Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As large systems strain and loosen, smaller systems already begin to form. People create pockets of care, work, learning and shelter that operate by different rules. These efforts remain partial, local and imperfect, yet they matter.
“The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us … [manifesting] today as an intersection of money, power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits … and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.”
The Pacific Northwest (PNW) region is typically defined to include Oregon and Washington, and British Columbia (Canada) and the northernmost section of California are often included, as well. The Pacific Northwest “bioregion”—an area defined by shared natural characteristics, such as watersheds, topography, geography, climate, or ecosystems, rather than by arbitrary human borders—also can be interpreted in different ways.
If we treat dissensus not as division but as an invitation into shared learning, then AI’s arrival could support a vital pedagogical turn: away from assessing mastery of sanctioned truths, and toward the integration of difficult lessons in this era of consequence.
This episode explores two powerful beliefs. One is the belief that humans could, and should, live in space: that we’re destined to leave our planet behind and colonize the stars. The other is the belief that we’re not on a planet at all—that the Earth is actually… flat.
This time of trouble calls for a vibrant forest—a woodland brimming with the stalwart oaks, the slender birches, and the bowing willows. We each offer distinctive gifts and dreams to share in our tenacious striving towards a more resilient tomorrow.
The future remains uncertain. The conditions keep shifting. What remains available is the most basic human capacity. Listen. Then place your energy where it returns coherence.
Drawing on historical examples of people power uprisings and on his recent work examining how general strikes and broader “social strikes” are built, in this conversation Brecher reflects on where the U.S. is now, what conditions make such actions possible, and what strategic groundwork is required to turn diffuse outrage into sustained, democratic power.
