The World Is Ending, Was Ending, and Shall Be Ending While People Continue Doing What They Are Compelled To Do

Inspired by Eric Lee, who shared an article from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, and his comments.

Peeps-R-Peeps, human all too human, embedded in hyperobjects ad infinitum; the polycrisis, something from an unimaginable book of records, spectated as the biggest, hugest, beyond informational, not merely a matter of culture, or worldview, rather the uncanny “other world” history, the ontological, physical, social, arrangements that need no special props, no Deus Machina, no apocalypse, that negate the intimacy of the strange strangeness of nonhuman hyperobjects (perhaps human-induced) whose longevity whether conscious or unconscious are vast, unfathomable and out of the realm of individual experience.

The seeds of the Anthropocene were sown long before the term was coined and long before Homo sapiens began planting seeds and domesticating animals. Way back in the Upper Paleolithic, complex language and abstract thought allowed for sophisticated communication, planning, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Homo sapiens’ social organization made great hunters and, soon after, the apex predators.

During the Middle Paleolithic & Earlier, we mastered fire and cooked food, developed our brains, and made more sophisticated tools for clearing vegetation. What were you doing? What were you thinking? You silly beast, you fallen angel.

Then we started migrating out of here and into there and back again and again, exploiting resources on the way in search of more, of plenty, running from scarcity, competing with other groups, running from competing groups. We interacted with diverse ecosystems, altering them as we went along, altering the behaviors of megafauna while driving some to extinction. As we wondered about interacting with hyperobject Gaia, our hunting, social organization, and ability to manipulate our environment became more sophisticated.

Then came the Neolithic Revolution. We settled down, and after a few thousand years, early civilizations emerged, and cities grew, leading to increased resource demands, deforestation, and infrastructure development that reshaped landscapes. There was a Bronze Age, an Iron Age, Big Gods, and soon thereafter, BANG, in 1792, came The Newcomen Engine!

The acceleration began, you know the story, modern modernity, industrialization, energy in the form of fossil fuels, with so much from then to now a sticky lava flow of humanity covering the Earth with all their goings on. Relativity, quantum mechanics, phenomenology: one can hardly get one’s imagination around everything we’ve done for tens of thousands of years, transcending nothing but rather absorbed in one hyperobject and another.

Mechanized, technological World Wars, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima, Chornobyl, whatnots, and wherefores, and THE Great Acceleration begins, so to speak, Fukushima, Chornobyl, the alignment problem. And let’s not shy away from all that’s left out.

We have become the potential for planetary-scale destruction. Rapid technological innovation, including synthetic materials, chemicals, widespread transportation, and information technology, has led to unprecedented resource consumption, pollution, global heating, climate, and habitat change, not to mention The Sword of Damocles, multipolar traps, arms races, prisoner dilemmas, tragedies of the commons that don’t exist anymore, and dwindling civilizational resources that will inevitably lead to decades of mass starvation.

Concentrically turning layers of zones of spooky action, uncanny, frightening, exciting, odd, and outrageous stuff dancing about, flittering and flashing a movement and a rest, music to our awareness, the stuff of dreams and intention driving us onward in the face of our fate.

And we’ve heard so many stories. ’Tis a curse on all our houses, the ones we build only to burn down. It is all ours; we can do what we want with it. But do we truly own what we do?

We are geological players now. The Great Game started long ago and continues to its dramatic, glorious conclusion.

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And the AI said do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a contemporary philosophical movement that challenges anthropocentric (human-centered) and correlationist (the idea that we can only know the correlation between mind and world) philosophies. At its core, OOO posits that reality is composed of objects, and these objects exist and possess qualities independently of human perception or access. This means that a rock, a tree, a smartphone, and even abstract concepts like gravity or justice are all considered equally real “objects” with their own inherent being.

OOO emphasizes the “withdrawal” of objects, meaning they can never be fully grasped or known directly. We only ever encounter “vicarious” or mediated aspects of objects through our interactions with them or through other objects. This idea challenges the notion that human consciousness is the primary lens through which reality is understood. Instead, OOO seeks to flatten ontology, giving equal ontological status to all objects, regardless of their scale, lifespan, or relationship to humans. This perspective encourages a move away from solely focusing on human experience and towards a broader appreciation of the intricate and independent existence of the nonhuman world.

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There is no social discount rate or sliding scale for the half-life of plutonium or carbon emissions. Ideologies morph and die with us, but supernovas happen nonetheless. Black Holes suck like jobs moving overseas, hardly perceptible until we are made aware of it. Flash. Flitter. Shimmer. Pop.

Massively distributed entities like climate change or the biosphere itself dwarf human timescales, and comprehension overwhelms our petty obsessions with this or that description of a thing. Prattling begets prattling like the sons of kings beget sons of kings and genocides.

The unbearable lightness of Ecocide. We spread our garbage across the planet because we can, unseen by The Great Filter.

The AGI robots will never build a Dyson Sphere — our creations inherit our limits. We lack the energy and materials to turn the Universe into junk. We can never have enough for a brain fart takeover of the Universe. The hyperobject {Universe} is beyond our diversions, toys, investments, and profits. AGI and all its things are what memes and landfills are made of. The blade can’t outrun itself.

Doomers, doomists, preppers, and Know-it-all commentators of all things polycrisis dislike all human effort because it’s dumb and destructive, but people will be people. They must do something and fight their “good fight.”

“What the fuck gets you up in the morning? Well, there’s that.”

“What a muddle, what a mess; let’s clean it up and mend our ways.”

“But, Pappa, things can get in a muddle in infinite ways. Can we ever know the proper way to organize things?”

“There are indeed infinite ways to muddle things up, but there is only one way you like things organized. That will change, and you won’t notice it.”

“Don’t be silly, Homo hubris, do nothing but what you’re doing; free will is an illusion, and Great Nature will sort things out. Make a buck and buy a ticket to the show; the best and the brightest will be there. You don’t want to miss it.”

If you want to influence people, change the narrative, or subscribe to one, no, I mean, change the algorithm or create one that creates one. Learn from all the data so you can make more data to learn from; that is your solipsistic purpose. Do what you will randomly do with your knowledge, look back, find its meaning and story, and continue. Believe.

Wisdom favors the blind.

You don’t need any programmers. The machines can create and maintain themselves. You don’t need a job; you are a pet. Pass the time and leave the stage for the next, next thing. Life is a boot program for Deus Machina, Homo sapiens’ gift to this particular Universe; let the other Strings do what they do; we do what we do in ours. You can’t own it if you don’t create it.

“Why don’t you just shut up? I already told you how things are.”

Scale and interconnectedness prevent solutions; mitigations are inevitable within the framework of nuanced distributed strategies. Let plans resonate, or not; it will seem like a solution is near.

Naomi Klein will do her thing because she has a thing to do, and so will Peter Joseph — people do stuff, active is attractive. Please don’t blame them because they do not know what they do; knowledge is an illusion that flashes too soon and manifests too late. People’s minds won’t let them hunt and gather like animals on the plain or in the jungle (What jungle?), fitting into the aesthetic creation of imagination, also known as Nature. We no longer understand that culture; we do not value the precarious, wild way of life. Civilization killed all the savages. It continues killing wild things. (What it is is independent.) The tribes that still roam are tourist attractions and have already found Coke bottles in their zoological habitats. Once you have the concept of Nature, you are separated from it and fall from grace. We can no longer smell the gorilla or elephant shit in our lovely rooms. We focus on the zeroes and ones. We wash our hands, not their feet.

The sacred is always mysterious.

Who loves a mystery that isn’t solved in the third act? The only “unsolved mysteries” are those sold on the market of roles and stereotypes.

Systemic thinking, interconnectedness, feedback loops, global heating, climate, biodiversity loss, and inequality exacerbate each other, eliminating targeted interventions but targeting we must do — haphazardly, willy-nilly, and willfully with the illusion of brilliant agency, planning, and purpose.

We have a theory of how to play the game.

Cascading predicaments are beyond us, but not NOW; now we have things to do about things to do. There is much to do about everything.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end.

— Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30

We’re not disciplined enough after our fall from grace, which eliminates the daily challenges of survival and the risk of eating this or that that might kill us or heal us. (The hunter kills and often dies while killing.) We ventured far from our creator, which was the beginning of the end of our noble work towards interdisciplinary collaboration across science, public policy, community, art, education, and business — all activities unsuited for posterity, regardless of their metaphorical embeddedness in ephemeral hyperobjects.

The wheel of life exists within the jaws of death.

People must work together on something or another, regardless of grand outcomes or wise intent.

You can lead an illiterate population of hunter-gatherers to a library of good books, but you must not make them read lest you start the cycle again. But they will read Nature and come what may.

Awareness of the hyperobject {polycrisis that’s not a crisis} ends the illusion and liberates the soul.

“Do nothing, idiots; whatever you do only worsens things. You’ll never fail “up.” What will be will be, and you already know how it could have been, or was, so much better.”

It had to be this way.

Wallow in inebriation and nurse your addictions; what doesn’t kill you now entertains you. The ones who think they know how things work don’t matter; the game must go on. The game will go on.

Does knowing better make things better? Were you not better off before you understood pain? Experiencing pain is different from understanding it.

Education won’t foster collective action — action and reaction continue until we are gone. Do you need to know what causes something? Must you deduce and infer to survive? Why so curious, you damn ape, you silly pet!

Wait, take a deep breath, and wait. The apes will type the complete works of Shakespeare; we have infinite time and space.

Keep guessing things into existence as if you invented them.

Education is fit for purpose. What purpose? Whatever you try will leave destruction in your wake. Shut up. Leave it alone. Let it go. Take a walk in the park, for there are no woods, and enjoy the aesthetic, be it natural or not. Is not a paved paradise a marvel to behold? The gritty scenes in The French Connection, with its docu-style cinematography, a reflection of reality, and an Oscar-winning show, are profound, entertaining, and necessary. Could it have been otherwise? What artful choices, a profound thing to behold.

“That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases him is beautiful; that which is esteemed [or approved] by him, i.e., that to which he accords an objective worth, is good.” — Immanuel Kant

It is what it is, was what it was, and shall be what it shall be by virtue of having been.

Those silly activists and authors think they can make a difference somehow. Get thee to a library, peruse newspaper archives, and tell me what came of it all.

Vanity, it’s all vanity.

Will localized and distributed action empower communities to adopt a way of life that can’t exist until we have been gone for a long time? There are no places on Earth to hunt and gather in, and there are no ecosystems we can be part of except those we make and own. Plastic, forever chemicals, and radioactive isotopes attest to this, as e-waste becomes a horizontal colossus of hyperobject proportions.

We all hold the world above our shoulders.

We can wait and hope that a small group survives to reboot Samsara. Be patient; we all suffer and die, and if we are lucky, have some fun and joy along the way. We may feel loving and lovingly loved for a while, at least.

According to K&R categorization, a civilized, resilient local system is an oxymoron. Food systems, energy grids, and regional trade networks that may mitigate the shocks and disruptions of the end times are only folly — more folly, inescapable strutting, and fretting, a stupid stumbling thing cheetahs and gazels would never know how to do.

Decentralized governance, democratic anarcho-syndicalism, cooperatives, whatever works — we’ve seen it all before — the only thing worth doing is what you can do; the rest is a waste of time.

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.” — Albert Camus.

His work gave him purpose, and he couldn’t live without it.

We will adapt as we will because “Circumstances” is a brutal dictator whose demands we can’t ignore and must obey — come what may.

We will not invest in infrastructure because we can’t let it evolve within the fabric of life, the only superorganism that matters to the superorganism. To invest in infrastructure means leaving the biosphere alone and taking an extended vacation from doing anything.

Let the dark tetrad players play and accelerate towards the do-nothing day.

Investing in mitigating our manufactured cascading predicaments accelerates the breakdown of living systems upon which civilization depends.

We have many ways to deaden the pain.

Prepping for disaster is the disaster. We cannot prepare for what preparation brings. We have been warned many times and have chosen to ignore the warnings. We live in the moment. That’s our problem. Society is a disruption alliance.

Do we need social cohesion, mental health, community, and interdependence to lighten the load as the things we take for granted rapidly break down? Come on, get real. We don’t have time for such things. We have to make a living, fit in, and consume information.

Tell me what to do. Don’t be silly. Now, YOU tell me what to do. Idiot. How about you? Fool. I’ll do what I have to do.

Would you have me drain the excitement from life, the violence, stress, and trauma? What kind of commie Jesus or nihilistic budding Buddhist are you?

What are you for and against? Grow up.

If you build it, that’s right, consequences.

Mindful consumption, reducing waste, ecological integrity, and critically examining consumerism and growth-oriented ideologies — what are you selling, Astra Taylor? Is it a book, an article, or a fantasy? Let’s acknowledge the metamodern reality of today. Everything is oh-so ironic, hypocritical, and funny.

Why challenge dominant narratives when we can’t fight the determining algorithms? Ours is an anachronistic postmodern illusion beyond meta-postmodernism. The ancients experienced the same form of illusion, but it is more potent and prone to metastatic mutations manifested in the material world, the only world, the information of energy information space—huge and vast across infinite time in the mouth of the void: pre-life, pre-potentiality.

Degrowth happens; there is no need to prioritize well-being or limits because “this thing of ours” is self-terminating regardless of how we feel or hasten its end.

The pathway forward is new and through, and has nothing to do with how things once were; the hyperobject is a story we know little about but are getting acquainted with. We are deep in time but can’t experience it, and our role in the future can’t be known.

Slow violence will continue until we are gone. Naomi Klein, intergenerational responsibility is less popular than your articles and books. Thank you for making virtue possible. Sustained action can’t begin in a world of people lacking agency and power without the ability to develop it. Broad and narrow powers will always be at odds as the cycle of civilization continues until we are beasts again; the irony is that beasts are not violent.

We can no longer understand the consequences of our actions because civilization is now a hyperobject, a superorganism that ends when it ends. Knowledge has nothing to do with our fate. We die believing what we believe.

Love, breath, moving, resting, art, dreams, and stories express meaning, perhaps compassion and empathy. We can reimagine our relationships. And what will come of our reimagined worlds? Nobody knows.

In times like these, intimacy matters more than anything — intimacy with our people, place, and environment, with everything sacred, which means everything, including the things we do together, the things we do for each other, and the love of life.

Naomi, Astra, do what you do. We love you, too.