One of the biggest self-delusions of civilisation was the belief that it could one day become a self-contained, self-sustained, and self-sufficient environment for humans to inhabit. Human cities were designed to cater to the optical illusion of abundance of food and shelter, when in fact, they represent the most precarious and fragile environments to live in: … Continue reading The Fishbowl Effect
In a recent YouTube interview about my new book The Biology of Collapse, I was asked what timetable I gave for “The Collapse”, as if I was some type of Nostradamus-type guru who can predict the day when the sky will fall. I’m afraid that collapse does not work that way. It is neither a sci-fi moment nor … Continue reading Economic Comorbidities: Can A Single Cat Scratch Lead to The End of Civilisation?
Like any substance abuse victim that has reached rock bottom, human civilisation has become utterly ignorant of the pain it is inflicting upon itself. With every addictive personality there comes a point where the addiction takes over, replacing the actual person it infected: the subject is demoted into a host object as the drug becomes an internal parasite … Continue reading 8 Billion Junkies: The Addiction That Is Killing Civilisation
In Greece there is a proverb that goes: “the river of history never flows backwards” - meaning, what’s done is done, it can never be undone. The proverb is an apt metaphor for the geological history of the planet as the climate crisis unfolds, but also a tragic irony given that it is a literal description … Continue reading The Five Cursed Rivers of Babylon, and The Five Horsemen of The Apocalypse
The world keeps going about its daily business like a zombie pretending it hasn’t burned out yet. But as it whispers to itself through the flames “this is fine”, the corrosive fumes of an industrial civilisation undergoing autophagy become potent hallucinogens. “This is fine” soon becomes “this is normal”. Whoever thought, one could get so tripped out on … Continue reading The Long Flatline: In a Selfish Society, do “Systems” Actually Exist?
Human civilisations have been jumping off cliffs since the beginning of their existence: we are the most risk-taking species to have lived on Earth, equipped with the most ambitious, careless, imaginative thought processes that evolved as successful survival strategies. We don’t simply take risks: we devise them in our corporate board rooms, execute them in our … Continue reading Risk Kills. Will We Ever Learn?
I was once asked during an interview: “how do you reform a broken system?” - in other words, how do you change everything? The timeless popularity of this naïve question is evident in the scores of book titles available that promise to literally change the world in 10 steps. There is a reason why I’ve never written … Continue reading The One Attribute of All Systems Everyone Underestimates
When back in July the Washington Monument’s Reflective Pool turned green right before national Independence Day celebrations, the phenomenon attracted little media attention – and rightly so, in the context of the wars, heat domes, dictatorship shenanigans and genocides that have now become a regular occurrence in late-stage industrial civilisation (early-stage post-Anthropocene). It was only … Continue reading From The Edge of The Deep Green Sea of Stupidity
Humans are the only organism reliant on technologies that are not integrated into its DNA. If you take an insect or animal and move it to a new habitat far away, it will always have a much higher chance of survival than a human. This is because all of its technologies are in-built: all of … Continue reading The Technophyte
The reason why society appears to be dissolving is that human civilization is no longer run by humans, but by profit and algorithms: entities that lack both ethics and a conscience. Within this new matrix, all biological life and even the concept of existence itself have little value beyond the negligible price they can command as commodities within the necrosupermarket.
George Tsakraklides 