The end of paper?
While the world continues to consume paper in ever greater amounts, the idea that we can preserve all our knowledge electronically is catching hold. Is that really a good idea?
Society featured
A Compelling Theory to Explain a Key Trait of Modern Humans
Paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean has developed a comprehensive explanation based on a synthesis of research and archaeological evidence for what propelled H. sapiens to leave Africa about 70,000 years ago and colonize every part of the world, replacing other existing hominin populations. Key to the process is “hyperprosociality,” by which Marean means the ability to cooperate with people who are not relatives.
On the Ecological Tyranny of Tech and Repairing Our ‘Just Tech’ Age
What can be said about globalized tech when our earthly existence is consumed by viral uncertainties, urgent climatic shifts, and perpetual socio-environmental precarity and violence?
A Lifetime Ago
By putting it in terms of human lifetimes, which we can understand intuitively from personal experience, we can better appreciate how brief this transient behavior is.
2023 In Eight Points: Meditating On Our Planetary Moment
I feel that these are the years that I — and perhaps we — have been born for. These are the moments where we need to show up. Yes, it’s not easy, and that’s exactly why we chose to be here — to be here together.
The Human Predicament in 22 Clips
Following up last week’s Frankly outlining systemic themes for 2024, this year-end special is a reflection on 2023 with a series of clips, which together highlight the increasingly challenging world of which we are a part.
Text substitutions
Over the years, I have developed a number of automatic text substitutions for phrases/platitudes I hear people utter. The filter works so that what I hear is converted into my internal version before processing further.
Ideas for Living through the Great Unraveling
This year Post Carbon Institute has leaned into the “Great Unraveling” as a label for framing what’s happening in modern society and the natural world. In short, the Great Unraveling represents humanity’s comeuppance from overshoot, a time when debts are coming due and the promise of everlasting growth is fading.
Critical Thinking: Vital For Creating Sustainable And Democratic Societies
I believe that all of us, from those involved in planning an ecological transition to everyday people who will decide whether it moves forward or not, must cultivate our ability to think critically. And not just as a tool we use sometimes, but as a core part of our identity.
A Story of Mice (and Men)
Modernity is not time-tested, evolution-approved. It will fail. The question becomes: how do we respond to the failure?
Cultural Obsolescence & Ontological Revolution (Part 3)
Our entire cultural pattern of making sense of things is rooted in the sense of our being separate from one another, isolated and alone.
I believe we’re going to have to address the very root of the metacrisis where it emerges from the ground of its pseudo-being.
Holding the Fire: Episode 12. The End of the World with Dilafruz Khonikboyeva
Following another summer of record heat waves, droughts, floods, and wildfires across vast swaths of the planet, the injuries done to the planet by the Industrial Growth Society have never been so conclusive. As I grapple with collapse, I wanted to speak with Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, an Indigenous Pamiri from Tajikistan, who has lived through it and come out the other side.