What's next?
Trying to collect where all my thoughts are at the moment. I could ELI5 it, I suppose. We’re in the bottom left corner of the map, near (0,0) if you like. We know that a much better life is off to the right or the east (no hidden meaning here, about oriental wisdom), and it would be a better life for most people, comparatively speaking. Those who are currently super successful want to keep going on our traditional path of due north, the top end of the map. This is the path of incremental improvements to the status quo, and apparently if we keep struggling for long enough everyone will be rich. I think we’ve gotten to the point where most people know that’s a lie. It’s more likely if we keep going that way, we’ll all end up dead. But somehow, we aren’t ready to head off to the right-hand side; we’re just not used to an easterly heading. Or are we meant to go west? I mean, the Pet Shop Boys thought that was a good idea.
We’re heading for collapse. If not total, at least a major setback to what we currently label as civilisation. Whether folks want to admit it or not, it’s certainly a mood that’s been hanging around a long time, maybe since the 2008 financial crisis that we don’t seem to be recovering from. We keep waiting for things to get better – the next election, an upswing in economic recovery, another war to end… Progress was something we used to take for granted, or at least that was the narrative from the Boomer generation when I was growing up. Anyone who has seriously studied history would already know that this ontological approach was a lie, and now we have to face it. That’s kinda hard for most people, because it means grieving for a lost future, embracing uncertainty, and sitting with difficult emotions. We’re not good at that. We’re especially not good at facing a bleak future for our children.
So, what about this collapse? It has been called different things, especially by the media that won’t use such an alarmist term, from a climate emergency at it’s simplest, to a poly-crisis, perma-crisis, and so on. One of my MBA professors loved to call it VUCA; that was the closest any of those professors came to admitting we might have to stop worshipping at the alter of capital.
Something about the way we live is coming to an end, and this is linked to failures in the systems and institutions that we think helped get us here. Part of that is our trust in the incrementalist approach in existing socio-political structures that are were meant to keep things on the up and up. Things like standard of living, society, inequality, injustice, and the climate. If we can’t trust that anymore, what’s next?
Coming up in part two… why technology isn’t going to save us.










