Crazy Town 101: Even AI Chatbots Hate Us: The Rise of the New Luddites, with Brian Merchant

After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI’s newest initiative — the $350 billion Transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Prophet Studies and Education (TIPPSE) —  Jason, Rob, and Asher devise the only profitable pitch for raising capital: using AI technology to cure the loneliness that technology itself causes. Author Brian Merchant joins Asher this week to discuss the rise of the neo-Luddite movement.

Ishmael: Chapter 2

Tom Murphy, Do the Math

The mythology of “Mother Culture” [modernity] will become ever-present. It will be harder to interact with and tolerate the people around you who drink in this tale without awareness. In their eyes, you’ll be an unrelatable weirdo: isolated and alone.

As federal environmental priorities shift, sovereign Native American nations have their own plans

Alyssa Kreikemeier, The Conversation

Tribal governance takes a long view based in Native peoples’ deep history with these lands. And their legal and political status as sovereign nations – backed by the U.S. Constitution, treaties, more than 120 Supreme Court rulings and the plain text of federal laws – puts Native nations in a strong position to continue their efforts, no matter which ways the federal winds blow.

Finding the most effective ways to plant trees

In line with the goals of the Ecosystem Restoration Communities movement the group strongly agrees that we need to significantly increase the number of farmers or local community members that can propagate tree-growth across Europe, and the planned visits are aimed at equipping the local leaders and experts that attended this first gathering with new tools and insights!

Beyond Community Currencies: Strengthening Your Local Economy

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Renewable Energy Communities (REC), legal entities that collectively manage energy, promoting economic, social, and environmental benefits for their community. This model of citizen management over an essential resource has been widely accepted — so could a similar principle be applied to money?

A Different “Abundance Agenda”: Avoiding Delusions and Diversions

Robert Jensen, Resilience.org

Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.

The View from Washington

To describe Washington, DC, as anything other than a circus would be to do it an injustice. Mind you, it’s not just any circus. It’s a two-ring Roman Circus with President Trump as its master.

Ishmael: Chapter 1

Ishmael characterizes the young people’s efforts in the sixties as trying to escape from captivity, but failing to do so “because they were unable to find the bars of the cage.” People of our culture would be relieved to escape captivity, and to simultaneously release Earth from its dire path toward collapse—except we can’t identify the bars.