







“Polycrisis” has become a ubiquitous descriptor for the multisector, intersecting problems afflicting the world—but the term masks the systemic nature of these crises and overwhelmingly reflects Eurocentric voices, priorities, and…
Polycrisis - Cascade Institute
The polycrisis program examines how today’s multiple crises are linked and how the polycrisis could create possibilities for positive outcomes.

Prefixing the World
Why the polycrisis is a permacrisis, which is actually a metacrisis, which is not really a crisis at all.

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster
The AI boom wasn’t built for the polycrisis.
John Vervaeke: “The Meaning Crisis: Wisdom, Purpose, and the Search for Coherence” - The Great Simplification
The crises that our world is facing seem to be constantly growing, leading to enormous and devastating systemic effects across the globe.

Transformational Pathways to Sustainability Through Polycrisis
Keep up to date with our latest news, events, and other IIASA activities. Sign up.
The Prospects of a Pluriversal Transition to a Post-Capitalist, Post-C
This book critically engages with a central dilemma facing counter-hegemonic movements as global crises intensify: how to foster systemic change while

Interdependent Thoughts – by Ton Zijlstra
Still, many questions have global aspects. Our information networks, our trade routes, our dependencies are truly global. Because of it many of our issues, including climate emergencies, are global in both their roots and consequences. We all suffer from small earth syndrome these days, as I phrased it in 2010 at the SHiFT Conference, where everything anyone of us does reverberates around the world because we are continuously bumping into real global limits, Club of Rome style.
AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum
This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum
This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
Erik Brynjolfsson on Twitter / X
The @nytimes piece today by @ByrneEdsal13590 highlights a concern I share: “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real.”In work with @zhitzig, we ask why AI may shift the balance between dispersed knowledge… pic.twitter.com/10vOTRj4Dq— Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) March 17, 2026

Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonoga…
Attachment theory has entered the mainstream, but most …

‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come
Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come

Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm | David Bollier
Every so often I am invited to write a piece that in effect answers the question, “Why the commons?” I invariably find new answers to that question each time that I re-engage with it. My latest attempt is an essay, “Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm,” which I wrote for the Next System Project as part of its series of proposals for systemic alternatives.

Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, and the Cost of Civility-Theater Liberalism
“Talking across divides” is laudable—until it becomes a license to launder antidemocratic and dehumanizing ideas.
