Resisting cannibal capitalism
Capitalism in essence is a cannibal, primed to guzzle its own conditions of possibility.
polycrisis
Artificial Intelligence & The Polycrisis
The arrival of this AI challenge to our adaptive capacities is occurring precisely at the historical moment in which all of the other facets of the polycrisis are reaching a kind of historical crescendo or apogee.
Navigating the Polycrisis–Life in Turbulent Times
How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis. What happened?
Polycrisis? What Polycrisis?
Human societies the world over are confronted with a growing number and range of difficult and compounding problems and crises, which they are increasingly struggling to address and failing to solve, and which are slowly but surely eroding their ability to function effectively and undermining their capacity to coexist peacefully.
Global Polycrisis as a Pathway for Economic Transition
As the global polycrisis worsens, transformational change will be significantly encumbered by crises, breakdown, and collapse scenarios.
I was wrong to conclude collapse is inevitable…
I was wrong to conclude collapse is inevitable… because when I was concluding that, it had already begun.
Community, Belonging and the Polycrisis
The sense of belonging in community I think we all deeply need now weaves human beings in—integrates us—with the other-than-human world, such that our neighbors are not just our fellow humans, but all of the life around us.
Whose Polycrisis?
Unless the Polycrisis seriously questions the drivers of power and finds ways of challenging them, it risks becoming yet another neoliberal policy buzzword.
Our future isn’t a problem to be solved
The best we can do is have lots of ideas, lots of tools, lots of ways of thinking, all ready at hand when crises of whatever flavor come barreling down that hill.
Is “Polycrisis” the Right Word for Our Times?
But as the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter documents in his seminal book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, this is what “advanced,” hierarchical human societies do—they respond to challenges created by their complexity with ever more complexity. This may work in the short-term but usually leads to the underlying crises worsening in the long term.
From Polycrisis to Permacrisis
Permacrisis is the joining of the prefix perma- (which means a fixed state) and crisis, resulting in a word that means ‘a state of permanent crisis’ (or according to Collins Dictionary “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.”)
How to Survive Us: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on a Broiling Planet
To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now.
