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.
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
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.
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