Image by Markus Spiske.
I am in Port Orchard, Washington, with my wife, Shelly, staying at The Comfort Inn all the way across The Generic States of America, where collective suicide has been dressed in a happy face. Humanity, under the auspices of global capitalism, tap dances its way to extinction. The end of the biosphere is being televised on FOX News in the breakfast area to the accompaniment of three varieties of glyphosate-infused cereal. Washington, the one-time “Evergreen State,” is being reimagined as the “Smoldering Ash State” right on FOX News. Wildfires rage in Spokane we learn with a graphic illustration of a skeletal house photo, and not just Spokane but some place called Kaiser Canyon, and somewhere else named Sinlahekin, and also in Modrite and throw in The Cascade Range. It is FOX News so we don’t have clips of climate experts, or even the bare mention of climate, at least I don’t hear it said while absent-mindedly gazing out of the window across Puget Sound where the National Anthem blares in brassy resonance from a Naval Base featuring battleships at rest in calm, cold waters. Perhaps someone mutters the word climate as a formal nod to the pretense of journalism. As a responsible caveat, I might have missed it while spreading Jiff on white bread. Yes, vegan diets have low points too.
We are in Port Orchard to celebrate the first birthday of our only grandchild, Björn. I am obliged to perform a few cerebral-cortex backflips to avoid thinking about the future being foretold in shadowy skies. It is a particular, narrow tightrope that our grandchildren will cross, mottled with the empty seduction of competition, the wrong turns of addiction and greed, and the possibility/certainty of societal/environmental collapse. We are the grandparents of armageddon, displaying a cell-phone video proudly to absolute strangers at the hotel. Our grandson, a bright, smiling innocent child, miraculously befriends a squirrel and pets her gently, and we have it on video.
A flight across the nation uncovers a very simple revelation – the stars each evening occupy the same sky in Northampton, Massachusetts and Port Orchard. There is Venus, there is The Big Dipper, and a small matter of over 3K miles on Jet Blue cannot change the frantic highways and generic institutions that define every geographic point of our tedious nation. The same Denny’s, the same McDonald’s, the same Taco Bell, the same Home Depot pass by like telephone poles whizzing past a train car. The country has been tamed by monstrous, unnatural forces that mock one’s sense of adventure. There is natural beauty: Mt. Rainier across the Puget Sound, stands of Douglas Fir, taller than our local hemlocks, and blackberries in ridiculous abundance. One is left suspended between despair and wonder.
But the homogenized imprint, the sameness of a McDonald’s colonizing town after town, in the fashion of a viral pandemic that duplicates itself infinitely at the cost of the host, tells you that the organism we call planet earth is churning agonizingly, mouth agape, spewing pieces of red spittle – the flames raking Spokane. We don’t easily, the huddled, befuddled masses yearning to breathe at all, connect MacDonald’s rapacious plundering of Brazilian rain forest for burger grazing to the smoky skies delaying our Flight at Sea-Tac Airport. And it is not enough for McDonald’s to merely burn down the planet and coat our veins with hardened sludge, if we wander on to their corporate web page we our whacked across the cranium with this:
“The philosophy is to advocate for policies that we believe are relevant to our operations, can help improve the lives of our people and the communities where we operate, and also help protect the natural resources on which our System depends. Decisions are made at every level of government that can have a significant impact on our operating ecosystem. We believe it is important to understand key policy areas that impact our business and work with policy makers and other organizations to express our views.”
Every corporation has a “philosophy” and in Port Orchard, like everywhere else in America, all the roads converge on Colonel Sanders, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut – subsidiaries of the world’s biggest restaurant conglomerate (Yum Foods) whose spin-masters tell us:
“Everything we do ladders up to our Recipe for Good Growth grounded in the idea that our growth and brand relevance will only endure if our brands are accessible, sustainable and reflective of evolving employee, franchisee and stakeholder needs.”
Even Chevron has ideals and a website for public bullshit:
“Our purpose. Chevron’s purpose is to provide affordable, reliable, ever-cleaner energy. To enable human progress. That is at the heart of who we are.”
I am uncertain who is paid to create corporate slogans, and what sort of gullible subjects consume them, but as I contemplate the smoky skies drifting in from Spokane and look at the innocent eyes of my one-year-old grandson, I am led down the path of speculation. We enter the second quarter of the 21st century, with an unprecedented relationship to the future – we are on the cusp of a moment that cannot maintain itself for long. I was born in a naive and foolish time, an era of collective, self-congratulatory triumph – however illusory. The great war was won and people procreated in a dull frenzy. The path ahead opened broadly, brightly (so we thought) – no longer. The road forks abruptly, tensely, shifting at a particularly opaque juncture.
Our personal longings, fears and dreams find expression in some of the best leftist writing, for we all live precariously at the juncture where collapse and (the hope of) renewal vie. Such brilliant writers as Balázs Matics and Jeremy Lent give voice to each. I believe that all aging people find relief in their approaching deaths, just under the wire of something stark, inevitable and ferociously ominous in its leisurely but certain approach. But for our children, grandchildren or for humanity in the abstract, one has to fight back against the arsonists and psychopaths who embody capitalism’s lust for even a pyric victory.
Balázs Matics, a Hungarian scholar, writes a blog entitled “The Honest Sorcerer,” that traces our dire trajectory with such unflinching courage that one is utterly remiss to ignore his political/environmental/cultural forecasts. His eyes are so far ahead of the standard media that the only excuse for overlooking his work is that you haven’t discovered him yet. That is no longer an option for my readers. Here is The Honest Sorcerer dispensing plain truth in a new piece called, Civilizations Fall When This Mechanism Activates:
“Yet, instead of admitting that we’ve reached a dead-end and planning for the long descent ahead, the ruling strata of our civilization (not just in Europe but everywhere else, too) still keeps pretending that drilling more wells or building a few windmills and batteries could solve the issue… In the meantime great powers have merrily engaged in wars already over who controls the last remaining resources and trade routes on Earth. It increasingly looks like that some ‘elite’ circles have finally came to a conclusion: there is already not enough to go around. Well, by thinking and doing so they really make sure that there won’t be enough to go around—and that we will get there much sooner than it otherwise would have to be the case.”
Matics has a particular focus on the implacable/perseverative impulses animating capitalism – the fetishization of technology in the face of diminishing returns, as resources are both depleted and stacked on top of one another in a desperate maneuver to increase growth and profits while the earth stubbornly yields diminishing returns. Few writers provide a more graphic critique of renewable energy which clearly does not constitute a new paradigm, but continues the exhaustive and futile quest to drive production – reflexively and unsustainably. Coal, gas and diesel drive the process of renewable extraction, and renewables don’t replace fossil fuels, but are simply stacked (in the fashion of geological strata) as impulsive, undifferentiated means of subduing the planet.
Invoking historian Ronald Wright’s concept of “Progress Traps,” Matics illustrates how the overconsumption and collapse of ancient civilizations, beguiled by the illusion of limitless abundance, yet destroyed by the exhaustion of precious resources succumbing to “overshoot,” encapsulates the historical roots of collapsing modernity. The Honest Sorcerer concludes his latest blog post with an optimistic, if vague thought:
“We need a new paradigm built around robustness, reciprocity and regeneration, giving back as much as possible to the living world on which our survival ultimately depends, so that it can take care of us and our descendants. Extracting one-time reserves of minerals (metal ores and fossil fuels alike), destroying the soil with industrial agriculture or polluting the atmosphere and rivers will not cut it. Only reciprocity can. Restoring biodiversity—even if its a small region you live in—or implementing the principles of agro-ecology, building low-tech but robust machines and tools from the scraps left behind by this civilization, and cooperating with neighbors is the only way through. I’m not suggesting that success is guaranteed, but doing more of the same will surely see us fail. Again.”
Unlike Matics, Jeremy Lent imagines a full throated triumph for justice and equality emerging out of the worst impulse of capitalism (in the second of a 3 pt. series entitled, AI and Ecocivilization: The Unexpected Opportunity) – the creation and expansion of Artificial Intelligence. Lent sees AI as a tool for extraction and exploitation, but, as the ultimate act of “enclosure,” stealing all of humanity’s intellectual property for profit, he envisions an unprecedented explosion of revolutionary public fervor:
“At this pivotal moment, we are now facing an enclosure of far greater scale. The large language models reshaping our economy were trained on the accumulated knowledge, creativity, and expressions of humanity—books, art, conversations, code, scientific discoveries, and cultural traditions built up over countless generations. These treasures represent the cumulative ingenuity and industriousness of our ancestors going back to earliest times: the commonwealth of our shared human legacy. Now, captured by a handful of corporations, this immeasurable inheritance is being repackaged as a proprietary product and sold back to us, while the value it generates is funneled up the wealth pump to a tiny elite.
This is the result of what I’ve referred to as Windigo’s Law, operating now at unprecedented scale. But the very magnitude of this brazen theft opens up an opportunity. Once people recognize that AI is built on the theft of our commonwealth, an inescapable moral conclusion is that the wealth it generates rightly belongs, in significant part, to all of us. This calls for a massive response based on a foundation of collective moral outrage.”
I note that Lent departs from Matics on the matter of technology, seeing it as an endeavor possessing moral worth determined by the forces that control it. Lent goes on to conceptualize a future society in which AI is not only owned as a common good, but uniquely “democratized” with a controlling political structure comprised of ordinary citizens chosen via “Sortition” (random lot).
The publicly owned and equitably distributed spoils of AI would require the uniquely democratic structure of Citizens’ Assemblies as a matter of protection from future whims to assert enclosure. According to Lent:
“Its sortition structure would shield it from both corporate lobbying and political pressure—and, unlike a conventional regulatory agency, it would carry a direct mandate from the public it serves.”
But Lent stops short in this essay of broadening the idea of a publicly controlled vision of AI to the more general issue of democracy and power.
He calls for mass participation:
“The future is not a spectator sport: it is something we all co-create as part of the interconnected web of our collective thoughts, ideas, and actions” but does not imagine (in this particular piece) a system of governance in which all decision making resides within the body of the citizenry. Nor does he discuss the larger question of the purpose of AI beyond simply generating shared wealth. As it now stands, AI functions as a profit driven mechanism to inspire enormous investments with the prospect of replacing human labor with technology. But labor, human or robotic, under capitalism has been a tool for extraction, imperialism and war. If AI is not merely a means of profit (shared or hoarded) but a tool for human, animal and environmental well-being then it will need to be strictly regulated and limited in scope. AI is enormously polluting to the environment with huge expenditures of both water and fossil fuels. Perhaps, its only immediate use ought to be for the planning and implementation of the critical “Degrowth Economy”
These issues are uniquely within Jeremy Lent’s “wheelhouse,” and I look forward to his expanded thoughts on AI (as an aspect of a just society) in the upcoming third part of his series.
Such an economy would require a radical transition from systems of enclosure to wholesale expansion of “The Commons” – public transportation rather than private vehicles, public swimming pools and exercise facilities rather than privately owned equipment, local farming cooperatives rather than industrial agriculture, and an overall shift from a philosophy of individual ambition to mutual cooperation. Jeremy Lent has expanded on the subject of human possibility and environmental harmony with singular depth. He is a storyteller from a world that has only been realized in brief, local instances, but now, Lent argues, we must see past our habitual, limited horizons.
The dichotomy of “collapse and renewal” demands a profound narrative shift. The biggest question to me involves the transition from capitalist brainwashing to environmental class consciousness, a shift from pseudo-electoral democracy to “Direct Democracy,” and, critically, mass access to the narrative of collapse. As the collapse looms and accelerates, ordinary people must have a coherent story that describes our collective predicament. This TED Talk by Bill McKibben illustrates how even the most respected voices in the “environmental movement” have been coopted by capital (most likely, unknowingly – I do not question McKibben’s idealistic intentions). McKibben’s talk makes it seem like the renewable energy industry is poised to save us – all we have to do is follow the market trends making solar cheaper than coal. That is not, as The Honest Sorcerer instructs us, how capitalism operates. Bill McKibben and The Honest Sorcerer are quietly locked in a narrative struggle to create a story able to mobilize the working class. Sadly, McKibben has a larger platform than Balázs Matics (The Honest Sorcerer).
The power to organize resistance and transform society pivots around our collective ability to tell an honest story. In the context of capitalist control, this will require a touch of magic. As such, The Honest Sorcerer has chosen an apt name.
We leave Port Orchard gazing at smoky skies and arrive in Boston beneath clouds of soot. My grandson will be roughly my age when this century runs out. There is no reason to suspect that the climate will not heat to the point of mass extinction by that iconic turn of the century. There are gathering voices like those of Jeremy Lent and Balázs Matics that will inspire people, or not. As grandparents, we are obliged to help tell the needed, truthful story.
This piece first appeared on Phil’s Substack.
