Hope and Vision in the Face of Collapse – The 4th R of Deep Adaptation

Professor Jem Bendell

“People need hope, Jem.”
“It’s really important to have a vision of a better future, Jem”

As someone who worked in environmental campaigning and then organizational change, I learned about the role of hope and vision in helping to align and motivate people. As someone who worked at the heart of political communications during the 2017 UK General Election campaign, I’m also aware of the power of a positive narrative when told well, consistently and authentically. In my professional world of leadership and its development, hope and vision are recognized as key. I still teach such skills to senior executives in business, politics and civil society and am proud of the way they feel empowered in their purpose as a result.

But, but, but…

Since my return to analysing climate science last year led me to conclude we face inevitable near-term societal collapse, where might we find any hope or…

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Reza Negarestani: A Preliminary Investigation – Intelligence and Spirit

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Originally posted on Break The Code:
The History of spirit is its own deed; for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself – in this case as spirit – the object of its own…

Deeply Adaptive Patchworking vs. Fully Automated Fantasy

synthetic zerø

Interest in patchwork is moving out beyond its capture in the Landian gravity-well and as it does attention is moving from the system to the object level. The people I’m most aware of in this effort have been Justin Murphy and Michael James, as they reorient the conversation from theoretical concern with the patchwork network towards more concrete speculations on given patches. In my own thinking about patchwork I’ve stressed the need to maintain a focus on exit and the Outside rather than being tempted into the oil spills of identity and interiority.

While I’ve moved away from the principle of renunciation and thus home-leaving, I nonetheless think we should be very cautious whenever we get implicated in questions of belonging and community, even if, when we step outside a field strictly delimited as conceptual, we must ultimately confront these questions in practice. As I’ve deepened my own spiritual practice…

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The Invisible Committee | The Coming Insurrection

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics))

From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks.

The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect…

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Capitalism, climate change, and the death of worlds

keep it in the ground

Do you remember those childhood TV series where machines come and chew up the earth and the forest creatures run terrified and looking back it all seems cheesy and obvious? This blog is about why we can’t forget those narratives as adults, and what it means to be attuned precisely to the kinds of violence meted out by those machines.

The 2018 California ‘Camp Fire’ was the largest wildfire the state has ever known.

Bear with me here. In this blog i’m going to try to exorcise something. To get this out is to vent, and I don’t blame you for turning away. Actually, I don’t allow myself to go full throttle anti-capitalist very often. I think there is a kind of weary emptiness that repeatedly stating crisis brings,; the brittle and barren hoarseness of shouting FIRE to people who are too bored or don’t have the attention spans to…

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On Climate / Borders / Survival / Care / Struggle

I think something which has been the undercurrent to this conversation is the spectre of what has now quite openly and explicitly been called fascism. We have talked about it with Kingsnorth, and early on in relation to ‘Lifeboat Ethics’, and how it would be quite easy to imagine a response to climate change in which those at the top of systems of oppressive power, those empowered by capital, the state, gender, class, race, sexuality, do just basically live out a sort of super privileged version of what Rebecca Solnit is talking about. The classic vision of dystopian films recently has been that either the rich people go and live in the sky or a magic island etc, but that doesn’t seem realistic. Actually, what’s more likely to happen is that the city breaks up into increasingly small fragments in which extreme privilege and protected privilege is surrounded by a mass of those who don’t have the power to defend themselves, and that plays out around moments of disasters as well. There’s several accounts I remember reading after Hurricane Sandy of people watching the streets of New York, just as the hurricane was about to hit, filled with carloads of rich white New Yorkers going to the countryside or going to stay in hotels – they were being filmed by black and latino workers who had to stay at work. There’s something strong there about the nature of the disaster – some people literally in the absurd, nightmarish situation of not being able to escape the disaster because their boss wouldn’t let them.

via On Climate / Borders / Survival / Care / Struggle | base

“Geologists in millions of years may look at the Anthropocene as a brown layer of sediments lost in the geological record,” Sulpis said. “It’s a bit mind blowing. So at the end of the day, when we do take a step back and contemplate these results, it becomes scary.”

via The Seafloor Is Dissolving Because of Climate Change – Motherboard