Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck.
It’s 7am and I just woke up and checked my phone out of reflex. My husband is still turning in the crappy Airbnb bed, asleep. Unfortuantely, I also choose to finally check those messages from my colleague Fatima Al-Khwarizmi.
Just got asked by an NSA goon to sabotage my work
Going on a trip for a bit, dw have put in leave
If u could cover my lectures that would be amazing x
Need a fucking break lol
I immediately write back:
Sorry wtf???
ARe you ok
Where are you going???
As far as I can tell, she’s literally just walked out of her office and gotten an Uber to the airport. This is, to put it lightly, somewhat unusual. Fortunately, the rest of the conference seems to be just as bungled as it was yesterday so I have nothing to do except worry endlessly and—I remember what I was doing before I fell asleep.
Right. Brianna. The girl from yesterday. I promised her I’d look into ways out of this mess, even if I have no good way to start. A Google search about “new mindsets for the future” brings up Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, as well as Jon Alexander’s CITIZENS, but both are a few years old at this point (and are full books). Another search for “sustainable living projects” seems to bring up more promising answers that are being trialled, including a number of live trials of “new lifestyles” in American college towns, some in Southeast Asia seemingly due to climate pressures, and one in an island off the coast of Denmark, of all places. A number of countries have also promised to create new cities that embed new ways of living in their designs: Saudi Arabia, against all architectural and urban planning logic, is planning on a massive linear city project (part of a cluster of similarly ambitious plans called Neom) that will somehow be carbon neutral despite the massive infrastructure and energy investments required to build it. Nusantara in Indonesia, though suffering from predictable construction delays that caused it to miss its August Independence Day deadline, seems more promising in that it actually appears to be somewhat close to being done. Very few of them mention anything like the systemic risk mitigations that the paper I read talked about, and most seem to be resource sinks instead.
On the tech and organisation front, a number of towns in the Midwest are focused on developing climate resilient crops and construction techniques, and there are a surprising number of groups dedicated to the problem of knowledge preservation in the event of an internet collapse or communications shutdown. And then there are a slate of self-proclaimed “meta-organisations”, groups trying to “optimise world resource allocation and human development” through incredibly vague mission statements, artificial intelligence, and what seem to be associated hedge funds. Those I largely write off as Silicon Valley boondoggles. Most of the projects I research show no or only a token interest in non-hierarchial leadership structures or changing the way we live, whatever that even means.
Instead, my research justs points me at endless lists of risk factors: supply chains and transportations that might break, losing the world’s rice or grain harvests due to flooding and poor weather conditions, massive predicted migration trends as entire regions of the globes become unliveable, enhanced spread of diseases as health services break down, all of which compound each other as the Societal Limit Theorem predicts. It seems that, to get out of the mess, we’ll need a completely different conception of what life will look like. Then I get a response from Fatima.
Can you keep a secret?