Metacrisis Salon #11 · Cleaned Transcript
June 6, 2026 · Lightning Lofts, Brooklyn, NY
Recorded by Mike the pigeon, our tiny mic mascot. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtHope · My name is Hope. Welcome to Metacrisis Salon number 11. I was only here to gather you, and now I hand it to Ben.
Ben · We have amplified sound this time. We knew it was going to be hot, so we built a sound system. Welcome to Lightning Lofts, a 17-person community house. I live here, along with Nick, Jess, Vincent and a few others, and after the talk we will open up the other rooms of the house so you can wander.
Food is up front. Finish your drink before you abandon the can so we do not kick it over. There are three bathrooms, one right here and two off the kitchen. The Wi-Fi is Lightning Lofts guest, and the password is on the wall — new friends, which I hope you all become.
The companion app for tonight is metacrisis11.dearcrisis.com. Scan the code, type the first three letters of your name, log in with your phone number. It shows you who else is in the room and lets you drop questions in for the Q&A, which helps if speaking up in a room this size is not your thing. There is also a matchmaking tab that gives you a name and a question to ask that person. It is all AI generated, so the question may be terrible, but it is an excuse to talk to a stranger. That is the point of being here. You can listen to a podcast at home.
The agreements: welcome the stranger. Share the space and land the plane. Hold the tension without rushing to resolve it. You do not have to agree with everything said tonight; sit with the discomfort and ask why it is uncomfortable. Explore kinship over transactions. Thank the chefs, because a dozen people chopped, plated and laid the mats before you arrived, and we all stay behind to clean up. Think about where the food came from too, not just the hands that cooked it but the land that grew it.
And real feedback is welcome. There is a button in the app. The chocolates exist because someone said there was no dessert. The backjacks exist because sitting on the floor for two hours hurts. The two air conditioners and the giant extension cable exist because we popped a breaker testing them. We are always trying to make this better, so tell us.
Tonight splits in two. The first part is the knowledge: Jeremy, discussion, Q&A, community announcements, and we aim to be done around 9:15. Then a break and a book signing. The second part is community, a warm data lab with a theme in every room of the house.
Ben · I moved here about two and a half years ago with a fear of gathering. It took me a year to organize my first event, in a space I actually lived in. New York is a city where you are lonely together. As the world spirals, it felt strange to turn on the news, feel awful, and then go to a bar or a show and shake it off as if nothing were happening. So this became a space to be uncomfortable together, and to educate and inspire each other while we are at it.
The byproduct is that I feel far less alone. There are people in this room who have come three, four, five times, and that has built a shared way of seeing the world. Nate Hagens has a frame on The Great Simplification: first take care of yourself so you can face what is happening with open eyes, then find the others, because it is only through finding the others that we start solving anything. What I want next for this community is the step after that, moving from finding each other into doing something together.
Hope · Our energy is scattered, so let us land. Squeeze everything as tight as you can, then release. Breathe in. Feel your seat on the ground, your spine tall, your jaw loose.
We are about to get into our heads, so I want to start in the heart. Some things I love. Fish that change gender. Trees so enormous they remind me I am part of something much larger than myself. Whale song, which makes me ache to know what they are yearning for, or whether they are singing just to sing. Birds of paradise doing their mating dances, which are hilarious, and remind me that part of life is whimsy. Albatrosses, who mate for life, fly around the world, come back, and wind their necks together in a dance that makes me weep. They balance on cliffs an inch wide and defy gravity, which reminds me anything is possible. Murmurations, a whole flock deciding together how to move, a ballet in the sky. The Milky Way, which I saw for the first time at Big Bend, and understood that we are not alone on this planet, we are part of a universe. The shapes water makes when it falls on water.
And one place I do not just observe but have a relationship with: my grandparents' lake, where I spent every summer, fed the ducks, chased a duck away from my dog, got swimmer's itch, and floated. It is one of the few lakes in America clean enough to swim in. That is the difference I want to name. Most of what I listed I have only witnessed. That lake I am in relationship with, and it is rooted in love.
So close your eyes. Think of a being, a place or an element that made you feel awe. Where does that live in your body? Now one that thrilled or surprised you. Now one that made you feel peaceful. Now one that made you feel playful, curious, mischievous. And last, one that you love. Really love. When did you last touch it? How did it make you feel?
Open your eyes, find a friend, and describe it to them for a minute.
Jeremy · This book came out last week. I spent five years on it, years researching and two-plus years writing, so it feels like a long gestation. I have been on the launch circuit since, and this is different. This is a real community thing, and I am glad to be part of it.
Start with the Earth. It is still the only place in the universe we know of where life exists. Life got going here surprisingly early, over four billion years ago, and took billions of years to become what Hope was just describing. Our species in its modern form is about a hundred thousand years old, a fraction of a second of that history, and in that fraction we have developed the collective power to alter the systems of the whole planet. You know how that is going. Climate breakdown, ecological overshoot, extreme economic disparity, sociopolitical breakdown, militarization, exponential technology.
Most people looking at this ask how we fix the system. That is what I thought I was researching. Two years in I found something else: the system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is extract and exploit and run a wealth pump that sucks faster and faster.
And it is not ancient. It emerged in one time and place, early modern Europe, four or five hundred years ago, around the scientific revolution. Francis Bacon was one of its prophets, promising to extend the dominion of the human race over the universe and render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature. Underneath it sits a story of separation: nature is a machine, humans are separate from nature, humans are essentially selfish and competitive, progress comes from conquering nature, and the Earth is a resource to exploit. From there the purpose of a life is obvious. Get as wealthy and powerful as you can.
They extended conquering nature to conquering other nations, because they saw anyone who was not a white male Christian as not that different from the rest of nature. The genocide in North and South America wiped out roughly 99% of the population. One silver mountain in Peru probably cost eight million Indigenous lives to enslavement and mercury poisoning, and the silver taken from Latin America, compounded at ordinary rates of return, would be worth around 165 trillion dollars today, about a third of all private wealth in the world. Twelve million Africans were enslaved and shipped to the Americas to work sugar, tobacco, indigo and cotton. As one historian puts it, Europe did not develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.
When Europeans arrived, the Ojibwe told of a creature called the Windigo, a ravenous ten-foot monster with a heart of ice. The more it consumed the more ravenous it became, and if it bit you, you became one and could never eat enough. Watching Europeans take more beaver fur, more timber, more of everything, and need more the more they took, they said these people have been bitten. Think of it as a Windigo virus: human supremacy, white supremacy, nature as resource, other people as resource, spreading around the world into a system we now call global capitalism.
It is more than a metaphor. Capitalism runs on perpetual growth. A company can have a great year and shareholders will not care, because what they price is the earnings expected over the next ten or fifteen years. The more it delivers, the more it must deliver next. It is a system designed to mint billionaires, and it has done that brilliantly: a couple of dozen of the wealthiest now hold as much as half of the world's population, roughly four billion people. Sixty-nine of the hundred largest economies on Earth are not countries but corporations. I call it Windigo, Inc.
Scientists measuring consumption and production since the Second World War call the curves the Great Acceleration, and standard economics projects a tripling by mid-century. The Stockholm Resilience Institute mapped nine planetary boundaries, the safe operating space for humanity, and we have blown through seven. Which is why the World Scientists' Warning says it will soon be too late to shift course, and why the UN Secretary-General tells world leaders we are heading for collective suicide.
In all of history there have only been two transformations of how humans live everywhere: settling into agriculture around ten thousand years ago, and the scientific revolution a few hundred years ago. Almost everyone who studies this is convinced a third one happens this century. The question is which. One is the collapse the scientists warn about. Show of hands, who feels in their gut that is where we are headed? Yes. A lot of you.
Another is a fortress Earth, which I suspect some of the people enjoying the wealth pump are planning for. The split widens, most of the world experiences collapse, and an elite enjoys its technological and transhumanist project. Morally I find that worse than total collapse. Hands? A few.
The third is a transformation in the other direction, toward sustainable flourishing, and it would be every bit as total as the other two. Some years ago I came across a term for it that has stayed with me: an ecological civilization. It means changing the operating system of the whole Earth, from a system based on wealth to one based on life. Its founding question is this: what would it look like to create the conditions for all people to flourish as part of a thriving living Earth?
Jeremy · So I am turning the tables. Get into groups of three for ten minutes and work out what the core principles of that civilization would be. Then we will popcorn them out.
What came back, in the room's own words: honor the matriarchal imagination instead of patriarchy. Cooperative sharing, not only of things but of knowledge and wisdom. Clean water for everyone. Redefine what counts as life, and decenter the human. Change human psychology away from jealousy and greed toward wanting other people's lives to go well. Competition replaced by cooperation as the default assumption. A cap on how much any one person can accumulate. Collective care. Immediate protection of ecosystems. A different financial system, maybe no private banking, maybe no money at all. Public infrastructure good enough that nobody needs to own a car. Regulation that keeps the fossil fuel industry out of politics. Housing, education and healthcare as basic rights, because nobody thrives without them. Locally produced food. A rebuilt psychology drawn from neuroscience, sociology, spirituality and evolutionary biology, because whatever system we design gets hijacked by our nature if we do not understand it. An end to separation in how we relate to our own bodies and to each other, and inspiration drawn from the principles of nature, since we are nature. Legal rights for nature, for oceans and for land. Watershed-based, bioregional government. Islands of coherence converging into collective action. Biomimicry applied to the economy, so it cycles the way nature does. Education refocused from credentials toward civic consciousness. An end to infinite economic growth. Democratic control instead of top-down rule. And decentralized ownership of corporations, so the people can own them.
Jeremy · You have just written the presentation. You are about to see slides that feed back almost every single thing you said, and anything not in the slides is in the book.
Jeremy · This vision is not mine. It belongs to a lot of people. The book mostly gathers and connects work already happening: Indigenous sources like Buen Vivir and Ubuntu, transition towns, the rights of nature movement, agroecology, spiritual sources across engaged Buddhism, Taoism and Christian liberation theology, and a long list of political movements. They do not speak the same language and often do not know about each other, but they move toward the same thing, the dignity of all people and the sacredness of all life.
It starts from how living systems actually work. Ecosystems, left alone, stay resilient for millions of years. And every major leap in the complexity of life, from single cells to complex cells to multicellular life, came not from one species out-competing another but from increases in cooperation, two organisms combining skills into something greater than the sum. In Lynn Margulis's words, life did not take over the world by combat but by networking. Walk into a forest and symbiosis is happening everywhere: plants photosynthesize, insects pollinate, animals carry seeds and fertilize, fungi regenerate the soil and move nutrients between trees.
Humans are the same story. Our hominid ancestors in the Rift Valley were vulnerable to predators, and the ones who collaborated survived. Over millions of years our identity expanded from self and kin to the whole group, and cooperating with people who are not kin is precisely what differentiates us from other primates. Social psychologists call the result our moral emotions: compassion, gratitude, shame, guilt, embarrassment, and our love of generous people. We are told we must overcome our selfish genes. The opposite is true. We act morally because it feels right, because that is how we evolved. Indigenous cultures knew this and built on it. Ubuntu means I am because you are. The Lakota say mitákuye oyás'iŋ, we are all related, and they do not only mean people.
So the core principles, set against what we have now. From human supremacy to the intrinsic value of all life. From the primacy of capital to the primacy of human dignity. From commodification and homogenization to diversity of cultures and people. From hierarchical structures to subsidiarity, pushing power down to the lowest workable level, the way grass does not take orders from a head office. From structural inequality, five hundred years of it, to structural equity, which means looking at historical injustice and putting it right. And from incentives for selfish behavior to designing deliberately for cooperation.
What that looks like in practice, briefly. We measure a society by GDP, which only tracks how fast nature and human activity get sucked into the monetary economy, and does not care whether that is good or bad. An oil spill is great for GDP because the cleanup costs a fortune. A hurricane is great. Terminal cancer is best of all. Grow vegetables and share them with friends, or cycle to work, and GDP suffers. Kate Raworth's doughnut reframes it: stay inside the planetary boundaries on the outside, and above a social foundation on the inside. No country is inside the doughnut, but Costa Rica is close, with wellbeing and health outcomes better than the United States on a fraction of the consumption. That is what development should mean.
On inequality: a global wealth tax and a wealth cap. Universal basic services. George Monbiot's phrase is public luxury with private sufficiency, which is not everyone being miserable, it is sharing the luxury rather than letting billionaires own it. Then there is the commons, everything not yet appropriated by the state or private ownership. Nature contributes the oceans, sunshine and atmosphere. Our ancestors contributed language, cultural traditions, scientific knowledge, and on up through electricity, microprocessors, computer code, the internet. All of that belongs to us all. Then somebody adds a few tweaks, copyrights it, calls it Facebook, and extracts two hundred billion dollars of that common wealth into one person's hands while half the world cannot meet its basic nutritional needs. That may be one of the great moral scandals in history. Recognizing the commons as commonly owned points to a universal basic income, not as welfare but as a social dividend, the way a shareholder expects a dividend. Where it has been tried, people do not get lazy. They want to be needed by their community, and the security frees them to contribute. Almost every program shows the bad things going down and the good things going up.
Corporations exist for shareholder returns. B Corps let a company opt into something better, but it is voluntary, so few do and the world has not moved. Imagine instead that every corporate charter had to be renewed every five years against a triple bottom line of profit, people and planet, and that the people deciding were not regulators heading for a job in the industry but ordinary citizens chosen by lottery, like a jury. Analysts would stop asking only about next quarter and start asking about a company's risk of social or environmental bankruptcy. One change to the DNA.
Cities designed on ecological principles: the twenty-minute city, maker spaces, repair cafes, community land trusts, nature sanctuaries owned and managed by the community. In the countryside, agroecology replacing industrial monocrops, without fossil-fuel fertilizer and without factory farming, and it turns out to be every bit as productive. Technology is not something we give up, it is something we transform, moving from centralized ownership by Amazon and Google toward commons-based structures like Wikipedia and Firefox, platform cooperatives where drivers work for themselves rather than Uber, and community currencies.
Governance matters most. We think we have a flawed democracy. What we have is an electoral oligarchy, and the founders chose it deliberately. James Madison wanted a system for the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, and held that the rights of property should be the first object of government. Even when elections work they select for wealth, connections, charisma and ambition, and they punish anyone open-minded or nuanced. The alternative is citizens' assemblies: ordinary people chosen by lottery, broadly representative, given skilled facilitation, access to subject-matter experts and enough time. Under those conditions polarization dissolves, people genuinely weigh each other's views, and the decisions are more nuanced and better than what elected politicians produce. Ireland and Belgium have shown it for years.
In culture, Riane Eisler's distinction between a domination system, which is what patriarchy runs on, and a partnership system, where the qualities stereotyped as feminine, compassion, caregiving and nurturance, are valued and belong to everyone. And planet-wide, a UN declaration of the rights of nature, putting the natural world on the same legal standing as humans.
Which leaves the real question: how the hell do we get there? We do not know which scenario we get. But we do know the current civilization is unraveling, and while that is terrifying and causing real harm, it opens degrees of freedom. So the question is whether we can reweave society's fabric even as it unravels.
Ilya Prigogine studied how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and found that in the pupa everything dissolves into mush, and then imaginal cells form, cluster, and become islands of coherence in a sea of chaos that eventually lift the whole system to a higher order. There are already islands of coherence everywhere: bioregions, neighborhoods, commons-based groups, cooperative networks. I would say this room is one. They all face the headwinds of the dominant system, which makes them hard to sustain, so the work is connecting them into something like a mainland. As Buckminster Fuller said, you never change things by fighting the existing reality; you build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete. What all these groups share is a manifold of meaning, the flourishing of life, and that is what makes it possible to transform society from within. Alongside the book I have been working with many of these groups to build an Ecocivilization Coalition, and Jeff is here tonight, so talk to him.
Last, how each of us can orient. Acknowledge the gravity of what we face, because nothing starts until you look at it. Share your grief and concern with others, because the enormity is too much to hold alone. Build community and solidarity from that sharing, which is exactly what is happening in this room. Orient toward action, because community alone will not do it. Focus on the actions with the biggest potential for systemic change. And when you have a great idea, do not start a new group; find the people already doing it and make their wheel better. Then, once you are in, do not only push for your group to succeed. Empower the groups around you, because that is how the fabric gets woven.
We call this the Anthropocene, a period that is scary, short-lived, destructive and inherently unsustainable. An ecophilosopher offered a different name for what could follow, the Symbiocene: a long-lived symbiosis between humans and a living Earth, with us as stewards tending it. And if we do that, we might just regenerate this beautiful planet.
If real change has only ever come from catastrophe, where is the leverage now, and where is the hope?
Sobering answer: most big swings from inequality back toward equality have followed catastrophe. Japan after total collapse in the Second World War is now among the most egalitarian advanced economies. And to be clear, if you had asked me to raise my hand on collapse or on the authoritarian future, I would have raised it both times. I am not selling you Pollyanna. What I am saying is that as long as the third scenario is possible, it is the only thing worth putting our lives into.
The unraveling is where the opening is. Look at AI. It is genuinely dangerous and it is the biggest single suction of the commons yet, all of human knowledge pulled into a few private companies. But people are frightened enough that the conversation is moving fast. A shared public dividend was fringe a year ago. This week Bernie Sanders announced a bill for 50% public ownership of OpenAI and Anthropic, held in trust for everyone. As things get crazier the space for bold ideas grows. And remember that the hopelessness is manufactured. They need us to believe we can do nothing. The moment we see our collective power, theirs weakens.
How do we keep these ideas from being weaponized the moment they start to work, the way progressive ideas keep getting turned into slurs?
Do not fight it head on. They own most of the media and the money; you will not win that boxing match, and every push invites a harder attack. Think aikido rather than boxing. We are not trying to win intellectual battles. The one thing we have that they do not is the hearts and minds of nearly every human alive who wants a life of dignity. Ask almost anyone whether they want conditions where all beings flourish on a regenerating Earth and they will say yes. We evolved to want community, to love and be loved, to be respected, to connect with the natural world. That has to be beaten out of people to turn them into good consumers. So the task is not rebuttal. It is to keep turning toward people's hearts, let them feel seen, and offer a pathway that feels better than the one the authoritarians are offering.
You said to focus on the actions with the biggest impact. Where are those? Molly
Two kinds: places and ideas. On places, the islands of coherence can be tiny or vast. Vía Campesina, the way of the peasants, is a movement of hundreds of millions of smallholders across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia practicing agroecology and organizing around food sovereignty. Mondragón in the Basque Country is an 80,000-person worker-owned cooperative running sophisticated industrial businesses plus healthcare, banking and finance, where the ratio between the highest-paid executive and the person sweeping the floor is six to one, and the focus is the flourishing of the people who work there.
On ideas, citizens' assemblies are an extraordinary undermining of the hierarchy, they can be run locally, and there are toolkits online for convening one yourself. Rights of nature is the other, and groups everywhere are pushing it. Those are the ones where the idea itself leads to a different system.
Rights of nature feels right, but I have a hard time seeing an average person accept something that radical. How do you balance top-down solutions against where people actually are? Gian
Use the Three Horizons model, which McKinsey invented for long-range business planning and social-change people reformulated. You are a traveler in unmapped land. The first horizon is right in front of you: do not fall in a ditch and break your leg, or you never get anywhere. That is the work everyone can agree on today, cutting fossil fuel subsidies, investing in renewables. The third horizon is the beautiful destination, the radical stuff, transforming governance, rights for nature, and nobody thinks it lands in five years.
The second horizon is where discernment is needed, because it is disruptive and exciting and can lead either forward or straight back. Elon Musk's electric car is the classic snap-back: it disrupts, then re-instantiates billionaire ownership, shareholder returns, consumption and extraction. I would put geoengineering in the same category, though I know you had a good argument about that last month. Rights of nature is a second-horizon move that genuinely points at the third, and it is already winning, city by city, including in the United States, sometimes fighting federal law along the way. You do not ask people to swallow the destination whole. You show them it is already happening.
How long do we actually have, in my lifetime or my grandkids'? And after five years writing this, were there lows? Dylan
On timing: much of my earlier work is about nonlinear self-organizing systems, and the one thing you learn is that they cannot be predicted. We live inside nonlinear human systems nested inside nonlinear Earth systems that react to each other. So when anyone tells you collapse is inevitable, or that oligarchy arrives in exactly twenty years, do not believe them. My honest answer is I do not have a clue. It could be next year. We could still be in this unraveling thirty years from now, and the longer it takes the more chance we have. Which is why we simply give it everything we have.
On despair: the bigger part of my rational brain lives right on its edge. There is a voice that says you are kidding yourself, none of this will happen, it is obvious. If you know Internal Family Systems, you honor your parts rather than defeating them, so I feel that voice every day, and I feel the care underneath its intensity. But the deeper part of me knows we are all ultimately in the service of life, and what life wants is for us to go and make it happen. So these five years, with all the bad news, have left me inspired rather than crushed. Giving yourself to what is possible turns out to be one of the most energizing things a person can do.
Ben · We have ideas and knowledge. Now, what are you actually going to do, and what would you like support on? Use I, not the global we. If nobody talks, we will sit here in silence until you do.
Andrea named the step in Jeremy's spiral about sharing grief and despair, and how hard it is to do without becoming the Debbie Downer, so she and Abby are going to host a grief circle. Jeff is on Zoom with Jeremy every week building the Ecocivilization Coalition and wants to connect more grassroots organizations into that network. Lindsay has spent the year getting into her neighborhood, including a justice club running protest support and community defense training for when ICE shows up. Andrew works in AI and is looking for designers and technologists who want to build buttresses against what the technology is destroying. Jason asked everyone to carry these frameworks past this room, into the Knicks fan clubs and everywhere else, because persuading people outside the bubble is the actual work. Catherine is working with community gardens across the city, gathering data to prove their value to the people who decide what happens to that land. And Emil recommitted to transparency in his professional work, on the grounds that a lot of actors simply need to know what is going on.
The Sunday hackathons run every Sunday from 5 to 8pm, values-oriented and sometimes using AI. We are prototyping action labs, which are members of this community offering something practical. Jess is hosting a no-grid resilience lab, which is like doing your taxes but together: bring a card and build your mutual aid kit as a group. Jason is running the off-grid comms lab on ham radio and Meshtastic mesh texting, with the nonprofit Signals Rising, which teaches frontline communities, and it will be hands-on.
From the room: a Thursday gathering on consciousness and action. Max is running a free breakthrough coaching session on Sunday, twenty seats, for whatever you have been putting off. Hope ran a first facilitation workshop, found there was too much material, and is turning it into a multi-part series plus a practice space where people can workshop what they want to facilitate. Molly has never been to the trash pickup club that meets locally and wants a buddy to go with. Kevin's partner runs the Strangers Project at the Oculus, a fifteen-year collection of handwritten one-page stories from strangers, where people read, write their own, and stay for hours; there are tissues everywhere. One attendee is launching a book called American Indigenous Democracy and wants help getting it into book clubs. Vincent is organizing a Rockaway Beach field trip next Sunday at 1pm, with a Partiful in the WhatsApp chat for ride shares. Liz asked everyone to look for the B Corp and fair trade logos when shopping, because the more political our dollars are, the more we buy into better farms and products. Amy is building Dinners for the 99, which brings people who feel powerless together with the organizations already doing the work, over dinner, with the ticket money going to those organizations; the site is dinnersforthe99.com. Brandon and others are running low-key wellbeing experiences, picnics and meditation, starting with a very chill one today.
There are two WhatsApp groups, a community chat and a New York City events one, both linked from the app; post your events there. And a member asked us to flag that the primaries are coming up, with DSA endorsements posted if you want them. I am Canadian, so this one is on you.
Ben · Break and book signing now, back here at 9:45. Hope will lead a short somatic grounding, and then we open the warm data lab. Every room in the house holds a theme, and we start with about ten minutes where you are before you begin roaming from room to room. You are not trapped; leave whenever you like. The magic comes from the real conversation with real people, not from theorizing in the ether. For those of you with mental bandwidth left, stay and see where it goes.