Miguel Afonso Caetano"Given this outlook, some have recently argued that we may need to pivot toward a new “palliative care” paradigm for humanity. I used to see this suggestion as rather hyperbolic, but not anymore — especially after Trump’s reelection, because as the saying goes: “If the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches pneumonia.”
In 2017, I jokingly “coined” the term superfucked to describe a situation in which catastrophe is strongly overdetermined, meaning that there are multiple possible causes leading to the same undesirable outcome. “Superfucked” is more or less synonymous with “polycrisis,” which has become widely used by scholars over the past few years. There are just so many unprecedentedly complex, formidable, urgent threats facing humanity that it’s difficult to see how civilization, as we currently know it, can make it through unscathed. I’m talking about catastrophic climate change, worldwide biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, global ecological collapse, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, AI flooding our information ecosystems with memetic poison, the possibility of new emerging disease epidemics, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, anthropogenic carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals becoming ubiquitous in our environs, and so on and so forth.6 Each of these yields a plethora of sub-problems that make the existential obstacle course before us look dauntingly dense.
This is precisely why, the argument goes, we need a palliative-care approach, a kind of hospice for humanity. While we should never give up the fight — because we have a moral duty to keep fighting even if things look hopeless — we should also seriously ask ourselves: What does it mean to live a good life in the face of collapse? How can one find meaning and purpose in this situation? What kind of communities can we build right now to protect ourselves...?"
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/doomers-say-theres-a-20-chance-of
Cdnpup
