In my first reading of your rendition of Polak’s game, I think I misunderstood you in a significant way: it seems like you meant the second axis to be a measure of the extent of humankind’s agency wrt climate change, and I understood you to be asking for a measure of my own personal agency.
Therefore I was surprised to hear you say that you don’t perceive anyone in the bad-outcome low-agency quadrant; in my framing, that describes me, and also (I suspect) a lot of people I know. I absolutely believe that some people have a great deal of ability to influence our collective future, but I don’t think I am one of those people, and I have very little confidence in them to make decisions that benefit us collectively, or in my ability to influence their decision-making.
That's good to know. What I hoped to suggest was that there may be many people such as yourself, but that they do not comprise an articulate constituency. Who speaks for them? Who advocates for defeat? In any case, if there are many such people, then my task should be to ask them what would need to happen to enable them to walk into one of the other quadrants?
“advocates for defeat” seems a bit harsh, and also is not at all how I see my position. I’d say, instead, that it’s very difficult for me to be enthusiastic about ideas of a better future if those ideas don’t include a plausible story about bypassing or overcoming elite resistance to change.
Or, to put it another way: it’s a lot easier for me to handwave over a solution that depends on technological advances that haven’t happened yet, because I believe that powerful interests in our society are incentivized to invest in technological advancements, and so I expect that those advancements will eventually happen. It’s a lot harder for me to handwave over a solution that depends on oligarchs acting against their own perceived benefit.
So to answer your question about what it would take to get me to walk into a different quadrant: the answer is “offer a plausible theory of change”. Degrowth, for example, is a great idea, and I love it, but there are very wealthy people in the world who don’t want degrowth, and they have armed forces at their command. How to deal with that problem is not an implementation detail to be figured out later, it’s a fundamental obstacle.
The late comedian George Carlin's "The Planet is Fine" monolog from 1992 represents the closest I've seen to a Negative Future-No Agency view of ecological crisis. He takes the long view that humans are at best a temporary annoyance to the planet and that it will heal over time any damage we do. The reason I classify this as Negative Future is that he rightly points out that we are the ones at threat from our activity over the long term. Basically this is the cynic's response to Accelerationism. Here's a link if you are interested. https://youtu.be/Kmo8sh77G6Y
His bit about the planet & plastic is the most absurd & funny invocation of the Gaia hypothesis I've ever heard
Indeed we do have agency over destruction of habitats, landscapes, water, and by impact, biodiversity. The climate is influenced by huge variables in which we are being blamed, but we have very little agency for. Solar cycles and long-duration maxima radiation, ocean warming that has noting to do with atmosphere, unexplained shifts of jet streams and earth angle of rotation, and so on. I'm not an earth system expert, but then neither are climate "modelers" oceanographers. The cures may be worse than the disease - we have to fix the things we can fix, which are primarily land and water.
I noticed that as changing weather patterns became harder to ignore (blizzards in texas and whatnot) that some people who had previously been deniers switched to saying it was inevitable. Like, all at once. I think the denialism industry changed gears.
Yes. It will be set of fallback positions, each with a "but I always thought this way!" ending with them insisting they were concerned about it all along but that scientists/liberals/journalists etc. prevented them speaking/acting. (At least for some people. Many literally never thought about it before now.)
Karl, just a short note for now and maybe to follow up with some papers. I have a long-form being published in She Ji next issue with Christakis titled: Limits to Modeling: Design Lessons from the World Problematique. Its the start of a scholarly series that argues a different frame of definitions and assumptions, by going back in time to the future as perceived by different futurists of the 60s-70s.
I start to pick apart the ideas that our conception of "crisis and climate catastrophe" are based on computer modeling, and that modeling is biased and deceptive. Not that there isn't "changes to climate' but the causes, effect systems, and adaptation strategies are woefully distorted. Why? Well. money and the Green New Deal, for one. Crisis capitalism sells. Complex interactions between multiple continuous critical problems, well - even the Club of Rome didn't understand Özbekhan. That's why we live in Malthusia. And the model being presented here assumes a Malthusian future.
Not everyone will agree with me, but the paper is a first and serious step.
The other position is - assuming we DO have agency, what's the best unit of change? Nobody feels solidarity with the nation-state any more, except countries under siege by the West, who are brought together in response to the attacks. But the West? US, UK, Canada, Europe? Have never been more fragmented since - well the US Civil War. Here's where I'll suggest that "conservative" futurists, who are realists, tend to quietly go about using good social science and developing new forecasting systems. These include Neil Howe (Fourth Turning), Peter Turchin (Cliodynamics), and many careful historians of the past (Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin). They don't "identify" as R's or cons, but the approach is realist and evidence-based. This school of thought has strong relationships to systems thinking models as well. So the historical cycles modelers are not computer modeling climate crisis modelers - their predictions have been very good actually. We just don't like to hear them. Our clients would hate these forecasts.
So an Oakeshott quote from Wiki on what conservative means? This is a mean put-down. Maybe in the Reagan era. But today you have a whole new age of younger, smarter populists and actual-democratic thinkers like Mike Shellenberger, you have the Elon Musk & Super Abundance (which is clearly postmodern conservative, civilization preserving), and there is Archeo Futurism, Julius Evola is bigger than he ever was when alive. As a lifelong peace activist, normally lefty-Dem - until they went all-in for the NATO war machine - I started watching how the young right became firmly anti-interventionist. I think a main point is, if we don't start getting along in our own countries, there might not be countries in the future. Nukes are worse than any climate change.
And if we don't have social solidarity why would you even care about any kind of global environment that you cannot see, travel to, live in, or ever experience? We have all heard too much preaching and too many media lies. Smart people want honest science and good futures thinking that makes sense of massive complexity, not yet another crisis story from entrenched elites.
In my first reading of your rendition of Polak’s game, I think I misunderstood you in a significant way: it seems like you meant the second axis to be a measure of the extent of humankind’s agency wrt climate change, and I understood you to be asking for a measure of my own personal agency.
Therefore I was surprised to hear you say that you don’t perceive anyone in the bad-outcome low-agency quadrant; in my framing, that describes me, and also (I suspect) a lot of people I know. I absolutely believe that some people have a great deal of ability to influence our collective future, but I don’t think I am one of those people, and I have very little confidence in them to make decisions that benefit us collectively, or in my ability to influence their decision-making.
That's good to know. What I hoped to suggest was that there may be many people such as yourself, but that they do not comprise an articulate constituency. Who speaks for them? Who advocates for defeat? In any case, if there are many such people, then my task should be to ask them what would need to happen to enable them to walk into one of the other quadrants?
“advocates for defeat” seems a bit harsh, and also is not at all how I see my position. I’d say, instead, that it’s very difficult for me to be enthusiastic about ideas of a better future if those ideas don’t include a plausible story about bypassing or overcoming elite resistance to change.
Or, to put it another way: it’s a lot easier for me to handwave over a solution that depends on technological advances that haven’t happened yet, because I believe that powerful interests in our society are incentivized to invest in technological advancements, and so I expect that those advancements will eventually happen. It’s a lot harder for me to handwave over a solution that depends on oligarchs acting against their own perceived benefit.
So to answer your question about what it would take to get me to walk into a different quadrant: the answer is “offer a plausible theory of change”. Degrowth, for example, is a great idea, and I love it, but there are very wealthy people in the world who don’t want degrowth, and they have armed forces at their command. How to deal with that problem is not an implementation detail to be figured out later, it’s a fundamental obstacle.
The late comedian George Carlin's "The Planet is Fine" monolog from 1992 represents the closest I've seen to a Negative Future-No Agency view of ecological crisis. He takes the long view that humans are at best a temporary annoyance to the planet and that it will heal over time any damage we do. The reason I classify this as Negative Future is that he rightly points out that we are the ones at threat from our activity over the long term. Basically this is the cynic's response to Accelerationism. Here's a link if you are interested. https://youtu.be/Kmo8sh77G6Y
His bit about the planet & plastic is the most absurd & funny invocation of the Gaia hypothesis I've ever heard
Indeed we do have agency over destruction of habitats, landscapes, water, and by impact, biodiversity. The climate is influenced by huge variables in which we are being blamed, but we have very little agency for. Solar cycles and long-duration maxima radiation, ocean warming that has noting to do with atmosphere, unexplained shifts of jet streams and earth angle of rotation, and so on. I'm not an earth system expert, but then neither are climate "modelers" oceanographers. The cures may be worse than the disease - we have to fix the things we can fix, which are primarily land and water.
I noticed that as changing weather patterns became harder to ignore (blizzards in texas and whatnot) that some people who had previously been deniers switched to saying it was inevitable. Like, all at once. I think the denialism industry changed gears.
Yes. It will be set of fallback positions, each with a "but I always thought this way!" ending with them insisting they were concerned about it all along but that scientists/liberals/journalists etc. prevented them speaking/acting. (At least for some people. Many literally never thought about it before now.)
Karl, just a short note for now and maybe to follow up with some papers. I have a long-form being published in She Ji next issue with Christakis titled: Limits to Modeling: Design Lessons from the World Problematique. Its the start of a scholarly series that argues a different frame of definitions and assumptions, by going back in time to the future as perceived by different futurists of the 60s-70s.
I start to pick apart the ideas that our conception of "crisis and climate catastrophe" are based on computer modeling, and that modeling is biased and deceptive. Not that there isn't "changes to climate' but the causes, effect systems, and adaptation strategies are woefully distorted. Why? Well. money and the Green New Deal, for one. Crisis capitalism sells. Complex interactions between multiple continuous critical problems, well - even the Club of Rome didn't understand Özbekhan. That's why we live in Malthusia. And the model being presented here assumes a Malthusian future.
Not everyone will agree with me, but the paper is a first and serious step.
The other position is - assuming we DO have agency, what's the best unit of change? Nobody feels solidarity with the nation-state any more, except countries under siege by the West, who are brought together in response to the attacks. But the West? US, UK, Canada, Europe? Have never been more fragmented since - well the US Civil War. Here's where I'll suggest that "conservative" futurists, who are realists, tend to quietly go about using good social science and developing new forecasting systems. These include Neil Howe (Fourth Turning), Peter Turchin (Cliodynamics), and many careful historians of the past (Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin). They don't "identify" as R's or cons, but the approach is realist and evidence-based. This school of thought has strong relationships to systems thinking models as well. So the historical cycles modelers are not computer modeling climate crisis modelers - their predictions have been very good actually. We just don't like to hear them. Our clients would hate these forecasts.
So an Oakeshott quote from Wiki on what conservative means? This is a mean put-down. Maybe in the Reagan era. But today you have a whole new age of younger, smarter populists and actual-democratic thinkers like Mike Shellenberger, you have the Elon Musk & Super Abundance (which is clearly postmodern conservative, civilization preserving), and there is Archeo Futurism, Julius Evola is bigger than he ever was when alive. As a lifelong peace activist, normally lefty-Dem - until they went all-in for the NATO war machine - I started watching how the young right became firmly anti-interventionist. I think a main point is, if we don't start getting along in our own countries, there might not be countries in the future. Nukes are worse than any climate change.
And if we don't have social solidarity why would you even care about any kind of global environment that you cannot see, travel to, live in, or ever experience? We have all heard too much preaching and too many media lies. Smart people want honest science and good futures thinking that makes sense of massive complexity, not yet another crisis story from entrenched elites.