Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Green AI will likely continue to stretch as different communities bring their own priorities and imaginaries to the term. But if its dominant forms remain tethered to extractive assumptions, it risks becoming little more than an alibi for the systems driving planetary breakdown.
The entire Community of Life—humans included—were better off when shrouded in the mysterious magic of the living world: held in awe, humility, and respect. We came into being inside the feedback loop, and threaten to destroy much when presuming to extract ourselves from its magical protection.
The question of who’s the real nut often arises for us collapse-aware folks living here in Crazy Town. Since Mr. Peanut is no longer returning their phone calls, Rob, Jason, and Asher invite Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, professor, and host of the Team Human Podcast to answer the question.
Hunter-gatherers engaged fully in life with their psyches intact. They experienced far richer meaning and deeper relational being than we can now even imagine. That is what we must recover as we fight back.
As the current situation (March 2026) around the Strait of Hormuz continues to destabilise the global economy, it is timely to return to Alexander’s analysis outlining ‘the Disintegration of Empire’ (being Chapter Two of Entropia).
The question is no longer just how to succeed in the world. It is how to remain human in a time of unraveling, and how to become, in the deepest sense, both soulful and revolutionary: ruthless in understanding the material conditions of the age, yet still capable of love, grief, reverence, and fidelity to life.
The eclipse, then, is an invitation. Not a warning or a demand, but a quiet reminder that clarity is possible. Justice has not abandoned us. We stepped out of alignment with it, and we can step back. The shadow will stay as long as we remain in it, but it will fade the moment we stop standing in it.
While The Population Bomb is the book with which Ehrlich is most closely identified, he wrote dozens of others, including important and fascinating works on birds, human ecology, and conservation biology. He was as insightful as he was prolific, and his work deserves continued attention.
The news hasn’t improved since I started working on this article. Still, while doing so, I’ve found myself in the company of others — and that’s reminded me of something. When you make yourself go out into the world, however scary it might seem, and act to make it better, the world does sometimes shift. The atoms really do move.
This week’s Frankly marks the second installment of Nate’s recurring series, Uncomfortable Questions in Unsettled Times, where he poses questions about our shared future…Today’s episode is prompted by the Iran situation and what happens when geopolitics stops feeling distant and starts arriving as supply chain disruptions, rising prices, fear, and renewed stories about enemies and allies.
Justice is neither owned nor taken away. It is a state of being, a condition that arises whenever life is allowed to exist in its own way. When that truth is remembered, the language of rights will fall silent, and what remains will be the only thing that ever mattered: the unbroken relationship among all that exists.
At the time, I was learning engineering methods for controlling systems and optimizing outcomes, powerful techniques that I thought could alone solve society’s mounting problems. But I quickly realized my team with Fathom was a system that belied ambitions of control.
