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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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8 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Being heavily invested, emotionally, in the idea that the planetary crisis means a total apocalypse — even the extinction of all humanity — is not only NOT a more realistic understanding of the world, it actually aids and abets those opposing rapid change.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
In brief,
See also,
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/predatory-de…
And,

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-are-heade…

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
9 Jan
This essay crystalized a reality I've been on the brink of imagining myself for a long time. Powerful to see it said clearly and in whole.

studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/superhistory…
"Specifically, modern AI is better understood as AT — 'Artificial Time' that can be prosthetically attached to human minds. And highly capable computing systems are best understood as existing in superhistory rather than embodying superintelligence."

BOOM.
[Brink of imagining is @GreatDismal's line]
Read 6 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
7 Jan
"Being too far ahead is the same thing as being wrong," and being recognized as right, at the right time — but only in hindsight — is often the same thing as being broke.
95% of the job is learning, researching, pondering, exploring, weighing out the possibilities, until we arrive at an informed intuition about where things are moving — the other 95% is articulating our intuitions in ways that make clear sense to those who did none of that work.
It is so much easier to simply toss out provocations.

It's like Tom Sawyer getting the other kids to pay to paint the fence.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
4 Jan
“If they can’t pull this off, then we failed; the country has failed the climate test.”

There is no test. This is not pass/fail. That's orderly transition thinking.

Not acting only means different actions later, under more torque, with greater losses + less opportunity.
Believing we can "fail" the climate "test" leads us to the error of believing in binary outcomes— that there's a point at which it will be "too late" to act and it's "game over"— when all outcomes are complex and transapocalyptic, and action is inevitable.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/an-orderly-t…
(It's every bit as serious as we suspect, it's just that most of us are working with outdated and semi-functional epistemological frameworks for what increasing seriousness means in this context.)
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
3 Jan
This fantastic @lizweil piece on fire and California's future — and, by extension, about living in a planetary crisis — is this week's must-read story.

This is climate journalism that gets what time it is. Honored to be a part of it.

nytimes.com/2022/01/03/mag…
If you're interested in the ideas I share in the story, I have a newsletter for you:

alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe
Also, great photos by @MeridithKohut.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
2 Jan
Important points in this @dwallacewells piece, for those thinking about how we build and personal ruggedization.

“It wasn’t a wildfire in the forest, it was a suburban fire. The Costco we all shop at, the Target we buy our kids’ clothes at — all damaged.”
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"Though the fire did not begin there, it quickly jumped to a strip of big-box stores and their parking lots — to most Americans perhaps the very picture of an inflammable Anthropocene."
If you jack the climate/ecological extremes enough, exurbia becomes the new wildland-urban interface...
Read 8 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
28 Dec 21
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.
Read 5 tweets

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