Crazy Town: Episode 66. How to Have Sex with Yourself: The Bizarre Cult of the Singularity
Meet Ray Kurzweil, who combines Moore’s Law with nanobots in a faux recipe to cheat death.
Asher Miller
Crazy Town: Episode 65. Why the Polycrisis Is a Statistical Anomaly: The Willful Delusions of the World’s Leading Pseudointellectual
Meet Steven Pinker, whose denial of limits increases the likelihood of his worst fear: the end of the Enlightenment.
Crazy Town: Episode 64. What the Ph*ck Is a Phalse Prophet?
Season 5 of the Crazy Town podcast launches today, with a new theme to help maintain its laugh-so-you-don’t-cry sensibility: Phalse Prophets(TM).
Webinars: Mutual Aid in the Great Unraveling (November 2022)
In this two-part webinar, activists and writers discuss the importance of social ties and how anyone can get involved in mutual aid efforts within their own communities.
Presentation: Navigating the Great Unraveling (November 2022)
Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg briefly summarizes some of the major environmental and societal crises humanity (and other species) faces as the consequences of a fossil-fueled, growth- and consumption-based capitalist economy that’s been built on the exploitation of people and the planet.
Power: Chapter 7. The Fate of the Superorganism
Ecologists have been telling us that “small is beautiful” since the 1960s, but trends have gone in just the opposite direction, resulting in the flourishing of the Superorganism. Nobody designed this vast, intricate web of global interconnectedness, and no one can control it.
Power: Chapter 6. Involuntary Power Limits: Death, Extinction, Collapse
If we are indeed in an overshoot phase, we must do what we can to avert or minimize a die-off event.
Power: Chapter 5. Overpowered: The Fine Mess We’ve Gotten Ourselves Into
Power is essential; without it, we would be literally powerless. But one can have too much of a good thing. How much power is enough? How much is too much?
Power: Chapter 4. Power in the Anthropocene
With fossil fuels and electrification, and thus greater mobility and instant communications, we have indeed become a human “hive.”
Power: Chapter 3. Power in the Holocene
Whether in family, school, work, or politics, we’re all immersed in the pathologies of power. If we’re lucky, we learn to navigate these waters without being harmed irreparably, and without harming others. Many are not so fortunate.
Power: Chapter 2. Power in the Pleistocene
The power to communicate aesthetic pleasure and thereby to feel profound affinity with other people, including individuals of other species, propel human culture forward in ways that are hard to measure, but that are impossible to ignore. These are powers that provide hope for our future.
Power: Chapter 1. Power in Nature
There are probably downsides to humans’ specialized powers (extreme intelligence, a highly developed ability to communicate, and proficient tool use). We humans tend to emphasize the advantages of these traits, but it’s always important to look for hidden costs.
