What does it mean, truly, to turn away from something?
Our Longing for Inconvenience
People are pining for old technologies—CD players, VCRs, Walkmans. What’s behind our longing for inconvenience?
notes on the industrialisation of decision making
worrying away at an old subject
‘No & ...’ : A Forum on Technological Refusal - Home
This forum begins from the idea that refusal is, among other things, a rejection of one’s current relationship to technology (as an individual and/or as part of a collective) and a simultaneous commitment to another way of being in the world. The ‘no’ is accompanied by a ‘yes’ to another path. In this sense, refusal demands a careful articulation of what needs to change as well as a vision for a future that can (and should) be worked towards.
True resilience is not about bouncing back | Psyche Ideas
I hate talk of resilience: it places an expectation on people to return to how they were. That’s not how real recovery works
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
More and More and More
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.
A quote by William H. Murray
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the...
Masculist pushback: the threatened extinction of the great, white Judeo-Christian male
A political ideology rooted in fear is remaking the world in its own image and dragging us with it
Grow like Trees: An Organic Approach to Societal Regrowth
2026 is the year that system breakdown became impossible to deny. Democratic norms, societal norms, rule of law, the fabric of the social contract tearing as we watch. Or hide, unwilling or unable to face the unravelling. The hopeful among us see opportunity through the dark. Tentatively or boldly we
The Great Reckoning - The Ideas Letter
The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about…
