One of the few things that calms me down in response to the chaos is looking at nature and really observing it.
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."
“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…”
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.
Seeing what "we" need to do to build a better future as described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home reads to me a lot like an offseason blog post by a Chicago Bears fan talking about what "we" need to do to get better next year.
It’s interesting and valuable, imho, to consider that people have always tended to think things are falling apart, and that perhaps now is no different.
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.
On one hand the notion of the world is ending or gonna end is as old as history itself. On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.
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.
Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.
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.
I don't feel like it's AI, but I do get the feeling of reading someone dipping into the bucket of their local version of English slang, and maybe doing some context switching that they cannot handle as adeptly as could be hoped, to the detriment of the article's readability.
I suppose there are probably people out there snorting in disbelief and saying "you're one to talk", but that's how I feel.
“The panic pays and monetizes well - people share it to warn their friends, spread your message, lots of people comment in fear and raise algorithm engagement, and they paralyze thinking they are helpless.” Said the cowboy to the other cowboy as they scared the herd into their fenced yard.
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine" - REM, 1987
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.
Is it just me, or are the amount of hashtags quite jarring in the piece?
>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.
The whole thing reads like a bizarre, vaguely schizotypal manifesto, complete with it's own confusing form eccentricities.
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.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if a well-formatted blog is popular or it's just a single person screaming into the void. We don't have pageview counters anymore.
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.
That seems a little tautological, like "Maybe Unix had directories, but Windows Folders are purely a Microsoft invention."
They're both a symbol-with-label text convention for users, and in each case it designates a topic and mechanism for users of the service to converge-on the topic.
So in other words, people who were watching cartoons 30 years ago now think that the world didn't have multiple simultaneous crises, until they now happen to be adult enough to pay attention/care.
- 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)
That's only one of the misspellings or incorrect words in this fairly short post. There are also numerous grammatical errors. Perhaps it's intentional, to show it wasn't written by AI, but I think more likely it's just sloppy and rushed. (The thinking in the piece seems as sloppy and rushed as the writing.)
Literally full of spelling errors and omitted words and subject verb disagreement and awkward phrasing. To say nothing of the trash logic. Verified human everyone!
One of the few things that calms me down in response to the chaos is looking at nature and really observing it.
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 good, thank you.
“…climate breakdown, growing inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and the weakening of democratic institutions, these are no longer separate problems…”
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.
Seeing what "we" need to do to build a better future as described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home reads to me a lot like an offseason blog post by a Chicago Bears fan talking about what "we" need to do to get better next year.
> described by an author that doesn't appear to have a wife, children or any attachment to a permanent home
No shit, entire generations have been complaining for a while now about how these things are getting harder to obtain.
It’s interesting and valuable, imho, to consider that people have always tended to think things are falling apart, and that perhaps now is no different.
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 is absolutely true.
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.
I personally disagree , humans have for Millenia ruined eco systems, made things go extinct etc.
Fires majorly destructive for example. Humans did a lot of environmental damage with that over the years
On one hand the notion of the world is ending or gonna end is as old as history itself. On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.
We are entering? I feel like we've been there for years.
The term "polycrisis" started getting popular in 2023.
Honestly there are writings from the greeks, romans, enlightment, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s... That read just like this.
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.
The point about our current situation can best be understood with complexity theory.
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.
Isn't this how it always was though? It just feels to the individual it's different probably because our news feeds are all so toxic. The stuff that's happening in the world is bad but the way it's presented and with such significance is way worse.
Sure, the difference was that in the past local crises gave way to events that would normally span out to neighboring countries. The level of interconnectedness, as the article points out, means there's nowhere to go and nowhere that's exempt.
Speaking of the Romans, decline can indeed take hundreds of years to play out.
> 20s 30s
They were heading up towards large catastrophy. In fact.
But what kind of doom did they anticipate in the roaring 20s? I guess Upton Sinclair wasn't very happy, but that's not the same as crises everywhere you turn.
Well yeah but at the same time social specifics exist; Trump doesn't go about things like Caesar because the world is fundamentally different
So negotiations and solutions must be too
Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History
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.
Once in a lifetime events every single year since the 2000s
I don't feel like it's AI, but I do get the feeling of reading someone dipping into the bucket of their local version of English slang, and maybe doing some context switching that they cannot handle as adeptly as could be hoped, to the detriment of the article's readability.
I suppose there are probably people out there snorting in disbelief and saying "you're one to talk", but that's how I feel.
“The panic pays and monetizes well - people share it to warn their friends, spread your message, lots of people comment in fear and raise algorithm engagement, and they paralyze thinking they are helpless.” Said the cowboy to the other cowboy as they scared the herd into their fenced yard.
Looks hugged. https://web.archive.org/web/20261015185509/https://hamishcam...
Not sure what the point of that was?
World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?
The omnicrisis
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine" - REM, 1987
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.
Is it just me, or are the amount of hashtags quite jarring in the piece?
>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.
The whole thing reads like a bizarre, vaguely schizotypal manifesto, complete with it's own confusing form eccentricities.
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.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if a well-formatted blog is popular or it's just a single person screaming into the void. We don't have pageview counters anymore.
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.
Or IRC channels.
You are right that hash symbols were used for IRC channels but I'm almost certain that hashtags were a Twitter invention.
That seems a little tautological, like "Maybe Unix had directories, but Windows Folders are purely a Microsoft invention."
They're both a symbol-with-label text convention for users, and in each case it designates a topic and mechanism for users of the service to converge-on the topic.
I had trouble reading it because they kept drawing my eyes to them, so I stopped.
when i got to the second hashtag, i scanned the following paragraphs, saw it's littered with them, and just hit the back button.
#'s are for signaling root access, and bash comments.
edit: and also IRC channels.
So in other words, people who were watching cartoons 30 years ago now think that the world didn't have multiple simultaneous crises, until they now happen to be adult enough to pay attention/care.
- 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)
1980s had the "Intifada" which is another name for a war in the middle east.
"Then on the left the is a matching fantasy, we romanticism collapse, but it is not automatically progressive."
Should be "romanticise" rather than "romanticism".
That's only one of the misspellings or incorrect words in this fairly short post. There are also numerous grammatical errors. Perhaps it's intentional, to show it wasn't written by AI, but I think more likely it's just sloppy and rushed. (The thinking in the piece seems as sloppy and rushed as the writing.)
Literally full of spelling errors and omitted words and subject verb disagreement and awkward phrasing. To say nothing of the trash logic. Verified human everyone!