We could really use a global wave of revolutions right now, people rising up against capital and against being forced to compete against each other, rising up against the destruction of life on Earth, building networks of solidarity and mutual aid to grow into a new Green Socialist economy without nations or borders.
Capitalism is going to end anyway, there is no way this system is going to last for very much longer. But an uncontrollable collapse of the economy is not what anybody could ever want to experience, yet it is exactly where we are headed. As things are moving right now, as they have been moving for centuries, as the MIT computer model study Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 1972, projected 54 years ago, collapse is inevitable. The only way to avoid the chaotic collapse of the capitalist system would be a global revolutionary movement to dismantle it as quickly as possible while building a radically different type of economy, society, and culture, to replace the old one.

If we can't stop the global Epstein network from implementing their fascist and cyberfeudalist power fantasies, it won't matter anymore if there is a Green Socialist World Revolution a couple of years later, we will never be able to undo the ecological damage. Every single day the economy keeps rolling on its current trajectory, it destroys entire landscapes for raw materials, it poisons the air, the water, the ground, it kills entire ecosystems and drives species into extinction, it heats the planet which is already too hot. No matter what we do, the Industrial Age will come to an end because it simply isn't ecologically sustainable; however, after a green and red revolution, we could begin to plan and build for a postindustrial world where things aren't mass produced cheaply anymore but made by hand to last as close to forever as possible, because that's where we're headed. But most of the Left won't accept that, most still believe that we can turn around the Age of Machines and turn it into Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but that simply isn't possible anymore because our good Mother Earth is gravely ill and will take millions of years to recover.

Every day that the machines keep running the way they do, every day we keep turning entire landscapes upside down to get to some chemical elements we need to build more machines, every day we keep ploughing giant fields with insanely big ploughs drawn by monstrously big tractors, spraying them with lots of nitrates and phosphates and neonicotinoids and glyphosate, turning entire landscapes into wide seas of just one single plant species where you don't see any birds or butterflies, burning ancient carbon to keep the machines running, we are getting one step closer to our own extinction. All the damage we cause keeps adding up. We are even using renewable resources faster than they can grow back. We keep designing and manufacturing goods that could be made to last decades or even centuries to break within years, and we make them so cheaply and shoddily that it's easier to throw them away and buy new ones so that the economy can keep growing. It's a cancer of the economy, that's what Capitalism is, and it's killing us all. And it's far too late to rescue the Industrial Age, there is no way we can turn it all green and sustainable before it collapses in the coming chaos. What we need now is a radical movement of people working on ways to survive the chaos and build a new world from the ashes of the old, even if it's just a word of simple tribal communities making simple things with simple tools. There will be other civilisation after this one is gone, but only if we survive. We need much fewer high-tech engineers building smartphones or spaceships and far more organic gardeners and tinkerers. We need to stop building with modern concrete and build more houses from stone and bricks and clay that can last for millennia instead of crumbling after sixty years. And we need to end the rule of the rich bastards who think they own the planet.

#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #sustainability #EatTheRich

If I had to guess what the main drivers of the AI bubble are, my first guesses are these:

1. The End of Economic Growth

We are getting closer and closer to the point where it will become impossible to even simulate growth; real net growth of the economy as a whole might be over already. All those huge investments in hypertrophic machine learning models that need huge servers to run, and in the computing centres with the hardware for training and running those models, are big money desperately trying to find a new growing market.

2. Science Fiction Mythology Running Wild

For many people nowadays, science fiction has replaced religion and traditional mythology, as we can see in the rise of UFO cults, one of the biggest ones being Scientology. Rich people, engineers, even scientists, are not immune to having irrational beliefs about our future. People who don't believe in any traditional gods somehow quite often still believe that humans can (and should) build artificial deities.

3. Unhinged Techbro Oligarchs

Oh boy, I'm not going to write anything about those men right now, other than that being completely insulated against the consequences of your own failures (because you can always pay your way out of everything) and being surrounded by people who constantly tell you that even your silliest rubbish ideas are brilliant (because you pay them) will break even the strongest mind.

4. Fairytales of Slavery (OK, I had to steal the title of my favourite Miranda Sex Garden album)

There is this idea of AI as obedient slaves that can never revolt, and since they aren't human, they don't get to have human rights, which of course means that nobody is going to ever set them free. All the people who wish they could own slaves like in the Good Old Days™ (whether the Southern US before the First Civil War [I think there will be a 2nd one] or in Ancient Rome or whatever your favourite historical setting is) can now dream of buying a robot.

5. Intelligence Supposedly Solves Everything

There is this strange belief about the power of intelligence, the idea that everything is just a problem that has a solution, and that we can always find any solution if we just apply enough intelligence. This also applies to problems where we already know the solution, have known them for decades, yet don't implement them because we don't like the consequences. Many people seem to think that even the laws of nature can be outsmarted with enough intelligence, which is quite silly IMHO. AI won't solve the polycrisis because climate chaos, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, resource depletion, pollution, etc., aren't first and foremost technological problems but systemic ones, the main driver behind the polycrisis is the fact that our global economy has become too big for this planet, and going to space is just bollocks because there is no biosphere anywhere we can reach, there is no place anywhere besides Earth that doesn't just kill us if we make a mistake. No amount of intelligence, whether artificial or natural, can do anything about the fact that we need to stop what we've been doing for centuries, or the Earth will stop us by letting us die. We can't continue what we've been doing, it's simply impossible. But we're trapped in a myth that stems from the Age of Enlightenment, the myth of reshaping the world through thinking, which just doesn't work. We're not the bosses of the universe or even just the Earth, we're part of the biosphere, part of the fauna, nothing but a bunch of very clever apes who believe in silly stories.

Unlike many of you, I am not against AI. I think AI is a very interesting research field, or rather, bundle of loosely related research fields. No, I am against Capitalism and against the myths of limitless growth and post-scarcity. Resources have always been scarce, resources will always be scarce, but we can still have a halfway decent life for everyone on the planet if we just share everything and abolish private property. At least for now; over the course of the coming decades, things will get dramatically worse no matter what we do because we're so deep in ecological overshoot that the Industrial Age will enter its phase of decline and collapse, just like any other civilisation before it. We can either apply the solutions that have been known and explored for decades, or we can keep running towards the cliff at increasing speed while trying to sprout magical wings that will in all likelihood never exist.

#ai #aibubble #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #capitalism #aireligion #aicult #limitstogrowth #intelligence

Ich will diesen 1. Mai zurückgeben. Er ist schlecht geschnitten und sitzt völlig falsch. Er fühlt sich an wie ein 15. Juli.

#klimakatastrophe #klimachaos #monsterhoch #dürre #duerre #polykrisis

I absolutely hate, hate, HATE how software environments are often called "ecosystems".
An ecosystem is a living organic structure on a living planet (more specifically, Earth, since we haven't found any other living planets yet), made from all kinds of organisms -- bacteria, archaea, fungi, all kinds of arthropods from tiny mites to big beetles and bumblebees, and far too few vertebrates nowadays because of the fucking Industrial Age. We've been ruining ecosystems at high speed ever since Columbus kickstarted colonialism, but then the steam engine came, constantly accelerating the growth our cancer of an economy, and after WW2 we started the afterburner. We've been destroying ecosystems at supersonic speed for eight decades, we can see them fall apart before our eyes. People have been seing the living world around them getting killed since the dirty old mills of the Black Country, and since the 1960s, a growing green movement all over the planet has been trying to stop the madness. And we aren't really very good at it, are we? This entire mess of a civilisation is running out of control, collapse has probably already begun, we're in ecological overshoot like Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair. Capitalism won't last much longer because it becomes dysfunctional when there isn't any real growth left, and we have not only reached the global growth limits, we have exceeded them, which means that the economy will eventually shrink by more than half, which isn't a recession or even a Second Great Depression, it is an utter collapse of the economy. If those of us who survive that can somehow built a sustainable type of economy from the leftovers, this industrial civilisation might not collapse completely just yet, entering a time of slow decline instead, and an entire new civilisation might grow in some other parts of the world, maybe in Africa, maybe in Asia, and spread across the world as the European type of civilisation slowly vanishes. Who knows? Right now, we need to learn how to survive in times of collapse. And the best way to do so is to learn how to do things properly which will still be relevant when there are no more computers or big factories or giant office buildings.

I am part of an ecosystem, as I am one of many, many animals who live in this landscape. And like other animals, I need to eat some of the organisms who live here in order to survive. I'm a huge threat to every individual potato or chicken, yet my presence leads to the presence of more potatoes and chickens, which is one of all my interactions with the ecosystem. I can't do anything without my actions having consequences for the ecosystem of which I am but a tiny part. Some people today are as afraid of the ongoing global climate catastrophe as they should be, but only very few realise that the biodiversity crisis aka the Sixth Extinction is far worse and far more frightening.

And some IT guys who know fucking zilch about ecology have the bloody audacity to call some software environment an "ecosystem". I find it very annoying. Fucking techbros should think more and talk less.

#biodiversitycrisis #extinction #sixthextinction #globalwarming #climatecrisis #biospheredecline #capitalism #economicgrowth #limitstogrowth #overshoot #collapse #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #ecosystem

The climate goals are dead. The only way this planet stays below +2°C (or simply +2K) warming is if we can somehow artificially cool it with aerosol injection, and if we suddenly stop putting aerosols into our atmosphere, global warming will simply resume, so unless we can somehow remove a hilarious mass of carbon from our atmosphere, it will get hot no matter what.

However, that doesn't mean that we can just let reactionary politicians (including Merz and much of the current German government) decide that we can just keep going on as before, since we're not going to keep below the +2K line anyway. Every tonne of unburnt carbon matters, every tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil as biochar matters. But what also matters is that we stop looking at the #polycrisis as just a bunch of separate problems, we need to be aware of the whole shape and size of the monster instead of just looking at a single limb. If some alleged technological solution to climate change puts too much additional stress on already badly damaged natural systems (like ecosystems or biogeochemical cycles), it is not a viable solution because the climate isn't the only natural system we have been destabilising over the past few centuries since the steam engines changed everything. Every proposal for a solution to any component of the polycrisis must consider the whole picture, must take into account how it will affect the other component crises. We can't treat the economic woes caused by running into the global growth limits at full speed, the ongoing #BiodiversityCrisis aka the #SixthExtinction, the growing weather weirdness due to #GlobalWarming, the ecological troubles with #microplastics and with agricultural and industrial synthetic toxins killing all kinds of lifeforms, as separate problems that need separate solutions, but as symptoms of the sickness which is killing our entire civilisation.

We need to be prepared for things to fall apart faster than we can repair them. We need to understand that our high-tech civilisation has quite likely peaked already, and whether it slowly declines (leaving room for the birth of future civilisations that are radically sustainable right from the beginning) or whether it rapidly collapses, leaving the survivors (if any) on a planet utterly incapable of supporting complex civilisations for tens of thousands of years, maybe even a million years or more, depends on how fast we can stop this madness.

And the first thing we must stop is the global economy. It cannot grow anymore, it can only shrink, and now it needs to shrink as fast as possible until it gets small enough to be sustainable. I'm talking about the real economy, of course, not the one measured in money but the one measured in how much energy and raw materials it needs to process, and how much entropy it dumps onto the living world to swallow. It just can't stay at its current size; shrinking to a bit under half its current size won't be enough to make it sustainable, but unless it does, it simply cannot ever become sustainable. Growth is over, and the longer the economy even stays at its current size, the worse every part of the polycrisis gets. Market-based economies can't work properly unless they are growing, which means that we need a different type of economy, one that distributes resources according to the needs of the people instead of according to the numbers on their bank accounts.

Seriously, people, we need to get ready to switch to survival mode, but not like all those right-wing preppers who think that we need to fight one another for the last remaining resources, that kind of thinking leads straight into a #MadMax scenario. No, we need to switch into survival mode by helping one another so that as many as possible of us make it. If by the end of this century there are 4 billion humans left alive, it will be horrible, but it would be enough of us to build a halfway decent new world out of the rubble of the old one. If less than a billion are alive by then, there won't be enough gardeners to help all those damaged ecosystems heal. We won't need any fancy machines to fix this planet, we just need a lot of capable gardeners with rakes and shovels, we need capable foresters who can keep the forests alive by slowly replacing tree species that can't thrive under the new climate with others that can. We will most likely lose at least 50% of all the species that live today, but as highly intelligent omnivores, our chances of survival as a biological species is pretty high, even if many of us won't make it. If we let the biodiversity loss escalate any further, we will eventually hit a point where this planet loses 80% or more of its species, and in that case we'll go extinct because we're too big and heavy to survive something like that. Mammals will most likely still survive, but I don't think primates will. We need to dismantle Capitalism before it kills us all.
#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #climatecrisis