When it comes to the planetary crisis, the public good depends on protecting people from inaction by shattering barriers to action, speed is justice, and scale is inclusion.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-cannot-ac…
Most people are vastly more endangered by the worsening impacts of climate change, ecological collapse, systemic brittleness and societal instability than they are by the price tags of investments in action.

The poorer someone is, the younger, the more precarious their life, the worse these crisis impacts hurt them, and the more unfair they are.

Predatory delay is predatory precisely because it turns status quo profits into intergenerational injustice.

Social inclusion won't happen in places facing a combination of legacies of inaction and bottleneck financial pressures, without fast change.

Massively, rapidly scaling new housing, infrastructure, jobs and civic systems is the precondition for inclusion.
More on rapid-scaling-as-inclusion here, and in the follow-up I'm writing now.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/ruggedize-yo…
Some of the most immoral and destructive barriers to action we have are the piles of patchwork zoning plans, random building standards, "impact" fees and long "community" processes we pretend is urban planning in America.

At a moment when speed is everything, we delay anything.
Successful action demands a giant building boom.

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More from @AlexSteffen

10 Jan
This is as clear an articulation of the "orderly transition or apocalypse" frame you're likely to find:

"We solve the climate crisis together, or we risk everything."
Read 4 tweets
9 Jan
Signing up for The Snap Forward — my newsletter about life in the discontinuity of the planetary crisis — is free.

Paying supporters of the newsletter also get my private podcast, which explores these topics more fully.

alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe
If you're interested in understanding our fast-changing world, this is for you.
You can also book me for consultations and keynote talks, here:

app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?o…
Read 4 tweets
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.
Read 6 tweets
8 Jan
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,
Read 4 tweets
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
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

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