Thanks for this, Karen. Terrific overview. I’m currently reading The Goliath Curse, by Luke Kemp. It’s an interesting parallel read to yours. Kemp has studied the factors involved in hundreds of societal collapses across continents and millennia. The body count is enormous but they never kill everyone, and sometimes actually benefit those who were previously oppressed. For Kemp (I think) the looming collapse of global human civilisation is now the most dangerous it has ever been precisely because of the global interconnectedness of technology, energy and finance. High-tech bunkers for the super-rich won’t save them for long if the power is down, or there are no food crops, or the scientists developing vaccines are already dead. Unlike the survivors of the Black Death (and many other disasters), most of us enjoying end-stage capitalism are too urbanised and dependent on external food distribution to survive: we couldn’t grow a cabbage or catch and cook a rabbit (or even a rat) to save ourselves - not enough, anyway. But Kemp is endearingly confident that we’d try to help each other as best we could, and the evidence supports that (as opposed to the Hobbes idea of war of all against all). This is all tangential to your argument that there are agents actively encouraging societal collapse - his argument seems to be that it’s a strong probability regardless … happy days.
Accelerationist thinking stops us from learning vital things that will help us survive the polycrisis. I should have pointed that out. We can learn those things! I’m sure we can cooperate at least in small groups to help each other. I experienced this after the earthquake of 2011 and it gave me great hope
Thanks for this, Karen. Terrific overview. I’m currently reading The Goliath Curse, by Luke Kemp. It’s an interesting parallel read to yours. Kemp has studied the factors involved in hundreds of societal collapses across continents and millennia. The body count is enormous but they never kill everyone, and sometimes actually benefit those who were previously oppressed. For Kemp (I think) the looming collapse of global human civilisation is now the most dangerous it has ever been precisely because of the global interconnectedness of technology, energy and finance. High-tech bunkers for the super-rich won’t save them for long if the power is down, or there are no food crops, or the scientists developing vaccines are already dead. Unlike the survivors of the Black Death (and many other disasters), most of us enjoying end-stage capitalism are too urbanised and dependent on external food distribution to survive: we couldn’t grow a cabbage or catch and cook a rabbit (or even a rat) to save ourselves - not enough, anyway. But Kemp is endearingly confident that we’d try to help each other as best we could, and the evidence supports that (as opposed to the Hobbes idea of war of all against all). This is all tangential to your argument that there are agents actively encouraging societal collapse - his argument seems to be that it’s a strong probability regardless … happy days.
Accelerationist thinking stops us from learning vital things that will help us survive the polycrisis. I should have pointed that out. We can learn those things! I’m sure we can cooperate at least in small groups to help each other. I experienced this after the earthquake of 2011 and it gave me great hope