But I think we all sense now that things have shifted from “something is coming” to “we’re soaking in it.” We’re over the edge of the event horizon and in a different state of being. The other shoe has dropped. People are getting killed. The world has reoriented from the United States as ally to United States as part of a new axis of authoritarian powers. My European friends have sent their condolences.

On the one hand, I’m simply embarrassed. (I was negotiating to do a talk in Berlin, but after Trump told the rest of NATO that none of their countries came to our aid after 9–11, I just caved and told them I’d do the talk for free. Why do they even want to hear from an American, right now?)

But more to the point, I’m as afraid and confused as any of you. And like those of you who are filling my inbox with questions right now, I, too, am asking “what should we do?” How do we prepare for the next assault on our liberties, on another American city, on another human being trying to shield the vulnerable from state violence? What is next? It’s going to get worse, right? Should I buy a gun? What do we do?

Preparation is good and real, and I’ll get to some things we can do at the end of this piece. But this focus on preparing for “what may come” can also distract us — especially if it takes our attention off what is actually here right now. About anything more, we are really just guessing.

And this guessing and speculation can separate us from the moment, and our power. Sometimes, it may be healthier and more effective to respond to what is than strategizing for what may be. It spares us from projecting a logic or intention onto the actions of whoever or whatever is working against us. Putting ourselves into their mind — Trump’s mind? — is an act of mimesis, or mirroring, that creates some simulation of an inner turmoil that makes no logical sense to anyone else, lacks any true predictive power, and only immerses us further into that bizarre world view. What’s Trump thinking? I don’t know. What if we don’t need to know?

The alternative — sticking with what is actually on the ground and already here — safeguards against falling into an ends-justifies-the-means misstep, ourselves. We don’t strike out at the phantom attack preemptively, like an immune system attacking the body’s own cells as if they were pathogens. Or, worse, look at the human beings who have been coerced into their hostile postures as the enemy, rather than confused future allies.

When we are aiming to bring our very best selves to the moment we’re in, whatever we do has to be correct, aligned, and congruent with our values. If you are not doing it in the moment, you are not doing it.

The question that people keep asking me now is “what do we do about this?” And while I think there are many approaches to activism and resistance we can take right now, I want to step back from the “what action do we take” to “what comportment can we embody?” In other words, how do we metabolize this moment? And from there, we can begin to consider what actions or approaches that comportment may engender.

So bear with me. You can act in ten minutes from now if you want to. The problems and chaos will still be there for you to engage with when you get to the end of this piece. I promise. But stay with me for a moment here if you can. If there’s no one crashing through the door, or within earshot crying for help. Let’s take a minute.

Now I never lead this embodied-practice-somatic-guided-visualization stuff, but for a second it may behoove us to “be here now.” So, humor me. Just take a breath in through your nose, and out your mouth. And if you can stand it, just one more time. Thanks.

I’ve been living through a really tough patch lately. You may have, too — as everything seems to happen at once these days. For me, the anguish seems to be coming from the bottom up, the top down, and in from the sides all at once.

My daughter got really sick this month. Hospitalized and everything. They’ve now concluded it’s Crohn’s, a digestive disease — yes the same kid who got surgery for endometriosis last year. And I’m trying to be “always on” for her. Having a kid is like gaining an extension to your nervous system over which you have no control. All vulnerability. And of course I chalk up these so-called auto-immune diseases to environmental toxins, microplastics, packaged foods, antibiotics, forever chemicals. I’ll take time out from protesting those things to help my kid deal with their effects.

Likewise, I’m trying to be present for her, while at the same time seeing the footage from Minnesota — people getting rounded up by deputized Proud Boys; Venezuelan sailors mowed down while clutching to their boat debris; Democrats getting indicted for basic opposition; fake news leading to presidential declarations about Somalians embezzling billions of dollars from daycare funds; Greenland. And all the email and messages from people wanting to know what to do.

And I’m sure all of you are in similar positions, with loved ones confronting the fallout of our artificial civilization, and concentric rings of friends and allies increasingly impacted or at the very least unsettled by what they see happening around them, and in their name.

It is authoritarianism when the government, the president, and the attorney general say that protestors killed by federal agents were terrorists engaged in massacres, that Alex Pretti was an assassin, or that Renee Good “ran over” an officer. When the government makes statements that they and we all know are not true, and they know we know they know it’s not true, but still say it anyway? That’s authoritarianism. It triggers lots of stuff: that abused child feeling, that powerlessness, the sense of horror. But it’s not something that could happen or will happen. This is happening. We’re soaking in it.

We can’t help but ask ourselves and each other: what is next and what should I DO? Between the attorney general telling Minnesota they will withdraw federal agents from the state if the governor turns over their voter rolls, 15 million Americans living in their cars, the collapse of the NATO alliance, Gaza, the extra-judicial beating and killing of citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the street by masked regime-funded gunmen, the conflation of loyal opposition with domestic terrorism, the threat of an Insurrection Act that could even postpone the midterm elections? Not to mention the environment, which is seemingly on the back burner. Or Larry Ellison’s “Project Stargate” to collect everyone’s DNA and use AI to surveil us biometrically; the Pax Silica plan to maintain control of the AI minerals supply chain; Trump’s bank account in Qatar where he’s collecting both Venezuelan oil money and the billion dollar contributions from authoritarian states for his Middle East Board of Peace? This is it.

I’ve got friends busy comparing the pace of current events with arc of Nazi history in order to project their next move. Is the government intentionally terrorizing people in cities to provoke violence and have an excuse to institute martial law? ICE is buying the old Pep Boys warehouse just up the Hudson to process prisoners. Does that mean New York City is next?

Another way of imposing authoritarianism is to give victims false victories. Try outrageous things and then pull back. Like, shoot some citizens, then withdraw a bit and replace the guy in charge. Or threaten invasion of Greenland, and then compromise by just claiming all the rare earth minerals. Show the victim you can kill them, and then “reward” them with mere abuse. When the oppressor “backs down,” it’s strategic. It means we’ve become ready to accept their terms — which can still change at any time. After all, the bully doesn’t actually beat us up if we give him our lunch money.

We’re all floating somewhere on the multi-axis spectrum between rage and despair, futility and action, or resistance and helplessness. But the gestalt reaction to being terrorized can become the mirror image of inflicting terror. The somatic response, the clench, the inward spasm of fear and rage only creates the same violent impulse in ourselves. Or if not violent, antagonistic, dopamine-driven, out for vengeance, in need of fulfillment, retribution, completion. Like a mousetrap just begging to snap. Gimme an excuse. I have to do something.

The Customs and Border Protection agency itself (the one whose officers killed Pretti) was formed in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9–11. See? Terrorism works best when it gets its victims to turn on one another, with violence. So let’s hang on a second. Let’s be with this before we do something about this.

We have to metabolize what’s happening in the moment in order to respond, rather than react. Be with it. Feet on the ground. No alienation. This is happening. It’s kind of a bad trip. So make like a mushroom and metabolize, breathe, integrate, then extend.

Metabolize this yourself, individually, so you can find someone else and start to do it collectively. So yeah, call your friend or, better, visit your neighbor. Meet your neighbor. Not in panic, not looking for reassurance, but as that person they will want to turn to for how to be present and alive in this moment.

For it is these connections on the ground — these friendships and interdependencies between real people — that are the greatest inoculation against panic and false polarities. This connection to others is easiest way to stay in the real world rather than escape to the abstracted landscape of ideologies (however enlightened those ideologies might be). Most important, these connections make us tactically defensible as a community against ICE, agitators, fascist gangs…whatever.

Your extreme local, embodied community is your only truly real one. Think of it this way: Whose bodies are closest to yours when you’re sleeping at night? Those are the ones who can keep you safe. You have to know these people, care about these people, or even just recognize these people.

When we know each other, our relationships transcend whatever economic or class or other artificial distinctions have been erected between us. That’s what all those distinctions for. Likewise, all the figures on the TV or pinging us from the cloud are there to distract us and isolate us from our interconnectedness here on the ground.

But let me tell you this: it’s all ground. The figures aren’t real. Even Donald Trump is ground — more so every day. The figures are just extruded ground. Substance phantomized into image. Ghosts empowered by our attention, our desire, and our fear.

Yes, they can be useful. Gods, laws, ideas…they’re what gave rise to ethics, the Enlightenment, democracy itself. But they are abstractions, amorphous, and require real agreement and social construction from people in order to function. They are second-order phenomena. Without ground, the figures don’t help. Without community, democracy can’t even happen. We are the ground. There’s nothing separate.

That’s why I’m taking a step back from activism or reaction, and I’m instead asking we start by just aiming for basic coherence, on an individual level, and then with the people around us.

Who are the people around you?

Who are they? What do they need? What can they offer? I used the recent storm as an excuse to reach out. I put a note and a copy of Team Human on everyone’s door on the floor of my building. Hey, this is me. I’m Douglas. I write books. Thought I’d introduce myself. I’m here if you need anything.

Gotta start somewhere. And it’s not political or lefty to find out if there’s an elder person or someone who needs to be checked up on in a storm or a blackout. Or if you live out in the real world, who has water? Who has a chainsaw? Who knows first aid? I know, that sounds advanced. Like real mutual aid. So how about do it the easy way: Knock on someone’s door and ask for something. An egg. Borrow an egg. And bring one back the next day.

Know these people. Know their faces. This is your squad. You think a war is coming? Okay, it’s your platoon. The more you know and depend on these people, the more resilient you are against any adversary — be it storm or stormtrooper.

Create the conditions for community support, safety, and awareness. Then the good stuff happens. I lived in Greenwich Village in the early 90s at the peak of the AIDS crisis when gay men were getting chased and murdered in the street in great numbers. Those of us who had apartments on ground floors started putting pink triangles in our windows, so gay men knew they could seek refuge with us. They had a place to run. No one else knew what the symbol even meant. But the more pink triangles that went up, the more people realized that practically every home was part of this effort. Not a “movement” toward something, but a state of being. Of presence. Of readiness.

The movement, the activism, the ideals arise from that. They are the figures that emerge from the ground we have prepared and embodied.

And they are local. In Minneapolis, people are joining Signal messaging groups by the block. All the organizing apps were removed from the App Store for fomenting insurrection; so people were forced to create their own hyper-local messaging groups — at the scale of just one city block. Each one has an organizer who can report up to the neighborhood group, and so on. Not everyone needs to be everything to everyone all the time. The network takes care of that.

The more networked we are, the more specialized we can be. The more grounded we are in our area of expertise — be it foraging, immigration, biodiesel, childcare, or local councils.

Without connection to the people and communities where you live, all of these stresses and TV images are food for abstraction. No ground, just figure. And then you are on the path to dehumanization. Before long, you’ll be suffering from some version of Steven Miller’s hallucination of white people being replaced by Somali killer insects.

The only direction that goes is toward force. Brute force. Step on the bugs like that sadistic boy in fourth grade we all knew who would pour lighter fluid down an ant hill, set the colony ablaze, then watch all the burning ants come running out. That’s Steven Miller’s set and setting. Those who don’t agree with him are “Un-humans.” Can we resist the temptation to go there? That truly bad trip of might-makes-right?

“Might makes right” is not even an argument; it’s just the excuse to get to express the sadistic urge. That compromised, vicarious way of experiencing ground through the annihilation of the other. The “dom” energy, except it’s not play. There’s no consent. Just the bam bam bam bam.

Any of us could go to the sadistic extreme. And the best way to prevent it is also the best defense against those who have gone there. Find the others. Join Team Human.

You want to know things you can do? After you’ve grounded yourself, met your neighbors, established bonds? How do you want to help? What would you like to be able to offer? What can you already offer?

You can start by fostering and weaving the fabric of community and interconnection and mutual aid. You don’t have to be on some frontline. Make sandwiches. Creating communities of mutual aid changes how people think about policy and politics. It changes how people vote, who they elect into roles of leadership, which in turn changes America from a place that threatens the sovereignty of other countries to one that understands itself as a member of the global community. We transform ourselves from a country worthy of international boycott into a place people around the world want to visit and support.

Politically? Well 15 republicans crossing over could stop all this. Engage. Join a local chapter of Indivisible. Call your senator and tell them to stop funding the madness. Or, yes, go outside. Take the streets. Join a general strike. Be creative, peaceful, enthusiastic, united activists. With the teachers, ministers, parents, police — yes police — and other protesters willing to do democracy with their embodied presence.

I understand the current administration won a mandate to deport undocumented aliens. But it’s become an excuse to perpetrate violence and create the conditions for authoritarian rule, domination of women, subjugation of people of color, and extraction of the world’s remaining wealth by an elite of billionaires who see us as expendable, lower forms of life. As bad as if we were indigenous.

And what are they really fighting? Us. Team Human. The very bonds of community and mutual aid. Our neighborhoods. A person helping another one. Be that person. A person helping another one.

That’s the most radical, meaningful, sacred, powerful thing you can do. That happens in the moment. In the right now. It’s not a strategy based on speculative assumptions.

It is the first, last and most fundamental premise of self-rule. Find the others. Become the ground.

But every once in a while, when I’m out in the real world (or more often, in the fake world of podcast or TV interviews) I’ll find myself feeling regarded as absolutely crazy. And the more I explain or justify or contextualize or recount the actual history of my claims, the more crazy I sound. I come off like a conspiracy theorist revealing an organized plot—just for suggesting that elites throughout time have been creating and enforcing systems of control and embedding them so far into the fabric of our constructed world that they have become invisible. Just…the way things are. It’s as if by revealing the hidden or lesser-known reasons by which this all came to be, I’m just revealing myself as paranoid.

And I’m not talking about left vs right here. I can go to South Dakota or Alabama or Tennessee and find plenty of MAGA people who recognize the systemic effects of choices made long ago. They may have different solutions, like eliminating vaccines or deporting Mexicans instead of modulating our engagement with them, but even Steven Bannon’s narrative for late stage hyper-capitalism under the technocratic elite—and presumably that of his millions of listeners—is consonant with my own suspicions about the tech billionaires’ true intentions for the future of government, humanity, and life on earth. I’m actually more comfortable debating someone who draws different conclusions from the same observations, or who makes completely different observations but is at least looking.

Let me tell you what happened.

I was a guest on the companion vodcast for one of those high budget post-apocalyptic streaming TV series. There’s a bunch of them out there these days, and a good number of them are based on, or at least inspired by my book Survival of the Richest. And while it turns out you don’t have to get rights to a non-fiction book in order to use its stories or ideas, it’s nice that the creators of some of them do a little call-out when they’re giving an interview or invite me to a panel at a festival. Paid or not, I’m still seeing my ideas on the screen, which is totally cool.

These days, it’s almost always the same genre: billionaires going underground or into a bunker or onto an island retreat in order to survive or celebrate the end of the world. The Billionaire Bunker genre.

So last month, I got invited to be on the vodcast companion show for a Hulu series called Paradise. It’s one of the kind like Silo, Fallout, The Ark: a billionaire or corporation with tremendous foresight develops an impossibly gargantuan fallout shelter for some subset of people to perpetuate the human project. And it’s a whole society in there, a whole world, with artificial light and stores and farms and corrupted leaders and an underclass.

This one, Paradise, is about an underground city of 25,000 people with a fake sky and roads and buildings and a college and everything. The ultimate next-level perfect eco-city tech bro wet dream utopian American society, with a fake president who just takes his orders from the tech billionaire who owns the place (a woman in this show) and—responding to the questions I raise in my book—her main challenge is to maintain the allegiance of the security force. But unlike the other shows in this genre, the bunker they’ve made doesn’t look like a giant missile silo or an artificial shopping mall. It’s an impossibly giant town with LED sunlight, roads, cars, and wide open spaces. Storywise, it’s pretty much the same premise as the others—like, what happened to the outside world? Is everyone dead? Is it safe to check? And who is actually in charge down here, who really made this place, and was there an ulterior motive…?

I’ve done these kinds of interviews since Survival of the Richest came out. Everyone wants to know about what the billionaires are really planning, as if the things they tell us they are planning aren’t already crazy enough. And this interview with the lovely wife of the series’ star, starts like any other. She announces me as this important professor who studies billionaires and bunkers and wrote a book on the phenomenon. Then she starts by asking me, is the show real? Do billionaires really have plans for bunkers in case of a disaster?

I’ve only got 15 minutes, so I figure I’ll get right to the point: Yes, I explained, they have plans. But the power of this show is not its ability as science fiction to predict the future. It’s about right now. We are already living in a world where the ultra rich are insulating themselves from the rest of us. The show is really just a metaphor for what is actually happening.

She thought I meant billionaires are building bunkers, and maybe hanging out in them for fun.

Yes yes, I told her, most wealthy people are outfitting their existing homes with modifications to make them sustainable and somewhat defensible in the event of a catastrophe of some kind. Yes, Peter Thiel has a compound in New Zealand, and Mark Zuckerberg has a giant estate that also serves as a defensible fortress in Maui. Why not? If you have the money, and understand you’re not going to be able to hold out there forever, it’s not so unreasonable to have a place to try to protect yourself and your loved ones against the next pandemic, water crisis, or civil war. Good luck with that, but go for it.

The show, nor my book, are really about that, I tried to explain. This is much bigger. Realer. Current.

I went on, and explained how right now some tech billionaires — including Marc Andreesen (Netscape) and Reid Hoffman(Linked In) — are part of an investing group attempting to buy a large amount of land in Solano County to build a utopian city for themselves and their friends called California Forever: a utopian, sustainable eco-city, totally walkable to the tech headquarters. Instead of fixing San Francisco or Oakland, just retreat as if to a bunker and build your own gated community.

“California Forever?” Her eyes were widening. Taking me in, but also something else going on in her face. Like, incredulity?

No, she had never heard of Solano or California Forever.

That’s real? She asked. As if she didn’t know or, more likely I was thinking, wanted to make sure the audience didn’t think this was presumed knowledge.

So of course I dug myself in deeper. It’s not the only project of its kind, I told her. There’s Neom, the zillion-dollar megacity they’re trying to build in Saudi Arabia? A 100-mile long strip of mirrored city for 9 million people. Built from nothing and totally sustainable, except for having to displace the Bedouins who had been living there sustainably for the past few thousand years. It is as expensive and improbable as a Mars dome. Or the city in Paradise. Or have you heard of Próspera, the autonomous island “nation” tech-bros created in Honduras to experiment with technology illegal anywhere else?

She tried to get it back on track. “But billionaires have plans for bunkers. What have you seen?”

I’ve seen a couple of plans for bunkers, I said. But the story here is that the real world is becoming a bunker. At least for the wealthy. They don’t believe there are enough resources for everyone. Their scenarios all point to imminent disaster. So they are busy accumulating as much money and as many resources as possible now in preparation for the coming collapse.

She was getting quiet now. As if this was all new. She was nice. She looked almost worried for me.

I knew I only had five, maybe ten minutes left. How far back do I go to explain this story?

“Right. Well, think of it this way: you’ve heard of disaster capitalism?” Blank.

”Okay, well, when a disaster happens somewhere, very wealthy people and companies are often able to capitalize on that. Buy distressed properties, take over collapsing businesses. The disaster turns out to be a good thing, at least for investors from hedge funds, or sovereign wealth funds who can afford to buy up public assets.”

“Sovereign wealth funds?” she asked. Like those of us without PhDs need some orientation here. Right. Fair enough.

“Sovereign wealth funds. You know resource rich nations who sell something like oil and don’t want to share the profits with their people? They create these big investment funds with the money, and then look for assets to buy. Apartments in New York, soccer teams, Trump crypto…whatever. They need ways for their capital to grow. Stuff to invest in. Problem is, there’s more money than there is stuff to buy.”

“Sovereign wealth funds and super rich investors get more opportunities to buy up assets when bad things happen and people need to sell them. So why not create those conditions right now? Like, disaster capitalism but enacted intentionally. That’s why they’d raise tariffs, put farms or ports out of business, and then buy up the land or ports or schools or highways. Take these public places and turn them into private assets. Places they own and control, like the private utopian city in your show, in Paradise.”

“Really?” I saw it in her eyes. She was thinking, is he one of those….crazy people? I could hear it just listening to myself. There was just too much to pack into 15 minutes. Summarizing it or, worse, assuming any knowledge just made me sound crazier.

“All I’m saying is that your show about a tech billionaire building a private city to hide from the rest of the world while it decays into Mad Max or The Road? That’s not science fiction. It’s what we’re seeing right now. It’s how they experience the world.”

“But why?” She asked. Or something like that. I knew I had lost her. Or that she felt this was just too much for her audience to swallow. Or maybe she was simply drawing me out for entertainment value? I knew there was no easy way to make this make sense. I kept thinking I would touch bottom. That I’d reach ground with her, and the rest of it would cohere.

I tried to explain how the wealthy were trapped in a system that required exponential growth (because of the interest-bearing currency we use). And they’re getting nervous because they can’t find ways to get further up the pyramid. That’s why they’re so intent on growing the AI industry at any cost, getting all regulation out of the way by undermining states’ rights or even the European Union.

She just looked at me. Worried. And the more I tried to explain, the further I strained what credibility I had left.

I lost her way back at “sovereign wealth fund.” I shouldn’t have used the term. It sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. Are there really such things? Or is that 9-11 conspiracy theory? The whole premise of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like a conspiracy. In fact, all finance sounds like conspiracy if you try to explain it out loud: Remember the mortgage crisis? Goldman Sachs sold baskets of mortgages to investors, while simultaneously betting against their solvency. They were selling investments they hoped would tank. That’s how they would cash in.

Sovereign wealth funds. Privatizing public assets. Billionaires working in collusion with government to deregulate AI and build Project Stargate, a global genomic surveillance apparatus.

I heard the words coming out of my mouth. and I could tell I sounded crazy to this woman. PhD or not. I mean, I could have gone back to the Knights Templar, the invention of central currency, City of London… The historical proof points sound even worse.

I tried to make it plainer. The billionaires are not imagining underground cities after a nuclear war, but creating private cities deep within our real ones right now. Think Sao Paolo, or a gated and highly militarized mini-city inside a big one. Like the walled palace in a medieval city, surrounded by guards. Or South Africa before apartheid. Most of the Middle East. That’s not a science fiction future, it’s what’s happening right now. What they’re building right now. The ultra wealthy are creating walled gardens, while draining what’s left of the common wealth, and getting us accustomed to seeing the military being used against civilians today because they’ll be using these troops to protect their enclaves from the rest of us tomorrow.

I could almost read her mind now. Who booked this guy? How do we wrap this segment? I pivoted back to get to a nice ending.

“At least in the show,” I explained, “we find out the real world may have not been fully destroyed. People got along okay up on the surface, even after the disaster. So maybe the billionaires are vastly underestimating us human beings. Taking themselves off the playing field by retreating into bunkers may be the best thing they could do for us.”

So I managed to get into stuff that made me sound more Team Human and a bit less Survival of the Richest. But the experience was agitating me. Making me…concerned. Initially, for myself. Have I gone off the deep end? Just describing the function of a sovereign wealth fund sounds like conspiracy theory. Or where corporations come from. Or wage labor. Or how capitalism works.

And that’s when it hit me: we are that far down this road. I was still talking to her about her show and the apocalyptic billionaires, while also, inwardly, trying to reassure myself that just because I obviously sound crazy to her doesn’t mean I am crazy. It’s the world that’s crazy. The series of steps that those in power have taken over the past five-hundred-or-so years to maintain their hold over the economy, the law, the culture and—by extension—the real things of this world, have grown so convoluted that to describe it is to recount the history of the way a sociopathic civilization gets constructed.

And in that moment, God’s honest truth, I thought about you. And how I could use the same logic I was using to console myself, to reassure myself, to console and reassure you, too.

You are not crazy.

We are being gaslit by the constructed world. It’s the same way we grow accustomed to the necessity of owning an automobile, simply because our jobs and homes were placed at distances where we need an automobile to get back and forth—forgetting that these places were zoned by automobile industry lobbyists so that we would need to buy cars. The landscape is crazy. Those of us who see it for what it is, who know its origins, who know that it is constructed? We are the sane ones here.

Only in this case, it’s our convoluted money system that has convinced billionaires and the investor class that the only way for them to survive is for them to privatize the world, hoard the remaining resources, and lock the rest of us out. Peter Thiel believes that those of us who point this out are, literally, satanic beings, pulling wealthy winners like himself back into the mud, and preventing his ascension to the next level. He says this out loud. This isn’t conjecture.

So no, you’re not crazy. Neither am I. This is actually happening. And these events, these schemes, are indeed crazier than a sci-fi series. At least on TV they have some reason for going underground or up into space. We are doing this to ourselves, in a completely unnecessary and avoidable way.

I’ve been researching this history for the past thirty years. Mainly, in an effort to document the fact that this is a created reality, based on both a few false premises about human nature, as well as a few unnecessarily aggressive, dominating styles of control. These choices eventually turn into assumptions and these inventions eventually turn into institutions. To see them this way, to denature them, to point to their origins and inventedness and the intentions behind them is to look crazy.

The reason they think we are crazy is because we are coming to see how the choices that led us here were arbitrary. We could be doing things differently. We’re blowing up children, poisoning the water, and killing the planet for no good reason.

We are not the crazy ones here. The situation’s not unclear, it’s just absurd. We are living in a constructed world—a built environment so convoluted that accepting its premises means gaslighting ourselves.

And I’ve seen a few comments here or on my YouTubes asking why I’m so into this esoteric stuff right now—particularly when the world is facing so many real, on-the-ground, actual challenges. Genuine violence, starvation, suffering, slavery, abuse in the moment. Loss of cultures, languages, species, habitats. Colonialism—not just as some abstract concept—but an ongoing exploitation, taking ever-new forms, disguising itself as populism while it breaks what’s left of civics, a social safety net, or international cooperation.

And even though there are occasional setbacks to the twin monsters of authoritarianism and Neo-liberalism, the war between the two only distracts us from the rapidly accelerating crises threatening us all.

Things seem hopeless, I get that. And some of the most informed environmentalists I know say we’re past the point of no return; my political science colleagues argue the world has tipped toward at least a half-century of globally dominant dictatorships; my fellow media and technology theorists think AI is going to destroy human cognition and psychological coherence whether or not Artificial General Intelligence is ever achieved. The collapse of civilization as we know it seems not only inevitable, but like it may have already happened. It feels like we’re already over the edge of the cliff, noticing the wind rushing by around us as we descend, and maybe just mustering the courage to look down.

So how, facing this urgent, inevitable certainty of—at best—crisis but, more likely, doom… how am I here offering such a diet of “weird” along with substance? Isn’t this more a moment for me to step up in my persona of Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics instead of the psychonautically informed hope fiend?

But it precisely the urgency and inevitability of our situation that calls for us to shake something loose. To see things…differently. Call to the outliers. If all of our most logical faculties, or our standard tools for evaluating our situation point to bad outcomes, then maybe we need to employ some non-standard tools. And that’s even more than I’m asking for here; it’s above and beyond the mere “supposing” I’m trying to initiate. I’m not asking we get all the way figuring out our best new strategies right here and right now. I’m just asking us to achieve the preconditions. Let’s even just get to a place of psycho-social readiness.

That’s not so easy to do when it feels like we’re staring through the windshield of a car accelerating toward a concrete wall. The closer we get, the more the wall fills our field of vision until that’s all there is. That’s the feeling right now, between domestic troop deployments calculated to provoke fear or anger, economic policies structured to force farmers into foreclosure while transferring another few trillion dollars of collective wealth to the top .1%, or America’s withdrawal from any form of global collaboration over energy, health, or pollution.

The resulting state of fear and paralysis is an intentional byproduct. Something like “shock and awe,” but really just traditional ‘psyops’: the“psychological operations” that one country would carry out on the population of its adversary in a war to soften their resolve or distract them from good warring. Keep the people in a state of panic until they go numb, or—better—begin to direct the fear and anger against others. Just help them find someone else to hurt more than they do, or to blame for the imminent collision. Convince them that there is no future, only a past when things were better, and to which we can somehow return.

When people are in a state of trauma, or bad PTSD, their eyes lock in. That’s what EMDR therapy is all about, where they have the patient follow LEDs with their eyes left and right, while thinking about the traumatic event. It loosens up their eyes and, correspondingly, loosens up their brain to look at the story in other ways. To change their relationship to what happened. Put some play in the wheel. Leave things up for re-interpretation. Unlock the trauma so it can metabolized and transformed from a psychic scar of trapped energy into new possibilities and potentials.

That’s the same thing that these magical moments, inklings of awe, reconnections to each other, or the divine, or “the everything” do. They’re like the deja vu that helps Neo recognize a glitch in the matrix, or when Katniss shoots an arrow at sky in Hunger Games to reveal it’s just a dome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, there is a way out or—better—through. All you have to do is tilt the picture a new way, so you can distinguish between the actual limits and those that have been imposed by people and institutions who don’t want us to even try (either because they think it’s not possible, or because it will undermine their own efforts to exploit widespread doom for their own self-interest). So they use media, religion, economics, and even hard evidence to lock down the inevitability of doomsday—all the while building spaceships, underground shelters, and arks of the covenant (I kid you not) for their own escape.

Whether we are mentally trapped in a simulation or simply stalled by a propagandistically curated wall of facts, we need to be able to consider alternatives. To unlock our gaze, and free up our minds. And these strange but increasingly common and provable phenomena—from autistic kids demonstrating ESP on the Telepathy Tapes to the Practical Magic of Mitch Horowitz, to the demonstrated retro-causality theories of Rod Sutherland, or Julian Barbour showing how half of time since the big bang is going backwards, they crack open the mind for a moment of possibility. They make us go, huh? If a hundred people take a test, and then fifty of them are told to study for the test after it’s over, those people will end up having done better on the test. Huh? The studying somehow trickles backwards through time?

I know, half of you already don’t believe me. Even that’s fine. Don’t bother Googling. Just wrapping our heads around this Mobius strip of possibility flips a switch. It’s like when you show a dog something it doesn’t understand, and it tilts its head to the side, as if it will understand things better looking from a different angle? That’s the state we want to go for. That place of confusion. Of living in-between the inevitabilities. Suddenly uncommitted to a reality tunnel and willing to choose or even create a new one. It’s not fantasy, but rather, “is there a better way of framing what I am experiencing now?” Reframed, like at the end of a movie where they flash back through all the moments that you now understand differently.

Or even before that part when you have a new frame. The space of possibility. Of being able to suppose…anything. Just suppose. Just open your mind. Open your skull. How long can you hold that? Without succumbing to terror? Hold onto the truth that no one knows what the fuck is going on here? What made us, what are we here for, why is there so much pain and suffering, what if….?

What if…?

It’s hard to hold onto that. Usually, when people get zapped into this place, when the surface illusion of one of the prevailing systems of thought is pierced, we rush to create some new “sense” and flip into hardened religion or conspiracy theory. That’s when I found Jesus! That’s when I knew they were out to get us!

That’s just as debilitating as being trapped in the original hopeless conundrum. You have the moment of opportunity, but then surrender it to the first fantasy or nightmare that comes along. Like a person succumbing to a bad trip or one of those first seductive or scary Bardos along the way to the white light. That’s MAGA world, poor things, with 5G towers and nano vaccines controlling behavior, Jewish space lasers, HAARP weather station-induced earthquakes, or Venezuelan remote election hacking. And that stuff isn’t even as weird as actual remote viewing, dark matter, inter-dimensional travelers, or shooting a fly out of the air with my fingers.

That state of openness is hard to maintain. There are many casualties of learning to see or un-see this way. Fallen fellow travelers, from Russell Brand and Naomi Wolf to Alex Jones. They went too quickly from huh? to aha! Pointing the finger at their new villains. Too secure they know what’s going on, they replace wonder with worship of one kind or another.

The current neo-fascist, technofeudalist, billionaire oligarchic simulation has no tolerance for the weird or wonderful. The premise of their escape plans, for their sealed off eco-villages and Mars colonies and eugenic civilizations, is that they can account for everything: the ventilation, the soil matrix, the social codes, the diet, the water treatment. Environmental disaster is the excuse, but the aspirations is the same: America 2.0, hatched ex nihilo, as if from nothing, and—more important—accounting for everything. No surprises. No wiggle room. No magic. No women, for that matter. Just robots and little girls.

There’s no magic to it. Everything has to be figured out, from vertical farming to regenerative systems. As if the complexity of life can be recreated from a sterile starting place more easily than tweaked back into balance right here in the real world. Pave over the living planet and live above it, as if a moss could grow on a plastic-sheathed tree trunk, or a gut biome can thrive on packaged protein powders. And it never works. No matter how well they lay down their foundation, there’s always cracks in the pavement. And something sprouts through it. Unaccounted for. Differently alive, in spite of everything.

Reality is weirder than these simulations. Weirder and better and more powerful and sustainable and regenerative and sexy and fun. Yeah, fucking is even more fun than blowing up a Venezuelan fishing boat. I promise you it is. I’ve never blown up a Venezuelan fishing boat, but I know in my bones it’s not as much fun as good sex, or singing in the shower, or rolling in the grass, or seeing the stars. I feel certainty about that.

But that’s besides the point. All I’m trying to get across here is that when things seem impossibly bad or inevitable, we have the option of considering the impossible. So challenge the evidence. Find the cracks in the pavement. Tilt your head to the side like a dog, and welcome the state of confusion.

Embrace the absurdity, and stop making sense for long enough to actually sense what’s happening here.

The way they do that is with an induced form of disaster capitalism, where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that private equity firms can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers.

What I explained was that the kleptocratic elite, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they don’t have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. That’s what we’re watching on TV and on our city streets, and why so many Americans voted against the current administration. It was a resounding “what the fuck?”

But I briefly mentioned something about AI and employment that I want to get into now. See, it’s not coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilization’s history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalism—the end of this eight or nine-hundred year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialism—then we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. And I will get to why I think that can ultimately be a good thing, but let’s go through the scenario that’s running through everyone’s heads right now, and then find our ways there.

AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of jobs. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies, the spreadsheet people, the powerpoint people. Doomers say it’s 90% of jobs, but let’s even say it’s just half of office jobs taken by AI’s and blue collar jobs taken by robots.

The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, the racist antisemite, understood that workers—even his assembly line employees—needed to be able to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from them or at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services?

And this is the weird part: in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling things to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them.

We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.

As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents’ business. The humans don’t matter. You end up with a small elite of big business owners living in luxury with perhaps a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AI’s doing the work and consumption.

And of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchised-especially the ones who live in cities-that that we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed.

It’s a both dismal and liberating vision for the end of colonialism’s employment and exploitation of people. Let’s consider the liberation part. For close to 1000 years, growth based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing actual work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed the capitalists from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral there’s another company selling the mineral. There’s another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment. There’s a derivative on the stock and a derivative on the derivative.

Or there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. That’s called the “rentier.” But the rentier themself has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on.

That’s the pyramid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid simply grew too top heavy to support itself. There’s only so much you can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down. Crypto should have been the great public lesson for how this happens. But no.

AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI (human-level AI) is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply level up. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the humans represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh and blood mammals.

Our real world economy only has so much matter, anyway. We can’t scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works, because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, tech businesses and their investors get trillions of AI customers. We are not required. The real world economy and real world of people can’t scale enough for them so they live it behind.

But this may be a good thing. It’s akin to a slave population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees, anyway. As I’ve explained before, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this coercive form of capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s. That’s when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become “employees” of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. That’s when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses. (This is what Adam Smith was all upset about.)

So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isn’t worth capitalism’s attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time and attention, so there’s no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they are—optimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit.

Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI-economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants, and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods. If any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality.

That’s why to me, it’s less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra rich have accepted the end of capitalism—or at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So it’s time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another.

There’s really only two kinds of “jobs” anyway. There are the jobs people do to provide goods and services to each other—like, farming, healing, teaching, building—and then the jobs we could call “city” jobs, maintaining corporate control over all that work. That second category of work is the one that’s going away. So all that’s left for us humans is the real stuff.

We’ve already got tons of books and models for how to execute a peer-to-peer circular economy, scaled locally, and optimized for flourishing and circulation over hoarding and stagnation. This is not rocket science, and these ways of living are already being modeled everywhere from the Mondragon cooperatives to Tamera in Portugal.

If the wealthy people’s AI fortress cities really do come to pass, we can still sell our excess meat and produce and music to them in exchange for the kind of centralized currency we might need to get cell phones or AI tech. Almost like trading with another civilization. But our world on the ground doesn’t have to be the Mad Max Hunger Games underclass nightmare to which the wealthy believe they are condemning us.

Or think of it this way: we built the net as a safe refuge for the counterculture. Corporations invaded the net, took it over and turned it into an accelerationist nightmare. But they are ignoring the real world in the process. They believe they are leaving it behind for something abstract and better. As far as I’m concerned, let them take the net as long as we can take back the real world.

They get the net and we will have each other.

So what do we do now right now is learn to get along with people rather than competing with them. We begin to explore mutuality, experiment with new models of collaboration and cooperation. Restore the fabric of our local communities. Get involved in local politics and civics and mutual aid. And model how fun this is for others to get interested and play along. People will engage this way with one another once they see how fun and alive and sexy it is to do. It’s even more fulfilling than being validated by ChatGPT.

I know I’m sounding optimistic; I fully understand the transition won’t be easy. Reclaiming our land and resources, and even our conscious awareness will involve considerable struggle. And learning to function in a horizontal society will require us to recall how to be human and compassionate. Our real job in the coming collapse is to figure out ways to make the landing as soft as possible for everyone. We need to find ways to welcome those who fall out of the matrix and re-orient them to the real world.

Do I really think the tech bros can create an economy where AI’s serve as both the workers and consumers? No. But the fact that they believe this and are working toward it should give us all pause. They know that without an AI miracle, they’ve run out of room to keep moving up the Tower of Babel—the ziggurat—through successive layers of abstraction and growth.

Pyramidal civilizations, like the one that’s currently ending, are competitive. People strive for acquisition and accumulation. The more you have, the higher up the pyramid you go. That’s not our game. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not even fun. The more you accumulate, the more brittle life becomes, the more everyone else is an enemy, and the more you need accumulate to protect yourself from those without.

Horizontal civilizations—the ones we inhabit after those pyramid collapse—optimize instead for leisure. That’s why the former peasants of medieval Europe only worked two or three days a week. Their money expired at the end of the day so there was no point in accumulating it. Instead, they worked as little as possible in order to have as much time to love and make art and eat and play and fuck as they could get.

It’s so much easier, so much less extractive, and so much more fun. But it requires we value the social, the contact, the moment to moment experience of living, and the desire to connect with other people rather than finding new ways to lord over them.

The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.

The way they do that is with an induced form of “disaster capitalism,” where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: Use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that a private equity firm can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers.

The über-wealthy, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they don’t have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. That’s what we’re watching on TV and on our city streets.

It’s no coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilization’s history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalism—the end of this 800- or 900-year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialism—then we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. I will get to why I think that may ultimately be a good thing, but let’s go through the scenario that’s running through everyone’s heads right now, and then find our way through to what I think are better days.

The spreadsheet people

Yes, AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of your jobs, dear Fast Company readers. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies . . . the spreadsheet people, the PowerPoint people. Doomers say it’s 90% of jobs, but let’s say it’s just half of office jobs taken by AIs and, of course, blue-collar jobs taken by robots.

The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, despite his enthusiasm for fascism, understood that workers commoditized by his own assembly lines still needed to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from them—or at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services?

And this is the weird part; in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling stuff to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them.

We already see how AIs can replace us as workers. But how could AIs also become the new population of consumers? They don’t have time off to spend money. What do AIs need? To do their jobs better.

The humans don’t matter

Instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AIs so that they succeed in their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AIs will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks, and then spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.

As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents’ business. The humans don’t matter.

So, assuming this tech-bro dream comes true, we end up with a small elite of big-business owners living in luxury with a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AIs doing the work and consumption. And, of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchised—especially the ones who live in cities—that we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed.

The good news

Sounds like a nightmare for most of us, but it also offers clues to an emancipatory vision for the end of employment. So let’s consider that good option: For close to 1,000 years, growth-based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral, and another company selling the mineral. There’s yet another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment, there’s a derivative on the stock, and a derivative on the derivative, and a platform trading the derivatives, and so on.

Or, more simply, there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. That’s called the “rentier.” But the rentier has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on.

That’s the pyramid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid has simply grown too top-heavy to support itself. There’s only so much one can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down.

Total abstraction

AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from the employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply “level up” in what they believe is a simulation anyway. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the “humans” replaced by non-player characters represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh-and-blood mammals.

Our real-world economy only had so much stuff anyway. We matter-based entities can’t scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, they get trillions of AI customers. We are not required.

But this is a good thing. It’s akin to an enslaved population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees. As I’ve explained in some of my books, the whole concept of “employment” was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s.

That’s when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become “employees” of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. That’s when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses.

A moment of transition

So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isn’t worth capitalism’s attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time, so there’s no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they are—optimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit.

Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods (if any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality). The current state of the technology doesn’t fill me with hope for much more than a fierce market correction.

To me, it’s less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra-rich have accepted the end of capitalism—or at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So it’s time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another.

Let’s start at the beginning. AI is just the latest, perhaps greatest advancement yet in what OG computer scientist Norbert Wiener dubbed “cybernetic” technologies. Unlike traditional technologies, cybernetic ones take feedback from the world in order to determine their functions. They work less like a machine you turn on than a home heater’s thermostat, which turns itself off when the heat has reached a certain level. This, in turn, allows the room to cool. Then the thermostat snaps on again, using feedback from the environment to keep the room within a chosen temperature range.

Of course, the other kind of feedback we all know about is that loud screech you get when you point a microphone too close to its speaker. The microphone is hearing its own sound, then feeding it back to the speaker, then hearing that sound, and feeding it back to the speaker again. Each feedback loop adds more sound until it screeches out of control.

People engaging with AI prompts are vulnerable to those very same “positive” feedback loops. You come up with an idea, pose it to your favorite chat, and the more supposedly “human” the AI, the more it tries to find a way to give you positive feedback. “That sounds like a great idea for a new business, Douglas. I’m intrigued! Shall I develop a proposal with possible action points?”

PASSIVE SPECTATORS

Round and around we go, the initial tiny utterance of a prompt getting cycled again and again, our human nervous system stimulated and reinforced by the positive feedback. Sure, we may contribute a bit to the process, but for the most part we are passive spectators of the phenomenon, marveling at how much history, logic, and speculation the AI can bring to bear. It can even create a slide presentation or video or simulated prototype of the idea suitable for presentation to others!

Go to any business conference these days, and you’ll run into more than one entrepreneur who is high on their own supply, sharing videos of their AI’s crazy visions. Lord help the folks they convince to invest.

As I see it, the reason they fall prey to such positive feedback loops is that they are too ready and willing to pull themselves from the equation. The AI seems so authoritative, and so human, that surely it’s aware of what it is doing. It wouldn’t be so on board with your ideas if it didn’t have some sense that it would work, right?

YOUR AGENTS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS

Wrong. Don’t accept the positive reinforcement. The AI isn’t on board with the idea so much as committed to pleasing you, in the moment, like a person if it’s been trained that way. But it’s not a human, not even close, and doesn’t hold a conception of the thing you are working on. No, you, the human partner in this feedback loop, are the only one who stands a chance of conceiving or contextualizing whatever it is you’re working on.

Your agents, like your children, are not your friends. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care for them. Quite the contrary, it means you have to be the one to intervene on everyone’s behalf. You are the conscious actor in the system.

The way to prevent such positive feedback loops in our interactions with technology is to assume the role of the human. Don’t get out of the AI’s way in the name of efficiency or output. It’s cool to see all that “stuff” coming out, but if you’re not intervening in the process—actively getting in the way—you’re not going to get anywhere at all.

FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS

Counterintuitively, perhaps, the way to do that is to become less mechanical, less results-oriented, less utilitarian, and more feeling, more process-oriented, and even less obviously useful. Yeah, slow things down. Nurture your intuition. Lean into your own experience, expertise, and sensibilities. Reconnect with your instincts. Pause and breathe. How does that make me feel?

For while cybernetic machines can iterate, only living beings can respirate. Instead of cycling through data, human beings can metabolize through our bodies. We can test ideas with our gut. Something doesn’t pass the smell test. A proposal feels off. This strange moment in the digital age may just be an opportunity to reclaim the uniqueness of being living, breathing, metabolizing creatures in an otherwise digital, unconscious, contextless landscape.

Making AI’s seem more human is not doing us any favors, especially when it tempts us to relinquish our roles as the living, breathing adults in the room.

The problem is not just that the publicist used AI to shotgun the known universe of podcasters with pitches artificially customized to their shows. It’s that the comparisons and connections are really bad. “Your guest spoke so passionately about being a death doula, I think you would be so interested in an artist who makes Halloween napkins festooned with skeletons, which are usually of dead people.”

So what do I do? I blacklist the sender. The human publicist ends up losing credibility because the one thing I might trust her to do—to accurately assess the appropriateness of my show for her guest—had been surrendered to a machine whose job was to make that connection by any means necessary.

She was using AI in the fashion of an Industrial Age factory owner to increase her productivity, but simultaneously ignoring the human process that defines her expertise.

I see the same thing happen with AI-generated reports and presentations. Someone gets some speculative idea and then asks Chat to justify it with a few case studies. On the surface, the case studies may sound like they’re supporting the premise—but if you look any deeper, they don’t really relate at all. They’re analogous, but not truly relevant. Worse yet, they’re sitting in what looks like a fully realized Powerpoint presentation. Concepts that could have been interpreted as half-baked, speculative, or open to discussion now appear finalized. They seem inappropriately unrealized for how elaborately they have been rendered, and make the presenter seem foolish. (That is, if the recipient is even reading the work rather than having their AI summarize it.)

DESKILLING OURSELVES

By using the AI to do the big stuff—by outsourcing our primary competencies to the machines instead of giving them the boring busywork—we deskill ourselves and deprive everyone of the opportunity for AI-enhanced outputs. Too many of us are using AI as the primary architect for a project, rather than the general contractor who supports the architect’s human vision. (And even many of the general contractor’s functions are attributable to the human relationships they have developed over the years.)

People are treating their chats as if they were fully realized (but as yet nonexistent) AGIs, and letting them do big stuff rather than treating them like tools that can do lots of little stuff. When facing a new seemingly gargantuan project, they turn to the AI first rather than digging in and doing some research—perhaps even using the AI as a research tool instead of relegating the whole project to it all at once. The output looks good to the user, less because it is good than because the Chat has been programmed to make the user feel good about their query. “That’s an insightful project idea, Douglas! I’ve managed to flesh out an entire proposal at three different price points.” The positive feedback loop reinforces the user behavior, until the threshold for asking the Chat to do the project is lower and lower. In the name of getting more product out there, the user loses touch with their own process—their core competency.

NO SHORTCUTS

The only ones who win in such a scenario are the AI companies, who effectively commoditize the users and their companies. Without any core competencies, the only competitive advantage a user has left is the robustness of their service contract with the AI company. The fast, slapdash results are not worth the cost in human expertise.

As the researcher behind MIT’s study “This is Your Brain on ChatGPT” explained at a recent ANDUS event, when people turn to an AI for a solution before working on a problem themselves, the number of connections formed in their brains decreases. But when they turn to the AI after working on the problem for a while, they end up with more neural connections than if they worked entirely alone.

That’s because the value of the AI is not its ability to create product for us, but to engage with us in our process. Working and iterating with an AI—doing what we could call generative thinking—is actually a break from Industrial Age thinking. We focus less on outputs than on cycles. Less on the volume of short-term results (assembly line), and more on the quality and complexity of thought and innovation.

AI’s don’t have to replace our competencies or even our employees. That’s less an opportunity for success and scale than it is a recipe for deskilling, commodification, and eventual disappearance.

Adopting AI as a partner in process and enhancer of competencies requires developing a new kind of culture around technology and innovation—one that centers the human ingenuity at the core of a company, and supports the ways that new, intelligent technologies can foster that living resource.

But I think it’s important I explain what I see as the motivations driving some of the people—yes, human beings for now—engineering what feels like an intentional collapse of our government and society.

I first wrote about this phenomenon in my 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. That was based on a ridiculous encounter I had with five ultra-wealthy dudes, who told me about the bunkers and other preparations they were making for what they called “the event”—the nuclear disaster or climate catastrophe, food shortage, pollution or pandemic—that makes life unlivable. What struck me at the time was that these guys were the richest and most powerful people I had ever met, yet they felt utterly powerless to influence the future. The best they could do was hire a few futurists to predict the future, and then prepare to survive it.

So the object of the game, to them, was to acquire enough money and technology to outrun the impacts of their own businesses and technologies. If they had a social media company whose net effect was to make people crazy and break democracy, then the thing to do is create a fortified island paradise that doesn’t depend on a functioning democracy back at home.

But my reaction was to laugh. I wrote a black comedy. These guys seemed crazy. They were high on their own supply, and using the excuse of a potential global disaster to build out their childhood fantasies of a virtual online clubhouse to which they could upload their brains and have sex with anime characters. I wrote that book so we could laugh at this tiny cohort of Ayn Rand skimming techno-libertarian, transhuman, proto-fascist, misogynists, not take them so seriously just because they could convince Joe Rogan of something, and – most of all – not follow in their footsteps when something like Covid or an economic crisis tempts us to put up the barricades and live behind an Amazon video doorbell. I was trying to show the ridiculousness of attempting to go it alone, and impossibility of genuinely shielding oneself from catastrophic horror. Or, as I asked in the book’s opening episode, “why are the Navy Seals in your security force going to protect you once your bitcoin is worthless?” It’s laughable.

The solution, instead, is to meet our neighbors, reduce our dependence on big corporations, and establish local resiliency. We all get to make it. When we survive together, we thrive together.

And to this day, all I get interviewed about is book’s opening chapter. It seems so preposterous, unbelievable even, that grown up billionaires would be building doomsday bunkers. And I get why that hook is so interesting. But, I’m sorry to say, the book wasn’t about those five billionaires but an entire world view: a belief that only the strongest individuals can and should survive, which is now informing the self-destructive policies of the US government. It is the world view and philosophy driving what seems like authoritarian chaos in America, as well as the logic behind its plan.

Just as the billionaires I met believed there was little they could do about an impending, existential event—some fantasy of an AI-spawned zombie apocalypse—the wealthiest among us genuinely believe that the systems through which our society organizes itself are breaking down. They believe in the inevitability of climate change as much or more than the climate activists working to prevent the worst damage. They don’t even believe in the possibility of remediation. Sure, they pay for propaganda that insists climate change is a hoax, but that’s just to prevent everyone else from catching on. The campaigns give the elite the time they need to make their survival plans, accumulate land, tilt the economy, secure private armies, build the walls…before the masses figure out what’s going on. Just go to a private conference thrown by the one of the conglomerates funding climate change denial propaganda and you’ll see presentations on how rising tides will impact the housing finance markets or how shrinking coastlines will require mass migration inland. They cover same subjects being discussed at a Soros conference, except focused less on mitigation than on perverse economic opportunity. The bankers and insurance companies are more hopeless about potentially averting an ecological breakdown than the most radical environmentalists are.

Or take the protestors of Occupy Wall Street. We were arguing for alternatives to mandatory exponential growth, ways of reining it in while developing more circular economic practices. The folks funding and steering the new far right don’t have such faith in the economy. They see better than anyone how unbridled, extractive corporatism eventually makes a vast majority of people destitute. They know the pyramid they’ve built is going to stop generating wealth. (The only exception are a few AI zillionaires who believe that once human consumers no longer have any money to spend, they will be replaced by AI consumers—autonomous agents will be the new customers, using crypto to purchase the computer cycles and data they need, from the AI companies. First, they come for our jobs. Then, they take on our role as consumers. Theoretically, at least in the minds of the craziest technocrats, it works. For them. I’ll write about that another time.) Either way, the system collapses for the vast majority of people.

Quite simply, the elite are the ones who have lost faith in the system that has served them until now. They think it’s all going to crash—at least economically—and, more importantly, that there just won’t be enough food and shelter and energy and stuff to go around when it does.

Convinced an inevitable collapse is coming—private bunkers aside—their best answer for survival in the chaos is to get as rich as possible, buying up as much land and assets as possible, while also building a military force capable of controlling the hordes of us who won’t have enough food or shelter or medicine. Even if it means enacting policies that hasten the collapse, that’s preferable to losing control over one’s monopoly on the remaining spoils. As long as the edifice is coming down, may as well do controlled demolition.

So they invest in crypto while devaluing the dollar, lower their own taxes while raising taxes on the poor through tariffs. The tariffs simultaneously bankrupt farmers who can’t find a market, and see their land purchased by private equity who can then rehire them as sharecroppers. Put as many people as possible out of work by firing government employees, which leads to a cascade of failures of the businesses they patronize. Cut healthcare and other programs, throwing more people into poverty. Basically, they looked at Noami Klein’s ”disaster capitalism”—the way that businesses profit off disasters—and realized they may as well create those disasters. As state and local governments go bankrupt, sovereign wealth funds and other investors can buy up the ports, bridges, highways, state parks…privatizing public assets so they can own rather than share what remains. It’s how Putin and the oligarchs who supported him took over Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Except in this case, the collapse will be orchestrated for the purpose.

I keep wondering, wouldn’t anyone prefer to be quite wealthy a happy world than super wealthy in an awful one? If they had the choice? You could still lord over people and build libraries and walk around like gods. Only your legions of workers and consumers would be happy and singing your praises. You could make parades like Macy’s did.

But they don’t actually think that’s possible.

So any policy to bring people up from the bottom, in their eyes, only distributes and wastes the funds and assets the elite need to insure their own safety. Because they’re going to need whole islands, walled kingdoms, massive security forces, nuclear power plants, robot soldiers, and computing power and neural implants so they can build virtual worlds in which to live if the planet itself becomes too toxic.

I doubt they have anything against creating technologies cheap enough for everyone to get their minds into the cloud, too; but that’s not the object of the game, here. Besides, to them all this radical Democratic Socialist talk of making sure everyone gets enough food to eat or access to medical care is just unrealistic. There’s not going to be enough to go around so instead of caring for the poor, we just cut them off. Instead of providing aid to impoverished parts off the world, let them go down in famine, disease, or conflict. And treat the underprivileged in our own country the very same way—all while convincing them that immigrants are the problem and we only need to restore our nation’s ethnic and religious purity to make it through.

And if people complain or resist, send the army into their cities to quell the unrest. Create arguments to keep women out of the military, for fear that they may not follow orders with the aggressive zeal of ICE squads. And make sure there’s no black soldiers, who may be more likely to see themselves in the people they’re supposed to shoot down. (That’s what the new regulation requiring people to shave is all about. Pseudo Folliculitis Barbae.) You don’t want women and people of color in your domestic urban assault units.

Right now, such invasions are justified as sweeps of illegal immigrants or mitigation of non-existent crime waves. But—as we’ve been told—this is also training for the urban warfare to come. They are saying that part out loud. On TV. In their Project 2025. In the book they’ve endorsed, UnHumans about how communists are not fully human.

Why would they say that part out loud? Because they’re selling a philosophy that only the strong and saved deserve to be among the survivors. They’ve leveraged the general sense of social justice overreach (DEI) to advance their notion of Darwinian survival as the natural order of things. The cheetah eats the gazelle. ICE patrols round up Mexican children.

They just have to maintain the illusion that joining in the might-makes-right revolution will benefit even the poor whites. Take a couple of trillion from healthcare in order to pay them $50,000 signing bonuses to conduct authorized pogroms of hispanic neighborhoods. Keep even 30% of people believing this will all work in their favor—at least long enough to suck out the remaining wealth and then subject them to the same treatment. Except maybe for those who have remained loyal.

Whether or not this comes to pass, here’s the icky part right now: When even a sane, compassionate person hears all this and wraps their head around the idea that our government is selling itself off because it leaders believe the governed world is imploding, one can’t help but ask: so what can I do to protect myself and my family? Do I move to Canada? Try to earn a lot of money? How much money would I need to be on the “safe” side of things? Is that even possible? Do stocks go up when the dollar crashes, or do bonds? Gold? Bitcoin? How about a second passport? Is it too late to join a remote permaculture community?

Or worse: people wonder what they have posted online. Will the AI’s find your 2011 retweet of someone deemed “anti-capitalist”—one of the groups now officially named as part of the radical democrat plot to promote terror? I don’t like thinking that way, and neither should you.

I know, I know. You’re waiting for the good part. My “Team Human” alternative. Okay. Here it comes.

Our job as members of Team Human is not to succumb to the zero-sum mentality of the wealthy. Instead of seeing our reality as unfixable and requiring self-interested retreat, we see the potential bounty of being in this thing together. They’re the ones who have given up on prosperity. They are living the nightmare. They are the pessimistic downers, who lack faith the regenerative capacity of people, cultures, the planet, and life itself.

They may be the rich, but they are not the strong. They are the weak. The ones who see forecasts of climate change or the collapse of capitalism under its own extractive weight, and think there’s no way out other than an escape hatch built for one.

We must instead be the ones who see such forecasts as challenges to rise the occasion. How can we prevent another two degrees of warming? How can we restore the topsoil through crop rotation and no-till agriculture to sustainably feed the world? How do we preserve the rainforest so it can continue to deliver its bounty of as-yet undiscovered medicines? How do we increase our capacity to welcome, instead of deport, the millions of climate refugees to come? Instead of making zombie movies to help us dehumanize the masses at the gates, we create stories to help people remember that the sign of an advanced civilization is how well they treat the stranger. (This was God’s test of Lot in the Bible, and the reason he and his family were spared the destruction of Sodom. He welcomed the stranger. I wish more people would actually read the Bible.)

That’s how to survive the apocalypse—because an “apocalypse” really just means revelation, or unveiling. Not an ending. We see that this whole obsession with winning the endgame is really just our fear of death. It’s a fantasy of immortality (another tech billionaire fixation). And it’s what prevents us from enjoying this heaven into which we’ve been born, and the bounty it offers us. We’re in Eden, people, and we better start acting like it.

Instead of hitting tit for tat, or running away, or strategizing for the end, we refuse to see the world as ending. Instead of buying into the elite’s nightmare and accepting their limited vision of how things could be, we embrace the stranger, share our food with them, and together build the reality we all know is possible, and even probable.

Rather than confronting those who hate you as their enemy, just do the opposite of what they do. Don’t hate them, or you become them. Instead, meet their hate with love. Counter their selfishness by sharing. Instead of building walls to keep out the others, open doorways that welcome them home.

We can do this. So no more doom and gloom. That’s their game.

Let’s do it as a thought experiment - change the names so we can protect the innocent.

When my kid graduated middle school, we got this big portrait of her for me to hang in the living room. But we have these old plaster walls, so I needed to drill a hole to hang it. Problem is, I don’t have a drill. So, what to do? Like any middle class American, the first impulse is to go to Home Depot and get the cheapest available drill for $39.97 plus tax. Some rechargeable piece of crap that I’ll use this once, then put it in the garage and never use again. Or maybe I’ll eventually take it out in two years, find it won’t take a charge, and then just throw it out.

So to make one hole in the wall, I send kids into mines at gunpoint to get the rare earth metals to fabricate the thing; I spend God knows how much fuel to ship the finished product from China to the US, creating a huge carbon footprint in the process; then I throw it out so it can be shipped to Brazil, dumped on a mountain of industrial waste, and scavenged by one of a legion of impoverished children looking for toxic garbage to sell, who takes it apart to find the single renewable element and receive a couple of pennies from a reseller who delivers it to a Chinese smartphone plant so some Silicon Valley company can claim it does green manufacturing. Great. I’m part of the problem.

Or, I could summon the courage to walk down the street to my neighbor Bob’s house, knock on the door, and say “Bob, can I borrow your drill?” Bob has a drill. He’s got maybe three of them. He’s that guy. His garage door is open all weekend, and he’s got table saws and saw horses with doors that he’s routing and bannisters he’s lathing. This is what he does.

But no. Most of us, like me, are afraid to knock on Bob’s door. Not that he’s going to hit us or anything, but if I ask Bob to borrow his drill, I will unleash a chain of events I may not be prepared for. He will not only lend me his drill, he’ll say “Doug, I’m coming over with my drill and doing this for you.” He’s knows I’m a a writer. A nerd. “You don’t know how to find a stud, or set a sinker. It’s a plaster wall, Doug, you can’t just drill a hole. The picture’ll come down.”

So he’ll come over with his drill and his bits and his anchors and his stud finder. He will find the stud, and pull out his drill. It’ll a big, metal drill that plugs into the wall as God intended. He’ll drill the hole, set the anchor, screw in the thing, and hang the picture. Done. He’ll smile, tell me he likes the way we faced the couch in our identical house toward the living room window, and go home.

Why don’t I want that? Because that next weekend I’m going to have a graduation party for my daughter in the backyard. I’ll be barbecuing chicken and ribs for our friends and family, and the smoke is going to go over to Bob’s house, and he’ll think, “what the fuck? I went over and hung the graduation portrait of Rushkoff’s daughter and he couldn’t even invite me to her party? Are his ribs that fancy? Fucking liberals.”

So I invite Bob. And his wife, and his daughter. And his mother-in-law who lives with them and likes to sing. And they enjoy the ribs with us. But then some other neighbors are going to see Bob and his family over at our house eating ribs, and wonder why we invited Bob and not them. So I invite the whole block, and before long they’re bringing Cole slaw and brownies and a Sonos speaker and a spin art set…. and my daughter’s graduation barbecue has turned into a block party with everyone.

And that’s the nightmare! That’s what we’re afraid of!

Because now they’re in our backyard, and I find out Bob’s kid is having trouble in algebra, which my daughter could really help him with if she has any spare time. And his mother-in-law sees our piano and wonders if we want to do a sing-a-long. What are we doing next weekend? Christmas is coming right up. If we’re not careful, we’ll have the whole block over for Christmas, singing songs in the living room, exchanging presents, have a big meal together…maybe our kids will like each other even though they’re in different “friend groups” at the prison yard otherwise known as the school cafeteria.

This supposed nightmare is really the community ideal. This is the good life. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America meets Norman Rockwell tradition meets Diego Rivera solidarity. It’s not just social; it’s political and economic.

Maybe someone else at the party hears about how this all started — with me borrowing a drill — and gets the idea that we create a little tool library for the block. “Why does every house need its own lawnmower?” she asks. “What if we got just two lawnmowers and two snowblowers for the whole block, and we share them?” No one uses a lawnmower all the time. We could each take an afternoon… And we only pull out the snowblowers two or three times a year.

So now, instead of just me sending fewer kids into the mines for rare earth metals by borrowing a drill instead of ordering up a new one, a whole block of people is buying fewer machines, sharing things, doing favors for each other. We’re replacing economic activity with social activity, learning each other’s names and needs. Creating a web of interactions and interdependencies instead of more personal expenses and corporate profit.

And the more we all do this for each other down here on the local level, the more resilient we are. The less dependent we are on tortuously long, convoluted supply chains for our stuff. The less stuff we need, the less money we have to earn and the less we have to work. The more we know our neighbors, the safer our neighborhood, the less environmental toll we take living in the separate little homes of suburban neighborhoods designed to promote individual consumption. And the more we know each other, the less easily we can be divided by ideological fictions and media-created factions.

But when I tell this story at a conference, invariably some business person gets up and says “Yeah, but with everybody sharing their tools, what happens to the drill company?” Before I can even say fuck the drill company, he says “they will have to lay people off. Their stock will go down. And the old lady who is depending on the dividends of a lawnmower company stock for her fixed retirement income? She won’t be able to support herself. If everybody does this, the whole economy will contract.

That’s logical, maybe, but since when are human beings here to serve the economy? The economy is here to serve us. If people don’t have to work as much or create as much toxic waste in order to meet everyone’s needs, that’s not a bad thing but a good thing. The five-day workweek is an artifact of the early Industrial Age. An arbitrary assignment of time, not some law of nature.

And the old lady who is depending on stock dividends to survive in retirement? What kind of society requires people to earn enough money during their working years to support themselves completely independently in their later years? Besides, as we develop the bonds of community and sharing, that woman becomes part of the fabric of our interactions. Not some obligation, but a privilege. We find out how useful she is, as someone to watch our kids, give us advice, provide us with an opportunity to serve. She’s not a liability but an asset. We should be competing for the privilege of inviting her to lunch or mowing her lawn or walking her to the grocery store. We’re putting the social back into socialism. It was never about the “ism,” but about the truly social nature of local transaction.

If it’s not the businessman criticizing the negative impact of community on the economy, it’s the progressive activist arguing that such small actions never create systemwide change. Reviewers often critique the endings of my books where I offer such solutions, saying they are “unsatisfactory” because they’re too small to make a difference. They don’t involve big policy changes or a macro-economic rethink, or sweeping regulation. These solutions don’t fix the big stuff, and don’t do anything to address economic inequality.

So which is it? Is sharing too much of a threat to the global economy, or too small to make a difference? Both critiques are trapped in the mindset of scale. As if everything has to or is going to happen all at once. It doesn’t. Because unlike big top-down solutions, making these kinds of changes to our behavior slowly impacts systems from the bottom up. We have time to adjust. They’re incremental, and full spectrum. Companies don’t simply fail all at once, but gradually lose their influence and dominance over our society and the ways in which we interact.

We can still be activists and march and call general strikes. But in the meantime, we become more resilient communities in the face of the inevitable shocks ahead. A neighborhood that knows how to work together and come to each other’s aid is going to be in a lot better position when the next extreme weather event happens — particularly when FEMA has been defunded. If it takes three months instead of three days for government help to come, the community will have the means to hold out together instead of fighting over generators in the Home Depot parking lot in an every-man-for-himself battle for survival. We don’t fortify our bunkers against each other but find ways of sheltering one another. We identify more with our block than our house, running extension cords to those without generators and taking in the elderly.

So yeah, borrowing a drill instead of buying a new one initiates a chain of events that really can change the world. A single act of heroic courage. Of being willing to knock on someone’s door and ask for something. To put yourself in someone else’s debt, and be able to tolerate a feeling of owing someone something, which used to be understood as good thing.

It’s why we bring brownies to someone when they move into the neighborhood. They don’t need a plate of brownies. They just moved in. Their kids are sleeping in a strange place for the first time, and they don’t need to be jacked up on Duncan Hines Double Fudge. We give them the brownies because it weaves them into the fabric of obligations. It’s not the brownies, it’s the plate that invites them to knock on our door and return it — maybe with something on it, or a story. The gift is the invitation for them to do something for us. To be grateful. Indebted. Neighbors.

In his Prison Notebooks, written under the repression of Italian Fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci said politics is downstream of culture. Nationalist extremists like Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon understood this one way — that we can use cultural fears and beliefs to shape the political landscape. But while politics may be downstream of culture, culture is downstream of rapport. If you don’t have rapport, then culture ends up being about difference.

The high leverage point for systemwide change is not some big idea or belief, but a behavior. A way of interacting that assumes each of our welfares are mutually dependent. That understands it’s not just more prosperous but more fulfilling, more fun, to do this thing together.

That to be truly human, means to be on team human.

I had a good few weeks. I met some interesting people, had a few deep conversations. I danced. I went to the Metropolitan Museum with a friend. And in each of these occasions, I felt myself experiencing a profound sense of appreciation for getting to do these things. I had so much fun. And I feel like there’s more to come.

Yet I have to ask myself, is it okay to feel this way when there’s so much seemingly falling apart? When there’s so much pain and suffering going on? Families being torn apart by ICE in California? Others being starved in the Middle East, bombed in Ukraine — not to mention the war zones that don’t generally make the news, like the ones in Cameroon, Congo, Central African Republic — just to list some that start with C.

Here in America, whether they know it or not, millions are at risk of sinking further into poverty, and 18 million households currently suffer food insecurity. Climate change, topsoil erosion, continuing displacement of indigenous peoples, encroachment of industrial agriculture and mining on remaining rainforest or wetlands. Microplastics and forever chemicals… But more importantly, the actual real-time horror in this very moment experienced by other human beings right now, as I sit here in my happy place, engaged with you — a community I cherish — about the challenges and opportunities that matter to us most.

In the midst of so much unspeakable trauma (actually, quite speakable trauma) is it okay to experience moments of joy and connection, or even mere appreciation for being alive and breathing?

I think so. I think if we’re lucky enough, even privileged enough — and I know that’s a loaded word — to have waded into a warm spot in an otherwise cold ocean of despair, we have to at least let ourselves experience the opening and appreciation that comes with it. For being, as long as it lasts, simply okay.

Providing — and here’s the ethical caveat, I guess — providing it’s the joy of connection to the whole shebang, not the relief of having temporarily disconnected from the way things are, or having strategized some “win.” Sure, achievements are great and all that, and if you’re studied and done well on a test, or succeeded in business, or did some hard work and now get to taste the fruit of that effort, sure. Go for it.

But I’m talking more about the sort of bounty that just shows up. The way the snow just falls and quiets the city. A moment of beauty that simply unfolds for you. The way the essential rightness of nature or pattern of moments line up. An embrace from your lover. A moment of recognition with a friend. A sunset with your dog….less something you have achieved than a gift from the gods. Totally unearned. Undeserved. Bounty.

These kinds of moments — what Christians once understood as “grace,” these moments that engender a heart-opening sense of awe — they shouldn’t be denied their recognition and appreciation. The attendant guilt and shame for such moments of grace is natural. Justified, even. I was the kid on his birthday who felt the only thing appropriate to wish for when blowing out my candles was an end to world hunger. How dare I do anything else? And I’m the same way today whenever something great happens. Even now, writing to you from this safe, air conditioned apartment, with a decent desk chair and you actually reading it. How great is this?

And while it calls to mind the many who aren’t in this position — those who don’t yet have an audience for their expression, or don’t have access to technology, or an education, or food, or their land, or a violence-free day — that’s no reason not to experience the moment we are in right now. Because they’re in this moment, too. How dare we refuse to acknowledge and appreciate the bounty we have, when we have it, in the face of what those without are experiencing?

It’s not like we’re oblivious. Few of us are in danger of aspiring to a…let’s call it a “Mar Lago lifestyle,” where one’s joy is predicated on maintaining the walls of separation between themselves and those they exploit. Smoking cigars with fellow elites and celebrating the very separation they’ve been able to create between their own experience and everyone else’s. Victory or domination over some ‘other,’ whose defeat or inferior position is one’s only measure of success.

No, the joy I’m talking about is the very opposite. Not the joy of triumph or domination, but the joy of feeling connected to everyone and everything else. Not the joy of winning the soccer game, but of operating in wordless harmony with the other members of your team. That collective or at least connected bliss/flow state. It’s not at the expense of others. It requires the others.

But if you, like me, get pangs of guilt or shame whenever you’re feeling really good even during times of collective trauma like this, the first thing to remember is that — at the very least — you are refueling and restoring yourself for the good work. Even a diehard activist or agent of change needs to refill their pranic tank.

There’s a great quote about this from Savage Love columnist and podcaster Dan Savage that circulated earlier this year. “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon, and danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight—because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

So yeah, no matter how bad things are, how many of our teammates are falling every day, we can still spoon at night and take delight in that connection. Even when one member of a family is sick or in pain, they want their caregivers to go out and have fun and metabolize all the frustration and grief. It makes us better able to do service and be present. It reminds us what the “light” even is, so that we can bring it to places it’s dimming or gone.

Joy, awe, sex, dance, art are our ways of metabolizing, processing, composting the anguish — rather than wallowing in it. Like the jazz band at a New Orleans funeral, turning the corner and suddenly shifting from funeral dirge to celebratory upbeat dance catharsis. It’s as if they are processing and transforming the energy, pacing and leading the mourners and the deceased to the next place. “We danced at his funeral” doesn’t mean we hated him, but that we loved him. Still do.

Moreover, we are members of the larger human organism, or the greater organism of the planet, life, or the cosmos itself, so these experiences of bliss or compassion or awe are not ours alone. We’re not just restoring ourselves for the next fight. These are opportunities for us to metabolize the greater trauma, the pain, the confusion, the grief. Or think of it this way: with so much awful shit going on around us, how dare we deny the profound beauty of engaged experience when it is offered to us?

If a tree is dying, or under attack from a parasite, with many of its leaves and branches decaying, what of the leaves at the distant edges of the canopy? The ones that are being bathed in sunlight, and still healthy enough to take that in, photosynthesize, and convert that energy into nourishment for the rest of the tree? Should those leaves cower from the glorious process and undergo respiration in a compromised state of despair, or embrace the good fortune of their circumstance and fully accept the nourishment on behalf of the whole tree?

After all, does the rest of the tree want chlorophyll or glucose or whatever it is, tainted by the tree equivalent of stress hormones, anxiety, and more grief? Or do those suffering parts want the healthiest, joyously transmitted, encouraging signs of life and growth and sustainability from those parts that are healthy? Even if those parts are continuing on without them? When you die someday, it’ll be more important that your kids are truly happy and flourishing than that they have cried sufficiently for you. That’s what will help you pass on.

But I digress.

I thought about all this when I was at the museum with a friend the other day. We were at the Metropolitan Museum’s new wing with art from Africa, the ancient Americas, and the Pacific. And the whole experience was transcendent. Maybe that’s the wrong word. It was somatic, embodying, grounding. Yes, also with the attendant guilt, shame and sadness over how many of these artifacts were removed from the people and places they belonged to — maybe under force.

And all of those factors — the beauty, and the circumstances leading up to that moment — moved me into a really profound experience of appreciation. On the one hand, just to be there in those tremendous spaces, tall ceilings, natural light, and surrounded by other curious humans, even museum guards who wanted nothing more than to help us find what we were looking for and achieve states of wonder. For all its problems — and I’ll get to some of those — this was western civilization at its finest. A pay-what-you-wish public institution that was functioning so well it overflowed.

It was the work itself — or maybe I should call it the play itself — that really got me, though. The way these various peoples expressed their reality, their depiction of the human form and its place in nature. Nothing was pedestaled or separated. Everything was in and of the natural fabric. Not that these people didn’t live lives harder than what most of us can imagine, but they also expressed the innate joy of embodiment, an awareness of the cyclical nature of this reality. There was progress and movement, but not of the kind we understand in an entirely linear culture. Not progress toward some new and improved future away from this moment. It was the progress of iteration, of gaining deeper knowledge of what is, and learning how to relate to and exchange energy with everything else - rather than trying to tame or dominate it.

Artifact after artifact, each one emanating the innate, assumed joy of being part of this sometimes painful, sometimes ecstatic dance.

Occasionally I’d peer past an archway to a neighboring gallery of Greek or Roman statues. And nothing against the ancient Greeks or our own civilizational path, but I felt pretty repelled by the work. They had more objectified anatomical accuracy, for sure. But it was almost like a contest to see who could best identify and perfectly represent an idealized human form while simultaneously maintaining perfect verisimilitude. A bit like an expensive Marvel movie special effect or an AI avatar deep fake. Impossibly hyper-real. And the forms themselves were pedestaled. To be admired up there for their ability to rise from earthly matter into pure models of idealized beauty, rendered in perfectly objectified detail.

Yet they were quite dead. For all their accuracy and verisimilitude — like a Gray’s Anatomy of the gods — they had lost the plot. In their effort to perfect the human form distinct from nature, they ended up sacrificing the living essence of their subjects for these objectified ideals. As different from the flesh and soul as written words are from human speech or, even better, as an email summary is from grunts and moans.

And one gallery further on from that, was all the European Jesus stuff. Jesus himself aside, the art and representations curated for that particular gallery were about darkness, and pain, and suffering. Perpetual sorrow. Why have you forsaken me? And at that moment, I felt, life is hard enough. I’m going back to the fecund, regenerative, celebration of love and life and death and rebirth. That’s what I need right now as I watch my civilization finally bear the karmic returns on centuries of war, slavery, and domination, and slowly wake up to the truth that we’ve been on a misguided mission to escape from the very source of all joy and flourishing.

Finding a pocket of bliss along the way, even in the most dire of circumstances, is not just a privilege but an obligation. It’s the path to reconnecting ourselves and everyone to the world we’ve been trying and failing to control. Your deep sense of rightness, grounding, and flow is not an indulgence but a compass.

Joseph Campbell got labeled a feckless New Ager for summing up this common wisdom as “follow your bliss.” Aleister Crowley tried to express it as “do what thou wilt.” Ram Dass told us to “be here now,” which would of course include the moments of joy.

And I get it. It sounds and feels selfish. Follow your bliss? What if our bliss is some sort of cannibalistic Yellow Jackets moment, feasting on the flesh and pain of another. And in some cases, truth be told, it kinda is. Gotta eat. Gotta cut down a tree. Gotta take in order to live. Well, at least we can make like Hiawatha and thank the tree for offering its wood for our canoe, and the bird for contributing its body to our metabolism. If we just do it consciously, we’re not taking so much as participating in this whole thing that’s going on in and around us.

The more we appreciate, the less we want to take - the less we need to take. Because the way we’ve learned to take in our society? It has less to do with participating in the great cycles of things than extracting enough extra in order to insulate ourselves from those cycles. We freeze and store and save and invest as admired values, tributes to our ability to become independently wealthy. The more we stuff or value we can extract and isolate from the great swirl of things, the safer we feel. We’d rather pedestal something natural as a goddess we can own or at least worship, rather than a living thing with its own spirit with which we can commingle.

So we have come to equate moments of joy with isolation and selfishness or, worse, the karmic debt for whatever awful thing we must have done - at least indirectly - to have seized that sweet nectar.

But I promise you: if you are really tasting that sweet nectar, appreciating it for all it is, letting it open you to an awareness of the entire chain of being that brought it to you, with the full knowledge that you don’t even own or control it, that it is merely passing through you, using you to transform to some other state? If your experience of bliss is compatible and complementary to this composting and regeneration of everything? It’s more than okay.

By all means: revel in that pocket of joy when you find it. It’s good for everyone, and everything.