We are entering a period of overlapping crises(hamishcampbell.com) |
We are entering a period of overlapping crises(hamishcampbell.com) |
Watch the birds, squirrels, etc and compare their general behavior to that of humans. What I've observed is that unlike us, they're not worried or panicked. They just live. A threat may appear and startle them, but assuming there isn't one, they just carry on. No 'bird news,' or 'bird notifications,' or 'opinions about <other bird> to have at the feeder.' They just flap around and eat the fucking seed.
Humans seem to be obsessed with turning life into an endless cycle of stress and 'critical' moments.
Need I remind everyone: we're floating in what we call 'space' on a giant ball (one of ~billions) protected by a relatively thin atmosphere, hurtling at a thousand miles per hour, convinced of our own brilliance despite barely having left the neighborhood. I think our next evolutionary step, the one that moves us further up the Kardashev Scale, is realizing just how much of our existence is consumed by human-manufactured nonsense and distraction or, "crises."
Very weak opening. These were never separate problems. If the author is just beginning to notice, it doesn’t bode well for what insights they have to share.
No shit, entire generations have been complaining for a while now about how these things are getting harder to obtain.
That said, all societies rise and all appear to eventually fall. It’s equally reasonable to consider that the US/Western Civilization/humanity might actually be nearing a fall.
It's also true that as the scope of power humanity has over itself and its environment, it equally manages to create ever larger crises, and it seems like we truly are reaching the ecological and environmental limits of what the planet's life support systems can give us before breaking down.
Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years
At some point, this view point, and this predicament is just "The Human Condition".[0]
[0] That's not a excuse to not try to fix the broken things around us. But perspective is important.
Complex systems can be interpreted as trajectories in high dimensional spaces. When a complex system is pushed out of equilibrium too far, it "runs up against its constraints", the borders of the space it can operate in.
It follows those towards edges and along those finally into corners (so to speak), reducing the degrees of freedom along the way. "Being cornered" is an accurate visualization of a complex system out of options: you have nowhere to go.
Our society is such a cornered complex system. "Crises" are themselves symptoms of reduced resilience: the system cannot evade them. They compound, eventually overwhelming the coping abilities, leading to catastrophic break down of entire subsystems and further domino effects.
The same observation is correct for our natural environment, whether you look at biodiversity, climate or other pollution-induced stressors.
So no, it's not "the human condition". It's the end-state of a prolonged lack of course-correction.
I suppose there are probably people out there snorting in disbelief and saying "you're one to talk", but that's how I feel.
World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?
The world has always been in overlapping crises, the only difference now is that it's constantly blared into your face by your pocket screen. Ignorance is bliss. Delete the news, buy index funds, and relax.
>But any one with any sense can see there is no #stupidindividualism exit from #climatechaos. There is no technological #dotcons platform that allows us to escape social relationships.
I checked the "hashtags" link and was met with the following: "Hashtags are a critique and a rallying cry to gather round. They are the protest banners of the openweb"
Nothing says protest banner of the "openweb"(?) like a convention invented by Twitter.
I didn't see any comments on this page, nor did the linked Mastodon accounts have much engagement, and that suggests the latter.
Also, both the number of and length of posts started increasing dramatically in 2024, which might just be a strange coincidence.
#'s are for signaling root access, and bash comments.
edit: and also IRC channels.
- 1970s: multiple oil crises, war in the middle east, iranian revolution
- 1980s: latin american debt crisis, soviet-afghan war, ethiopian famine
- 1990s: collapse of USSR, yugoslavian war, bosnian genocide, ethiopian genocide, asian financial crisis
- 2000s: dot-com bubble burst, darfur genocide, african food crisis, global financial crisis (due to US housing bubble burst)
Should be "romanticise" rather than "romanticism".
They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.
So negotiations and solutions must be too
That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.
That's my perspective.
Societal collapse has happened before, many times actually (but usually with great spans of time between them). Western culture doesn't particularly like to speak about it, lest people get the idea, such cataclysm might repeat.
A society doesn't exist after it collapses, so "reporting" on it is usually rather scant and framed from the view of those left to talk about it (often not many).
Consequently, historians struggle with pinpointing the reasons for those collapses. People often had no clue themselves and didn't see it coming. Complexity theory is a rather new development.