I agree with the assessment that extinction events seem improbable, even if we cannot entirely rule it out.
As far as civilizational collapse is concerned, I suppose it depends on the definition of what constitutes a collapse. If we are to remain within the current societal paradigm, it does indeed seem almost inevitable that our days are numbered. However, it's not as if the question of "Revolutionary change" had not been on our Civilization's agenda for some time, again and again (with wildly varying trackrecords and as a constant undercurrent), so I would argue that a paradigm shift that would substantially alter that trajectory would not necessarily constitute a collapse.
Moreover, I kind of think that the old idea of "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will" sort of demands that we need to fight this "almost inevitability" tooth and nail.
In terms of How to deal with this realization, I found Margaret Killjoy's short essay on "How to live like the world is ending" rather excellent.
Just read the article that you linked. It's fantastic, thoughtful, and very poignant. Really appreciate you sharing it!
And I agree with everything you say above. I highlight in a footnote that it's important to be clear about how one is defining "human extinction," but I then completely ignore the question of how to define "civilizational collapse." That's an inconsistency in the article, so thanks for pointing it out! I'll try to discuss this more when I write my review of Luke Kemp's new book. :-) Really appreciate your feedback here!!
Here are some of the questions I am contemplating.
Can I/we humans - discover that real satisfaction comes from the vulnerability of loving relationship rather than from illusions of control?
Am I/ are some of us humans - willing to trust that we humans are actually a very, very small part of the “WE” of a larger co-evolving beloved community that has been around forever, and who will fold us in and continue to include us even as we become extinct?
How do I-we humans - live into this rapid, anthropogenic extinction event with love, compassion, and wisdom?
I am profoundly grateful for your work. You see and then you say what you see and you ask, what am I missing and where do we go from here?
I feel like you and Rachel Donald and Nate Hagens and others are engaged in this deep empathetic inquiry which is in service of love.
And we are here to love - only love. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else.
This is liberatory and yet also profoundly prescriptive for us.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing these thoughts! I love the questions you're asking here, and very much agree that they're important. I'll need some time to reflect on how I'd answer! :-)
Thank you. One of my hopes is that many of us will be able to live into this crisis with a spirituality that emphasizes that we belong to each other in reality even though we cannot fully comprehend that. We can choose to love as best as we can, and also to trust the universe for ultimate outcomes…. This is not easy to move into for us who have been trained to isolate ourselves and to see ourselves as completely separate and even as competing entities who can only survive through domination and control.
We are challenged in our time to answer the question: “ what does it mean for me to be a human being?”
I notice the Peter Theil is now trying to “techbro-splain the Antichrist” as he has been trying to “techbro-splain the apocalypse” for years now.
This is interesting as so many religions in the world have shifted from earth-based and village-based spirituality to corporatist-based spirituality over the last few hundred years.
Ancient mytho-poetic narratives are being captured, altered and weaponized by current elites, and also synthesized with what may be novel mytho-poetic narratives.
Who will tell the stories that bring peace and nurture beloved community rooted in our unity with earth here among the stars?
Mother Earth still invites us into her beloved community, I think - but we are busy crushing life out of the biosphere with the weight of our Global Goliath. That’s how I see our species now.
Will it be possible to tell stories that displace and replace the toxic stories that the organized crime syndicate masquerading as government now tell?
I find it interesting that both Luke Kemp and Sarah Kendzior - two quite different investigators of our current predicament - have both used the term “organized crime” to describe what they see going on in history, and especially today.
while i agree with your overall assessment, i don't think your approach really gets to the roots of the predicament.
with pandemics - we've already got a piece of biotech here now that has managed to break the transmissibility | lethality tradeoff: the ongoing sars2 pandemic is as effective as it is because it slowly disables its hosts, rather than outright killing them - while circulating on a global world system of 8 billion people. it's hard to imagine a plague worse than this - altho we are reproducing the conditions for worse, so i guess we'll find out soon enough.
not sure why AI is considered to be an existential threat, given that we are nowhere near AGI (certainly not with LLMs and procgen models) and that humans are a necessary part of the supply chain for any AI system. an AGI event would constitute radical upheaval and revolutionary change for human civilization (we'd all be working for it, rather than the other way around) but this is again - hardly an extinction threat.
and if every nuke ever built went off tomorrow, it would certainly constitute a hard reset for civilization - but this would almost certainly extend the timeline of our extinction trajectory, seeing as we're currently reproducing an extinction event in overshoot.
the thing that guarantees civilizational collapse is overshoot and biodiversity loss, both of which spell the end of our energy and agricultural systems as we knew them. surprised to see no mention of overshoot here.
for a clear-eyed assessment of inevitable collapse, i recommend andrea's work over at @aep19.
Great article ..makes me think about A point from wolfgang streeck wrote on what happens when capitalism ends - in the west at least - is that with the withering of the welfare state there is an increasing reliance on pre modern institutions such as the family for welfare... However given the erosion of intermediate social forms by both social democratic state and then neoliberalism austerity etc as charted by the likes of deneen , sometimes discussed in policy literature as capacity for resilience makes it seem that streecks doomerism is a bit optimistic... I've been wondering if institutions like the Catholic church might continue to reproduce itself in some form of reoganising social reproduction on the collapse of civilization you discuss but Im not convinced . There is something that feels therapeutic in the timelessness of mass in a way I don't feel in a long time of leftist activism ....
Well. That’s a nice cheery read to kick off the long weekend.
I wish I had some arguments to make against your case, but what you wrote aligns with a lot of my thoughts recently. I feel like, in most of the world, we’ve built a society that is extremely vulnerable to some not-unlikely events: an EMP or cyberattack or AI malfunction that trashes the power grid and the Internet and leaves most of us quickly losing access to food, water, and livable shelter. I don’t see how these tech gazillionaire preppers are going to do all that much better than the rest of us if that happens. Sure, they’ll have their bunkers, so maybe they outlast the rest of us by months? Maybe years? But will they really have the wherewithal to rebuild the necessary infrastructure for a sustainable supply of food and potable water? Canned goods, MREs, and bottled water will last only so long.
Collapse is structural (in several realms), and thus unavoidable, though the timeline is hazy. The world is huge; it will be very uneven and drawn out.
You touched upon most things, but of course one could go deep into behavioral psychology. I’d probebly mention the collective action problems, too. But yeah a full account of collapse would take a lot more than 10.000 words unless one aims for utmost brevity, in which case one isn’t explaining much.
We better not go extinct. I’m a firm believer that the galaxy is meant to teem with intelligent life one day and that we are meant in part to be progenitors of that. If we die out and leave the galaxy devoid of intelligent life, God is going to smack us in the afterlife for being idiots.
we have only had photographs for a rounding error number of years. the most widespread contemporary document about the boston massacre was a highly inaccurate artist’s depiction. if ai puts fake images and real photos on the same level, then that won’t have really set us back that far.
I think what you're missing is that, say, Israel becomes a religious extremist country with nuclear weapons, and uses them. That's far more likely than a big player like Russia or the US throwing them around. There's also the billionaire psychopath aspect. Currently the nation state is still large and powerful enough to keep them in check, but that's rapidly fading, with both Russia and the USA falling to "strongman" illusions run by billionaires. Will that break down completely once someone as rich as Musk decides to take over an entire (or part of a) country with a robot army? Yes, those thousands of bipedal robots and quadcopter drones are only there to move parcels, but they could also drive a tank, carry a bomb, or punch through a wall.
A relatively small cult, or a rich country taken over by a cult, could bring something like this about, I fear. We would rebuild, though, unless something else were to happen at the same time. But of course, there's climate change and other random disasters, and with the right (wrong) timing...
I agree with the assessment that extinction events seem improbable, even if we cannot entirely rule it out.
As far as civilizational collapse is concerned, I suppose it depends on the definition of what constitutes a collapse. If we are to remain within the current societal paradigm, it does indeed seem almost inevitable that our days are numbered. However, it's not as if the question of "Revolutionary change" had not been on our Civilization's agenda for some time, again and again (with wildly varying trackrecords and as a constant undercurrent), so I would argue that a paradigm shift that would substantially alter that trajectory would not necessarily constitute a collapse.
Moreover, I kind of think that the old idea of "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will" sort of demands that we need to fight this "almost inevitability" tooth and nail.
In terms of How to deal with this realization, I found Margaret Killjoy's short essay on "How to live like the world is ending" rather excellent.
https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/how-to-live-like-the-world-is-ending
Just read the article that you linked. It's fantastic, thoughtful, and very poignant. Really appreciate you sharing it!
And I agree with everything you say above. I highlight in a footnote that it's important to be clear about how one is defining "human extinction," but I then completely ignore the question of how to define "civilizational collapse." That's an inconsistency in the article, so thanks for pointing it out! I'll try to discuss this more when I write my review of Luke Kemp's new book. :-) Really appreciate your feedback here!!
Here are some of the questions I am contemplating.
Can I/we humans - discover that real satisfaction comes from the vulnerability of loving relationship rather than from illusions of control?
Am I/ are some of us humans - willing to trust that we humans are actually a very, very small part of the “WE” of a larger co-evolving beloved community that has been around forever, and who will fold us in and continue to include us even as we become extinct?
How do I-we humans - live into this rapid, anthropogenic extinction event with love, compassion, and wisdom?
I am profoundly grateful for your work. You see and then you say what you see and you ask, what am I missing and where do we go from here?
I feel like you and Rachel Donald and Nate Hagens and others are engaged in this deep empathetic inquiry which is in service of love.
And we are here to love - only love. Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else.
This is liberatory and yet also profoundly prescriptive for us.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing these thoughts! I love the questions you're asking here, and very much agree that they're important. I'll need some time to reflect on how I'd answer! :-)
Thank you. One of my hopes is that many of us will be able to live into this crisis with a spirituality that emphasizes that we belong to each other in reality even though we cannot fully comprehend that. We can choose to love as best as we can, and also to trust the universe for ultimate outcomes…. This is not easy to move into for us who have been trained to isolate ourselves and to see ourselves as completely separate and even as competing entities who can only survive through domination and control.
We are challenged in our time to answer the question: “ what does it mean for me to be a human being?”
I notice the Peter Theil is now trying to “techbro-splain the Antichrist” as he has been trying to “techbro-splain the apocalypse” for years now.
This is interesting as so many religions in the world have shifted from earth-based and village-based spirituality to corporatist-based spirituality over the last few hundred years.
Ancient mytho-poetic narratives are being captured, altered and weaponized by current elites, and also synthesized with what may be novel mytho-poetic narratives.
Who will tell the stories that bring peace and nurture beloved community rooted in our unity with earth here among the stars?
Mother Earth still invites us into her beloved community, I think - but we are busy crushing life out of the biosphere with the weight of our Global Goliath. That’s how I see our species now.
Will it be possible to tell stories that displace and replace the toxic stories that the organized crime syndicate masquerading as government now tell?
I find it interesting that both Luke Kemp and Sarah Kendzior - two quite different investigators of our current predicament - have both used the term “organized crime” to describe what they see going on in history, and especially today.
while i agree with your overall assessment, i don't think your approach really gets to the roots of the predicament.
with pandemics - we've already got a piece of biotech here now that has managed to break the transmissibility | lethality tradeoff: the ongoing sars2 pandemic is as effective as it is because it slowly disables its hosts, rather than outright killing them - while circulating on a global world system of 8 billion people. it's hard to imagine a plague worse than this - altho we are reproducing the conditions for worse, so i guess we'll find out soon enough.
not sure why AI is considered to be an existential threat, given that we are nowhere near AGI (certainly not with LLMs and procgen models) and that humans are a necessary part of the supply chain for any AI system. an AGI event would constitute radical upheaval and revolutionary change for human civilization (we'd all be working for it, rather than the other way around) but this is again - hardly an extinction threat.
and if every nuke ever built went off tomorrow, it would certainly constitute a hard reset for civilization - but this would almost certainly extend the timeline of our extinction trajectory, seeing as we're currently reproducing an extinction event in overshoot.
the thing that guarantees civilizational collapse is overshoot and biodiversity loss, both of which spell the end of our energy and agricultural systems as we knew them. surprised to see no mention of overshoot here.
for a clear-eyed assessment of inevitable collapse, i recommend andrea's work over at @aep19.
Great article ..makes me think about A point from wolfgang streeck wrote on what happens when capitalism ends - in the west at least - is that with the withering of the welfare state there is an increasing reliance on pre modern institutions such as the family for welfare... However given the erosion of intermediate social forms by both social democratic state and then neoliberalism austerity etc as charted by the likes of deneen , sometimes discussed in policy literature as capacity for resilience makes it seem that streecks doomerism is a bit optimistic... I've been wondering if institutions like the Catholic church might continue to reproduce itself in some form of reoganising social reproduction on the collapse of civilization you discuss but Im not convinced . There is something that feels therapeutic in the timelessness of mass in a way I don't feel in a long time of leftist activism ....
Well. That’s a nice cheery read to kick off the long weekend.
I wish I had some arguments to make against your case, but what you wrote aligns with a lot of my thoughts recently. I feel like, in most of the world, we’ve built a society that is extremely vulnerable to some not-unlikely events: an EMP or cyberattack or AI malfunction that trashes the power grid and the Internet and leaves most of us quickly losing access to food, water, and livable shelter. I don’t see how these tech gazillionaire preppers are going to do all that much better than the rest of us if that happens. Sure, they’ll have their bunkers, so maybe they outlast the rest of us by months? Maybe years? But will they really have the wherewithal to rebuild the necessary infrastructure for a sustainable supply of food and potable water? Canned goods, MREs, and bottled water will last only so long.
Collapse is structural (in several realms), and thus unavoidable, though the timeline is hazy. The world is huge; it will be very uneven and drawn out.
You touched upon most things, but of course one could go deep into behavioral psychology. I’d probebly mention the collective action problems, too. But yeah a full account of collapse would take a lot more than 10.000 words unless one aims for utmost brevity, in which case one isn’t explaining much.
On a side note, Martin Rees gave me a copy of that book, and I used it as an opener for my series on collapse 🙂 https://gnug315.substack.com/p/part-1-of-5-denial
We better not go extinct. I’m a firm believer that the galaxy is meant to teem with intelligent life one day and that we are meant in part to be progenitors of that. If we die out and leave the galaxy devoid of intelligent life, God is going to smack us in the afterlife for being idiots.
we have only had photographs for a rounding error number of years. the most widespread contemporary document about the boston massacre was a highly inaccurate artist’s depiction. if ai puts fake images and real photos on the same level, then that won’t have really set us back that far.
Ever read The Chrysalids? It terrified me as a kid. Not unlike this essay. ;-)
So Agenda 2030 won’t be fulfilled?
A very solid article.
I think what you're missing is that, say, Israel becomes a religious extremist country with nuclear weapons, and uses them. That's far more likely than a big player like Russia or the US throwing them around. There's also the billionaire psychopath aspect. Currently the nation state is still large and powerful enough to keep them in check, but that's rapidly fading, with both Russia and the USA falling to "strongman" illusions run by billionaires. Will that break down completely once someone as rich as Musk decides to take over an entire (or part of a) country with a robot army? Yes, those thousands of bipedal robots and quadcopter drones are only there to move parcels, but they could also drive a tank, carry a bomb, or punch through a wall.
A relatively small cult, or a rich country taken over by a cult, could bring something like this about, I fear. We would rebuild, though, unless something else were to happen at the same time. But of course, there's climate change and other random disasters, and with the right (wrong) timing...