‘If you’re not changing the numbers, you’re not changing the world.’ So says this week’s guest, Katie Patrick. Katie Patrick is a Silicon Valley based environmental engineer, climate action designer, and author of How to Save the World: How to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We’ve Ever Played, now taught in Harvard University’s graduate program and top recommended reading material by UNEP
How do we step past the magical thinking of the elites that says we can either use AI to ‘Solve for Climate’ – or just ignore the entire climate and ecological emergency completely?
How do we shed the shackles of modernity and step into a new set of stories that could help us grow into the fullness of our potential?
Is it possible that 2024 might be the year of ‘Peak polarisation’? Audrey Tang certainly thinks so and in this wide-deep, mind-expanding conversation, we explore everything from the dual nature of AGI to the potential for liberational education that gives young people a sense of agency, interaction and the common good, to ways to rescue democracy to recipes for sound sleep.
As we head rapidly into biophysical and cultural collapse, how do we adapt and transform to the changing realities?
We are not going back. But how do we go forward now in a world where the old norms are under assault by people who move fast and break everything? How do we find a place of balance and compassion – for ourselves, each other and the More than Human world – so that we can move forward in a way that isn’t just a replaying of the old binaries?
How do we move beyond our myopic focus on carbon/CO2 as the index of our harms to the world? What can we do to heal the whole biosphere? And what role is played by water-as-verb, forest-as-verb, ocean-as-verb?
In this moment of transition, we need to become the best of ourselves, as individuals, and as a culture. But how? What does it look like? More importantly, what does it feel like? Designer and Thrutopian thinker, Jenny Grettve says it’ll feel as if we care for the web or life as a mother care for her children. And we’d better learn how to do it as fast as we can.
The Western world is in a crisis of democracy – but we learn a lot of our principles from the ways we interact online and the internet is essentially a feudal space that gives absolute power to a few and robs the many of agency. Nathan Schneider proposes that if we were able to shape a more liquid democracy online, our experience of generative interactions would spill over into the outer world. Has to be worth a try, right? So how do we do it?
We’re in late stage capitalism, surrounded by interconnected systems that are crumbling under our feet. IF we’re going to birth something new, we need concrete, real-world tools: actual practical bridges that will work *now* to bridge from the old to the new. ‘Resilience Strategist’ Michael Haupt is building these tools and shares them with us.
Author Stephen Markley opens the doors to The Deluge, his ground-breaking, world-changing Climate/MetaCrisis thriller- 900 pages that absolutely squarely rips into the current system in all its deficiencies – and offers a route through to a future that might work.
Douglas Rushkoff shares with us the palpable “ocean of tears” lurking beneath the surface of our collective consciousness—a reservoir of compassion waiting to be acknowledged and embraced. His candid reflections on the human condition, amidst the cacophony of a world in crisis, remind us of the importance of bearing witness to the pains and joys that surround us. He challenges us to consider the role of technology and AI not as tools for capitalist exploitation but as potential pathways to a more humane and interconnected existence.