Metacrisis Salon #9 · Cleaned Transcript
April 18, 2026 · Brooklyn, NY
Recorded by Mike the pigeon, our tiny mic mascot, on the night he was introduced. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the night kept intact. It is not verbatim.
Download as .txtBen · We have rebranded the series to Dear Crisis, and we want to introduce you to Mike. Mike is a carrier pigeon, and he is holding a tiny mic, which I am going to make every speaker hold so we get a clean transcription of the whole night.
You are probably wondering what is up with the pigeon. Here is the thing. New York and a lot of other cities use pigeons as an indicator of environmental health. They frolic around, they drink water off the street, so they are an accurate read on lead. If you see a lot of handicapped pigeons with string foot, this place is dirty. They pick up our litter. They reflect the environment we have made.
Humans are at a similar point. If you diagnosed us and looked at the signs, obesity, loneliness and the rest, you might conclude the environment we are building for ourselves is not a healthy one. So the question is how we nurture the environment we live in well enough to thrive in it.
Ben · Hope gave me a book about pigeons, which is how I fell down this hole. In medieval times pigeons were so valuable that only royalty could keep them; dovecotes were illegal for commoners. They were food, they carried messages, their droppings were excellent fertilizer, and you could make saltpeter from them for firearms. Pigeons were a source of power, the industrial superstars of their era.
Then technology moved, the industrial revolution arrived, and the age of the pigeon closed. They found themselves unfit for the civilization that had bred them and spread them across the world. Now they are rats with wings, and half of you probably hate them.
So what does that mean for us? The wealth of a nation used to depend on the quality of its people and its ability to harness resources and technology. We are entering an age where we outsource our capacities to machines. If a country's wealth no longer depends on the quality of the people coming out of it, what do you think that country invests in? Data centers, resource extraction. We may be on the same trajectory as the pigeon.
There is a framework called the resource curse, and I think I took this from Karen Hao. Some countries are wealthy because of a resource, and if the lithium matters more than the schooling, you get children working in lithium mines. That has already happened. And if you think the AI version is a future problem, it is happening now. Data centers are opening across the world, some the size of Manhattan, and people are becoming secondary to the profits. It is not only what they output, it is the fuel to power them, the water they take, and the energy prices they push up for everyone. Machines are being prioritized over people because they bring in more money.
Ben · I am not against the technology. I made these infographics with AI. I built the app with AI. I also pay two hundred dollars a month straight into the hands of billionaires so they can accumulate more power. The haves get to be more creative and more human, the middle hollows out, and the have-nots get pulled into something a lot more dystopic, training their own replacements.
Karen Hao's frame is that the AI companies work like the empires of old. They are built on resources that belong to the commons. They use cheap and exploited labor to tag data and train the models. The product of that extraction is monopolized by a few. And everyone insists they are the good guys, doing it better than the bad guys over there.
Tristan Harris at the Center for Humane Technology has a frame I like. It is easy to get lost in the wonderful things AI could do, cure cancer, cure any disease. The problem is that the positive infinities do not cancel the negative infinities. Curing cancer does not stop someone building a bioweapon. Great security systems do not stop a government using the same tools for mass surveillance. The negative infinities outweigh the positive ones. So if we want to survive this transition we have to be careful about how we deploy these things, and the real question is who holds the power. Centralize it in a few hands and it is always a problem.
Ben · AI is only one of the things we have to contend with. There is also the carbon pulse. We are consuming more energy than we ever have and our appetite keeps growing. Even as we shift to renewables we are burning fossil fuels to extract the materials to build them, because the resources that make renewables are not renewable. If all we think about is expansion, we drive ourselves off a cliff.
In the process we have hit seven of the nine planetary boundaries. Economic instability is growing, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and that breeds civil unrest. And underneath it there is a social disintegration, less trust in institutions, in governments and in each other than ever before, which the technology accelerates.
When we face something like this we have two default reactions. Look away and hope it fixes itself, or lean in and work out what we can do. The pigeon is our attempt at the second one, cute and approachable rather than doom-shaped.
Ben · So much of how we feel about crisis is a story, a cultural story about how to react. If we can rewrite that story a little, maybe crisis can read as opportunity. We are testing a manifesto tonight; we will read it a line at a time, together.
Hope · Put your theater hat on. Take on the character. You may not even believe it yet; say it from your gut anyway.
Dear Crisis. You wanted us overwhelmed. Isolated. Frozen. But all you did was push us closer. Now we are sitting in the unknown together, enduring, adapting, multiplying. We are not here to survive empire. We are here to outgrow it.
Ben · That is a draft, so give us feedback. The point is to name this moment as a real opportunity, while the systems that sustain us are still online, and while there is still time to act.
Luke · I am a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge, and also someone who did not expect to spend a Saturday evening in New York presenting barefoot in a suit while holding a pigeon. Desperate measures. Which is fitting, because I want to talk about how we ended up in desperate times, and offer you a radical history of the roots of the metacrisis. It is a history haunted by one ghost: inequality.
Start with the first farmers spreading into Europe from Anatolia, up through the Mediterranean and eventually into northern Europe and the British Isles. What is interesting is what happens when they arrive. They displace the local hunter-gatherers and then run through boom and bust cycles. In Scandinavia it takes about 400 years to reach peak population, and about three centuries later 70% of them die off. They did not just pick up the plow, they picked up the sword. Before those collapses you see the first signs of inequality and of warfare; cranial remains from that period show roughly 11% of people with marks of violence, along with the first evidence of torture, mutilation and massacre.
It was not only Europe. Eight thousand kilometers away, in the deserts of the southwestern United States, the Ancestral Puebloans built great sandstone houses, the largest structures in North America until the skyscrapers of Chicago. They were the first farmers of North America, growing corn, beans and squash, the three sisters. They ran the same boom and bust cycles, and the last crisis, beginning in 1245, was a termination. There were roughly 25,000 farmers across the southwest, and within about forty years there were none. Some died. Many simply went back to hunting and gathering.
They were not alone. North America was once dotted with hierarchical farming and city-like communities. On the outskirts of St. Louis, Cahokia held ten to fifteen thousand people who built great flat-topped earthen pyramids that survive as mounds. They also practiced human sacrifice; Mound 72 contains over 270 sacrificial victims, and at the top lie two men buried under 20,000 beads. Early elites. They seem to have received corn from Mesoamerica, and along with it ideas of rulership, of human sacrifice, of a priestly class ruling over the many. You could call it the first stirrings of civilization in North America.
I think a better name is Goliath. Civilization comes from a Latin root carrying connotations of virtue, wisdom, moderation and restraint. Look at the first states and you find patriarchy, warfare, slavery and human sacrifice, which does not strike me as civilized. What you actually see, in every one of these places, is a shift from social organization built on altruism and egalitarianism to organization built on dominance, where a few rule the many, take their resources and impose rules. A Goliath rules by intimidation and violence. It is large and frightening, and surprisingly fragile.
Look at how they get remembered. The Diné tell of a great gambler, a god who came to Earth and out-gambled everyone, taking their children and their property until there was a revolution and they overthrew him. Cahokia has no stories at all. A city of fifteen thousand, and no oral tradition about it. People left the area for hundreds of kilometers around and never returned to settle at scale. It became known as the vacant quarter. They left a bad memory to rot in the swamps of the Mississippi.
And this pattern is not only about farming. Many of the earliest states began as egalitarian cities: San Lorenzo and Monte Albán in Mesoamerica, Jenne-jeno in Africa, Teotihuacan and Tiwanaku in South America. In all of them people built monuments, cities and large irrigation canals with no elites, no rulers and no signs of inequality. It is once inequality and a ruling class appear that things destabilize and eventually fall apart.
Luke · Why is inequality so corrosive? It makes sense from an evolutionary view. We evolved as nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers about 300,000 years ago in multiple parts of Africa, and that period is buried under myths. The loudest is the Hobbesian one, ragtag families who could not cooperate and were constantly killing each other. It is nonsense. Modern nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers live in surprisingly large groups, often in the hundreds, and the average person knows thousands of people across a lifetime because they are constantly moving between groups. Those groups are more diverse than we assume; fewer than 10% tend to be close blood relatives, and they often draw people from different languages and cultures.
That movement built enormous zones of trade and shared culture. A hundred thousand years ago you find shared culture, genes, musical instruments and stone tools from the west coast of Africa to the east. In Europe the Aurignacian culture stretches from Spain to Siberia, sharing figurines, cave painting techniques and technologies. Across North America people made arrowheads, fishhooks and stone tools in very similar ways. That is hard to do if you are constantly killing each other, and the best evidence is that roughly one to two percent of people died at another human's hands, about the same as the modern world.
That period covers something like 98 or 99% of our species' existence, and it is the reason we exist. Think about it. Small hostile bands constantly killing each other is an evolutionary recipe for disaster. We had to move between groups for genetic diversity, and that capacity for movement, altruism, egalitarianism and cooperation seems to be a large part of why we survived while our cousins did not.
Then things change. The Holocene arrives, a period of climatic warmth and stability, and in region after region the same sequence plays out. People settle, agriculture intensifies, and then come the first signs of inequality, then warfare, then the first states, the first Goliaths.
The story we are told is that this was about surplus: grow enough extra and you can pay for kings and administrators. It does not check out. Ten regions of the world developed agriculture independently, and only five ever produced states. What mattered was not how much you grew but what you grew. Compare Egypt and New Guinea. Both had agriculture roughly seven thousand years ago. New Guinea never adopted pharaohs or built pyramids. The difference is the crop. New Guinea grew banana, yam and taro. Bananas store for about a month, yams and taro for about six, and yams and taro grow underground where they are essentially invisible, and can be left in the ground for months after they are ready. Wheat, which the Egyptians grew, is easily seen, easily stolen, easily stored. It advertises itself on tall stalks when it is ready and it keeps for decades. It is the perfect tax crop. I call that a lootable resource. Notably, even hunter-gatherers who start smoking fish, which is storable, tend to become more hierarchical and to take up warfare, patriarchy and slavery.
Lootable resources are one ingredient of what I call Goliath fuel. The second is monopolizable weapons, weapons a small group can control. In Mesopotamia and China you do not get the first states until handheld bronze axes and swords arrive. The third is caged land, places people cannot easily escape. Mesopotamia means the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Egypt sits between the Nile and the Red Sea.
What you are looking at is not a story of great civilizations and advances in art and culture. It is organized crime. Small groups could take the resources people depended on, and people had to accept it because they could not leave. It was a form of evolutionary backsliding, away from something uniquely human and back toward the harems of gorillas and the hierarchies of chimpanzees, with one key difference: we can pass resources and status down across generations, and they cannot.
Luke · If we default to egalitarianism, why does this keep happening? Because other parts of our psychology allow dominance hierarchies to form.
The first is status competition. Every one of us wants status to some degree, to be admired and loved and respected. It varies; in general men want it more than women, and a very small number are willing to pursue it through violence. Status is an evolutionary game, and there are studies suggesting higher-status men have more children who are more likely to reach adulthood. That is why emperors kept harems. The pursuit was never really about money or power. There is a good line from the Texas oil baron H.L. Hunt: for practical purposes, someone on two hundred and fifty thousand a year is just as well off as I am; money is just a way of keeping score. The score is the status game. Hunt had around fourteen children across three wives, which is fairly Musk-like, and intentionally so.
The second is the dark triad: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. People high on those traits are both more likely to pursue status through domination and generally better at it. They are good at politics, at building coalitions, at lying and deceiving. And it has not changed. Clinical psychologists broadly agree that around 1% of the male population would pass the clinical threshold for psychopathy. Among prisoners it is roughly 25%. In parliaments and boardrooms, estimates run from 3 to 21%. The numbers are disputed. That the dark triad is massively overrepresented in places of power is not.
It is worth noting that we used to keep this in check. Nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers are not equal because they are poor. It is a social choice. In studies mostly done by Christopher Boehm, when someone tries to rise up and dominate, the group resorts to counter-dominance strategies: they ridicule the person, ostracize them, expel them, or in the extreme, execute them. A direct, intentional refusal to be dominated.
When that check fails, Goliath leaves marks. Terracotta armies and pyramids: what unites them is conspicuous consumption, wasteful uses of energy to signal status. Nothing says I matter more than you like thousands of people spending their lives building your death monument. It is the exact opposite of the hunter-gatherer principle of least effort, which maximizes leisure rather than energy capture. And it shows up in our genes. Roughly four to eight thousand years ago there is a bottleneck in the Y chromosome, because a small number of men monopolized reproduction.
Then Goliaths become engines of inequality, for two simple reasons. Power begets power: money buys elections, offices and eventually your own army. And as Piketty showed, capital grows faster than wages. So inequality tends to rise over time, often to staggering levels. One study of 28 premodern states found they averaged 77% of the theoretical maximum, where one person holds all the surplus and everyone else has just enough to survive and reproduce. Even Rome was about three quarters of the way there.
Historically the best way to reverse inequality has been what Walter Scheidel calls a great leveller: mass mobilization warfare, bloody revolution, pandemic or collapse. And it was not only that collapse reduced inequality. Inequality often caused the collapse. Rising inequality brings knock-on effects: more polarization, more corruption, and a swelling elite class that turns to coups, assassinations and civil war, because a growing number of elites competing for a fixed number of high-status positions will compete. It also makes everything more expensive for everyone else. Scholars call it popular immiseration. We call it a cost of living crisis.
Luke · The good news is that collapse was often not that bad. After the fall of the western Roman empire, people grew taller and healthier, and we can see it in their teeth. It was not simply that so many died there were more resources to go around, because even people outside the empire grew taller and healthier. The old trope of the muscle-bound barbarian was somewhat true.
We hold an almost apocalyptic view of collapse largely because the history we inherited was written by the one percent. Writing was monopolized by a small number of scribes employed by the rich and by kings. And it is much easier to dig up a pyramid, a ziggurat or a palace than a biodegradable wooden shed.
When you actually read what elites wrote about collapse, you see what they were really worried about. This is the Admonitions of Ipuwer, poems written after Egypt's first collapse, describing the First Intermediate Period.
The corn of Egypt is common property. The poor man has attained to the state of the nine gods. He who could not make a sarcophagus for himself is now the possessor of a tomb. Noble ladies are now on rafts, and magnates in the labor establishment. Servants spoke freely. No nobles lamented, and the poor rejoiced.
I do not tend to think of slaves speaking back to their masters as an indicator of collapse. But the scribes spend far more time on the social inversion of the world than on famine or civil war, for which we have very little evidence.
I think the future will look different, because today we have far worse weapons, we rely far more on global industrial infrastructure, and we cannot easily go back to farming and foraging. Collapse had a bright past. It has a darker future.
Luke · Before the world wars the world was growing steadily more unequal. The wars produced what is called the great compression, partly by destroying huge amounts of old money and partly through new measures: welfare states, democracies, the expansion of the vote, taxation. It did not last. The wealth pump kicked back in, particularly from the 1980s. In 1980 roughly 25% of global wealth was captured by the top one percent. Today it is probably over 40%. In the United States alone, about a third of the wealth in this country sits with the top one percent.
And the knock-on effects are exactly what you would expect. The rise of the far right, increasing polarization, declining trust in public institutions, democratic backsliding, rising corruption. Every one of those has an empirical relationship to wealth inequality, and every one is increasing, not just here, but in the United Kingdom, in Germany, in Australia, across the world.
That is not what keeps me up at night. What worries me is nuclear war, extreme climate change, lethal autonomous weapons, an artificial intelligence pursuing goals of its own, engineered pandemics. Existential risk, the things that could cause global societal collapse or in the most extreme case the extinction of our species. And even existential risk is underpinned by inequality.
Take a drone, one of the most common lethal autonomous weapons, or a large language model and the data center under it. They depend on cobalt, and roughly 70% of the world's supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Roughly 40% of that is artisanal mining, unregulated work at around four dollars a day, and somewhere in the tens of thousands of those miners are children. The same is true of nuclear weapons. The world's first came from a mine in the DRC called Shinkolobwe, named after a fruit that burns the skin if you squeeze it, which turned out to be apt, because most of the people who worked it got radiation sickness. It is the purest uranium mine in the world. It supplied the uranium for the Trinity test and for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it was sold at a cut price by Belgian authorities. If you thought the British were bad colonizers, the Belgians were known as the worst.
The inequality is there in the production of global risk too. We get fed a story, often planted by large corporations, that all of us are to blame. But 86% of the nuclear stockpile is held by two countries, and roughly two dozen companies maintain, build and upgrade those weapons. If you are worried about artificial general intelligence, there are only three companies you really need to worry about. On climate, roughly 80% of historical cumulative emissions come from ten countries, and about a quarter from one.
Their response is always that they have to, because they are the good guys and it is better than the alternative getting there first. Better us than Russia or China. People call this a multipolar trap, or a game-theoretic trap. But it is not something that happens to ordinary people. Put normal people in a laboratory and they do not produce these arms races. It happens to a small selection of people, the ones high on the dark triad who are more likely to defect, and people trained in finance and economics. Once you have convinced yourself everyone is an arsehole, it is a great justification for acting like one.
Think about the average institution, a corporation or a state, as a person. What would they be like if they walked into this room? They would be the worst person here. Constantly grandstanding and virtue-signaling, giving less than one percent of their income to charity, stockpiling weapons to use against their closest neighbors. Run them through a battery of psychological tests and they would score very high on the dark triad.
So this is not a story about Moloch, some malevolent god who makes us fall into traps. It is not a universal force and it does not happen to everyone. It is a simple story of organized crime. We have built institutions that select for the worst of us and propel us into these traps. The metacrisis, if you like, is the endgame of Goliath.
Luke · What comes next is what I call the Silicon Goliath, and it runs on the same three ingredients. The lootable resource today is not only grain and fossil fuels, it is data. The monopolizable weapons are nuclear, and worth remembering that an entire nuclear arsenal sits under the control of one person who can choose to launch it any day, and now also killer robots, where whoever controls the code controls the army. And caged land no longer needs valleys, geography or walls, because we have mass surveillance.
It is a complex of AI, data and a new kind of economy, a new kind of Goliath. And my fear is that if we do not stop it in the coming decades, it gets locked in.
Luke · The first thing worth saying is that the solutions are obvious and technically feasible. We already have a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that many countries have joined, excepting, unsurprisingly, the ones with nukes. We already know we can get rid of these things; during the 1990s the United States decommissioned thousands of warheads a year. On decarbonization we have clear plans to reach net zero in every major economy using existing technology. None of these are technical barriers. They are political.
So what can we do? One strategy is refuge: build a bunker, or a lovely permaculture farm, which I like, though I do not think it is the way forward. In a paper with Florian Jehn and others we looked at catastrophic scenarios, including loss of global infrastructure, abrupt sunlight reduction from nuclear war or supervolcanoes, and global catastrophic biological risks. Long story short, Australia is a fairly sweet place to be. But the conclusion is that no place is safe. Australia is also the most vulnerable of the high-income countries to climate change, and you do not know which catastrophe you are getting; you might be well prepared for a slow decay of infrastructure and not at all for a nuclear war. There is an ethical objection too. I could move back to Australia, there are great beaches and my family is there. I choose not to, because I do not like the idea of waiting it out while billions of people die.
A second strategy is to build alternatives outside state structures and hope they take over when things fall apart. There is something to it, and I do not think it is sufficient. Across history, empires get bigger and they eat the alternatives. When people formed the Paris Commune, or the anarchist rebellions, states predated them.
What we ultimately need is to level each form of power. Economic power, the control of resources, which is the original one. Political power, the control of decision-making. Information power, the control of data and information. And violent power, the control of the lethal means of force. There are ways to level each. A wealth cap, and let us say ten million dollars, because nobody needs more than that. Deeper and more profound democracy. Collective ownership of the data these companies depend on.
And to do any of it we have to get better at storytelling. We have to seize the memes of production. In the collapse community we tend to rely on narratives where nobody is really to blame, it is all incentives and Moloch. That is not how you get people onto the street. Social mobilization requires a hero and a villain. You have to tell people who is to blame, and the good news is there is a very clear villain: the one percent, the agents of doom, the fossil fuel industry, the nuclear industry. And we can link it directly to everyday concerns like the cost of living.
We also have to embrace populism to some extent. Populism has become a dirty word, but it is broad enough to cover a Bernie Sanders voter and a Trump supporter, and what they share is the belief that there are groups of corrupt elites who do not represent their interests, and that the world would be better if the everyday person had a say. That does not sound so bad to me. The problem is that the right has very good narratives, blaming trans people and immigrants, and the left tends to shrug.
The strategy I want to push is open democracy: citizens' assemblies and citizens' juries. Let me argue for it with an anecdote. In 1945, before the first nuclear detonation in the New Mexico desert, Manhattan Project scientists were taking bets on whether it would destroy the planet, because Edward Teller and another physicist had calculated a nonzero chance that the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and kill every living thing on Earth. Not just human extinction, potentially the only life in the cosmos. They detonated it anyway, and by then they knew the Nazis were no longer capable of building one. This was not about beating the Nazis to the bomb.
Now imagine we had convened a jury, randomly selected across the United States. Nurses, farmers, teachers. You give them the information and ask whether we should detonate. What do you think they say? Hell no. That is the consensus answer I get every time, and it reflects both how people feel they would respond and how they think humanity would respond. Likewise, Shell and other fossil fuel companies knew about climate change in the 1970s, buried the information and ran misinformation campaigns funded by tens of millions of dollars. If a jury had been there, do you think they would have said yes, please lie to my family?
So open democracy could be a critical leverage point, and the clearest wedge issue to target is AI. People hate AI, for good reason. People hate big tech; it is trusted less than Congress. So why not put a citizens' assembly or a jury over the top of the big tech companies, see how it works, and then expand it? Goliath began with a couple of small changes that had enormous feedback loops. We can make a couple of small changes toward radical democracy that do the same. And if you have these assemblies, they will probably vote for wealth caps and wealth taxes. The message I want to leave you with is that yes, we are facing a crisis, and yes, it may feel inevitable, and it is not. Democracy can save the world.
As the cracks widen and people start losing jobs, what does collective power look like in this moment?
It depends on who you are. There is a big difference between someone already working nine to five with no spare resources and someone heading into university and planning on a powerful job. In general, get involved with movements and organizations already pushing for democratic control of AI, or for open democracy generally. There is a movement called Humans First in the US looking at exactly that. And although I was critical of the refuge and alternative-community strategies, they have their place. During crises and disasters, communities with higher social connection, what people call social capital, survive and do much better. So spaces like this one, where people build relationships that are not dependent on structures of power, are genuinely useful. Also think about your everyday conduct. Do not run your relationships on domination, including at work. It is strange that we think voting every four years is democracy while spending nine to five in an autocracy.
Why did Norway build the largest wealth fund in the world instead of letting the oil be extracted for private benefit?
Two big things. Norway already had quite inclusive institutions before it found oil, whereas countries that suffer from the resource curse often had colonization and colonial infrastructure in place first, so their institutions were extractive by nature. And Norway had no large existing fossil fuel industry to veto the move. In my own country, Australia, we tried for a sovereign wealth fund and a mining tax, and the fossil fuel and mining industries immediately mobilized enormous campaigns against it. Norway had good timing and inclusive institutions.
What coordination infrastructure made Norway possible, and what are the empire killers of our era? Vincent
Empire Killers is a great name for a band. In Norway's case they reversed inequality without a great leveller, and part of it seems to be very strong unions and a parliament reformed to be more inclusive, including union representation. Ancient Athens is the other example. It had a lot of slavery and was not a great place to be in many respects, but it had an intense form of democracy, with roughly 15% of the population in a lottery-based system of assemblies and juries. For most of human history real wages are essentially stagnant. Athens is one of the very few exceptions, and they achieved it through more intensive democracy rather than through violence. As for how you kill an empire, ideally there is a little point on the Death Star you can hit. It is not that easy. Across most cases it comes down to social mobilization. There is a study by Daniel Hoyer and Peter Turchin looking at societies that pulled back from the brink, including the Gilded Age here, and the key finding is that it takes mass mobilization, and usually some enlightened elites, meaning elites who realize this is no longer in their interest and that the choice is reform or revolution.
In your research, what have post-collapse democratic institutions looked like? Ali
It really varies. Sometimes the institutions after a collapse are worse and more autocratic than the ones before. Sometimes much better. After Egypt's First Intermediate Period you do get pharaohs again, but they style themselves as modest shepherds of the people rather than strong autocrats, and you get a democratization of religion, with grave goods appearing among ordinary people. Athens is the other example: we forget it was preceded by a dark age, which archaeologists call dark mostly because they lost writing, but which levelled wealth inequality across Greece so deeply that institutions could be rebuilt on an equal footing. When people have economic equality they bargain in ways that produce equal political institutions.
The industrial revolution is similar. Real wages and even human height stagnated across most of human history, and things only improved after the industrial revolution, which was initially terrible. In the core of England people got shorter, life expectancy dropped, children were maimed in machines. What made the difference was social mobilization, suffragettes and unionists pushing for sanitation and the forty-hour week. That is when you get shared prosperity. In general, more inclusive institutions before a collapse mean more inclusive institutions after, and the deeper the collapse the more likely a more inclusive society follows. But I would not rely on crisis producing utopia.
Were there times America pulled back from the brink that we could learn from?
The clearest measurable one is the Gilded Age; it shows up on the graph. A less measurable one, call it vibes analysis, is 2016. If the Democratic nominee is Bernie Sanders, I think you end up in a very different world; he cannibalizes half of Trump's voters, probably wins, and pushes for very different things. And from deeper American history, when Cahokia and the Puebloan societies and others collapsed around the same time, you get a real shift in institutions afterward. We think of Native American societies as egalitarian, and they had things like matriarchal checks; among the Haudenosaunee, women took over governance when men went to war, and held a veto over the decision to go at all. Much of that was built on mutual aid and reciprocity, and much of it looks like a reaction to the previous Goliaths. More checks and balances, more decentralization, because they had stories that said we tried having rulers once and would not recommend it. Those may be the ones we can learn the most from.
If Goliath fuel is always present and there will always be psychopaths and narcissists among us, how do you break the cycle?
The dark part is that when Goliaths collapse they tend to re-emerge, across almost every world region. Empire is its own fuel. Once you have turned fertile hunting land into tilled fields, the lootable resource is there forever. Once you have iron age weapons they generally do not go away. And you get stories passed down, what I call stories of subjugation. Every initial civilization is apparently ruled by a god, or a messenger of a god, or a reflection of a god. The mandate of heaven in China, the divine right in Europe. We can look back and say the pharaoh probably was not a god. We have equivalents today. The myth of meritocracy. The idea that if three people get together they need a manager, that we cannot self-organize, which is ludicrous.
How do we stop it? Look at forms of governance that factor these traits out. The good thing about assemblies and juries is that you are not selecting for people who want power or status, you are selecting at random, and people move in and out fast enough that power cannot corrupt them. Because that is another darker angel: power corrupts. Well-intentioned, competent people do get into positions of power, and then start cheating more, in games and on their spouses, becoming less risk-averse, less compassionate, less sympathetic. Rotation prevents that. Then cut the intergenerational transmission of wealth, with wealth taxes and other means, so people cannot pass status down. And kill the stories of subjugation. Right now the main future people can picture is a technotopia, and I know what people like Musk want in terms of technology, but I have no idea what they want in terms of gender relations, democracy or individual freedom. There should be alternative futures that people everywhere know about and are striving for.
Nineteenth and twentieth century revolutions had elites who could not flee and factories anyone could run. Today elites globetrot and the means of production are blindingly complex data centers. What does seizing control actually look like?
It is difficult. Jokes aside, you probably have to start in the US. People have asked the same about wealth inequality in a world of tax havens; Gabriel Zucman has written about this in The Triumph of Injustice, and the answer they point to is a coalition of countries, almost certainly including the US, that says if you do not maintain a certain tax rate we will embargo you and use tariffs. The US apparently loves tariffs. Likewise on AI: if the US decided on democratic control, and the assemblies and juries said we want to make sure compute and microchips do not spread so others cannot build this quickly, that is straightforward. The US already runs export controls, because most of the compute supply is heavily centralized through Taiwan and essentially all the manufacturing infrastructure is built by one Dutch company, both allies. Shift the US and you can start to shift the entire international order. That matters, because historically democratic experiments get predated. But if you take the superpower and make it the democratic one, suddenly democracy and goodness can compete.
Ben · No pressure on you all. Though it is an opportunity, and it is lucky that we happen to be in the place where something might happen. The cracks are forming. If we take the time to build relationships, keep a healthy information ecology, and learn how to organize and mobilize together, there will be a moment when the opportunity arrives and we can act. That was always the intention with these gatherings.
Samantha · It is a sacred thing to respond to affinity. A call went out to talk about and respond to the metacrisis, and all of you answered. I want to name the agency in this room and the structure of desire that brought you here, because it is a profound thing, and it is a niche call.
I have been a transformational facilitator for my entire adult life, and also a biodynamic organic seed farmer and a permaculturalist, and a systems person coordinating projects across a lot of domains. Tonight I want to talk about my book, True Human: reimagining ourselves at the end of our world. By the end of our world I mean the world built by separation. The world that assumes we are separate from nature, at the top of a hierarchy we invented, the master species on this planet. That assumption has brought us to a moment where we are meeting planetary boundaries, proliferating existential technologies, and are more lonely, addicted, distanced, polarized and medicated than we have ever been, because we cannot cope with the world we made.
Sit with this for a moment. We are a collection of organisms in a room in Brooklyn, on land that is still real land, eating food that came from places, drinking water that came from places. We are placebound organisms. This building is nested in a city, nested in a country, nested on a planet, nested in a cosmos. Going to Mars is not a solution to the limits we are exceeding.
Julia Butterfly Hill has the simplest description of the metacrisis: there is no away. There is no away from us, no away from our pollution, no away from the metabolic cycles that AI is instantiating which are not the metabolic cycles of ecology. We are in what I call a planetary crucible, a crucible the size of a planet that we built for ourselves to evolve in, and the evolution it demands is an evolution of worldview and of agency. We need to transcend the stories of dominance, and we need to enact stories that are both new and ancient, mirrored in the original instructions of many Indigenous traditions and in what Aboriginal cultures call Law: aligning human attention, identity, agency and action with the flourishing of the biological systems we depend on. The flourishing of places, of biodiversity, of the waters. Which turns out to equate to the flourishing of children and mothers, and to much greater human health.
I think of the age of separation as a geological age that began before the Anthropocene, because we were not that powerful when our ideas of separability and dominion started. It is a phase instigated by an adolescent creator species. I would classify us as an adolescent creator, preserver and destroyer species. A Gaia is a very specific thing, and we are not the only one in the universe: a Gaia is a planet where water collaborates with a local sun to boot up complex life. At some point a Gaia produces a species that distances itself from ecology and says, I am going to work out who I am. Then it creates technology, becomes deeply recursive and deeply creative and very dangerous to everything else. We are in the adolescent phase, facing a horizon of technocultural maturity that requires we meet our zero-sum and multipolar traps.
Zero-sum games are addictive because the results are clear. It is addictive to know exactly how much is in your bank account and exactly how much you have relative to others. Status games are addictive for the same reason; winning feels good. I watch it with my partner's teenage son and sports. The mind becomes much more interested in hierarchy if we do not train it on something else.
So here are the questions. What if being human was never meant to be a domination project but a devotional practice? What if the converging ecological, geopolitical and technological unraveling is pushing us to remember that we and our technologies and our economy are part of the Earth? Can I invite you to reckon with that in everything you design and consume? What if the true purpose of a human life is to contribute to the infinite game of life itself?
The way I would put it is that the civilizing impulse of a true human is to harmonize the forces of nature. That phrase mirrors many Indigenous traditions and initiatory structures in earth-based cultures. It came to me in a dream, from a teacher named Sophia who comes from a place where they made it through technological adolescence without breaking life, and her perspective is woven through the book. It is a perspective on the cultural practice required not to destroy ourselves.
The path is one of enlivenment, and this is an epochal move that transcends and includes. It takes the view that all the spiritual lineages we have inherited, including the very best Buddhist traditions and anything not Indigenous, need to be subtly reorganized so that the ecology of practice focuses more fundamentally on the immanent. The immanent is what is in the world. It is the relational fabric, which mirrors all of your research, Luke. It is embodiment, the capacity for attunement, the recognition of embeddedness and interdependence and interbeing at every level of scale, and at particular levels of scale, because the granularity of entanglement differs depending on how global your supply chain is or how local your air is.
This is the move of putting life at the center of everything we are and do. You can call it sacred or not; if sacred is intimidating, just say: I am alive, and I am interested in the continuity of life. For my kids, for my friends' kids, for the kids in the Congo. It is a universal ethic, and I would articulate it as sapience exists to serve sentience. Wisdom is only wise if it serves life.
There are some beautiful cosmic winks going on. AI is proliferating just as we realize it could coordinate between people and processes, in how we manage an agricultural system, or map and value hydrology, or the biodiversity of a forest or an urban ecology. And we are finally recognizing that other beings are sentient. No scientist working anywhere near best practice can now deny the sentience of mammals, and it is becoming clear that anything with a pulse, even a single-celled thing, is sentient.
This also brings our ethics and spirituality back into time. One of the wicked memetics we are in is that quantum physics let us say time is not real. At the level of relativity, time is real and things have consequences, and there is no wisdom tradition that does not root wisdom in time and in the outcomes of our actions.
To come into this practice is to take a kinship journey, which I think is the developmental narrative most relevant to our time. The West has been living inside its romance with Joseph Campbell's monomyth, and Campbell's version is not Hollywood's version. But the hero's journey runs a dopamine cycle of achievement and proving, and it dovetails with hyper-individualism and the status game in a way that cannot carry us to a new epochal narrative. The kinship journey is an ancient narrative that lives in almost all Indigenous traditions and in the initiatory traditions most European cultures also had. Go out. Work out what you are good at and what you love. Get battered around by life until you find where your harmony fits into the song. Get recognized by community and elders. Then come back to the community with responsibility.
The beautiful thing about the kinship journey is that its inception point is disconnection. How many people here feel disconnection in some form? In thirty-five years of working with people, almost everyone who came to me was on a kinship journey. I did not find the narrative until I was two thirds of the way through writing the book, and then it was obvious. It is about rethinking what constitutes an adult human being.
Two of its core practices are awakening and remembering. Our culture has had a deep romance with awakening, partly because it offers refuge from ego, from the loudness of status and the race of the Western world. Its essential insight is that the self is a fluid construct we can build many ways, and that awareness is the substrate of primordial reality. That recognition makes everything calmer, which is a medicine we need. I call what you contact there the no-self rather than the capital-T True Self, and that distinction matters, because the other half of practice is remembering. To remember means to put the members back together, which is literally what your brain does in a memory, reconnecting synapses to reconstruct an etching of something past. Memory is the continuity and emergence key, and traditional cultures knew that.
Remembering also means recognizing your agency as contributive to the fabric of existence. In Western pop-spirituality awakening, the purpose is to realize you are a construct and then be free, which dovetails neatly with consumerism, and you get California spirituality where everyone is living their best life. Over here, you recognize that you are participating in the fabric of life, and that there are particular things your life, your gifts, your unrepeatable suchness bring to this world, and that not doing them is a kind of forgetting.
The currencies of an incarnated being stitching that fabric are not only awareness but presence, praise, attention, and even naming. Has anyone studied Indigenous names for things? I have had the experience in Hawaii of standing with a plant and saying its English name, then its scientific name, then its Hawaiian name. Because language has been so weaponized in our culture, we have inherited a story that language is separative. It is not true. Language couples, like memory. When you name something well, in a way that invokes its true nature, you are adding to the aesthetic genius of the whole creation song. If you have ever thought hard about branding and enjoyed it, that is a version of the right power of naming.
The other one I want to name is grief. Many Indigenous traditions hold that when we fail to grieve we leave a great debt to the world. So I want to validate the parts of you that are grieving, and invite them forward.
The most audacious vision I hold is that we collectively remember we are part of Gaia, and that we become skillful and diverse enough in our storytelling to reroot the fact of our humanity in a larger vision, where we are an incredibly creative species that is part of the planet. We and our technologies and our economy, what Nate Hagens calls the superorganism, are nested inside a more powerful superorganism, and collectively we could harmonize ourselves with it. I call that third-tier social evolution. Second-tier social evolution is what we and other social organisms have done, creating the capacity for multiple roles inside the hive; it includes bees, termites, mole rats, a couple of crustaceans and us, and we are the most complex of them. My argument is that a species reaching planetary conscious stewardship would be a third tier. I would love someone to pick that up as a science project.
The end of the talk, kept simple: either we come home together or we do not come home at all. And the simplest practice is this. Are you in integrity with yourself? How much reciprocity is there in your interactions with other people, and with other things? With the bubbly water I am so grateful for, and the chips, and the soup, and not just the cooks but the beans and the tomatoes and the farmers. There is a peace studies finding out of Berkeley that the only statistical difference between a violent society and a peaceful one is the prevalence of acts of reciprocity between members of that society.
So the most important thing we can do is be in integrity with ourselves, practice presence and reciprocity and attunement with the people and things we are in relationship to, and then explore how that lives in complementarity, because it is an ecology and we do not all serve the same role. There was a lot of complementarity between these two talks. The Kogi have a way of saying it in conversation. Rather than saying well, I think, someone says: may I compliment you? They do not mean it as flattery. They mean it ecologically. May I add to that? May I stitch it forward in a way that increases the whole picture? These are deeply disruptive social technologies. And as the Kogi also say, let us remember to remember. The way I think about being a person in this giant song is that we become trustworthy by tending what we love.
Much of that is about the individual. If everyone in this room became that version of themselves, how do you thread from here, through the collapse we may be facing, to the future we could have?
I can tell you which threads I am following. One is deliberative democracy, not only on AI but across domains. Another is community-based resilience. The third is reciprocity: the Dalai Lama ran a movement around kindness that was quite effective, and I think we need a new movement about acts of reciprocity. People are depressed and things are hard, and I am not sure we could revisit kindness, but reciprocity might travel.
Like Luke said, we do not know what is coming, whether it is nuclear or AI or a pandemic or climate dysregulation combined with a fertilizer shortage producing a food crisis some people are putting at ninety days out. Either way, the strategy I am putting the most energy into is neighbor-to-neighbor connection and resilience, at city and county scale, which dovetails with deliberative democracy. And I am curious how we spin up a movement that asks: are you connected, are you attuned? Multiple platforms still do not accept attuned as a word, which I find telling, because how co-regulated we are with everyone we interact with is a deep key.
Mutual aid and reciprocity are contagious. Everyone I know who worked on the Klamath dam removal came back with their mind blown at how contagious it was. It is natural to our biology to help each other around meaningful things. Some of you weathered 9/11 and other things in this city and have felt it directly; the great book on that is Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell.
I also think story is a strategy, which is why I wrote the book I wrote. If you think of society as a fabric of relationships and communications, every interaction has the potential to shift initial conditions, like the butterfly effect. And some things create deeper basins of attraction, meaning where attention and energy and agency go. Health was a major basin of attraction in the last election and will continue to be. Story is one too, and we are in a dearth of good stories. A better story about what we are as a species can steer agency and action in new ways.
If we focus on enlightenment now, do we not just cede power to Luke's dark triad? Josh
No. We definitely need a movement of consequence, and the consequences will vary by context. There was a story that broke recently about an online platform where men filmed abuse of their partners and other men paid to watch, with a very large user base. What is also going on is a large movement of men speaking up against it, saying this does not come into my space, it is not welcome in my circles. There are consequences.
No is a sacred word, and it has been badly denigrated by pop spirituality and pop psychology. We have to reclaim boundaries and we have to reclaim consequences, and we also have to hold the mystery of consequence. When I really sit with it: what would I do if I were a judge trying someone for ecocide? What would the consequences be? I think we need to ask ourselves those questions seriously, honestly, and with some humor.
I work on a computer for a bank and feel physically disconnected from the ecology I want to help heal. I wish there were an organization that gave volunteers assignments. How could that happen?
I cannot speak to what is local here, though I was just in Irvington, New York, where there is a very active climate response movement. If you want deeper immersion, there is WWOOF, which places you on a permaculture farm working a few hours a day, and you can be a digital nomad at the same time; you just have to be selective about the placement.
Ben · To bring it back to New York: Neil wants to do a river cleanup and has found an event, so we are trying to share more of these and do a few field trips as a group. And Hope and I found a bird rescue called the Wild Bird Fund that rescues thirteen thousand birds a year in New York City, with four-hour volunteer shifts. It is not about solving the world's problem. It is about healing that relationality, the pulling and the caring, and personally that is what I am excited about.
Samantha · It would also be great to do a Council of All Beings here. That is a container where everyone takes on the role of a more-than-human being and we counsel together. It is not cute. It is deep. And it is used legally in places in the UK and elsewhere in natural law, because it trains citizens as proxies for the more-than-human world. People could represent the threatened birds, or the pigeons, or the grasses along the river. It is a tool for deep ecological education and for expanding our identity into kinship and reckoning with our responsibility to those who have no voice.
Many of us treat religion as a net negative and say we are spiritual, not religious, which twists itself into pretzels. Yet spirituality and religion have historically been binding forces, linking intellectual worldviews to emotional motivation in a way people sustain. What is the strategy for a simple, shareable set of beliefs that could appeal to large numbers now, without asking them to give anything up? Jim
There are a lot of ways in. I run a church called One Life Circle. True Human is oriented toward pre-institutional religion, when cultures were integrated with spirituality, and I think the myth of primitivism we have layered over that period misses all the granularity of what those practices and rituals actually were. So True Human is a post-religion sacred culture orientation. I do not propose a religion in it, and I also run a church.
The other talk I did not give tonight is the five competencies of a person who is part of life, and I am happy to share those slides; they are very interoperable with a democratic vision. And I would love to work with storytellers and people in big media. There is a need to bring the kinship journey forward as an invitation into a developmental arc for individuals that requires community, at a very large scale, because it is a genuine response to the meaning crisis. Wait, you mean I am not my job, and not my bank account, and not where I sit on a social hierarchy, and not whether I own my home? Maybe I am someone who tends the river and knows how to speak for the oak trees and is part of a ten-thousand-year vision. That is so much more interesting than collapsing this generation.
I am a fiction writer thinking about moving past the obsession with the hero's journey. Are you seeing a shift toward the kinship journey? Daniel
Ted Lasso is the best example, and everyone loves it, and it is not a hero's journey. It is a kindred quest and a kinship journey at once; a kindred quest is when you put all the characters together and they interoperate. The Bear is a good example of something that is not quite an anti-hero story but a kinship journey. Dying for Sex is a great one, one of my favorite pieces of media ever. Looking at this year's Oscars I do not see bright lights; Hamnet is exquisite and is more hero's journey than kinship journey. And I have been furious at James Cameron for missing the opportunity to evolve the narrative. My partner's son was eleven when the second one came out and said, it is the same story and it is longer. So there is clearly a dearth of imagination. But there is probably space for it, if we show up with the right producers and the right imagination.
Ben · We are going to split into smaller groups of about twenty so you get another round of questions with Samantha in a setting where more people can actually speak, and so we can meet each other, because we are the ones who have to figure out what to do. Then we migrate up to the roof.