Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines.
The pain of this moment offers a profound invitation: to re-educate ourselves, transmute our settler ignorance, and rise together in loving solidarity.
We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.
The old bromide goes: If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. In today’s Washington, the joke would be to buy a DOGE.
Rather than retreating into the world of brains and their fancy constructs—responsible for initiating a sixth mass extinction that would wipe us out, too—we ought to break free of their grip.
As both China and the U.S. go hurtling ever faster toward Armageddon in the race to dominate in AI, they have both bought into techno-utopian ideologies, lock, stock and barrel. We should all take a deep breath and ask the question: Is accessible, open-source AI really a good thing for anyone?
In my 2021 book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, I traced how social power arose among humans and how it has been used in societies large and small, ancient and modern. Whatever insights that book contains, now is a good time to put them to the test.
Personal computers and the internet were supposed to democratize information and the power to analyze and use it. Instead, they are contributing to the increasing concentration of wealth and power and putting us on the road to authoritarian rule.
In this episode, Nate is joined by complexity scientist, Peter Turchin, to discuss his work modeling the key factors that drive patterns of peace, turmoil, and revolution in nations throughout history – and how those connect to the situation in the United States today.
So rather than take from the world, take yourself out of this system and go responsively and responsibly contribute to living. Go live your whole and healthy life in the edge spaces. And pretty soon there will be no center. (Because we all know it can’t hold…)
As we head into a future shaped by climate change, we must find ways to stabilize societies and reduce conflict. Solutions may lie in the archaeological record.
Fantasies are fun, and the rewards can be intoxicating/addictive. But it’s time that we grow up and stop playing the empty, escapist game of modernity: we need to learn to live in the real world again.
