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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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28 Dec, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Also, seems worth noting that #DontLookUp is the #1 movie, worldwide, on Netflix.

There is a massive, under-served audience, hungry for stories about the real world we actually live in, which is one of planetary terror, absurdity, and chaos— and heroism in the face of it all.
Acknowledging the scale of the planetary crisis is a cultural discontinuity. It shifts once-authoritative perspectives from the center to the periphery.

No one likes that, including critics, academics and journalists who feel their value cast into doubt.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-expertis…
OTOH, just as in every other industry and endeavor on this fast-changing planet, the refusal by some (those currently benefiting from the status quo) to accept even the idea of the need for change creates massive opportunities for those who take the need for change for granted.
The Snap Forward will roll through culture and entertainment just as it rolls through every other industry... in part because larger and larger shares of audiences themselves are in the midst of their own personal discontinuities.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/thinking-abo…
Media, entertainment and cultural work that speaks to these new realities = multi-trillion dollar unclaimed space.

Then too, it a space where the right successes might also very well improve the prospects of humanity for millennia to come.

You have to see it to win it, tho.

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
27 Dec
Yes, you should watch #DontLookUp.

Yes, 3/4 of the critic's responses seem like hot takes written by jaded culture workers from an alternate universe in which the planet Earth was not in the early days of its most catastrophic upheaval in 100,000s or even millions of years.
It's not that climate chaos will end all life on Earth like a planet-killer comet.

It's that the planetary crisis has irrevocably altered every fact of your, my, everyone else's life... and is getting more intense... and we continue fuck around as if finding out wasn't a thing.
We're on a trajectory to crash the futures of most people on the planet and finalize the irreversible annihilation of a big chunk of the natural world because of a mix of predatory delay and terminal entitlement.

Making movies about that shit is hard. #DontLookUp is a great one.
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
26 Dec
This should scare the crap out of smart people, or even dumb ones.

The prospect of a lengthy dirty civil war in America, right as the world lurches into the depths of planetary crisis, bodes no good for anyone on the planet.

theguardian.com/us-news/2021/d…
America is the most potent geopolitical force in the world, and will remain so for years to come.

This conflict promises to make the international effects of that power (more) deeply unpredictable and irrational.

A politically unstable U.S. benefits no one (except maybe Putin).
Especially in climate/sustainability.

Predatory delay is the key war demand of a party we on the Left continue to define by their culture war extremists.

Saying this conflict is about those is like saying the last war was about states' rights or cavalier culture, not slavery.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
24 Dec
Being someone who thinks about the future for a living, it's become a little tradition of mine, at the close of the year, to offer some thoughts about what's coming.

In that spirit:

2021 was the last year of the Twentieth Century.

We're not ready for what comes next.

(Thread)
The dividing line is continuity—the belief that things will be more or less like they are now for years to come.

That out assumptions, cultural beliefs, personal experience, professional expertise, etc. will remain valid for the foreseeable future.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
Popular thinking of the last century centered on the idea that history was an arc, a continuous curve from the Enlightenment to a future in which humanity would have chosen to create a more rational society for the betterment of all.

Of we'd blow it all up.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
23 Dec
Very little American urban progressives advocate for will matter if U.S. cities don't build millions and millions of new homes in compact communities over the next decade.

Our worst problems aren't solvable without rapidly-built abundant housing and reductions in autodependence.
This is before we even discuss climate brittleness, risk-driven relocations and climate refugees...

Most of the biggest barriers to rapid progress on inclusive and sustainable urbanism are purely political. They could be changed overnight, if we had the will.

Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
20 Dec
Nothing is external to the planetary crisis.

Everything we eat and drink, buy and use, every object and every service we depend on—even those objects and services we so take for granted that we call them "the landscape" and "nature"—is now immersed in rapid ecological upheaval.
It's amazing to me how (comparatively) little it'd take, even now, to avoid truly ruinous coming decades— how materially better off we'd be— if we acted at scale and with speed.

Bold climate action/preparation will never be this cheap (in true and total costs) again.
We're going to end up acting — at bigger scales, with greater speed.

It's just going to cost us not only the price of change, but the (by then many times greater) costs of inaction.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
20 Dec
Ecological illiteracy shows in the belief that the planetary crisis can be broken down to its parts, prioritized, solved sequentially or ignored altogether until people reverse it later. ...the belief that ecological imperatives will mold themselves to our desire for continuity.
The consequence of ecological illiteracy is to find ourselves incapable of seeing the discontinuity that's here, all around us, and unable to form perspectives and plans that offer tools for successful action as change accelerates.
The deepest damage of ecological illiteracy is to understand climate/environmental impacts as being limited to "the environment" somewhere out there, and not ripping through every certainty in every human system everywhere in the world, including your own life.
Read 4 tweets

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