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.
I guess if you take a wide enough lens, the west lives in the civilization founded in Rome. There's no political continuity, but there's a reasonably coherent cultural trajectory going back a few thousand years.
Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?
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.
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.
It's not AI, it's just someone writing that is deep into a particular niche and community and is using much of that language outside that niche without considering their audience probably as much as they should.
“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.
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.
What an unnecessarily privileged take. We have an entire class of people for whom homeownership is not even a dream. We have a fertility crisis. We have a loneliness crisis. Have you been paying attention to anything outside of yourself for the last ten years? Because that's the only way I can imagine someone would make a statement like this.
I noticed a pattern of people incapable of altruism - and apparently can't imagine it exists - weirdly call it "virtue signalling" as that's the best-fitting motivation that exists in their worldview.
Your comment says a lot about how you view things that don't affect you personally, in the vein of "Après moi, le déluge."
“…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.
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."
Indeed, for many small squeaky animals, a predator may kill their offspring, and they will set about making another batch the next day. Consider the lilies of the field, they have no jobs, and would go around naked, if they could move.
Escapism can be a useful tool for managing individual stress levels.
On the level of society, it's a catastrophic maladaptation.
The problem for normal people is to discern between "fearmongering" and honest warnings by competent people who actually know and understand the situation.
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!
No. Humans have been entering this period gradually from the start. It started with them destroying habitats from non-human living beings during ancient times. Ancient humans wars destroyed this planet's ecosystem. Now, we've got unhinged capitalism and greedy brats that demand too much on a planet with limited resources. A war economy is not sustainable in the long run, either. Without humans, this planet would go back to having life thrive a lot more. Humans are the only ones ruining this planet. Other species would be fine without humans existing.
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.
Many of our current crises are consciously created. I was about to say artificially created, but that would include mistakes. We have people who pay large amounts of money to cause disruption and instability, not just Putin supporters but billionaires. And they design some of these crises with a prepared solution that hands them more influence.
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)
"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.
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.
I guess if you take a wide enough lens, the west lives in the civilization founded in Rome. There's no political continuity, but there's a reasonably coherent cultural trajectory going back a few thousand years.
Do we think that there is going to be a major break from that?
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.
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.
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.
>On the other, the complexity of everything and the amount of technical capability an individual or small group can wield has never been higher.
This, too, has basically always been true at every point in time across history.
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.
It's not AI, it's just someone writing that is deep into a particular niche and community and is using much of that language outside that niche without considering their audience probably as much as they should.
Once in a lifetime events every single year since the 2000s
“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.
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.
What an unnecessarily privileged take. We have an entire class of people for whom homeownership is not even a dream. We have a fertility crisis. We have a loneliness crisis. Have you been paying attention to anything outside of yourself for the last ten years? Because that's the only way I can imagine someone would make a statement like this.
I noticed a pattern of people incapable of altruism - and apparently can't imagine it exists - weirdly call it "virtue signalling" as that's the best-fitting motivation that exists in their worldview.
Your comment says a lot about how you view things that don't affect you personally, in the vein of "Après moi, le déluge."
> 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.
“…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.
Looks hugged. https://web.archive.org/web/20261015185509/https://hamishcam...
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."
Indeed, for many small squeaky animals, a predator may kill their offspring, and they will set about making another batch the next day. Consider the lilies of the field, they have no jobs, and would go around naked, if they could move.
Escapism can be a useful tool for managing individual stress levels.
On the level of society, it's a catastrophic maladaptation.
The problem for normal people is to discern between "fearmongering" and honest warnings by competent people who actually know and understand the situation.
Very good, thank you.
Not sure what the point of that was?
World is on fire so join whatever the hell Open Media Network is?
"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!
No. Humans have been entering this period gradually from the start. It started with them destroying habitats from non-human living beings during ancient times. Ancient humans wars destroyed this planet's ecosystem. Now, we've got unhinged capitalism and greedy brats that demand too much on a planet with limited resources. A war economy is not sustainable in the long run, either. Without humans, this planet would go back to having life thrive a lot more. Humans are the only ones ruining this planet. Other species would be fine without humans existing.
The omnicrisis
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.
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.
I had trouble reading it because they kept drawing my eyes to them, so I stopped.
well based on the newest data you won't have to worry about anything else after 2050
https://tbsky.app/profile/weatherprof.bsky.social/post/3mxvy...
Many of our current crises are consciously created. I was about to say artificially created, but that would include mistakes. We have people who pay large amounts of money to cause disruption and instability, not just Putin supporters but billionaires. And they design some of these crises with a prepared solution that hands them more influence.
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.
"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.