Polycrisis
Keely Adler and
Polycrisis
“For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?” our columnist Thomas Friedman asks. There’s no consensus as of now: It has been referred to as the Anthropocene, the Information Age, the Artificial Intelligence Age, the Return of Geopolitics. “But none... See more
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antidote/counterpoint to packy magic piece
awe is more than an individual experience. As Keltner suggests, awe can mobilize us toward social progress. It can help us address the systemic shocks that have made our reality so weird. In fact, awe may be the key to solving the polycrisis
🏡 Shock and Awe
You could call all of these events surprising, but I’m not sure any of them could be convincingly labeled unexpected. Such is the paradox of our times. While Black Swan events such as 9/11 or the Covid pandemic used to disrupt the regular run of things, we are now thrown off course by predictable events waiting in plain sight. These incidents are... See more
🏡 Shock and Awe
On the other hand, I am a believer in radical hope, by which I mean recognising that the chances of success may be slim but still being driven to act by the values and vision you are rooted in. Time and again, humankind has risen up collectively, often against the odds, to tackle shared problems and overcome crises.
The challenge we face as a
... See more“We have a problem with scale. The planetary crisis can seem impossible to grasp. But focusing on the local can feel limited. How do we work to a scale that feels manageable? There is a way of reorganising how we think about scale: the -shed. -sheds (from Old English scead) describe the natural boundaries between waterbodies. They are not
... See moreCreative Destruction • Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #82
Before a tipping point in a complex system, there are early warning signals that may be detected.14 The most widely applicable of these early warning signals is “critical slowing down”—the phenomenon we are all familiar with before our computer crashes, and rather than heed the implications of this slower processing power, we jam at the keys in
... See moreSummer Praetorius • The Great Forgetting
History holds too many examples of what happens when the masses suddenly wake up to a sense of overwhelming dread
Viviane Zandonadi • How to De-Zombify People
From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations