transformation. In their gardens, these women are sowing more than seeds; they are sowing peace, power and the foundations for a better future.
We must engage in a deliberate act of political imagination: to recognise that AI’s path is not predetermined by Big Tech, but is contested terrain – a technology that can either concentrate power or strengthen democracy, accelerate ecological collapse or support sustainability.
With universities being highly enmeshed with corporate money that comes from fossil fuel industries, does it even make sense to have universities? And how exactly do we move from profit-seeking science research that advances weapon technology to liberation?
We don’t have simple answers where we can just say, right, ‘That’s what we need to do’. So we need to do things locally, individually, in community from the grassroots.
