The pivot ⊗ We should all be Luddites ⊗ What is civil society, and why should we care?

The pivot

Fair warning; if you are already doomed-out, save this one for later. Or skip the intro? The piece by Charlie Stross is kind of a doom sandwich, with a historical and predictive middle that’s very much worth the read. Stross argues that 2025 marks a pivotal moment comparable to 1968, as multiple crises converge around an irreversible energy transition. He sees widespread unrest and political radicalization as symptoms of fossil fuel interests resisting their own obsolescence. Solar power has become so cheap that it’s displacing coal and oil, with China and the EU leading a rapid shift to renewables. This threatens to strand trillions in fossil fuel assets and undermine the economic system that has concentrated wealth for the past half-century.

The transition creates a paradox: to avoid agricultural collapse and mass starvation we need the fossil fuel economy to stop, but the ruling class can’t envision maintaining power without it. Combined with the end of Moore’s Law killing the tech investment bubble, Stross sees 2025 as the year when unsustainable systems finally break. Our current economic system’s focus on efficiency over resilience leaves us vulnerable to potential agricultural collapses and supply chain disruptions that could have catastrophic consequences. If we can navigate through the coming decade without widespread conflict, famine, or financial collapse, we may be better prepared to face the challenges of the 2030s in a renewable energy future where power generation is distributed rather than concentrated in extraction economies.

Note → In issue No.340 I shared an article by Adam Tooze, Trouble Transitioning: What energy transition?, about Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’ book More and More and More where he argues that “when we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy.” That doesn’t contradict Stross per se, but assuming Fressoz is right, it’s definitely a big “tweak” to the shape of the pivot. By the way, I don’t know how he does it, but Stross still has an extremely lively comments section. At the time of writing, that post was up to 1500 comments!

As long as we have global supply chains and bulk shipping we can shuffle food around the globe to cover localized shortfalls, but if we lose stable agriculture globally for any length of time then we are all going to die: our economic system has shifted to just-in-time over the past fifty years, and while it's great for efficiency, efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience. […]

Business logic has no room for the broader goals of maintaining a sustainable biosphere, or even a sustainable economy. And so the agents of business-as-usual, or Crapitalism as I call it, are at best trapped in an Abilene paradox in which they assume everyone else around them wants to keep the current system going, or they actually are as disconnected from reality as Peter Thiel. […]

The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying. Massive AI data centres won't keep the coal mines running or the nuclear reactors building out (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware).

We should all be Luddites

Not for the first time, here’s a piece that realigns what the Luddites were actually fighting and how this fight could be mirrored today with AI. The author, Courtney C. Radsch, a nonresident fellow at Brookings, proposes that “It’s time to rehabilitate the Luddites as guides for the present. They understood that the future is not written by the machine, but by those who wield it.”

What makes this one worth a share, even though Luddites correction might be redundant for some readers here, is that it’s a kind of short how-to manual for thinking and writing about AI. With sections for journalists (“stop reporting from inside the hype machine”), academics (“look beyond the sector to the system“), policymakers (“regulate deployment, not just development“), and educators (“don’t hand the mind to the machine“).

As AI makers hope to reshape society, we must resist accepting its deployment as inevitable and instead question who benefits and who is harmed by these changes.

What if the questions were instead: What kinds of labor markets are being designed around AI? What is shaping the choices about adoption? Who has bargaining power in those decisions? How will the value created by as yet unfounded promises of productivity growth be distributed? Who has power and how is it wielded to promote certain interests and negate other futures? […]

When human inquiry and creativity are offloaded to anthropomorphic AI bots, there is a risk of devaluing critical thinking while promoting cognitive offloading. If we turn the intellectual development of the next generation over to opaque, probabilistic engines trained on a slurry of scraped content, with little transparency and even less accountability, we are not enhancing education; we are commodifying it, corporatizing it, and replacing pedagogy with productivity. […]

The new weaving machines are being installed—infinitely more capable of performing a far vaster set of tasks than any prior technology—at the behest of the state and the tech corporations whose platforms we use every day. […]

But what’s at stake isn’t just educational outcomes: It’s the formation of minds and how we learn to reason, to discern truth, to engage with one another. … What’s lost is not efficiency, but encounter. Not content, but context. A generation educated by AI may gain convenience, but at the risk of losing curiosity and creativity.

What is civil society, and why should we care?

Henry Farrell draws on Ernest Gellner to define civil society as a vital sphere where people can freely associate and resist tyranny, existing independently from government control. It emerged historically as a compromise that balanced state power with social and economic pluralism, allowing individuals to choose their affiliations without ritual or coercion. However, many contemporary conservatives have shifted away from protecting this pluralism, instead seeking to dominate or dismantle civil society by imposing ideological conformity. He urges the left to value genuine pluralism too and stresses that preserving civil society requires relentless, attentive effort.

The dominant strain in American political conservatism has abandoned any commitments that it once had to this vision of pluralism. Some conservatives favor a shared notion of the common good, which ought be imposed as necessary on society. Others are more straightforwardly interested in domination and plunder. Neither faction has any interest in preserving the autonomy of civil society. Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, they see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, as filtered through the mud-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought. […]

Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join (say) the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep, in fact you would hardly be allowed to do such a thing, and you can leave it without incurring the death penalty for apostasy. […]

You absolutely do not want a political system in which the government is able to remake civil society in its likeness. The value of civil society stems precisely from its capacity to (a) restrain government from tyrannical behavior, and (b) create a realm of free engagement, where people can live their lives, and freely create and dissolve bonds among each other.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Reimagining the way the world works. “The Future of Sustainability 2024/25 showcases examples of organisations or communities — ‘Bright Spots’ — that are fundamentally reimagining how we live and work, with game-changing potential to create a future in which both people and the planet thrive.”
• The future is mundane. “Renowned anthropologist Sarah Pink explains why the sensory and embodied experiences of everyday life should take a more prominent role in imagining possible scenarios.”
• How to Synthesize the Future: Build Better Futures Faster. Upcoming book by the folks at Futurity Systems. “A 240-page methodology book complete with a playbook (disguised as dust covers) that combines rigorous science with imaginative design.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Refusing generative AI in writing studies. “This guide positions refusal as a disciplinary and principled response to the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI)3 technologies in writing studies. We created this guide to add to ongoing efforts to think through approaches for responding to GenAI in writing studies, and in higher education more broadly.”
• 2025 AI Adoption Report: Gen AI Fast-Tracks Into the Enterprise. “As Gen AI fast-tracks into budgets, processes, and training, executives need benchmarks, not anecdotes. Now in its third year, this unique, year-over-year, cross-sectional study shows where the common use cases are, where returns are emerging, and which people- and process-levers could convert mainstream use into durable ROI.”
• AI weather forecasting, built on high-tech balloons. “WindBorne Systems uses a fleet of self-navigating weather balloons to collect data for AI forecasting.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• World’s largest Indigenous-led conservation project launched. “In an unprecedented partnership, 21 Indigenous governments, the Government of Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories and private donors are investing $375 million in Indigenous-led conservation, stewardship and economic development across the Northwest Territories.”
• Biodegradable plastic made from bamboo is strong and easy to recycle. “Hard plastic made from bamboo is as strong and durable as conventional plastics for uses such as household appliances and car interiors, but is also recyclable and biodegrades easily in soil.”
• Australia has so much solar that it’s offering everyone free electricity. “Formerly a coal-heavy nation (for which coal is still its 2nd-largest export), solar and wind have rapidly taken over Australia’s electricity grid, pushing coal and methane gas out of the equation. … The program would require electricity retailers to provide free electricity to everyone for at least three hours a day, in recognition of the incredibly low wholesale cost of electricity during daytime due to extensive solar power penetration.”

Asides

• I was today-years-old when I learned that there’s an upcoming Prime animated series titled The Mighty Nein that looks like an anime and is based on a D&D campaign run on Youtube by the gang at Critical Role. That’s… awesome and weird? (It’s also the second such series so I’m very late to this.) “The Mighty Nein follows a group of fugitives and outcasts, bound by secrets and scars. But when a powerful arcane relic known as ‘The Beacon’ falls into dangerous hands, they must learn to work together to save the realm and stop reality itself from unraveling.” (Via Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in November!.)
• Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966. Back in the days when the US and Canada were bffs. “In 1966, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) Cheyenne Mountain underground facility became America’s command and control centre for when the Cold War turned white and the nuclear apocalypse became real.”
• Originally released in 1982, the Vectrex was a truly unique console. “Featuring its own built-in vector display and colorful screen overlays. Forty-three years after its creation, this iconic console is reborn in a brand-new miniature edition.”