An Introduction to the Metacrisis

Also catalogued elsewhere

Brief (compared to his usual 3hr marathons) analysis and provocations from the founder of the Consilience Project “We are at the end of history…what would it take to turn the entire arc of humanity?”

Notes are a poorly auto-transcribed Youtube highlighting

respect deeply and who are saying some of the most important things that can be said and are brilliant educators and I was feeling uh I was feeling the sense of the recognition that it probably doesn’t matter at all that most everybody will leave and probably continue working the jobs that they work doing mostly the same types of

things and they will remember what happened like okay we’re destroying the atmosphere we’re boiling the oceans we’re killing all the other species we’re doing it at the cost of colonialism we’re on the way towards Extinction and that will last in people’s minds till they scroll for a minute until a bunch of messages come in and until the bills need paid at most and I’m thinking about

they quoted German phrases that translated to something like officers orders I didn’t have a choice

eople don’t have an intuition for how fast it goes from here

I feel an obligation to have more people understand more of the situation they find themselves in and hopefully care more deeply

so people aren’t reductively focused on climate or social justice or whatever one issue they were coming from but recognizing there are many different critical issues facing the world and that they’re interconnected and that there are Cascades from one to the other and they need considered together which is unbelievably important

it’s not just there’s a lot of different crises and that they’re moving towards Global catastrophic risks but that they have underlying dynamics that give rise to them that have to be addressed

Tags: sm/metacrisis

this is totally nuclear weapons level catastrophic capability but unlike nuclear you just have to have an information packet to be able to use it the knowledge of how to do that travels the speed of light on the internet radically decentralized can’t be limited to G8

nd yet from the economic perspective of what um every speaker today was talking about exponential curve goes up software seems like the answer to planetary boundaries

the radical enablement of the distribution of human purposes as they exist today super problematic

how do we regulate that type of AI and that type of synthetic biology that has nuclear level catastrophic capabilities but that non-state actors can get

he’s like Daniel everything in DC is rotating doors and I’m like I know that’s why we’re going to go extinct

you’re being so unrealistic you’re pretending a biosphere can continue to exist and the issue is that he was grounded in the reality of human history as it has been so far and I was trying to ground in physics and biology

we don’t get to change those in the same ways and the two aren’t compatible

I have to be unrealistic to history as it has been so far if I want to be able to think about how to make a human technological civilization compatible with the biosphere and itself and its own continuity

I do believe we’re at the end of History like eminently in the lifetimes of everyone in this room or at the end of History

we’re at the end of a human civilization defined by the major defining characteristics that what we call written human history

the thing that has been more successfully dominant extracted more grown its population more increased its violence capability wins and that thing with exponential Tech at planetary boundaries self-terminates

either we’re at the end of our species or we’re at the end of our species being defined by those parameters

it’s the complicity of the week with the wicked that allows the evils of the world to happen most of the Nazis were not Hitler but Hitler couldn’t have done without a lot of people who obeyed

most of us are not the people that make the choice to make up reasons for Wars that are false flag for truly economic and geopolitical reasons but we will still not get in the way of that thing happening

here are a small number of people who are motivated by power exclusively pretty exclusively and then there’s most everyone else who just needs to pay the bills and not rock the boat too much and wants to feel like they will do good things within the

I want people to think about what it would take to turn the entire Arc of humanity factoring what is currently driving it and that everything else that you could do doesn’t matter at all because the end of the possibility space of all meaningful human activities is eminent if we don’t do tha

Tags: sm/metacrisis

markets and War co-evolutionary structures they’re both structures of how to grow and Empower populations and rival risk conflict with each other

you can think about what we call War as kinetic Warfare com zero-sum type competition using bombs and guns and stuff and you can think about what we call economics as economic Warfare political Warfare diplomatic Warfare narrative Warfare

till the Industrial Revolution right until until the Industrial Revolution we didn’t have the type of tech that could destroy the biosphere

how do we have the superpowers not war because throughout all of history there have no not been long periods of Peace where the superpowers don’t War because because the superpowers are run by power oriented people

who want more stuff and they get more stuff by taking other people’s stuff

so the answer was let’s connect the whole global system and there were some Brilliance to this through globalization so that we don’t want to bomb each other because we’re bombing our own Supply chains

you have to think about this when you start thinking about localization because if you make things more local and we’re not interdependent on each other we have less disincentive to bomb them

Tags: climate/localism

degrowth there are a lot of people who are like no I would rather not have less I’d rather there be less of other people’s people

one of the challenges to degrowth is that that has been the only thing that’s prevent the the growth equation has been the only thing with these kinds of uh people and patterns that have prevented World War III kinetically

Tags: econ/degrowth

why is it that no literally no country no company in the world wants climate change no nobody is like climate change is the world that I want but we’re orienting to it so fast and we can’t stop and nobody can stop it because we all want stuff that requires energy that is driving that thing and nobody wants species Extinction and nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons but we’re all racing to build them

what the is actually driving the world to a world that literally nobody wants

upon products so all of it has a