Culture & Behavior

Apollo 13: a guilty pleasure in the age of scarcity

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I was watching the movie Apollo 13 recently for what was probably the fifth time, consuming it in the manner of a guilty pleasure. I say guilty pleasure because this movie is the paradigmatic technofix movie. And, I have little faith that the mounting challenges of resource depletion and climate change can be addressed by technology alone

Book review: Culture Change by Alexis Zeigler

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With superb insight, wisdom and erudition—one is almost tempted to say omniscience—Alexis Zeigler’s Culture Change charts an ambitious course for the future of our civilization. The book calls for a revolution to bring about what Zeigler terms a “conscious culture” capable of responding intelligently to our ecological crisis. (Full book title: Culture Change: Civil Liberty, Peak Oil, and the End of Empire)

Of swans and turkeys

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When asked about the future of, say, nanotubes, or nuclear fusion, or genetic engineering, all technologists and scientists will predict that it’s bright, and continue to say so until the day their grants are canceled, their salaried positions eliminated, and their labs shut down for political and macroeconomic reasons they are ill-equipped to try to comprehend.

Future perfect: the future is Mayberry, not Mad Max

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[Peak oil prophets] are national heroes for sounding the alarm before anyone believed them. They have often been right, and any solar-powered Mayberrys of 2100 should have statues of them in the town square. But their long-held note of dread is useful only to the extent that it inspires people to do something more practical. The world we create will be, up to a point, whatever we were preparing for, and as we enter the opening years of the crisis, it is time we all take a deep breath and talk about what we realistically expect from the future.