The success of any business today is determined by the same criteria as the success of a virus: by how fast it can manage to create more of itself, regardless of the cost to humans or the planet. CEOs are taught that unless they have aggressive plans to expand, their business should have no reason … Continue reading The Future Of The Algorithmic Necrosystem: When Profit Grows A Brain, Where Do Humans Go?
When civilisations fumble in the dark, the risk is not so much that they will lose their way. Rather, the danger is that they will retrace their mistakes - only this time using bigger, more devastating technologies. Each year around May, my town’s not-so-bright mayor decides to spend an exorbitant amount of public money, labour, … Continue reading Breaking The Curse of Sisyphus: Action Bias
When children build castles in the sand, they always like to destroy them in the end. It is a moment of profound psychological catharsis: they are teaching themselves to laugh at loss. But it is also an action of tyrannic control: destruction can be an incredible indulgence. No one is sure how, and why, Nero … Continue reading Why Technobroligarchs Burn Their Own Castles: The Illusion of Control
The most successful oppressive regimes have always hidden behind a colourful theme park of consumerism. Western necrocapitalism / neoliberalism conceals its agenda of genocide and natural destruction behind an endless wall of products, a mesmerizing digital shopfront served to us every day, all day. It is ironic that an existential polycrisis this big can be … Continue reading Consumatronia: When Fascism Collides with Brands and Algorithms
The Narratives of Intent that Lurk Behind the Existential Problem of Overshoot Life on Earth began as a completely random, chemical accident: Initiate. Nucleate. Replicate. Consume. Deplete. Repeat. Die. It is no less than ironic then that, human civilisations have always claimed that they exist “for a reason”: whether it was religion, race supremacy, ecosystem … Continue reading A God for All Intentions, and A Civilisation for All the Wrong Reasons
Humans never learned to genuinely collaborate. They became good at forming tight clans who mobilised their members against other clans, against the planet, and ultimately against all members of their own clan who had refused to “cooperate”. Efficient, outcome-based cooperation always requires a level of top-down control over the clan’s members, and this is why … Continue reading A New Vision on Cooperation: How Our Greatest Strength Became Our Weakness
What if globally declining fertility is not merely a socioeconomic phenomenon but one of the ways by which the ecosystem responds to an overpopulated human species? And what if genocide is yet another one of those ways? Last week I had the distinct honour of being asked to contribute my own commentary to a soon-to-be-published … Continue reading Is Genocide Nature’s Population Regulation?
Where do thoughts go when they die? They end up in our dreams, where they randomly mix with other thoughts, people, places and objects and become actors in bizarre, almost surreal situations. At best, our dreams are the equivalent of “AI slop”: an opportunity for our brain to hallucinate in the safe space of deep sleep. Scientists still … Continue reading When Dreams Leak Into Reality
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
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?
