For more than 20 years, I have been writing about civilizational collapse. I’m not an expert in the subject, just someone who’s read a lot about anthropology, the history of civilizations, human nature, and how complex systems work. My fundamental thesis has remained basically unchanged over this time: Our now-global industrial civilization culture is utterly…
Last month I presented a bit of research on how our bodies’ chemicals appear to drive, direct, and dictate (ie ‘condition’) our behaviour by trying to maximize the body’s feelings of pleasure and minimize its feelings of pain. They do this because that’s been a successful evolutionary strategy for millions of years (ie it’s in…
image by Mike Licht on flickr, CC BY 2.0 Facebook and Xwitter are dying. Their membership is shrinking, their usage is dropping, and satisfaction with them is at an all-time low. Copycat “social media” have arisen, but they lack the huge user base to replace the wreckage of today’s greedy oligopolies with something better, and…
(photo from U. Berkeley, with the caption: “New study reveals the brain mechanism that makes rats feel empathy for other rats, yet refrain from helping rats they deem to be ‘outsiders’. Photo by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal”) Chris Hedges is a busy guy. In addition to being one of the most relentless public critics of the…
The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version…
This is #55 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. For most of my life, I’ve loved doing statistical analysis. Part of that, I suppose, is the ‘collector’ in me. And part of it is unearthing…
child labourers, Pennsylvania, 1910, photo by Lewis Hine in the National Archives A couple of people have asked me, after I’d written several times about what I call the “Patriciate” and what many call the “Epstein Class” or simply the “Elite” (among other conspiratorial-sounding names): Do you think this is a new phenomenon, or has…
all images in this post are my own photos (not AI) There seems no limit to the number of writers, artists and scientists intrigued and even obsessed with the challenge of trying to understand what it’s ‘like’ to ‘be’ a non-human creature. I’ve read more than a dozen books on the subject. My sense is…
Twenty years ago I did a brief study of The Chemistry of Love, to explore how our bodies seemingly compel us to fall in love in the interest of procreation. And how in the process (what I then thought was) our ‘free will’ is totally taken away from us. Now I know a little better,…
from the brilliant Scottish philosopher-cartoonist Tom Gauld in New Scientist I am haunted by this cartoon. Not only because Tom has captured so perfectly our propensity to anthropomorphize everything from pets to stuffies to cars to AI. But also because Tom’s delivery bot seems the perfect metaphor for all of us tragically caught in an…
