Sublime

The ones who will challenge the technocracy in the coming decade will be the children and grandchildren of the industrial class who themselves have had no contact with industrialism beyond family memories, were raised in fairly difficult conditions, and face a grim future without a significant change in their circumstances. The vanguard of this mov

... See more

We feel paralyzed because we fear that our institutions and leaders are no longer able to operate and the solutions require many to act against their own immediate interests. We strive to make more people and communities capital-efficient and market-friendly even as the water level rises. The logic of the market has overtaken most of our waking liv

... See more

West Virginia, almost all white, was a Democratic state until 2000 (since that year it’s voted Republican in every presidential election). If you look at county-by-county national electoral maps, 2000 is the year when vast rural areas turned decisively and permanently red. Something more than just the Democrats’ principled embrace of the Black free

... See more

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

... See more

If the 20th century represented the victory of individualism against the commune, it is hard not to notice the ways that in the conquest of China, the domination of conspiracy groups in politics, the rise of DAOs and worker-collectives, and the acceptance of open-source even among the most gated corporations, the internet is slowly but surely shift... See more

I suggested that Substack’s day of reckoning may still lie ahead. The bigger Substack gets, the more ideologically diverse its author pool becomes, the greater the chances for highly inflammatory, potentially harmful content.

Over the past two generations, such big questions have fallen increasingly to small, local governments. Why? Because our national governments have collectively failed to build the planetary institutions necessary to solve Earth’s biggest problems, from climate change to pandemics, corruption to poverty. They have also failed to protect democracy wi... See more

This distinction was brought home to me by collapse theorist, sci-fi novelist, and, former Archdruid of North America, John Michael Greer.20 “A controlled, creative transition to sustainability might have been possible,” Greer argues, “if the promising beginnings of the 1970s had been followed up in the ’80s and ’90s.” But our politicians and CEOs

... See more