Since the re-election of Donald Trump, I’ve observed a steady drumbeat of media articles and influencer-promoted narratives around the prospect of American liberals and leftists embracing gun ownership. It’s couched in the language of sensible preparedness and self-protection—topics I am demonstrably invested in.

These pro-Second Amendment arguments intensified over the course of 2025, as ICE increasingly acted in blatant violation of the Constitution (and often in violation of basic decency). In the wake of the public execution of Renee Good—and now reaching fever pitch with the execution of Alex Pretti, who exercised his legal right to concealed carry (though was not actually brandishing his weapon when he was killed).

Perhaps I’m colored by what I’m seeing and learning in Ken Burns’s superb The American Revolution documentary, but what’s happening now feels like it has the jagged edges of revolutionary spirit. There’s much to be excited about in this; the American imperial project has produced untold harms for its entire existence, and the neoliberal status quo has been harming us for decades—and left unchecked these systems will render the planet uninhabitable. In some form, what will be required to survive this century is a dramatic overhaul of our current accepted systems. Revolution is perhaps the “loudest” answer that has historically produced such an effect, and indeed some form of “revolution” will inevitably be necessary to break the stranglehold toxic capitalism (or, what has called ‘technofeudalism’) has on all over our other social and political systems.

But as the gun conversations have intensified, my spidey sense has started to tingle. I should say up front that I’m speaking from my affective experience, predominantly accumulated via various forms of doomscrolling. That said, my track record when it comes to following my spidey sense is (unfortunately) pretty strong. I noted and extensively covered the rise of lefty prepping throughout 2025, and essentially called the broad strokes of what we should expect from a Donald Trump 2.0 presidency within a week of the election in 2024:

So take all that for what you will.

Yes, owning a gun is still a right possessed by all Americans (at least, for now); yes, it’s a right that was designed as a counter-tyranny measure; and yes, tyranny is ascendant in America.

I just can’t shake the feeling we’re being politically kettled into the exact position the tyrants want us in.

It is now something like common knowledge that Trump will compromise the midterm elections. After all, his actions are increasingly unpopular, and the only remaining possible check under normative democratic processes would be for the Democrats to flip both houses of Congress (though please, even if by some miracle this were to happen, I beg you to remember the Democratic Party’s track record on opposing authoritarianism). In what follows, the impression I don’t want you to take away from this is that I think we should all sit back, wait for the elections, and cross our fingers. Quite the opposite.

Many believe Trump’s election interference will live and die with martial law. Indeed, martial law is the most powerful lever for outright election cancellation or postponement—I’ll come back to this in a bit—but it’s foolish to think they would bet the farm on that lever alone. Instead, we should expect to see them roll out a bevy of tactics, form-fit for different contexts. These could include:

• Executive orders by Trump that federally restrict mail-in voting, absentee ballots, or voting methods. Sure, courts might block these—but the Supreme Court could then overturn those rulings.

• Pushing for strict ID or citizenship documentation requirements that make it harder for people to register or vote.

• Pressure federal agencies to demand detailed voter data (e.g., Social Security numbers), increasing risk of inaccurate purges from voter rolls.

• Targeting or pressuring local and state election officials to change how elections are run or counted (see: Georgia in the 2020 election). While this form of interference could still happen after the fact if the election goes against Trump’s desires, it could also happen beforehand (read: now), with the administration encouraging state legislatures to pass election laws or redraw districts (gerrymandering) to favor one party, especially in states with tight races.

• The deployment of “poll watchers,” federal agents (ICE, CBP, or otherwise) or National Guard units at polling locations under the pretext of security, but in fact to intimidate voters or election workers. It’s also possible Trump will simply encourage “patriots” to undertake these actions in their duty as citizens.

• Using federal data systems (like the SAVE program) to remove eligible voters from rolls by misclassifying their eligibility status. Going further: the administration could actively encourage or legitimize state roll purges under the banner of “cleaning voter lists,” even if they disproportionately affect certain demographic groups. Because of DOGE and cooperation with surveillance companies like Palantir, this information is readily available.

• States, meanwhile, could proffer alternative electors if a (requisite majority of) their respective lawmakers greenlight such overt interference. Because Republicans currently hold the trifecta of power in government, nobody would necessarily be able to stop them from doing this.

I worry that many who are celebrating folks on the left becoming gun owners are unwittingly playing into the Trump administration’s hand, providing easy fodder for narrative warfare that will be used to bolster support for any of the above.

Now, again, does that mean I’m saying you should not own a gun if you believe it’s critical for your own self-defense? No. You should do whatever feels right for you and your situation. But there’s a whole lot of narrative smuggling happening right now—the sense that owning a gun is a precursor step to bringing about long overdue systemic change. What I’m cautioning against is jumping headfirst into that narrative.

Recently, laid out the case that promoting violence through gun ownership is a doom loop, writing “all of this 2A yeehaw bullshit is going to get vulnerable people killed. You are being manipulated.”

It’s worth watching the video in full here. I want to specifically direct your attention to this clip:

I recognize there are meaningful reasons why you would consider embracing your Second Amendment rights right now, and to repeat myself one more time for folks who only scan articles: if this feels like a necessary self-defense action for you and your circumstances, by all means, follow your conscience. But what do I vehemently caution against is viewing this as true change for the exact reason highlights: by doing so, you are playing on the gameboard the tyrants want you on, rather than pursuing the strategies they don’t want. This aspect isn’t a moral argument so much as a strategic one.

Of course, the moral dimension focuses on the outcomes of civil conflict—or God forbid a new kinetic Civil War—which will produce outsized harm for children and endangered groups.

So I’m asking you to be very, very vigilant about the feelings of cathartic frisson that might arise within you from the prospect of gun ownership. That affective dimension might feel like an afterthought, but it’s the absolute core of the matter. There is a critical difference between quietly becoming a gun owner and communicating that privately with friends and family for awareness vs. openly parading this choice on social media and calling for others to do the same, pointing to government tyranny as the raison d’etre.

Because the actual “war” that’s being fought right now—and the “war” that will determine what happens over the next few months and years—is a narrative one. It might surprise you to hear that, right now, the left is winning that war. Support for ICE is decreasing, and even Republicans are beginning to worry about the impacts this will have in the midterms. This is precisely because the tyranny is being made explicit; people are legally protesting without open violence and being executed in the streets for it.

To be clear, I do not intend this to mean that we should celebrate people being killed by our government because it helps our narrative. All of this is devastating; all of this has produced overwhelming moral injury in me, and in many ways disrupted my ability to think about anything other than ICE and the evolution of American fascism. But the facts are I know are this: whatever guns we might bring to the gun fight, they have us vastly outgunned. Their technologies of violence are many orders of magnitude more powerful and effective than anything we might try to counter them with.

Fighting fire with fire here will lead to many more deaths, and would inevitably bolster the administration’s arguments for why ICE actions are necessary—not only to sweep up innocent immigrants, but to crack down on “domestic terrorists,” and more broadly to make the case for intensifying their authoritarian crackdown.

It would be one thing if violence were our only option, but it’s not. We have a whole toolset for upending authoritarianism predicated on strategic nonviolence, adaptations of historical tactics that have actually worked. I don’t mean protests like No Kings—while those are perhaps a productive and cathartic first step for many, there’s so much more we can do that we haven’t yet embraced at scale: community organizing, constructing parallel systems of support, legal physical obstruction in your neighborhood, economic warfare (namely: a general strike!), and digital self-defense, to name just a few categories. I’m going to spend some time over the coming days and weeks researching and publishing what these tactics might look like in practice. But for now it feels critical to get this simple message out: promoting violence through gun ownership might feel cathartic, but it’s not the answer. Of course, neither is sitting around and waiting for the midterms. So we need to double down on the strategies that will actually yield durable, positive outcomes.

As I said in the subhead, this is still raw for me. I recognize there might be points I’m missing—and certainly recognize that it’s not a simple issue because violence has indeed worked to bring about systemic change in the past. I just feel strongly that it’s not the only or even best option, for the reasons outlined above. Put simply, I believe violence should only ever be considered as an absolute last resort, and despite how it may feel, we have so many other options at our fingertips right now.

I welcome disagreement in the comments, or, for subscribers, via a response to this email. What I want to share with my friends and comrades who are more excited about the gun narrative is an urgent desire to topple authoritarianism and promote democracy in the United States, one that is more just than this country has ever been, that lives into its stated ideals.

I’m sharing this not as an indictment of those who have been heartened by the lefty 2A movement—I recognize your feelings of righteous anger and I share those feelings. Rather, I’m asking you to slow down (following Báyò Akómoláfé’s usage) and remember that we have so many other, better options available to us to bring about systemic change. Yes, they involve hard work—work that is much more complex and multifaceted than the simplistic abstraction of gunfights in the streets. But if we want durable change, we’re going to have to get a whole lot more strategic than what I’ve been seeing. I hope you’re able to hear this.

Stay safe out there.

If any of my readers are at the World Economic Forum this week, here’s another item for your to-do list: check out SUCK, the augmented reality intervention that and I have geolocated over the Davos Congress Centre, experienced through her free, 4th Wall app (download via the App Store or Google Play).

It’s a monumental “VIP” tick sucking the Earth dry. Subtle, I know.

We pitched it to a dozen outlets and nobody seems willing to touch it, so I want to explain our motivations for this piece. We wrote up a mini-manifesto, so I’ll start there:

Every January, Davos hosts one of the highest concentrations of the world’s billionaires, global political leaders, celebrities, and CEOs anywhere on Earth. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the most influential gathering in shaping the global economy, with a stated mission to “improve the state of the world through public-private cooperation.” WEF is unmatched in scale, influence, and ambition; no other convening hosts anywhere near this amount of cross-sector power.

Despite grandiose lip service to “[improving] the state of the world,” at each yearly WEF, necessary change—be it political, economic, social, ecological, or technological—doesn’t happen. The greatest wealth transfer in history continues to impoverish billions in the Global South, and increasingly, even the majority of people in the Global North—all in service of making a handful of corporations unfathomably rich and “too big to jail.” Tech companies race to get to AGI before the so-called “AI bubble” bursts—all while they express concern in public that AGI poses an existential risk to human survival. In pursuit of “winning” this race, they steal data and plunder water sources and energy systems to support rushed data center buildouts. Meanwhile, humanity continues to accelerate systems of extraction and destruction that have set Earth on a warming path of as much as 3°C above preindustrial levels by 2050—a death sentence for most living things. This tipping point will dismantle the ecosystems that support life on Earth beyond any near-term possibility of repair.

In all categories, humanity is in a state of extreme overshoot. The threat of global war and civil conflicts are mounting—inescapable externalities of protecting wealth at all costs. The emergency is inarguable. The only appropriate response is all-out global cooperation and coordination to address these polycritical harms, pivoting away from the unchecked growth imperative embodied by the ceaseless pursuit of GDP, the fundamental driver of all other systemic problems.

Instead, every year, WEF is a champagne ball of delusion and doublespeak—arguing that we can have both a habitable planet and endless economic growth. We can’t. Anyone not recognizing this, and not treating it like the emergency it is, is most charitably a useful idiot for systems of power that benefit the select few at the expense of the many.

Of course, the power class’s lip service tells us that at some level, many do know this, leaving us to infer that they must have other priorities. WEF’s 2026 theme is “A Spirit of Dialogue,” and includes several topics that overtly contradict each other.

“How can we cooperate in a more contested world?” agenda item #1 asks, while the tech billionaires engage in an algorithmic arms race, no matter the social, ecological, or political cost; while wealthy nations (which hold the greatest power in WEF proceedings) refuse to commit to the necessary reduction of carbon emissions (witnessed most recently in November’s COP30 conference), putting developing nations—already the worst victims of capitalist hegemony and extreme climate events—in grave peril.

In item #2, WEF makes its true agenda clear: “How can we unlock new sources of growth?” If any question embodies the event’s thesis—and the destruction that WEF’s status as global agenda-setter currently wreaks—we find it here. Where can we find more planetary marrow to suck? The frenzied search for new sources of growth fuels ecological breakdown and catastrophic weather. Item #5, then, becomes a special kind of slap-in-the-face: “How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries?” It’s really quite simple: we build true prosperity—for everyone—by relinquishing the growth imperative. This is the root cause of the climate crisis and radical inequity, resource wars and systemic oppression. But this is not the “prosperity” WEF is fighting for. WEF is repackaging greed in reassuring language, while guaranteeing prosperity only for the elite. This form of prosperity is inherently antithetical to remaining within planetary boundaries.

As Maya Angelou reminds us: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.” WEF has told us clearly, since 1971, that it is here to provide a glossy veneer for toxic ideologies of power. It does so in the most hypocritical way: acknowledging pressing issues only to undercut any real attempt to address them. How can an event famous for exclusivity, embodied in an extensive color-coded badge system, proffer “a spirit of dialogue” with a straight face? What dialogue can possibly emerge when its participants are selected based on their existing power and money, many of whom arrive on private jets? To put a fine point on this, analysis by Greenpeace demonstrated that carbon emissions produced by private jets coming to Davos during WEF 2022 equaled the weekly emissions of 350,000 average cars. These are the people we’re supposed to entrust with serious dialogue? These are the people we should listen to?

If you really want change and prosperity? Learn to share. You have the resources, but evidently you lack the courage and creativity. If just a fraction of the leaders at WEF put their heads together, you could solve global problems overnight.

Until then, WEF is a con. Its job is not dialogue, or improving the state of the world. Its job is to give false hope that the billionaires and political elites care about the future of humanity, as they keep sucking our one shared Earth dry.

One thing I’ve been unable to stop thinking about is the simple fact that Luke Kemp explains in Goliath’s Curse—and that I discussed with him in a recent episode of Urgent Futures—that inequality is the root driver of collapse.

Inequality is rising all over the world, and inequality makes everyone less safe. If there’s one thing I wish the billionaire class would recognize, it’s this simple fact. They’re commitment to increasing their power is making the world more dangerous for everyone—including them.

WEF could be a place where real cooperation happens, where actionable responses to wicked problems are proposed, and where the most asymmetrically-resourced of the world invest in livable futures for everyone. Billionaires and political elites have benefitted astronomically from public investment, but evidently feel no responsibility to reinvest in those publics. This doesn’t exist in a vacuum; as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet. Their accumulation is driving us toward collapse—and rising authoritarianism, global heating, biodiversity loss, and social fragmentation are just a few of the byproducts we’re witnessing in real time.

We urgently need more just, equitable systems, and they could play an outsized role in building them. It’s very simple: we need systems where nobody is able to accumulate these extremes of wealth and power in the first place. Our puckish little digital graffiti is a call for all the above.

Right now, the most fervent political discourse in the United States centers around ICE, and for good reason. A paramilitary law enforcement arm that can act without transparency and accountability (embodied in Vice President JD Vance’s claim that ICE agents have “absolute immunity”) is not only a clear violation of the Constitution, it’s a moral stain, mirroring some of the worst authoritarian regimes in history.

And yet, as bad as ICE is, from a macro standpoint, the looming prospect of a U.S. invasion (or any other kind of “seizure”) of Greenland would be incalculably worse (and likely exacerbate the harms perpetrated by ICE). I get the sense that many Americans think such an invasion would be ambiently bad on moral grounds, but don’t seem to grasp that it would likely induce a catastrophe for them. For each of us, individually. Even the best-case scenario following such an action is nothing short of a wrecking ball to the baseline realities we’ve come to expect.

So I’m donning my polycritical foresight hat to help break it down. Make no mistake: we must do everything we possibly can to thwart this possibility.

Understanding the Bretton Woods System & NATO

To get the full picture, we need to do a quick historical survey.

One of the great misunderstandings about the post-WWII international order is that it made the world peaceful or just. You only have to refer to the 81 regime change interventions the US conducted between 1946-2000 to understand that this world order was neither peaceful nor just.

Indeed, the Cold War era was implicitly and explicitly violent, with no shortage of proxy wars and state-sponsored ‘regime changes’—American hypocrisy was baked in from the outset (in the messaging, the U.S. positioned itself as a champion of democracy and peacekeeping). But the system did do something that most of us alive today—most of all Americans—take for granted: in aggregate, it made the world less catastrophic.

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Before 1945, great powers regularly fought wars that destroyed entire systems. Conquest and annexation abounded in international politics; borders were provisional and empires rose and fell through force. After 1945, that pattern stopped. While all manner of fuckery and violence persisted, the most lethal form of conflict in human history—total war between great powers—largely did. Regardless of how you feel about the American empire, that fact alone makes the postwar order one of the most consequential political developments in modern history (again, bearing in mind the utter hypocrisy involved in how America and its allies exerted military and economic might at the expense of other nations).

For the first time in living memory, power was expected to operate inside a web of rules (hence, the so-called ‘Rules-Based Order’). Institutions governing security, finance, and trade made predictability more valuable than coercion. States—especially the wealthy ones higher up in the global pecking order—still cheated, bent norms, and acted in bad faith, but broadly speaking, expectations changed. Borders were no longer treated as temporary frames until the next opportune moment for war and conquest. Smaller states gained a level of security that simply didn’t exist in earlier eras. Stability became the organizing logic of global politics.

The Bretton Woods system was the economic architecture that made this post-WWII security order viable. Designed in 1944 and implemented in the following years, it replaced the interwar chaos of currency wars, protectionism, and debt spirals with a system built on monetary stability, capital controls, reconstruction finance, and U.S. dollar supremacy. The dollar was pegged to gold (that is, until 1971, but that’s a story for another time); other currencies were pegged to the dollar; and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created to manage balance-of-payments crises and fund reconstruction rather than force austerity through collapse.

This mattered because economic breakdown had been a primary accelerant of fascism, imperial expansion, and world war. Bretton Woods reduced the likelihood that economic stress would boil over into great-power conflict. By privileging predictability over predation, it allowed global capitalism to expand without constant military seizure of territory. It was the economic “shock absorber” that made a world without routine great-power war imaginable.

And that stability made the money flow. By replacing zero-sum mercantilism with open trade, development finance, and relatively stable currencies, economies around the world became intertwined, middle classes expanded (we have to remember that the advent of the middle class was in itself a historical anomaly), and extreme poverty fell. Interdependence made war irrational for most states most of the time.

Democracy benefited in particular. Historically, democracies don’t survive constant external threat and economic chaos, and Bretton Woods reduced both. Security guarantees, reconstruction aid, and norms against territorial conquest created an environment in which democratic institutions could consolidate and persist in places like Western Europe and East Asia. This didn’t happen because humans magically became more ethical or just, it happened because the international environment became less volatile. To quote Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome.”

The United States played a central role in making this work—not just by being powerful, but by binding itself and its currency to the very system it dominated. Alliances, institutions, arbitration, and rules constrained the types of historical aggression we would expect to see from an empire as powerful as the United States. That self-restraint reduced arms races around the world (even as, paradoxically, the Cold War was a highwire walk to avoid “mutually assured destruction”) and made U.S. leadership tolerable even when it was (often) resented—this is where the notion of the U.S. as the world’s “cop” emerges.

Formed in 1949 in the shadow of World War II’s devastation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was a catastrophic-risk mitigation device to reinforce the Bretton Woods system. Its core innovation was simple: an attack on one NATO member (of which there are now 32 across North American and Europe) would be treated as an attack on all. This mutual defense commitment decisively locked the United States into Europe’s security, ending centuries of great-power conflict. It’s worth noting that, again, this stability was fraught at best. Former Greek Minister of Finance (who more recently coined the notion of “technofeudalism”) famously equated NATO to the mafia.

But NATO further deterred the normalization of invasion and war in an era of nuclear weapons, froze borders that would otherwise have remained violently contested, and made escalation simply unprofitable in most cases.

Key to this was the United States’s restraint; it’s why the Iraq War was widely condemned two decades ago and why many condemn the Trump administration’s recent invasion of Venezuela. But, for as bad as those developments were and are, they pale in comparison to what an attack on a fellow NATO member would mean for the U.S. and for the world: jeopardizing whatever remains of the fragile stability that has held on for the past ~80 years.

The Dangers of the Donroe Doctrine

This is where doctrines like the Monroe Doctrine—and its modern descendants, most recently Donald Trump’s ‘Donroe Doctrine’—become so dangerous.

When James Monroe established his eponymous doctrine in 1823, it was a defensive warning: Europe should stay out of the Western Hemisphere. At the time, it was less a legal rule than a geopolitical signal, initially enforced by British naval power and later by American strength. In a fragile post-colonial moment (we have to remember that the United States was barely even a minor power at this point), it aimed to prevent the return of European empires to the Americas.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—especially with Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary—it evolved into a sweeping claim of regional primacy. It became a justification for interventions, occupations, regime changes, and economic coercion across Latin America. What started as anti-imperialism morphed into a rationale for American imperialism.

That evolution exposes the core problem. The Monroe Doctrine rests on “sphere-of-influence” logic—the idea that great powers are entitled to privileged control over nearby regions (i.e., in their respective “spheres”). A rules-based international order rests on the exact opposite premise (however shoddily executed): sovereign equality, where states have the same legal rights regardless of size or proximity to power.

As opposed to post-1945 norms, the doctrine lacks reciprocity. It’s not a rule every state could adopt without contradiction. A system that tolerates carveouts can’t credibly oppose similar claims elsewhere. If the U.S. claims the Americas, there’s no justification for stopping from Russia from claiming Europe and China from claiming East Asia. In fact, this is precisely what the Donroe Doctrine argues should be the case. But once exceptionalism becomes acceptable in one context, it will spread to any others where deemed expedient and worth the effort. Apsirations to accumulate territory and power don’t naturally curb themselves (see: all of recorded history). Remember, we are at a moment in industrial history when the demand for energy sources, raw materials, arable land, and water sources is paramount. If this comes to pass, global cooperation goes out the window; everything is decided by the iron law of power.

Reviving nineteenth-century logic inside a twenty-first-century system—especially one whose successes were predicated on stability—is lunacy. That’s why the “Donroe Doctrine,” however it’s branded, is not just bad for U.S. credibility, it’s bad for the system that made the United States the richest nation in the history of the world. In other words: it’s a catastrophe for the everday realities of everyday Americans.

What Greenland Really Means

An American seizure or invasion of Greenland would be a hinge event, one that definitively shatters the postwar order and pushes the United States into a far more dangerous, unstable, and coercive world. And Americans would feel that shift almost immediately.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a full member of NATO. Any unilateral U.S. seizure—whether framed as a “purchase,” “protectorate,” “security necessity,” or whatever future term the Trump administration tries to use—would amount to an attack on a NATO ally. Not once since 1949 has something like this happened.

NATO’s credibility rests on the assumption that all members will recognize the sovereignty of all others. Once that assumption collapses, Article 5—which holds that an attack against one member will be considered an attack against all, necessitating each member to assist the attacked party—becomes meaningless. Allies would rightfully no longer trust U.S. security guarantees. European states would hedge, rearm independently (which they’re already doing!), and/or cut their own deals with rival powers. The alliance would go poof overnight, and the beginnings of a new world order would be upon us. Again, nobody has benefited more from this world order than Americans.

My colleague Leah Zaidi has produced a scenario that captures the likely emerging realities of a U.S. invasion of Greenland. Please read it in full below (here is a link to the full text if you’d prefer to read it that way):

As you can see, where Americans would feel the impacts of a U.S. attack on Greenland the most is economically. The dollar’s reserve status, low borrowing costs, stable trade flows, and global demand for U.S. assets all depend on one thing above all: trust that the United States is a stabilizing force, not a revisionist one. Once that trust is shattered, there is no reason for former allies not to use economic warfare as self-defense. They will rightly see themselves at war. Remember when the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine? Why would the U.S. be treated any differently? Because of the United States’s outsized role in the world order, that might look different in the particulars, but the broad strokes would be similar.

People seem to keep forgetting that Europe is America’s largest creditor. As wrote in :

Who is the largest investor in America? This is what we call “Foreign Direct Investment” in macroeconomics, or FDI for short. Again, many people think it’s China or Japan, and they’re wrong. Badly wrong, in fact. China’s FDI in the US is just between 5-10%, given shadowy statistics. The EU’s FDI into America? It’s 45%.

So Europe is by far—by a tremendous, colossal margin—America’s largest investor. And that includes everything from stocks to bonds to property to companies and so forth. It represents nearly half of the world’s investment in America.

This is how important “the West” really is, and what it means. That the EU and America have these interlinkages which go so deep that they are genuinely foundational, in the truest sense of the word: Europe is the world’s biggest investor in America, by such a long way that it makes up half of the world’s total investment in America.

This is what is about to come undone.

The cascade will likely be swift and permanent, with long-tail impacts that stretch far, far into the future: higher interest rates, reduced dollar dominance, capital flight, sanctions on and rejections of American products, and long-term disintegration of U.S. economic privilege.

Americans—yes, you!—would feel this all throughout their economic lives: higher mortgage rates, more expensive credit, inflationary pressure, soaring costs, declining purchasing power, declining access to goods, and so much more that we can’t even currently predict. All this while having to spend billions or even trillions of dollars to maintain an active military presence in Greenland—especially if the U.S. wins, at which point the costs shift to sustaining occupation. For context, the Iraq War cost U.S. taxpayers roughly $2.4 trillion. Of course, with the U.S. now a rogue combatant, what’s to stop other nations from bringing the battle to American soil? And all of that doesn’t even include whatever the costs of the ongoing Venezuelan regime change will be, and assuming Trump doesn’t make good on invading the nine(!) other countries he’s threatened so far: Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, and Syria.

Even absent such an attack, it’s reasonable to expect social and political turbulence on our home turf. Americans would live in a country permanently on edge: higher taxes for defense, fewer resources for social investment, more frequent international emergencies, and a political culture defined by fear and oppression rather than confidence and freedom. A U.S. seizure of Greenland would require the Trump administration to conduct sustained propaganda, emergency powers, and suppression of dissent to maintain the facade of legitimacy. You cannot normalize imperial behavior abroad without normalizing coercion at home (see: the Imperial Boomerang, which I wrote about here).

The same logic that justifies violating another democracy’s sovereignty will be turned inward against journalists, protestors, and political opponents. Here we come back to the awful question of ICE: if the public revolts against Trump’s invasion of Greenland, what do you think an insanely well-funded law enforcement arm that can act with impunity won’t do? History tells us that these are dark, dark places.

Listen, I know this is all super depressing, and I won’t pretend to have the answers on where we go from here. All I can say with unflinching certainty is that an invasion of Greenland would be a full-blown catastrophe for Americans—not just as a moral stain, but as an economic and political battering ram to the relative comfort we’ve experienced over the past few generations—and we should be doing whatever is within our power to shut down that possibility.

Stay safe out there.

Amid videos of ICE brutality, news about protests in Iran, and fear that the Trump administration is going to torpedo NATO by invading Greenland (and set off a chain reaction of astounding bad news in the process), I’ve encountered more and more people in my life posting photos of themselves from a decade ago. We’re talking the works: stylized, blown-out Instagram and faux-film VSCO filters, flower crowns, skinny jeans, and other signifiers of (what we now call) Millennial cringe. Captions overflow with a mix of nostalgia and laughter at past selves.

Indeed, two weeks into a bonkers 2026 and the biggest trend on social media is…reversion. Maybe it’s only or primarily Millennials doing this—my perspective is inevitably blinkered given that I am one—but it’s pervasive enough that I’ve been thinking through what this trend tells us, not only about 2016 but about the current moment.

Surface aesthetics are doing what social media does best: compressing the zeitgeist into digestible formats. The throwback is more than just “lol skinny jeans,” it’s a collective attempt to renegotiate what the last decade did to us—and the uncertainty so many of us are feeling as we tentatively look toward the next decade through the cracks in our fingers.

2016 and the ‘Great Weirding’

Perhaps the primary reason 2016 feels so magnetically nostalgized is that it was a watershed political year, embodied foremost in the two prongs of Donald Trump’s election in the U.S. and the Brexit referendum in the U.K. However much the comfortable post-Recession neoliberalism might have cradled the collective consciousness (at least in the Global North) on January 1, 2016 had been definitively obliterated by December 31, 2016. Reviewing the current state of nationalist, authoritarian politics and hate-driven social ideologies, 2016 stands out as a decisive first chapter. Sure, there were precursors—when we smash the rewind button, we scrub past Gamergate (2014), the corporate and big-bank bailouts of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), and the PATRIOT Act (2001), to name just a few of the many early alarms—but 2016 is when the threads twined into something we can call a paradigm.

Though it played out in the political arena, this rupture was epistemic and ontological. Before 2016, many people still assumed that political and cultural change would be incremental, predictable, and legible. After it, the sense that institutions were stable, that shared narratives still mattered—or even existed—had begun its irreversible erosion. History, which had supposedly “ended” in 1989, was rearing its wild head anew.

So when I see friends share decade-old photos or celebrate the aesthetics of a “simpler” Internet, what I feel smuggled in with it is a desperate grasping for a version of the world that held the last glimmers of a legible reality, before macro-scale volatility became a persistent feature of our lives (again, this operates on scales—many had been living under fractured, oppressive realities all throughout these supposed “good” times). In this sense, 2016 becomes less about chokers and more about its role as a macro-cultural hinge, the moment when the structuring logics of the world irrevocably cracked.

I’m certainly not the first to identify this phenomenon. Perhaps the most salient framing I could point you to is ’s notion of the “Great Weirding.” He writes:

For many, the four-year period between 2016 and 2020 has seemed like a relentless parade of decade-sized weeks. I call this period The Great Weirding, a phrase I first used in a 2016 essay reflecting on the significance of the Harambe meme, which emerged in the wake of the unsettling killing of Harambe, the gorilla, at the Cincinnati Zoo in May, 2016. It was an event which, for many of us, turned into the symbolic marker of the advent of the Great Weirding.

and

It is a world that many saw coming, but almost nobody saw coming quite this fast. Starting in 2016, the future I wrote about in 2015, and expected to arrive by perhaps 2030 (see The Future in the Rearview Mirror) arrived so rapidly that it has left much of the world shell-shocked and bewildered. Not only did it arrive more rapidly than any of us expected, it arrived in a form that confirmed many of the worst fears, rather than the best hopes, of 2015. Humanity as a whole appeared to collectively abandon its fragile faith in the mechanisms — liberal democracy, free markets, and a globalized economic order — to which the great global increases in prosperity over the previous thirty years had been provisionally attributed. And as faith in the mechanisms unraveled, so did the widespread consensus that prosperity did, in fact, increase over that period.

For my part, I’ve analyzed these phenomena through the lens of what I call “Postreality,” though I chart the origins of this reality paradigm to the immediate aftermath of WWII. You can read more about my usage here. I’ve also elaborated on how this has impacted the evolution of fascism in my notion of “quantum fascism.”

With all that in mind, these posts exhibit a nostalgia for a time when our expectations felt aligned with practical reality. And because 2016 is also the year that I’d argue the trappings of what we now call “Millennial cringe” peaked, many people have these visible shared reference points to reflect on the moment just before the Great Weirding got going in earnest.

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We Miss “Relationship Feeds”—And What They Stood For

Underneath the eyeliner and memes is a quieter sociotechnical grievance, which has to do with how social media has evolved. We miss the era when platforms felt personal and less predatory. While surveillance capitalism was fully underway by 2016, many of us didn’t quite realize the scope, and moreover, whatever was afoot in 2016 pales in comparison to the algorithmic panopticon we now inhabit.

If you’re liking this article, you might appreciate my recent conversation with , who runs the fantastic publication :

Speaking for myself, I miss how “old” Facebook used to feel, blending aspects of microblogging and forums, with folks you actually knew. You weren’t broadcasting the way you are being forced to today, you were chatting with folks in your virtual neighborhood.

The 2016 trend romanticizes this older relationship to attention. We’re mourning the loss of an internet that felt less curated, commercialized, and saturated with constant ambient global crisis. Ironically, there’s no small amount of retconning going on in this approach to 2016—at the time, many referred to it as the “worst year ever,” but, to quote the meme, it turned out to only be the worst year so far.

Ultimately, 2016 is a potent container for this particular flavor of pre-Weirding nostalgia because it’s close enough to feel intimate and personally retrievable (via your camera roll, feeds, and story archive), but distant enough to benefit from “good ole days” mythologizing. It’s the last year many of us can point to and say, “I had no idea what was coming.” So when I see people post 2016 pictures in 2026, I don’t just see them saying “look how young/goofy/cringe/etc. I was”—I see them saying: “This was the last version of me who didn’t live in the permaweird.”

Here are some recent posts that you might like if you appreciated this one:

Happy New Year, all! And uh, what a start… 🫠

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about lessons learned in 2025 and what I want to both leave behind and bring with me into 2026. 2025 started for me with the Los Angeles Fires, and it’s been all-gas-no-breaks ever since. Lots of great stuff happened in my personal life, but in macro it was a real demon of a year. And given what’s already gone down, it’s evident the demon years are only just getting started. As an iconic band once put it, they “start comin’ and they don’t stop comin.’”

This is an uncomfortable post for me, the type I never imagined I’d write. My parents took great pains to raise me to be civil and polite, to treat everyone with respect. I have them to thank for whatever gifts I have as an interlocutor. I grew up in the South, in one of the reddest counties in Florida. Suffice to say that Christianity and southern hospitality were both major parts of my upbringing. Even as my own belief systems led me away from Christianity, I learned to stay accommodating. I internalized the idea that it was rude to confront the contradictions in Christians’ beliefs and actions.

In confronting them, I essentially faced two outcomes: awkwardness if I didn’t convince them, and—in the off chance that I did somehow succeed in doing so—shattering their worldviews. Neither was particularly appealing. So I learned to tolerate their presumptions with a tight smile, regardless of my internal monologue.

There’s a lot to recommend this way of being, and I continue to believe that we must not default to meanness and nastiness for the fun of it. But we’re in an emergency now. If a recent study is to be believed, we’re on track to reach 3°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2050. I need you to understand this: that’s a death sentence for most living things. If you survive in that context, you’ll be one of the lucky ones.

So I find myself feeling like it’s time to stop letting things slide.

When you act this way with one group of people, it inevitably seeps into how you act with others. Where I experience this most palpably these days is in a desperate cleaving to status quo. Surely the polycrisis is not as bad as all the experts say, right? Humanity is no stranger to prophecies of doom, and none of those have come true! Look around! Life is good—great!—for so many people. It’s the best time in history to be alive!

The problem is, I read a whole lot (not to brag or anything, but I clocked in at 152 books this year, though admittedly a bunch were comics) and I speak to some of the smartest, most rigorous minds on Earth on Urgent Futures. What you learn undertaking a transdisciplinary exercise like this is that the planetary situation is not only bad, it’s bad across categories. It’s not just carbon emissions, authoritarianism, or tech-accelerated automation. Nor is it just the mental health crisis, social alienation, or toxic nationalism. Across the board, the imperative of endless growth—on, it must be repeated, a finite planet—is driving us to the brink of collapse. (Cue Yeats: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre … the centre cannot hold.”)

I’m not a black-pilled doomer and I caution against letting that sentiment take root, as it neither helps you nor anyone else; it’s depressing and useless. I love life in general and mine in specific. It’s a baffling miracle that we get to have this experience at all—a thought that frequently stops me in my tracks. The fact that I’ve become one of the people sounding this alarm is in itself a sign that the situation is dire. I’d much rather spend my time on loftier, philosophical questions about life, the universe, and everything—trying to get a better grasp of who we are, how we got here, and what new realms we might uncover as we learn more about the aforementioned.

Unfortunately, none of that much matters if we rob ourselves of a habitable planet—the only habitable planet we know in the universe. Don’t get me started on the utter folly and preposterous waste about “colonizing” Mars.

Trained as a journalist, my inclination is to let experts do the talking, learn from them, and frame their positions honestly. This disposition finds a cozy home in the interview podcast format. But what that has meant in aggregate is that I remain more of a neutral party in my public presentation, even if my intentional curation does its own work to communicate my positions.

In private, I share my sharper side with my partner, family, and close friends. I’m often upset and incredulous at the ill-formed, poorly researched positions that manage to gain purchase in society—even as I intellectually understand how they all ultimately reflect the simple incentive structures of capitalism. My partner dubs the times I get especially jagged as “Dark Jesse,” and we’ve been talking a lot about letting that particular freak flag fly a bit more in public.

So in 2026, that’s what I’m gonna do. And I want to encourage you to do the same.

Through middle school and into high school, I got deep into punk, hardcore, and metal—which essentially comprised all my listening during those years. To this day they remain key pillars in my music listening. To speak in generalities: metal often goes lofty (which I love!), but what I love most about punk and hardcore is that they strip it all down to the raw.

If I had to distill the energy I want to bring into 2026, it’s encapsulated in this song—particularly the moment that starts at 1:57.

“Where’s your anger? Where’s your fucking rage?”

Our futures are being robbed from us in the name of endless growth. That’s worthy of our anger and our fucking rage. It’s only this way because a handful of dudes believe that ruining the planet is a small price to pay to maintain and increase their power.

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Again, being unnecessarily nasty, levying ad hominem attacks, or aggressively nitpicking your allies because they’re easier targets? That’s no good—and not at all what I’m advocating. If anything, I think part of letting Dark Jesse out of the kennel is making sure that any righteous anger I espouse is done so with crystal clarity of my priorities. Those of us on the left need solidarity now more than ever. If we agree about the big stuff—principally, that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with life on this planet—there’s a lot of other stuff I’m fine for us to “agree to disagree” on. Still, we have a responsibility to challenge the folks “on our side” who have good social politics but promote ideas that progress neoliberal extraction (cough Ezra Klein).

We must forcefully—but still civilly—reject bad ideas in public. I know it might feel futile, but it matters. Neoliberalism is a story invented by some mid-century weirdos with bad ideas that were persuasive among those in power. We can tell better stories, but we have to do it together, and recognize that these stories will unfurl in a shared, divergent universe. They won’t look the same from person to person, community to community. To find each other and connect dots, we need as many signposts as we can possibly muster.

We can demand better from public discourse. It’s a nuanced, complex world; everyone is welcome to have whatever opinions they have. But if you’re going to share them in public, make damn sure you’ve done your homework. Serotonin break for a classic:

And if, in the face of better information, you remain committed to ideas that harm other people, please be ready to be called out for it. I feel enough frustration with the Democratic Party that I’m a registered Independent now, but one delicious moment I remember is when Tim Walz called MAGA dudes “weird,” and it caught on like wildfire. They of course lost their minds, but if anything, weird is the gentlest word we could have used for them and their ideas. Even though I generally view “weird” as a badge of honor, its darker valence in this case was chef’s kiss. Let’s bring it back in 2026.

The other part of embracing your inner punk is knowing you’re going to get it wrong, you might even get some egg on your face. If we find ourselves in this position, it’s critical that we’re willing to revise our positions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve revised my position for exactly this reason. I recently reposted what I deem to be an absolutely critical short-form video explaining why this is a hallmark of intelligence:

We really need this form of argumentation right now. As part of my effort to give my inner punk more airtime, I’m going to start debating people in public, whether at public events in the “real” world, on podcasts, or in comment sections (and privately in DMs). I’ll be launching my own new podcast (tentatively—let me know what you think?) called Open-Book Debates. As you can surmise from the title, these will entail recorded conversations where I and my guest(s) have a debate in which we can research sources, data, et al. while we talk, letting us not only fact-check each other in real time, but ensure that we have our facts exactly right. I think this is an ideal format because—at least speaking for myself—I often have strong, well-formed conclusions but don’t have the exact right stats memorized, and suspect this will be true for my guests too. (To keep things zippy and valuable for audiences, I’ll edit out the time spent researching).

As a starter list, here are some positions I’ll gladly go to the mat for:

• Capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with a finite planet and wellbeing for all but the wealthiest (and it even harms them in important ways). So-called “free market” capitalism is a special kind of death sentence. It is not controversial to claim that there can be no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet.

• Related: capital accumulation is the root of other structural problems. Billionaires should not exist. We need to dismantle the systems that allow billionaires to exist in the first place. Likewise, we need to build antitrust infrastructure to ensure no corporation becomes “too big to fail.” Otherwise our lives will keep enshittifying.

• Inequality is the root of societal collapse (see my conversation with Luke Kemp). Shared decision-making structures are both more effective and more ethical (e.g., democracy > capitalism). This applies to corporations too. Why do we so readily accept monarchies and oligopolies in the workplace when we prefer democracy in our politics?

• We must get money out of politics.

• Climate change is real and uncomplicated. CO₂ (+ other greenhouse gases) traps heat and we are releasing ever more CO₂ into the atmosphere every year. There is no conspiracy by the climate science community. You measure the likelihood of a conspiracy on how much the conspirators stand to gain and how many people have to operate in secrecy in order for the conspiracy to succeed.

• Related: if there is a conspiracy, it’s by fossil fuel companies to flood the zone with distractions, drawing from the tobacco industry’s playbook.

• If someone’s life decisions don’t harm you, shut the fuck up. If you think their decisions do harm you, provide actual evidence and we can talk about it.

• If you say you’re a Christian, be able to defend your political positions and decisions with corresponding Bible verses that are not contradicted elsewhere in the Bible. (This goes for any religion, but Christianity is the ascendant orthodoxy in the United States, where I live, and the religion I grew up under).

• …and plenty more you can probably already infer from this short list.

So if you know anyone who wants to come debate any of those things in good faith, I’m game. Special emphasis here on “in good faith.”

Outside of OBD, you’re also going to start seeing a lot more hard-edged output from me here on Reality Studies and Urgent Futures. As an imperfect person, I’m sure there will be moments I get stuff wrong or don’t ideally comport myself. What I can promise is that I will always be willing to acknowledge when this happens, apologize when I believe I’ve done wrong or gone too far, and update my own understandings when presented with better evidence. If this feels right for you, I hope this post grants you the permission you need to join in the campaign. Because make no mistake—it’s a fight for a livable future.

Elon Musk likes to couch his aspirations to colonize Mars as “[extending] the light of consciousness to the stars.” As mentioned, this is a folly, and one buried in his own hypocrisy. Still, I resonate with the general idea. We’re a messy species, but we’ve managed to evolve traits that seemingly no other species on Earth has been able to. I think it’s worth seeing if we can make it through our species’ destructive adolescence into wizened adulthood. If we destroy the Earth, all of that possibility goes poof. We have a few short decades to make sure that doesn’t happen, and step 0 is galvanizing collective action around new stories of who we are and can be.

Hope your years are off to a great start, in whatever way(s) possible. Stay safe out there.

I first started noodling on this post in February. The official White House X account had just posted a 41-second video titled, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” Remember it? In the interminable dog years of Trump’s muzzle-velocity presidency, it genuinely feels like a lifetime ago.

In the clip, shackled immigrants are escorted onto a plane, the sounds of jet engines humming in the background. The post quickly went viral; ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos are typically considered calming and indefinably pleasurable, and the video paired that experience with the forced removal of human beings, framing the whole thing as frivolous entertainment—though it was anything but.

The cruelty and fear tactics have only intensified in the intervening months. We see it in the disappearing of individuals with no due process, starting with voices calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza (notably Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, along with many others); then the revoking international student visas under similiar auspices; and the brutalization of thousands of both American citizens and immigrants—the latter of whom have been sent to horrific detention centers ranging from Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to Ecuador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT—a megajail which has been called a gulag—unconscionable in its own right but worse so because many of these people were following the prescribed legal pathway to secure American citizenship.

These efforts have been colored by what we might charitably call incompetence, such as the high-profile deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia “because of an administrative error”—but the following attempt to brand him as a criminal and re-deport him tells us that even this “incompetence” is being weaponized as part of an explicit, intentional bid to simply terrorize immigrants.

Though the DOGE frenzy has died down, this “agency” also embodied this spirit: first in its trollish name, then with Elon Musk’s “smash it with a hammer” approach to government “efficiency” (which was anything but efficient, and is now believed to have caused over 600,000 deaths worldwide, including over 400,000 children—and furthermore is projected to cause as many as 14 million deaths through it’s cuts to USAID alone).

Most recently, we see it in the rebranding of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, under whose banner Pete Hegseth and Trump have occupied American cities that they call “enemies,” and branded essentially anyone who disagrees with their policies as terrorists.

All of this is done with a uniting disregard to constitutional law and basic human dignity, often coupled with the cruel “humor” and hand-wavey dismissal of those who call it what it is: abject evil.

It is here that we witness the emerging political philosophy of the United States under MAGA doctrine. The ongoing “will they/won’t they”—which at any given moment doubles as a “can they/can’t they”—creates a form of dysfunction and obfuscation that gets to the heart of our new political reality. It’s the same with Trump’s disastrous tariffs; the goal posts on which tariffs are real, which will stick, and which are up for negotiation have moved so many times it’s not worth cataloguing them all here. We’re left to ask ourselves: How much are Trump and his cronies thinking this stuff through, really?

All of this precarity, it deserves to be said, is being produced by the country that has designated itself the arbiter of the world order for 80 years; it’s unraveling has global impacts at scales that were never before possible. Any of these details in isolation might have historical precedent, but taken together I believe they constitute a distinctly 21st century formation of authoritarianism, which I call quantum fascism.

The Advent of Quantum Fascism

In quantum physics, particles can exist in multiple states at once—a principle known as “superposition”—until an observer measures them. Quantum fascism applies this metaphor to politics. It is a style of authoritarian rule that exists in a superposition of democracy and autocracy—simultaneously upholding democratic facades and violating democratic norms.

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Like the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a government practicing QF can be both “fascist” and “democratic” at the same time, its true nature collapsing into one or the other only when forced into view. This regime type embraces ambiguity, multiplicity and uncertainty as tools of power, rather than strict ideological consistency. And in keeping with the aspect of superposition, a quantum fascist government weaponizes its own madman theory—leaving the populace confused as to whether they are even considering their own actions in any depth.

Remember the penguin tariffs incident, when Trump levied tariffs on Norfolk Island, a small island near Antarctica whose only inhabitants are penguins? Many wondered at the time if Trump had simply used AI to write his tariff policy—alongside the raft of Executive Orders he dashed off upon entering office in January.

It seems likely he did, but who knows?

In their excellent 2022 book Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman argue that rather than the strongmen of yore, the so-called “fear” dictators, the 21st-century breed of dictator—embodied by Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Viktor Orbán—seeks to control the information ecosystem. In other words, they fake democracy while enacting autocracy—leaving aside all the time, resource, and labor-intensive aspects of dominating through old-fashioned force.

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Quantum fascism extends from this idea—emphasizing the ambiguity of madman theory and outright incompetence, expanding the scope beyond political leaders, embracing digital media ecosystems, and riding a wave of ascendant tech accelerationism. It’s not a formal ideology you’ll find in manifestos; in a sense that would defeat the purpose. It’s politics by vibe, an emergent mode of governing that is perpetually manipulated and refined in real time. If classical fascism was the physics of solid objects (heavy, forceful, blunt in its oppression), QF is politics in the quantum realm: weird, shape-shifting, and hard to measure, and all the more dangerous as a result.

Superposition of Contradictions

A hallmark of classical fascism was a rigid, bombastic ideology (ultranationalism, cult of personality, the Führer’s word as truth). Quantum fascism instead weaponizes inconsistency. The easiest example to pull from here is the January 6 insurrection; an attempted mob coup in the name of U.S. patriotism (including some now infamous images involving confederate flags, bandied about without a single iota of irony). Quantum fascists endorse completely contradictory narratives as needed, and switch between them with little to no consequence. In fact, this confusion is the point; the public should never feel sure about what is “real.”

This is an evolution of what Hannah Arendt observed in mid-20th century totalitarians: that their ideal subject was not the fervent believer but “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and true and false…no longer exist.” Under QF, citizens are bombarded with so many conflicting claims that objective reality fades into a blur. They come to “believe everything and nothing,” Arendt wrote, accepting even obvious lies because “everything was possible and nothing was true.” Quantum fascism has the benefit of social media, the notion of the vibe, and now the advent of powerful generative AI media, which further disorient and blur boundaries (more on that a bit later).

Observer-Dependent Reality

In quantum theory, the act of observation is believed to influences outcomes. Similarly, QF regimes often behave one way under scrutiny and another in the shadows. Publicly, they hold elections and court legitimacy; privately, they may suppress opposition or manipulate results. Rather than formally announce himself dictator, for example, Vladimir Putin simply “wins” elections by landslides every time (he won the 2024 election by an astonishing 88.5%).

When challenged by journalists, courts, or others, officials can abruptly pivot—denying they ever endorsed the previous stance, accusing the observer of bias, or brushing it off as a joke, “locker-room talk,” or bluster. Spokespeople thereby treat press conferences not as a chance to promote clarity about policy positions but as a chance to troll and create soundbites and clips that play to in-groups—which are conveniently assembled and spun by friendly media outlets.

Taken all together, this creates a state of constant flux in which the regime’s actions can’t be pinned down long enough for accountability. This, in turn, fosters hypernormalization, the phenomenon in which people in a given authoritarian society accept a distorted or fake reality as normal because no one sees an alternative, even though they know it’s not real, and this creates a vicious cycle in which any dissent from this obviously untrue narrative is chilled, and more people come to accept the fiction as fact. The term was original coined by Alexei Yurchak, and further popularized by Adam Curtis’s 2016 eponymous documentary:

To Recap

A definition of quantum fascism includes two related ideas:

1) Quantum fascism describes the phenomenon when fascism and democracy exist in a state of superposition.

2) Quantum fascism describes an emerging political and cultural condition characterized by power structures that operate through deliberate ambiguity, radical uncertainty, and the exploitation of indeterminacy, conceptually mirroring quantum theory’s notions of superposition, entanglement, and observer dependence.

QF is a framework through which we can critically examine the contemporary evolution of authoritarianism in the digital and information age, highlighting how political authority increasingly thrives not on fixed certainties, but rather on pervasive instability, contradiction, and confusion. Quantum fascism suggests political power that strategically maintains a similar state of suspension—where truth, reality, and certainty are intentionally blurred, only solidifying momentarily and contextually when politically convenient.

Late Fascism, Meet the Internet

Ideas like Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception; Jean Baudrillard’s hyperreality and simulacra; Guy Debord’s spectacle; Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary power” and panoptic surveillance, and ’s “ideological cynicism,” among others, are all within the conceptual DNA of quantum fascism. I’ll do a later post diving into all of these, but what I specifically want to address here is how quantum fascism builds on what political theorist Alberto Toscano calls “late fascism,” a 21st-century adaptation of the 20th-century construction.

In late fascism, Toscano argues, fascism is stripped of its old-timey costumes and synchronized marches, finding new expressive modes to thrive within global capitalism and mass media—but nevertheless continues to manifest as a toxic convergence of racism, nationalism, corporatism, and state power. Unlike mid-20th-century fascists, today’s authoritarian leaders often operate through legal loopholes, memes, and manipulated elections rather than outright coups. They are, in Toscano’s estimation, symptoms of the obsolescence of the old political order, blurring traditional lines of left and right, public and private​.

I really encourage you to read Late Fascism in full, as it’s been incredibly illuminating in my own intellectual journey. Where QF extends this line thought is how new technologies enforce these quantum-like qualities of ambiguity and multiplicity at scale.

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Classical fascists controlled the narrative by censoring or eliminating opposing voices—burning books, jailing dissidents, cutting off the radio. Quantum fascists don’t shut down the internet or TV; they flood the zone to distort it. They use algorithmic targeting to send tailored messages to different groups, so citizens no longer even consume the same reality. A single political figure can appear as a moderate centrist in one Facebook ad and a fire-breathing nationalist in another, with different voters each receiving the version that will sway them.

For a sense of how the information ecosystem has evolved in the digital age, check out my conversation with on Urgent Futures:

Micro-targeted advertising and social media echo chambers enable a kind of political superposition: multiple personas and policy positions can exist for the same candidate. In election campaigns, this tactic has been weaponized. During the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections, for example, disinformation teams (some foreign, some domestic) flooded social platforms with millions of ads and posts catering to niche audiences—sometimes spreading completely contradictory messages. Voters effectively lived in parallel universes of information.

Deepfakes and other forms of AI-generated media expand this scope of disinformation potential, not only allowing rapidly distributed content to ride algorithmic rails, but also creating a space where any given photo, audio, or video file—even those that were genuinely captured by a person in physical space—can be dismissed as fake, produced in service of a “witch hunt.”

and I went deep on this in a recent episode of Urgent Futures:

A quantum fascist leader need not reconcile these universes; he (and quantum fascists are indeed overwhelmingly men) inhabits all of them at once—benefitting wherever possible and dismissing any accusations of contradiction. The point is the vibe, not the researched argument—and the result is epistemological vertigo for the public. As we know from history, that vertigo makes for fertile ground for authoritarians.

These information operations—deliberately engineered with quantum ambiguity—ensure the populace cannot collectively agree on basic facts, shared realities, or coherent narratives. Power structures thus create and maintain political “superpositions”—simultaneous, contradictory realities—collapsing into stable forms only momentarily and strategically when politically advantageous.

Learn about the current state of the information warfare in the U.S. from this Urgent Futures conversation with :

In so doing, quantum fascists foster widespread epistemological fatigue and resignation. People begin to experience reality itself as radically unstable, perpetually indeterminate, and beyond grasp. Unable to anchor themselves in stable truths, individuals become ever more atomized, cynical, and vulnerable to charismatic authoritarian figures who promise simplicity amid complexity, certainty amidst ambiguity.

Collapsing Quantum Fascism

Traditional Enlightenment values—objective truth, transparent information, coherent rational discourse—prove inadequate in a technologically mediated quantum fascist context (to say nothing of the ways these ideas have been applied for oppressive ends). Quantum fascism doesn’t require total control through a unified narrative, but total uncertainty through an infinity of plausible ones. Familiar instruments of fact-checking, outrage, and moral persuasion remain important, but ultimately won’t rescue us to a more liberatory system of governance.

Bullshit noise can be created far faster (and thus spread far wider) than true signal. Collective consensus and epistemological resilience are degraded, reducing the possibilities of shared meaning-making. The crisis is not simply that people are being lied to; it is that the very conditions under which truth might matter are being actively dismantled.

I won’t sugarcoat this: effectively counteracting quantum fascism will be neither simple nor easy, and it’s unclear we will be able to do so in any near-term scenario. Furthermore, it would be impossible to prescribe all the interventions that will be necessary here. Instead, I want to briefly sketch what I believe our broad-level strategy should be.

Our strategic aim shouldn’t be to restore some mythical age of certainty, but rather to reclaim the capacity to collectively see and name what is before us, even amid contradiction, and build adjacent systems that hold more appeal than strongmen.

The antidote to quantum fascism isn’t nostalgia, but the collective construction of new networks of trust, accountability, and meaning-making that form “small islands of coherence.” If we want to get back to functional government—whatever that might mean—we will have to transmute the very indeterminacy used as a weapon of control into a space for undertaking critical imagination, pluralism, and care.

Inevitably, fighting any kind of fascism starts with your own mental and emotional health amid turmoil— has some critical information to share on how we do that, individually and collectively:

To say it plainly: our goal isn’t so much to counteract QF (though, sure, that too!) but rather to build out infrastructures that make their own arguments for solidarity—spaces where collective action yields tangible benefit for those involved, and thus becomes appealing to a broader base of people. Only then can the proverbial waveform of our present politics collapse into something beneficial and life-giving.

Here are some other episodes of the Urgent Futures Podcast that enrich the above:

Oof, last week was a doozy. I’m testing out a new format for paid subscribers where I recap the notable political news stories from the past week, and then offer a flash take through a polycritical foresight lens, looking at each in isolation and then synthesizing them collectively.

Do me a favor: let me know if you like this format as either a comment or response to this email. And if you do appreciate it, share it with a friend who might as well!

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On a semi-related note: I’m excited to host a Live on Wednesday, 10/8, at 12pm EDT/9am PDT with : “How to Tell Strategic Stories that Clarify Climate Crisis.” RSVP here.

With all that said, off we go.

Stories to Watch

U.S. Government Shutdown & Mass Layoff Threats

Last week marked the beginning of a new federal shutdown as Congress failed to pass budget legislation before the deadline (which, to editorialize for a moment: good. the Democratic party needs to do everything it can to obstruct the Trump administration’s unlawful, authoritarian squeeze—at minimum forcing them to compromise, and ideally halting their actions altogether).

The administration weaponized the standoff by threatening “irreversible” layoffs and altering federal employees’ out-of-office messages to blame Democrats (despite Republicans controlling the executive, judicial, and legislative branches), sending legal and ethical alarms ablare. Essential services continued, but hundreds of thousands of federal workers faced furloughs and uncertainty, deepening public frustration and political brinksmanship.

Flash Take: This shutdown isn’t just a fiscal crisis; it’s a stress test for the administrative state under conditions of executive brinkmanship. By weaponizing the shutdown as a tool for structural downsizing and narrative control, the Trump administration is signaling a shift from temporary budget impasses to governance through disruption. Polycritically, this event shows us how fiscal tools can be deployed as instruments of political consolidation, weakening institutional trust and amplifying downstream shocks across governance, markets, and public services.

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On Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University. If you’ve been online in the past couple days, you’ve probably had a hard time missing this. I shared some initial thoughts in the immediate aftermath, particularly with regard to how this event will be leveraged by the Trump administration, Right-wing media, and the MAGA movement to intensify ongoing efforts to centralize control of the U.S. military and law enforcement apparatus, and inflame political division among the American populace.

This article is meant to ground some of those speculations in more rigorous polycritical foresight analysis, the methodology I’ve developed that blends foresight, threat modeling, and systems thinking in order to develop robust, practical strategies around emergent futures.

Note: with this document, I do not intend any outright predictions, though I have limited the scope to scenarios that feel most likely to me (in all my potential bias!) for the sake of brevity. My goal is to sketch possibilities so that we can sensemake what’s happening and better prepare ourselves for volatile and even dangerous possible futures.

With that, let’s get to it.

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Earlier this afternoon, Charlie Kirk was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. I was immediately filled with dread, and felt compelled to write this post.

Right at the outset I want to state plainly that, whatever you think about Charlie Kirk, I hope you think carefully about what you post and write on digital platforms (public and private). I don’t say that from a place of judgement but concern about collective safety (I elaborate on this below).

Immediately after the shooting, videos started circulating on social media showing Kirk being struck in the neck while addressing a crowd under a tent in Utah Valley University’s courtyard. He was there for “The American Comeback Tour,” organized by the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA (TPUSA)—the organization Kirk founded. Other clips show students fleeing across campus after hearing the gunfire. (I’m not linking to them here because they are upsetting to watch, but if you feel so inclined, they’re all over the Internet). He has since been pronounced dead.

Who was Charlie Kirk?

Charlie Kirk has emerged as one of the most influential figures within the MAGA movement, largely through his leadership of TPUSA, the youth-focused conservative organization he founded in 2012. Kirk has become a crucial bridge between Trump’s populist message and the next generation of conservative activists. His ability to mobilize young people on college campuses, perceived as liberal spaces, has been particularly important for expanding the MAGA coalition beyond its initial base. On many occasions, clips of him verbally sparring with attendees have gone viral.

Kirk’s media presence—through his daily podcast, frequent appearances on conservative television, and active social media accounts—has allowed him to amplify Trump’s messaging, defend the movement against critics, and push its priorities in real time. Unlike many traditional conservative leaders, Kirk embraces the combative, anti-establishment tone that defines the MAGA ethos, presenting himself not just as a political strategist but as a cultural warrior in the ongoing battles over speech, education, and national identity.

My perspective, which admittedly may be blinkered, is that he’s received the most attention (and vitriol) among liberal and leftist circles through his positions opposing trans rights, abortion, and gun control, and in fact he was responding to a question about transgender mass shooters when he was shot, which may be a coincidence or a strategy timed for effect by the shooter.

To state it plainly: I am vehemently pro-trans rights, pro-women’s rights, and pro-gun control, among other leftist positions; there is likely very little that Charlie Kirk and I agreed on, and I can remember dozens of examples of Kirk saying things that fly in the face of not only my political positions, but of my morals and sense of basic human decency. In what follows I’m not meaning to tell how you should feel about this shooting or arguing that you should believe something different than you do; I’m trying to draw attention to the possible impacts of what you say using digital devices—even on apps you think of as private—as well as use my foresight hat to speculate on the broader authoritarian trends this might accelerate.

Analysis: Watch Out for Powder Keg Dynamics (“Gradually and Then Suddenly”)

Note: I elaborate what the next 12 months might hold for Americans using my polycritical foresight methodology in a more recent post:

America has been determinedly marching toward martial law, with the Trump administration increasing its direct control over both federal and state law enforcement and ramping up surveillance capacities under the auspices of immigration enforcement (I’m including a timeline at the bottom of the piece for deeper context). After today, I have a hard time imagining how all of that doesn’t intensify—and that the associated Supreme Court cases won’t be impacted by it.

I’m not going to say it’s a JFK or Archduke Franz Ferdinand assasination-level moment—it’s not—but where there are at least echoes of those events is that it has occurred in a powder keg, in which so many critical decisions about the future of American policing, military activity, and surveillance are being made in real time. I suspect Kirk’s shooting will increase sympathies and diminish the efficacy of democratic resistance to activities like the occupation of cities, increased digital surveillance, and ICE raids—and in fact I feel pretty confident we’re going to see an increase in all three in the days, weeks, and months to come because of it.

It doesn’t end there. American civilians are armed. We know this. A 2024 study concluded that recent gun purchasers may be “arming up for anticipated civil conflict. Our findings strongly suggest that large numbers of armed individuals who are at least potentially willing to engage in political violence are in public places across the US every day.” Of course, the shooting on Kirk is testament to this conclusion—as are the June 2025 shootings of state representatives Melissa Hortman, John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette Hoffman—and I’m worried that reprisals are on the way, likely in major U.S. cities deemed to be “enemy” blue dots. I know this sounds paranoid, but if you live in such a city, or are going to be spending time in one, I hope you’ll keep your situational awareness up.

What stands out to me about this particular assassination is all the available footage; there is already a video where you can see Kirk killed close-up, and I imagine more will surface in the coming hours. Never in modern American history has there been a killing of a public figure that was this palpably online—and the fact that it was of an extremely online public figure will only amplify the virality of these videos. Only time will tell what the impact of that will be on the American psyche, but I feel I can say with some confidence that it will traumatize some and catalyze violence among others.

On a related point, it’s my view that most Americans don’t appreciate how deeply surveillant their daily Internet experience has become. Google, Amazon, and Meta (just to name a few) are all known to cooperate and collaborate with the military and law enforcement—a trend that is increasing. This degree of surveillance is historically unprecedented, and it’s one of the primary tools by which the Trump administration can and likely will exert force over the American public.

There’s not much the average person can do in the face of the above other than be filled with dread, but what you can do is the bare minimum to deeply consider your activity online right now (and God forbid, in any future instances like this). It’s worth taking a beat to think through what actually needs to be said—whether online or in messaging apps. In this case, I question the value of talking about the shooting, Kirk, and his positions—and it is crystal clear to me what the risk is. If you do feel compelled to post, read whatever you write through the lens of either an angry civilian (if regarding a public comment) or a machine learning algorithm (if regarding a private text message)—if you were to read this, would you interpret it as glorifying the shooting? Would a large language model? Ideally you don’t want a scenario where there is any imaginable angle where the answer to those questions could be construed as “yes.”

The Trump Administration’s Tightening Control of the Military and Law Enforcement

As you’ve no doubt witnessed if you’ve paid any attention to the news over the past six months, one of the arenas Trump has exerted rapid, sustained influence is over the forces of domination in America: the military and law enforcement. This extends both his actions and rhetoric from 2016-20. Martial law and a surveillance state have never been far from Trump’s mind, and as mentioned above, my concern is that Kirk’s shooting will only intensify these desires.

Here’s a quick timeline of the key actions Trump has taken since assuming office in January—alongside related activities by government contractors and Supreme Court decisions connected to these and related efforts.

• Border/immigration posture with criminal-enforcement framing (Jan. 20): From Day 1 he declared a national emergency at the southern border, directing DOJ/DHS to consider additional steps up to (and reporting on) whether the Insurrection Act should be invoked.

• On February 27, the Guardian reported that private ICE contractor Geo Group expanded its electronic monitoring operations. As of early 2025, it tracked ~186,000 immigrants using devices like ankle monitors, smartwatches, and facial recognition apps. The company expected to scale up to 370,000–450,000 monitored individuals within a year.

• On March 27, the administration directed U.S. intelligence agencies—the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)—to use spy satellites to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. This marks a significant expansion of real-time, space-based surveillance integrated into border enforcement efforts. Simultaneously, active-duty troops equipped with night-vision gear, armored Stryker vehicles, and foot patrols were deployed to the border—representing an unusual militarization of domestic surveillance on American soil.

• Trump signed a policing executive order (April 28): “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” It prioritizes aggressive policing, expands federal support and protection for officers, and pushes resources to state & local agencies.

• Scaled back federal police-oversight work (May 21): DOJ announced it was dismissing Biden-era pattern-or-practice investigations and proposed consent decrees (e.g., Minneapolis, Louisville), reducing federal leverage over local departments. Independent reporting the same week described broader pullbacks across several agencies.

• In June, Trump directed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to increase migrant deportations, leading to raids in cities all over the United States, with a special emphasis on Los Angeles. The same month, ICE issued a memo requiring GPS ankle monitors be placed on most of the ~183,000 participants in its Alternatives to Detention program (up from just 24,000 earlier), with pregnant women receiving wrist monitors. Critics condemned the move as treating homes like “digital cages.”

• In Trump v. CASA, Inc. (June 27), the Supreme Court granted partial stays and said universal injunctions likely exceed courts’ equitable powers—narrowing the ability of challengers to halt Trump orders nationwide while cases proceed. This makes it easier for the administration to keep implementing contested policies (including on policing/immigration) outside the plaintiffs.

• Declared a crime emergency in Washington, D.C. (Aug. 11). The administration then pursued a standing domestic “quick reaction force” of Guard units for rapid city deployments during unrest (Aug. 12), according to internal Pentagon planning documents reported by major outlets, and pressed for its continuation; a House joint resolution to extend the emergency was introduced. Trump then invoked Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act to transfer control of the Metropolitan Police Department to the federal government—deploying FBI, DEA, ATF, ICE, and other agents, along with up to 800 National Guard troops (Title 32 status)—to patrol Washington, D.C., purportedly to support federal and local law enforcement as part of a “Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” This unprecedented federalization of local law enforcement in a major U.S. city raised alarms about surveillance overreach and militarization of policing—especially given that crime in D.C. was at a 30-year low at the time. On Aug. 25, the administration ordered additional measures centralizing federal direction during the “emergency.”

• On Sept. 7, Trump announced that the Department of Defense would be renamed the Department of War, later posting “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” to Truth Social, alongside an AI-generated poster with the title “Chipocalypse Now,” referencing the Vietnam-War film Apocalypse Now.

What’s Heading Toward the Supreme Court

• D.C. & city deployments/domestic use of troops: After adverse lower-court rulings and ongoing deployments (D.C., L.A.), multiple disputes over using Guard/active-duty forces for law-enforcement roles are expected to climb toward the Court. A recent piece in TIME notes the Court may have to decide how far a president can go in sending troops into U.S. cities.

• Immigration enforcement & emergency powers: Several cases challenge the administration’s reliance on emergency or wartime-style authorities for immigration and removals; outcomes could indirectly shape how DOJ and DHS partner with local police.

I don’t really know how to end this admittedly raw analysis other than to say that I’m worried about what comes next, and that I’ll be thinking it through in more depth, adding to this piece, and offering further analysis if it feels appropriate.

Stay safe out there.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Shortly thereafter, he posted to Truth Social threatening the city of Chicago, writing, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” and “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” including an AI-generated graphic riffing on Apocalypse Now. Perhaps the most ironic aspect (which is really saying something) of Trump’s post is that reference—itself a film depicting among other things the futility, absurdity, and interminability of the Vietnam War.

Declaring war on a city in the nation you lead ought to be a red line. This feels so blindingly obvious I don’t know what else to write, so I’ll leave it at that.

For as long as most of us have been alive, the United States has preferred to call its central military bureaucracy the Department of Defense. It’s a bit of linguistic sleight of hand, suggesting a reactive posture: protection, shelter, safety. But before 1949, the Pentagon was officially home to the Department of War. In the post-WWII context, this renaming was meant to emphasize national security rather than overt war-making in the nuclear age. What that older name lacked in finesse it made up for in raw honesty: American power has never been purely (or even mostly) defensive. It has always been outward-facing, shaping distant conflicts and securing global conditions favorable to its dominance. And what is enacted abroad—tactically, technologically, and ideologically—rarely remains abroad. It returns home, altered but recognizable, in what Aimé Césaire once described as the “boomerang effect” of empire, also referred to as the “imperial boomerang.”

In Discourse on Colonialism (1950), Césaire argued that the violence Europe unleashed in its colonies would inevitably reverberate back into Europe itself, reshaping its institutions and corroding its civic life. The colony served as a laboratory where new modes of domination were tested on racialized populations. Once normalized, these techniques migrated back to the metropole. Although the United States is not the direct aggressor in Ukraine and Gaza—casting these as somewhat slanted examples—we can discern similar patterns in the United States today. In these two profoundly different contexts—linked by their function as sites of experimentation—we find examples of how the imperial boomerang will look when it whips back to American soil.

Ukraine and Gaza

Ukraine has become a crucible of modern warfare, where U.S. and NATO investment in advanced surveillance, satellite-guided logistics, and proxy war is stress-tested at scale. Gaza, by contrast, demonstrates the logic of siege: the regulation of food, water, medicine, and movement as weapons of war, alongside the use of biometric data and AI-assisted targeting. Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics”—the sovereign right to dictate who may live and who must die—resonates acutely in this context.

I want to add a quick caveat here: what is happening in both Gaza and Ukraine is horrific. Especially devastating are the harms being committed against civilians, a reality true in both places but especially so in Gaza, where tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of civilians, including children, are being subjected to unconscionable trauma, ranging from outright killing to maiming and starvation. I want to be clear: I do not intend to say they only matter because of what they can teach Americans. What is happening in both places is appalling and unacceptable; both are an affront to human decency. We should care about them—and speak out against them—in their own rights. To acknowledge the lessons they hold for Americans is not to minimize their atrocities, but to increase awareness among American civilian populations about these realities so that they can prepare for what’s coming here.

In fact, this has already been happening; the United States has both been indirectly participating in these campaigns and learning from what is occurring in them. Surveillance systems trialed in Palestine and Gaza are marketed to American police departments. Border technologies refined in counterinsurgency campaigns are deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The militarization of urban policing, which first became evident at the national scale in the Ferguson and Standing Rock protests, is not an aberration but the homeward arc of imperial technique. Frantz Fanon once remarked that colonialism dehumanizes not only the colonized but also the colonizer’s own society. The boomerang slices both ways.

This return rarely arrives as a cataclysmic rupture. More often, it seeps in gradually: budget reallocations funnel billions toward militarized policing while schools and public health are starved. Language shifts, with democratic dissent recast as domestic extremism. Technologies once used abroad—drones, biometric databases, predictive policing software—become routine at home. The line between counterinsurgency overseas and the management of populations domestically has thinned almost to disappearance.

Depending on where you live, this might already sound familiar.

Ukraine and Gaza must not be collapsed into a single story, but from the vantage point of Trump’s Department of War they serve as parallel laboratories, each refining methods of control destined for eventual domestic use. In addition to the aforementioned theorists, Hannah Arendt also warned that imperial logics abroad corrode republican institutions at home after witnessing the atrocities committed in WWII. With Trump’s threats against Chicago—following the military occupation of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—we witness manifestations of the boomerang’s return.

Potential Threat Vectors

If Ukraine and Gaza serve as testing sites for twenty-first century warfare, then U.S. cities deemed opponent “blue cities” by the Trump administration are increasingly positioned to become the proving ground for their domestic application. The executive renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War is more than symbolic. It billboards the ongoing shift toward treating internal dissent, poverty, and urban disorder not as social problems to be addressed but as enemies to be vanquished through force.

Trump has already shown a proclivity for way of thinking about his perceived domestic enemies. In his 2022 memoir A Sacred Oath, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper claims that during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Trump asked, “Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” This sentiment reverberates in a recent claim by an Border Patrol agent that they were going to “end up shooting some of them”—them meaning folks suspected of having immigrated illegally to the United States.

Here are some of the “lessons” the Trump administration has no doubt picked up, and the techniques they might deploy, in these environments.

From Ukraine: the Digitization of the Battlefield

Ukraine has demonstrated the centrality of surveillance, networked logistics, and drone warfare to contemporary conflict. Commercial satellite imagery, battlefield apps, and real-time intelligence sharing have collapsed the distance between soldier, strategist, and technologist. When transposed onto an American city, these tools suggest the emergence of “total visibility” policing.

Imagine an urban grid where drones hover as persistent eyes in the sky, their feeds integrated with police dashboards that fuse cell phone metadata, license plate readers, and predictive algorithms. Protest marches are mapped in real time; “anomalous” movements flagged for intervention. Instead of treating neighborhoods as civic spaces, they are managed as battlegrounds, with residents reduced to nodes in a security diagram. Chicago under a Department of War could easily become a beta test for this kind of saturation surveillance.

From Gaza: the Inhumane Logic of Siege

The Gaza Strip has long been a site where restriction of movement, resources, and basic survival needs has been weaponized by Israel as a form of control. Food trucks are delayed or denied entry. Fuel and medicine are rationed according to political calculations. Biometric databases categorize populations into tiers of risk.

If these tactics migrate home, American cities could be subjected to “conditional access” regimes in moments of crisis. Already, during protests, authorities have shut down transit lines, declared curfews, or cut cell service. Escalated under a War Department, these techniques could evolve into systematic siege: neighborhoods cordoned off with checkpoints; water or electricity temporarily withheld to “restore order”; residents forced into biometric registration systems to prove loyalty or compliance. Siege does not need to look like rubble and famine to function—it can appear as rolling blackouts, blocked highways, and digitally enforced curfews.

Necropolitics Within U.S. Borders, Normalization of the “Enemy Within,” and Corrosion of Democracy

Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics resonates when applied domestically. In Gaza, this often takes the form of targeted killings and deliberate deprivation. In Ukraine, it manifests through artillery barrages that flatten cities deemed strategically expendable. In the U.S., necropolitics may manifest less through spectacle and more through selective abandonment: which neighborhoods get militarized protection and which are left to deteriorate; which populations are targeted for raids, deportations, or lethal police encounters; whose children breathe clean air and whose are consigned to toxic waste sites. The militarization of governance allows the state to formalize these life-and-death hierarchies under the guise of national security.

Perhaps the most dangerous import from these conflicts is not technological but discursive. In both Ukraine and Gaza, war is sustained through narratives that dehumanize the other side—“terrorists,” “orcs,” “human shields.” Once such language migrates inward, dissenters in Chicago or Los Angeles become “domestic extremists,” immigrants become “invaders,” and unhoused populations become “biothreats.” In fact, this rhetoric is already on display. Multiple of Trump’s executive orders already use the term “invasion” as justification for increasing crackdowns and detaining and deporting migrants.

The line between citizen and enemy thus blurs in the media narrative, granting the War Department rhetorical license to deploy extraordinary measures. What begins with militarized police presence can slide into outright military occupation, justified by the claim that the homeland itself has become a warzone.

The most immediate image of war coming home is a soldier on a U.S. street corner—a sight most recently seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and, if we take him at his word, soon Chicago. But the deeper danger is structural: a society reorganized around permanent war logic. Budget priorities shift toward armament rather than welfare (see: ICE’s new $45B budget while healthcare is left to crumble); urban planning takes its cues from counterinsurgency rather than civic life; legal norms erode as emergency powers harden into routine governance. Arendt’s warning about imperial logics corroding republican institutions feels prescient here. What is coming may not be a sudden imposition of martial law but a gradual hollowing out of democratic life until war becomes the ambient condition of everyday governance.

Ukraine and Gaza show us two faces of empire’s laboratory: one defined by hyper-modern digital warfare, the other by the ancient weapon of siege. Together, they sketch the contours of possible futures for American cities under the Department of War.

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What Can We Do About It?

Naming the danger is only a first step. The harder task is imagining and enacting forms of resistance robust enough to meet and mitigate it. If the Department of War is preparing to treat American cities as battlefields, then the question becomes: how do we prevent our neighborhoods from being militarized into submission? There are not easy answers to this question, but there are tactics and overarching strategies we must consider now.

First, we must refuse the discursive frame that recasts dissent as terrorism and communities as enemies. Language matters. The more the public accepts metaphors of “war” on crime, drugs, or immigrants, the easier it becomes to accept actual war footing against fellow residents. Counter-narratives—art, journalism, organizing, even basic conversations with relatives who may not have the media exposure that you do—are essential in preserving the civic language of solidarity rather than the martial language of annihilation.

Transparency campaigns can also expose the tools of militarization before they become normalized. Police contracts with surveillance firms, federal grants for “counterterrorism” equipment, budgetary reallocations toward militarized units—all can be documented and challenged, even at the municipal level. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant; we must drag the quiet implementation of imperial techniques into the light.

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Third, local coalitions must link struggles that are often siloed: anti-surveillance advocates, immigrant rights groups, environmental justice organizers, abolitionist movements. All are confronting different faces of the same war-making state. Cross-pollination of strategies—legal defense, mutual aid, digital security, direct action—will be critical in building a broad-based front. This is a key aspect of what I call polycritical foresight, a threatcasting methodology that foregrounds systems thinking.

Cities and states can serve as counterweights to federal overreach. Sanctuary policies, municipal ordinances limiting police access to military equipment, and state-level refusals to cooperate with federal overreach are not silver bullets, but they create friction against the totalizing reach of the Department of War’s logic.

We see hints of this resistance in efforts like California’s “sanctuary state” laws, which restrict state and local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration raids; in New York City’s ban on predictive policing tools like “gang databases” that disproportionately target Black and brown youth; and in the dozens of municipalities that have passed ordinances refusing military surplus equipment from the Pentagon’s 1033 program. We also see it in states such as Oregon and Illinois, which have limited or outright banned facial recognition technologies in policing, and in local campaigns from Seattle to Minneapolis that have demanded budget cuts to police departments and reinvestment in housing, health, and education. And hopping topics, we also see it in multi-state collaborative efforts like the West Coast Health Alliance.

Finally, we must cultivate practices of care that make communities resilient in the face of siege: neighborhood food distribution networks, medical mutual aid, decentralized communication systems. If Gaza teaches us the cruelty of siege, it also teaches us the power of survival strategies under impossible conditions. Building them now—before the crisis escalates—is itself a form of resistance. This is why I have argued (and will continue to!) that the left needs to appropriate the notion of prepping, wresting it away from survivalist lonerism and broadening it to emphasize community resilience and preparedness.

Empire’s boomerang is real, but it is imperative that we refuse the notion that it is inevitable. What happens next will depend on whether people in American cities accept the logic of permanent war—or do everything they can to refuse it.

At the White House last night, the country’s most powerful tech executives lined up for photos, pledges, and praise. Oh, the praise. (Elon Musk, it should be be noted, was conspicuously absent.) The optics were unmistakable: elite industry blessing a strongman project. Check out the video below if this is the first time you’re hearing about this:

In the history of authoritarianism, events like this aren’t sideshows—they’re more like Act I. The performance signals a bargain—especially in the case of President Trump, who has predicated his brand on such “deals”—regulatory indulgence and public money in exchange for loyalty, legitimacy, and technical muscle.

It rarely ends at dinner. Authoritarianism thrives on these public gestures of deference because they make support look safe. Markets see stability, media sees inevitability, and middle managers see where their loyalties ought to lie. What appears to be dinner theater is in fact the opening of a channel through which subsidies and contracts will flow, accompanied by steadily escalating demands for ideological alignment.

Historical Precedents for Trump’s Tech White House Dinner

There’s history to this gesture. On February 20, 1933, Adolf Hitler met with Germany’s leading industrialists at Hermann Göring’s residence for the so-called “Secret Meeting of 20 February 1933.” In it, funds were raised to secure the election that would pave the way for the Enabling Act, the law that gave Hitler dictatorial powers. German industry understood the bargain: favorable conditions and protection from labor unrest in exchange for money and compliance. Within months, strikes were banned, unions dismantled, and businesses folded into a war economy.

Benito Mussolini made similar overtures with his Carta del Lavoro (Charter of Labor) in 1927, declaring a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. It sounded like harmony—labor and industry working together for the nation—but in practice it (too) abolished strikes and made independent unions illegal. Soon after, Italy’s government created the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), a holding company that bound banks and industries into a corporatist state structure. Subsidies flowed, but the price was alignment. Business leaders didn’t have to wear party uniforms, but they were expected to act as if they had.

The dinner last night is obviously different in scale and stakes, but the structure certainly shares a whiff, and these echoes matter because they help us see where this kind of political theater tends to go. In Spain, Franco’s regime perfected the “vertical syndicate” through the Syndicalist Organization, a corporatist arrangement where workers and employers were bound into state-controlled bodies that left no room for dissent. In Germany, industrialists like Krupp became indispensable to the regime’s war machine, profiting from forced labor while aligning their fortunes with Hitler’s survival.

The common thread is that what begins as a flattering dinner progresses into capture, often swiftly. It starts with normalization: powerful people smiling alongside a leader whose politics many once considered toxic (perhaps most famously including Zuckerberg). It’s about reassurance: if the most prestigious firms are willing to play along, then everyone else can relax. If you’re interested in this subject, I can’t recommend Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation strongly enough—it’s more relevant today than it was almost a decade ago:

Then comes patronage. Governments offer subsidies and protection, whether in the form of tax breaks for factories, land and energy for data centers, or preferential treatment in contracts. At first it looks like industrial policy. Soon it hardens into dependence. And given the ongoing concerns about AI’s role in displacing human labor through automation, to say nothing of extractive industry and intensifying surveillance, this AI-themed tech dinner should absolutely set off alarm bells.

What to Watch Out For

Once dependence is established, conditions creep in. Procurement is an especially potent instrument. In Italy it was labor courts that stripped workers of the right to strike; in Germany it was orders that demanded industrialists produce for the war machine. In the United States today, it might be framed as “ideological neutrality” requirements for AI systems or content moderation policies tied to government contracts. The language sounds bland—that’s the point—but the effect is to chill dissent. You don’t need censors if you can dictate conditions through procurement.

Labor is often the next front. Fascist regimes were relentless in dismantling independent unions, not only to weaken opposition but to reassure industrial allies that strikes would not disrupt production. Franco’s syndicates, Mussolini’s Carta del Lavoro, Hitler’s crushing of the trade unions—each was a signal that the regime would guarantee order in the workplace. The modern echo is subtler but familiar: data-center workers and logistics staff facing union-busting campaigns, legal frameworks tilted against organizing, executives reassured that “efficiency” will be preserved.

Next up is security integration. Authoritarian states rarely resist the temptation to lure business into surveillance and control. In Nazi Germany that meant industrial mobilization and the use of forced labor. In Mussolini’s Italy it meant industrial conglomerates subordinated to the autarkic project. In the present, the watchword is data. Partnerships on artificial intelligence, policing, immigration enforcement, and intelligence become channels for binding private firms to state priorities. Contracts that look like ordinary procurement become levers of political loyalty.

Once solidified, punishment and reward quickly sharpen. Compliant firms receive healthy contracts and regulatory indulgence; recalcitrant ones find themselves harassed, audited, or frozen out. The effect is self-reinforcing: loyalty pays, dissent costs. In time, advisory councils and boards become stocked with executives who have demonstrated their willingness to play along, while skeptics are quietly sidelined. The German term Gleichschaltung—synchronization—captures the effect: institutions fall into line not because they are forced one by one, but because they see which way the current is running.

What begins as ring-kissing ends with rule-writing. Tech executives may think they are merely flattering a president in exchange for favorable treatment. But history shows that the dynamic evolves. Once the state has the leverage of subsidies and contracts, it begins to dictate terms. And once executives have signaled their willingness to comply, it becomes ever harder to draw the line. These executives might imagine themselves being able to maintain their ethical positions, but this becomes much harder in practice as incentives (or disincentives) for doing so in the face of this “death by a thousand cuts.”

Last night’s dinner was framed around “American AI dominance,” with executives pledging investments and the administration promising to clear regulatory and infrastructure hurdles. The optics were not of adversarial bargaining but of capitulation—exactly the image Mussolini liked to project in his corporate state. The very vagueness of the commitments, the pledges of loyalty to national goals, is the point. The specifics can come later, once the bargain has settled in as common sense.

Under this view, the dinner was less a cringey photo opp than a watershed moment. It demonstrated that the most powerful sector of the American economy is willing to lend legitimacy to an openly illiberal project, so long as subsidies and favorable policies flow in return. It demonstrated to mid-level executives, investors, and engineers that alignment with political power is the safe choice. And it gave the regime a platform to suggest that tech’s immense cultural and infrastructural power is now aligned with the state.

The best futurists are avid historians, and (relatively recent) history is unambiguous about what such displays might mean for us. Industrial elites have rarely stood against authoritarian drift; more often, they have rationalized their participation as pragmatism, until it was too late. When tech leaders kiss the ring like this, they are not merely flattering an imminently flatterable president; they are rehearsing the role that industry has played before in the consolidation of authoritarian power: not its victim, but its trusty partner.

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And here’s an episode of the Urgent Futures Podcast that relates to the above. If you like what you see/hear, I hope you’ll consider to subscribing to the show on Youtube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you live in U.S., and even if not, you’ve probably seen some of the turmoil at the CDC, particularly regarding mixed messaging about the updated Covid-19 boosters.

Earlier this week I shared my proposal for polycritical foresight—a method that fuses futures thinking, threat modeling, and systems analysis—as a means of better grappling with (aspects of) the polycrisis. Here, I’m practicing what I preach: applying PF to the unfolding crisis in U.S. public health. By mapping cascading risks as an attack tree, I hope to demonstrate how leadership turmoil at the CDC and HHS, politicization of vaccine guidance, and shifting risk communication practices could combine into the wider polycrisis affecting trust, uptake, and health outcomes. Furthermore, I hope this document helps sensemake possible outcomes of these developments.

Let’s get to it!

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Key Takeaways:

- Imagination alone isn’t enough for adequate polycrisis strategies. Threat modeling grounds foresight in basics—actors, vulnerabilities, attack paths, and mitigations—and backcasts that logic into today’s budgets, controls, and policies.

- Existing literature offers tested methods (threatcasting), academic frameworks (multidimensional cyber-foresight), empirical studies (threat drivers), and practitioner playbooks (future-back modeling) for such transdisciplinary synthesis. Deeper integration is possible and necessary.

- Polycritical foresight is the disciplined synthesis of futures thinking, threat modeling, and systems thinking—a practice that not only envisions multiple possible crises but actively stress-tests them against adversaries, vulnerabilities, and cascading risks—then backcasts those insights into today’s policies, budgets, and defensive strategies.

The polycrisis describes an era in which multiple, overlapping, and interacting crises are unfolding simultaneously. Climate change, geopolitical instability, financial fragility, technological risks, pandemics, and social polarization are not only simultaneous but interdependent, impacting each other in ways predictable and not. Traditional foresight methods, such as scenario planning, horizon scanning, Delphi surveys, have long helped governments, corporations, and civil society navigate uncertainty, but the scale and interconnectedness of today’s challenges demand a deeper commitment to transdisciplinary approaches. What is needed for the scope and scale of polycrisis is what I call polycritical foresight.

So, how can we develop more robust preparedness in the face of polycrisis? First: by blending classic foresight with a discipline from cybersecurity: threat modeling. Done together, they move us beyond imagining plausible futures to stress-testing those futures against the actors, dynamics, and vulnerabilities that make crises contagious—and then backcasting to concrete actions we can take now. This is the essence of threatcasting, a relatively new methodology proposed by Natalie Vanatta and Brian David Johnson in 2018.

This proposal (among others) persuasively argues for synthesis between these two domains. But where a gap persists is in execution—these are typically framed in a reactive posture and/or set against dystopian backdrops. I believe there is further demand for futurists to incorporate threat modeling practices into foresight strategy across scales, and critically: take as given that the polycrisis is omnipresent in all scenarios, rather than generating scenarios that specifically depict or examine collapse (e.g., “decline and collapse” scenarios in Dator’s Four Futures). There has never been a greater need for linking the tactical affordances of threat modeling with foresight and systems thinking, weaving together imagination, historical analysis, and a grasp of the interrelatedness of contemporary crises. Polycritical foresight can strengthen the resilience of positive futures, ensuring that desirable pathways are not derailed by adversarial action or cascading fragility.

Comparing and Contrasting Foresight Strategy and Threat Modeling

Threat modeling and strategic foresight have traditionally been separate practices in risk management. Threat modeling is most often associated with cybersecurity and defense; it involves identifying potential adversaries, attack vectors, and system vulnerabilities in order to prioritize mitigations. Classic threat modeling approaches (such as STRIDE or PASTA frameworks) analyze known threat actor tactics and historical attack patterns to map out “worst-case scenarios” for a given system. This adversary-focused, often technical process helps organizations harden their systems against attacks we know how to expect.

Strategic foresight, on the other hand, comes from the futures studies and strategic planning domain. It involves looking over the horizon—systematically exploring how emerging trends and uncertainties might play out in multiple future scenarios, often 5, 10, or even 30 years ahead. Techniques are used to imagine different plausible futures (both desirable and undesirable) and to devise strategies that either encourage or prevent those outcomes. Rather than prediction, foresight is about preparedness; it helps anticipate emerging trends, rather than be surprised by change.

Put simply, where threat modeling asks “How could we be attacked next?” strategic foresight asks “What else could happen, and what would we do if it did?”

At their intersection lies a crucial question: How can we better anticipate and mitigate future threats that lack historical precedent? This is increasingly salient as technological and geopolitical change accelerates. Cybersecurity professionals find that focusing only on yesterday’s attacks leaves blind spots for novel exploits. Likewise, national security strategists see the need to prepare for “unknown unknown” threats (from AI-enabled cyber weapons to bioengineered agents) which demand imaginative foresight. Thus, in the past decade, futurists and threat modelers have proposed blended approaches that incorporate forward-looking scenario analysis into the threat modeling processes. This is epitomized in threatcasting, mentioned above, as well as other proposals that include “strategic threat modeling” and “multidimensional cyber-foresight” (among others outlined below).

Foresight and its Limits in Polycrisis

Foresight is an essential tool for expanding strategic thinking. It encourages us to consider multiple futures rather than relying on a single prediction. Common foresight methods include: horizon scanning (systematically monitoring signals of change), scenario planning (building coherent narratives about alternative futures), Delphi methods (eliciting expert consensus about emerging risks), and trend analysis (projecting forward from historical data).

These methods are great for surfacing possibilities and challenging assumptions, but they often struggle with three key challenges in an environment of polycrisis:

1. Adversarial dynamics: Many crises aren't passive events; they involve deliberate actions by states, corporations, or other groups that exploit vulnerabilities. Traditional foresight often treats crises as environmental conditions rather than contested sites.

2. Systemic vulnerability: The polycrisis is all about interdependence. A single shock can cascade through multiple systems. While foresight sometimes maps these interdependencies, it often lacks the granularity to show how vulnerabilities actually propagate.

3. Actionability: Many foresight outputs inspire reflection but stop short of providing concrete steps for defense, resilience, and preparedness. In a polycrisis, we need more than just awareness; we need plans.

Enter: threat modeling.

What Is Threat Modeling?

Threat modeling originated in the field of information security as a way for organizations to proactively anticipate and mitigate cyber risks. It provides a structured way to think like an adversary and identify potential weak points before they are exploited. Its logic is based on a series of simple questions:

1. What are you protecting? (Assets)

2. Who might attack you? (Adversaries/Threats)

3. Where are your weak points? (Vulnerabilities)

4. How could a threat manifest? (Attack Vectors)

5. What can you do to reduce the risk? (Mitigations)

Like foresight, threat modeling isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about stress-testing a system to uncover blind spots and prioritize defensive investments. It's a proactive, rather than reactive, approach to risk management.

How Threat Modeling Enhances Foresight: Polycritical Foresight in Action

By integrating the logic of threat modeling, we can make our foresight work more robust and actionable.

Adding Adversarial Intelligence

Many foresight exercises treat crises like natural disasters—unavoidable external forces. But crises are often the result of deliberate choices, whether it's a trade war or a disinformation campaign. Threat modeling forces us to identify who the key actors are and what their motivations might be. This grounds foresight in the real-world politics and contestation that drive modern crises.

Mapping Vulnerabilities in Systems, Not Just Trends

While foresight often catalogs broad drivers of change (e.g., AI adoption), threat modeling drills down into the specific vulnerabilities of a system. It asks, “Where are the single points of failure?” This focus on weak points helps us understand how the polycrisis could actually reverberate across global systems—and the nth order effects that might follow.

Enabling Prioritization

A common criticism of foresight is that it can overwhelm decisionmakers with too many possibilities and signals. Threat modeling provides a way to triage these concerns by scoring threats based on likelihood and impact. This helps clients focus their resources where they matter most, even in an uncertain world.

Connecting Awareness to Mitigation

It’s easy to create a vivid scenario and then leave the audience wondering, "So what?" Threat modeling closes this gap by moving from vulnerabilities to concrete mitigation strategies. The goal is to identify defensive investments that are robust and effective across many different possible futures.

How Foresight Enhances Threat Modeling

Where foresight methodologies can benefit from threat modeling, the same is true in reverse. Many threat modeling frameworks still rely heavily on past attack patterns and overlook “unknown unknowns.” There is often an “insufficient integration of foresight into security strategies,” as one study noted, leading to an “unawareness gap” in preparing for emerging risks.

Bridging this gap will require greater collaboration among security experts and futurists, organizational culture shifts to embrace long-term thinking, and development of tools to systematically incorporate foresight insights into day-to-day risk management. Though it’s not in the scope of this article to elaborate on these points in depth, I will note that areas for improvement include developing metrics for success of foresight-informed security measures, training analysts in futurist techniques, and ensuring executive buy-in for proactive (rather than purely reactive) security investments.

What Scholarship Already Exists at This Intersection?

As I mentioned above, I’m not starting from zero here; there’s a growing body of work fusing foresight with threat analysis:

• Threatcasting (Vanatta & Johnson, 2018). A formalized 10-year threat methodology that integrates futures studies with military planning; outputs include narrative scenarios, early indicators (“flags”), and backcasted action plans.

• Multidimensional Cybersecurity Framework for Foresight (Onwubiko & Ouazzane, 2021–22). Proposes a six-domain framework (Physical, Cultural, Economic, Social, Political, Cyber) underpinned by situational awareness to ensure socio-technical drivers inform cyber risk planning.

• Strategic foresight for security (Vescent & Blakley, NSPW 2018). Ran structured foresight with security pros (interviews, scenarios, backcasting), deriving “new security paradigms” (e.g., from reactive to proactive security; human-centered design). Concluded that deeper futurist–security collaboration yields more robust strategies.

• Threat drivers research (Raban & Hauptman, 2018). Long-term foresight study eliciting major threat drivers and assessing how emerging technologies amplify defense and attack capabilities (e.g., IoT, biohacking, quantum/AI as dual-use).

• Industry practice notes. Futures Platform summarizes how to embed scanning, scenario workshops, and iteration into cyber strategy; Team Cymru frames adaptive threat models that merge strategic foresight with tactical preparedness.

• Future-back threat modeling (Vu Van Than, ISC2, 2025). A practitioner’s method to counter “past-pattern bias”—explicitly modeling hypothetical future attacks, challenging hidden assumptions, and using honeypots and anomaly-hunting to surface nascent tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

• Defense/intel foresight. National-security voices argue for layered time horizons (5/15/30-year) and dedicated threat-scenario programs for emerging science/tech risks—illustrated in analyses around “Havana Syndrome” and directed-energy concerns as a foresight failure case.

Toolbox: Practical Ways to Integrate Threat Modeling in Foresight

Scenario stress-testing with backcasting (adapted from threatcasting)

1) Build 3-4 divergent futures. 2) For each: enumerate assets, adversaries, vulnerabilities, and attack vectors. 3) Identify “flags” (what to watch) and “gates” (interventions). 4) Backcast to today’s concrete actions and owners.

Polycrisis “attack trees”

Translate interdependencies into multisystem attack/cascade trees (e.g., drought begets crop failure begets export bans begets food-price spikes begets unrest), then mark intervention points and mitigation portfolios (redundancy, circuit breakers, governance). This approach is aligned with threat-model practice and complements cyber-foresight playbooks.

Actor-centered scanning (adapted from Multidimensional Cyber-Foresight)

Expand scanning to behaviors of actors (states, firms, platforms, dark networks) that could exploit vulnerabilities—paired with trend drivers (tech, policy, culture). Multidomain lenses help catch risks that originate outside “tech.”

Resilience portfolios

Use modeled threats to assemble mitigation portfolios robust across scenarios (technical controls + process + policy). Industry guidance now frames threat modeling as a business-aligned, continuously updated program rather than a one-off artifact.

Hypothetical Case Studies

What follows are broad examples to depict how threat modeling can enhance scenarios produced using foresight methodologies. These are meant as invitations to possibility rather than exhaustive breakdowns.

Climate x Finance

The accelerating shift toward decarbonization has tied climate policy directly to global financial stability. As green investments, carbon-credit markets, and critical-mineral supply chains scale rapidly, they open up new avenues for both opportunity and exploitation. Imagine a future where the success or failure of climate policy is inseparable from financial resilience: energy security hinges on fragile supply chains, carbon markets become targets for speculation, and authoritarian regimes weaponize resource access. In this context, the intersection of climate and finance becomes a critical front line for adversarial action, cascading systemic risks, and potential crises of public trust.

• Assets: financial stability, energy supply, public trust.

• Adversaries/threats: opportunistic hedge funds, authoritarian regimes manipulating energy markets, cybercriminals targeting carbon-trading platforms.

• Vulnerabilities: overconcentration of green investment in a few technologies, dependence on fragile supply chains for critical minerals, politicized central banks.

• Attack vectors: speculative bubbles in carbon credits, coordinated ransomware on energy infrastructure, disinformation undermining climate policy.

• Mitigations: diversified investment strategies, stronger cybersecurity standards, international agreements on mineral supply governance.

Polycritical foresight techniques allow financial regulators, energy policymakers, and international institutions to anticipate where climate action intersects with financial fragility and adversarial behavior. Monitoring flags such as sudden volatility in carbon-credit markets, anomalous cyber activity targeting energy infrastructure, or sharp fluctuations in critical mineral supply chains can provide early warnings of systemic stress. With these indicators in hand, leaders could activate gates such as implementing temporary trading circuit breakers, enforcing rapid cybersecurity protocols for energy providers, or coordinating international stockpiles of critical minerals. In this way, polycritical foresight doesn’t just map vulnerabilities in the climate-finance nexus—it ensures that efforts toward a sustainable energy transition are insulated from manipulation, cascading failures, and crises of public trust.

AI-Driven Healthcare and Adversarial Misuse

AI-driven healthcare systems—ranging from diagnostic algorithms to robotic surgery platforms—promise efficiency and expanded access, but they are also vulnerable to adversarial misuse. Consider a future scenario where a nation’s healthcare infrastructure relies heavily on AI diagnostic tools integrated into hospitals and telemedicine networks.

• Assets: Patient health data, trust in healthcare institutions, availability of accurate diagnosis and treatment.

• Adversaries/Threats: Cybercriminal groups seeking to ransom hospital networks; hostile state actors attempting to destabilize public trust; insider threats manipulating algorithms for financial or political gain.

• Vulnerabilities: Dependence on opaque machine-learning models susceptible to adversarial inputs; fragile supply chains for AI-enabled devices; insufficient regulatory frameworks around algorithmic accountability.

• Attack Vectors: Adversarial data poisoning that subtly degrades model accuracy; ransomware attacks targeting hospital AI infrastructure; disinformation campaigns exaggerating algorithmic errors to erode trust in the healthcare system.

• Mitigations (Gates): Rigorous adversarial testing of healthcare algorithms before deployment; redundant diagnostic pathways that ensure human-AI collaboration; encrypted, resilient patient-data pipelines; international standards for AI validation in medicine.

By applying polycritical foresight, policymakers and healthcare organizations can anticipate these misuse scenarios and design safeguards in advance. For example, monitoring flags such as unexplained spikes in diagnostic error rates, coordinated social-media narratives about AI “failures,” or supply-chain disruptions of critical AI hardware could provide early warnings. With those indicators in hand, leaders could activate gates such as algorithm audits, public reassurance campaigns, or rapid-response protocols for affected hospitals.

Biosecurity and Engineered Pathogens

Advances in synthetic biology and gene-editing technologies offer potentially enormous benefits for medicine, agriculture, and sustainability, but they also create new risks of engineered pathogens or accidental releases. Consider a future in which cheap, widely available bioengineering tools enable both state and non-state actors to design novel viruses faster than global health systems can respond.

• Assets: Public health and safety, global mobility, trust in scientific institutions, continuity of healthcare systems.

• Adversaries/Threats: Rogue states seeking asymmetric advantage, extremist groups experimenting with bioagents, insiders at research labs, or “biohackers” unintentionally generating harmful organisms.

• Vulnerabilities: Uneven biosecurity standards across labs, gaps in international governance, reliance on centralized vaccine production facilities, lack of rapid surveillance in low-income regions.

• Attack Vectors: Release of engineered pathogens (deliberate or accidental), manipulation of genetic supply chains (e.g., contaminated DNA synthesis orders), disinformation campaigns undermining trust in vaccines and public health responses.

• Mitigations (Gates): Stronger oversight and certification of DNA synthesis providers; global standards for lab safety; investment in distributed, rapid vaccine production platforms; integration of genomic surveillance into public health systems; international data-sharing agreements for early outbreak detection.

Through polycritical foresight approaches, global health agencies, national security bodies, and biotech companies can anticipate scenarios where synthetic biology risks spill over into pandemics or geopolitical crises. Monitoring flags such as spikes in unusual DNA synthesis requests, unexplained clusters of illness in regions with biotech hubs, or coordinated narratives sowing doubt about public health authorities could provide early warnings. With these indicators in hand, leaders could activate gates such as halting suspicious synthesis orders, deploying rapid-response epidemiology teams, or invoking emergency collaboration agreements for vaccine scale-up. In this way, polycritical foresight strengthens not only pandemic preparedness but also global governance, helping prevent biotechnological developments from being misused—and from catastrophic cascading effects when they are.

Implementation Pattern (What “Good” Looks Like)

The polycrisis is dynamic, so polycritical foresight must be too. Futurists can adopt the following sample implementation plan to ensure that strategy, facilitations, and advisory are robust:

1. Standing cadence. Quarterly horizon-scan + semiannual scenario labs + annual “future-back” threat modeling sprint; plug outputs into the risk register and budget cycle.

2. Indicator architecture. Maintain a shared list of flags (early indicators) mapped to each modeled threat; instrument dashboards to watch them.

3. Backcasted roadmaps. For each priority scenario, identify “gates” (policies/controls) and assign accountable owners, deadlines, and test criteria.

4. Multidomain coverage. Use the six-domain lens to catch extra-technical drivers.

5. Red/blue teaming with futures. Test tomorrow’s potential tactics, techniques, and procedures (drawing on game theory and frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK) through tabletop exercises or live-fire drills (mirrors best practices in both industry and defense operations).

6. Program maturity. Tracking how well threat-modeling practices are actually adopted and used—who owns them, how often they’re updated, and whether they inform real decisions—rather than just producing artifacts (emphasis on governance over outputs reflects current enterprise best practice).

Toward Polycritical Foresight

We now live in an era when crises are no longer isolated events but part of a dense web of interacting risks. Foresight has always been about expanding our imagination, but imagination alone is not enough. We need sharper tools to identify where we are exposed, who might exploit those exposures, and how crises could ripple through our interconnected systems. Threat modeling without futures thinking risks clinging to yesterday’s attack patterns.

Bringing these two fields together isn’t without its challenges. Threat modeling, which works well for bounded systems, can be messy when applied to the global scale. There's also the risk of creating a false sense of precision, fostering undue paranoia, inducing scope creep, or running into political sensitivities when naming adversaries. Furthermore, more collaboration is necessary between futurists and security researchers to ensure they have a shared language to minimize cross-talk and blindspots.

Still, I believe the juice is worth the squeeze, resulting in more actionable foresight that is better attuned to the complex, interconnected nature of the polycrisis. This fusion does more than help us anticipate collapse. It equips us to improve strategic recommendations across all futures—even ones framed in a positive light—by making them more specifically resilient to adversaries, weak links, and cascading risks. Polycritical foresight weaves together foresight to expand the horizon of what might unfold; threat modeling to sharpen that horizon into actors, vulnerabilities, attack paths, and mitigations; and a clear grasp of how the polycrisis represents an interdependent system rather than a list of disparate crises. This practice is how we build strategies strong enough to withstand cascading risks—and flexible enough to adapt when confronted with unexpected emerging realities.

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You may have seen accelerationism coming up more in the news. Or, if you’ve followed Reality Studies and/or Urgent Futures for a while, you’ve perhaps encountered it here. But I realized I’d never done a proper explainer on what accelerationism is, so, following in the vein of my degrowth and post-growth primers, below you’ll find the official Reality Studies accelerationism primer.

I’ve come to believe that accelerationism is the defining philosophy of our times. It’s a term that emerges from a complex history, which has produced a wide range of meanings (many of which are contradictory or at least opposed). As with so many buzzwords, it is exactly this ambiguity that lends it staying power; debate = continual propagation.

What is Accelerationism?

At core, accelerationism is about the relationship of culture, capital, and technology to speed, change, and transformation. A simple definition of accelerationism:

Accelerationism is the idea that the best way to bring about radical change in society is to speed up the very processes that shape society—even if those processes are part of the problem.

Accelerationism holds that, rather than resisting capitalism or techno-industrial modernity, we should push them to—or beyond—their limits in order to destabilize the status quo and potentially generate something new (and theoretically better)​.

This philosophy has been called “political heresy” in its rejection of the impulse to use democratic processes to rein in capitalism’s excesses. Accelerationists instead propose ramping capitalism and technology into overdrive to trigger transformative change. If something is breaking or broken in modern society, some might argue that what’s needed is to adjust or reform it—slowing it down. The accelerationist looks at it and says: break it faster.

But this is where a consistent definition breaks down. Accelerationism isn’t a single, unified ideology but rather a spectrum of ideas​. To start, it helps to understand the term through a broad binary (though as we’ll see it’s much more complex than this!):

• Left-wing accelerationists (or “left-accelerationists”) hope that accelerating technological and economic growth can be steered toward progressive ends, like equality and emancipation (i.e., use the engine of technology to shorten the work‑week, democratize abundance, and reach post‑capitalism).

• Right-wing accelerationists (or “right-accelerationists”) embrace rapid growth and chaos in a far more nihilistic or even reactionary way—some believing it will hasten a collapse that allows a new (often dystopian) order to emerge. The burgeoning effective accelerationist movement in Silicon Valley, which demands technological progress and “innovation” at all costs to solve humanity’s problems, falls under this umbrella.

If you’re new to all of this, these ideas might sound a bit abstract or extreme. But accelerationism has shifted from obscure academic theorizing to the epicenter of politics—manifest in the words and actions of Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance (to pick only the most visible American examples).

The structure of this primer is as follows:

1. Origins: Accelerationism by Any Other Name

2. Key Thinkers & the Evolution of Accelerationism

3. Criticism & Counter-Theories

4. Modern Implications & Discussions

I’ve endeavored to explain these ideas in accessible terms. If you already have the hang of any of the above, feel free to jump to subsequent section(s). By the end, you’ll have grip on the basics (and then some) of accelerationism.

And hey, if you know somebody who would benefit from this, please send it to them or share it:

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Origins: Accelerationism by Any Other Name

Accelerationism’s roots stretch back long before the term itself existed. The impulse to speed up social forces has appeared at various points in history. While today’s most visible manifestations of accelerationism are right-leaning, its origins actually begin as a leftist response to capitalism.

Karl Marx

Many scholars point to Karl Marx as an origin point. In the 19th century, Marx observed that capitalism, by its very nature, constantly revolutionizes the means of production and intensifies economic activity. He believed this intensification of capitalism would eventually undermine itself and prompt a revolutionary collapse.

In his 1848 speech, “On the Question of Free Trade,” Marx noted that free-market capitalism “breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”

In other words, Marx suggested that pushing the system to its limits could bring about its end—a core tenet of what we now call accelerationism. (Note: Marx was not advocating reckless chaos; he was analyzing how economic forces might dialectically lead to revolution. Still, subsequent thinkers have taken inspiration from this hurried demise theory of capitalism.)

Friedrich Nietzsche

In the realm of philosophy, meanwhile, Friedrich Nietzsche offered an exhortation that accelerationists often cite as precursory. In a fragment published posthumously in The Will to Power, Nietzsche wrote that “the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it.”

This cryptic advice—to welcome the leveling, homogenizing forces in modern society and speed them along—can be read as an anticipation of the accelerationist stance, though Nietzsche’s context was quite different, addressing cultural stagnation in Europe. (What I hope is already emerging in this primer is that contemporary accelerationism is a composite of ideas pulled from different and oftentimes paradoxical sources—which in turn have been decontextualized, and that is certainly the case with Nietzsche’s ideas).

The Futurists

By the early 20th century, the ethos of acceleration, if not the term itself, surfaced in some artistic and political movements—notably among the Italian Futurists. In the Manifesto of Futurism, poet Filippo Marinetti writes:

Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

and

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

This worship of speed and machinery embodies the accelerationist belief that rapid progress and technology are rejuvenators of society—and the danger and violence that come with them are necessary byproducts (also an implicit commitment of accelerationism).

With the Italian Futurists we also find powerful foreshadowing of the entanglement of accelerationism and nationalism that would crystallize in the 21st century; Futurism is understood to have influenced the development of fascism in Italy, and the second-wave futurist movement directly supported the Mussolini regime.

Pop Culture, Political Activism, & Postmodernism

The 1960s brought both pop culture and theoretical foreshadowing(s) of the accelerationism to come.

Notably, the word “accelerationism” itself made a debut in 1967…in a science fiction novel. Writer Roger Zelazny uses the term in his book Lord of Light to describe a faction that wants to hasten societal advancement.

Meanwhile, activists in the ‘60s often debated whether creating or enflaming crises could expedite revolution. Some currents of student and leftist movements flirted with the idea that heightening the contradictions of capitalism (i.e., encouraging its excesses or provoking state crackdowns) might quicken its downfall.

The first sustained philosophical development of accelerationist ideas came from the philosopher duo Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who, in their landmark 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, posed a set of questions about what constitutes revolutionary activity:

“[W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market…. Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.”

Deleuze and Guattari appear to suggest that revolution won’t come by halting capitalism, but rather weaponizing its own processes against itself.

To clarify for those unfamiliar with this text: the authors refer to capitalism’s “schizophrenic flow” of desire and money, which serves to uproot and transform social relations (what they call “deterritorialization”). They argue that capitalism hasn’t yet done enough to achieve a real breaking point—and wonder if the truly revolutionary activity would be to move with and amplify these schizophrenic flows in order to ultimately break capitalism, rather than trying to oppose them. It’s easy to see why this “accelerate the process” passage is often cited as a theoretical birth of accelerationism as we understand it today.

Other French thinkers added to this proto-accelerationist thread. Jean-François Lyotard, in his 1974 book Libidinal Economy, abandoned orthodox Marxism, which asserts that communism will be an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Lyotard instead embraces the intense “libidinal” drives of capitalist society (money, desire, production), urging an immersion in its flows rather than a moralistic critique. Jean Baudrillard, in his 1976 book Symbolic Exchange and Death (and elsewhere), talks about pursuing “fatal strategies”—playing out the logic of the system to its extreme end so that it self-destructs or transforms (i.e., if the system feeds on information, one might try to hyper-saturate it with nonsense).

Both Lyotard and Baudrillard flirt with the notion that instead of opposing the system from without, one might ironically subvert it from within by exaggerating it. Again, these ideas weren’t called accelerationism yet, but have been retroactively recognized as such. Another French philosopher who contributed to the ultimate formation of accelerationist thought was Paul Virilio. In his book Speed and Politics (1977), he not only coined the term “dromology” (the study of speed and its impact on society), he argues that speed―not class or wealth―is the primary force shaping civilization (and an “engine of destruction” at that).

By the end of the 1970s, all the ingredients of accelerationism were in place: Marx’s insight about capitalism’s self-undermining speed, Nietzsche’s injunction to push forward, the Futurists’ love of speed, and the French theorists’ notion of riding capitalism’s wave. But they hadn’t yet been united into a guiding philosophy.

Key Thinkers & the Evolution of Accelerationism

Nick Land and CCRU

Accelerationism as an identifiable intellectual movement truly took shape in the 1990s, in an unlikely incubator: the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in England. The CCRU was a rogue research collective of young philosophers and writers fascinated by cyberpunk science fiction, rave subculture, continental philosophy, and the possibilities of emerging technology.

Two notable members were Nick Land and Sadie Plant, often credited with founding the CCRU. If accelerationism has a “mad scientist” figure, it would be Nick Land.

In the mid-90s, Land wrote a series of wild, visionary texts that read like theory infused with sci-fi horror—describing capitalism as an intelligent alien force or an uncontrollable techno-system that is escaping human control. Land’s writings (later collected in Fanged Noumena) laid the groundwork for what we now call right-wing accelerationism (or sometimes “cyberpunk accelerationism”).

Land drew on the earlier French ideas and pushed them further. He viewed capitalism itself as a self-propelling techno-cultural evolution, a positive feedback loop where technology and markets feed each other in exponential growth. In Land’s eyes, capitalism was not just an economic system, but a runaway process—“a self-escalating techno-commercial complex,” as he later put it​. The CCRU under Land’s influence became known for a kind of ecstatic nihilism: they celebrated the idea that human agency was becoming irrelevant, overtaken by the accelerating “machinic” processes of capital and tech.

Land’s essays were known for their raw, hallucinatory, almost cyber‑gothic prose. “Meltdown,” for example, describes a scenario of an Earth transformed into a “techno-slime” by self-replicating machines​. A key concept he introduces is “teleoplexy,” in an essay of the same name, which refers to the the compounding intelligence of capital as it evolves—essentially dismissing the prospect of capitalism’s self-destruction imagined by left-accelerationists.

Mark Fisher, who was a CCRU member (before charting his own course), described their stance as an “exuberant anti-politics, a ‘techno-nihilism’ celebrating the irrelevance of human agency.”

“Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could,” Land wrote later, arguing that trying to oppose or regulate capitalism was futile—the real revolution is capitalism’s own forward eruption. The conclusion for Land was: don’t resist—ride the tiger. This is accelerationism in the raw: surrendering to the runaway tech train in hopes it leads somewhere new, even if that “somewhere” might be the extinction of humanity. In the aforementioned “Meltdown,” for example, Land remarks that “nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”

It’s important to note that Land’s accelerationism was theoretical—he wasn’t advocating terrorism or immediate chaos; he was sketching a philosophy of history where technology and capital merge and spiral beyond control, potentially to a point called the Singularity (a hypothetical moment in which AI and tech growth become irreversible and self-sustaining, and displace humanity’s dominance on Earth).

Land foresaw this happening first in East Asia: in “Meltdown” he envisions China as the site of a coming techno-capitalist singularity that Western nations would struggle to contain. Notably, Land later moved to Shanghai and praised China’s rapid development as exemplifying accelerationism in action​. By the end of the 1990s, Land had effectively sketched out the accelerationist worldview on the right: radical embrace of free-market forces, technology, and the breakdown of traditional structures—even democracy and morality—in pursuit of an unprecedented future.

This would eventually lead Land towards the fringe neoreactionary movement (NRx) in the 2010s, where he advocated autocratic techno-elitism (his infamous essay “The Dark Enlightenment,” argues democracy is a brake on acceleration and suggests CEOs-as-monarchs instead. This was later elaborated in his book of the same name. (I’ll be covering this in greater depth in a separate piece on how it has evolved through and because of the MAGA movement)​. That shift also tinged his ideas with racist overtones that caused many to distance themselves from him. Nonetheless, Land’s ‘90s writings remain foundational in accelerationist thought; he has been dubbed the “godfather of accelerationism.”

Mark Fisher, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams

While Land was pushing a delirious pro-capital accelerationism, others began to return to the idea’s origins: Could these ideas be actioned toward leftist goals? Fisher, along with younger thinkers like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, took inspiration from Land’s diagnosis but not his prescription. They observed, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, that traditional left politics seemed stuck and ineffective, almost resigned to managing decline.

In his landmark Capitalist Realism (2009), Fisher cites both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek writing, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” a quote that’s become famous for capturing this sense of paralysis.

Instead of rejecting acceleration outright, however, Fisher suggested that “Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist.” He meant that Marx himself admired capitalism’s revolutionary thrust (as I outlined above), and that the left should reclaim that thrust of modernity rather than clinging to nostalgia.

Writing under his blog k-punk, Fisher wrestled with how to reconcile the CCRU’s dark visions with a humane left project. In “Terminator vs. Avatar” (2012), he critiques Land (the “Terminator” side) as having brilliant analysis but a “fatal” flaw in abandoning the human side. Fisher also coined the phrase “the slow cancellation of the future” to describe how our culture has lost the drive for progress (see: Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures). Capitalist Realism isn’t about accelerationism per se, but its conclusion calls for reclaiming a sense of possible future beyond capitalism—implicitly aligning with earlier left-wing accelerationist aims.

In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, a short manifesto that officially launched what came to be known as left-wing accelerationism (L/Acc). Their manifesto was a rallying cry for the left to stop playing small. They argued that neoliberal capitalism had stalled—it was no longer delivering broad improvements, only crises and inequalities​. Meanwhile, the left had become oddly timid and localist, focused on protesting or escaping capitalism in micro-communities, rather than offering a grand vision for the future. Srnicek and Williams saw this as a dead end. In #Accelerate, they write:

“Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.”

In other words, they advocated for taking the very infrastructure and innovations capitalism has created—big data, automation, global networks—and using them to build a new system beyond capitalism. They pointed to experiments like Project Cybersyn in Chile—an attempt in the early 1970s to cybernetically plan an economy—as a hint of how technology could enable democratic economic planning at scale. Why, they asked, should the left settle for hand-crafted local alternatives when it could leverage 21st-century science and engineering to radically transform society?

Building on the manifesto, Srnicek and Williams later wrote Inventing the Future (2015), where they dropped the term “accelerationism” (perhaps due to its growing controversial connotations) but continued the program of an ambitious, tech-savvy left agenda. They advocated for automation of labor, a Universal Basic Income, and the reduction of the work week—aiming for a “post-work” society where machines produce abundance and people are free from drudgery. This was essentially accelerationist thinking applied: accelerate automation to free humanity from toil, rather than fear it. Importantly, left accelerationists stress that this acceleration must be steered—they want more technological development, but under democratic control and directed toward egalitarian outcomes​.

So by the mid-2010s, we see the formation of two major branches of accelerationism. To elaborate on the binary presented earlier in the essay:

• Right-Accelerationism, exemplified by Nick Land, sees unfettered capitalist/technological acceleration as an end in itself (even if it’s inhuman or anti-democratic in result). R/Acc often dismisses attempts at social justice or regulation as “brakes” on the runaway train of progress.

• Left-Accelerationism, via Fisher, Srnicek, Williams, and others, wants to hijack the controls and push toward post-capitalism, using the engine of progress for social good. As Srnicek & Williams put it, accelerationism for them means “[preserving] the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.”

The dialogue (and tension) between these two forms has been a defining feature of accelerationist discussion. The #Accelerate manifesto itself explicitly dissented with Land’s view, arguing that leaving acceleration to capital alone would lead to barbarism or apocalypse, whereas a guided acceleration could lead to new horizons of freedom.

Nick Land, unsurprisingly, scoffed at the left version. In an interview, he called the notion that technology can be separated from capitalism a “deep theoretical error.” He insisted that any attempt to plan or slow the spontaneous process (i.e., via egalitarian politics) is doomed, dubbing left-accelerationist ideas as basically a call to slow down, not truly accelerate.

Apart from these two main, opposed camps, other related offshoots emerged:

• Techno-Optimism & Effective Accelerationism (e/acc): Futurists and Silicon Valley “visionaries” sometimes argue that accelerating innovation (AI, biotech, quantum computing, et al.) will solve problems like disease, climate change, even death. The “techno-optimist” stance is milder than full-on accelerationism, but in my experience it’s something of a gateway to right-accelerationism (especially since venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”). Starting with Silicon Valley Twitter circles in 2022, this more generalized techno-optimist stance has combined with the purported rationalism of the Effective Altruism movement to become “Effective Accelerationism” (e/acc). E/acc proponents claim that slowing down tech is a worse risk than pushing ahead; they genuinely fear stagnation. For example, they believe a super-intelligent AI, if achieved quickly, could devise solutions to poverty or climate change, and thus we should remove all obstacles to technological development​. One such voice, philosopher James Brusseau, argues that any problems caused by AI should be answered with more AI innovation, not less​. E/acc amounts to techno-utopian accelerationism: it trusts that speeding up progress will yield positive outcomes in time. (Critics retort that this view dangerously underestimates risks—more on that in a bit.)

• Far-right adoption (late 2010s): Since the mid-2010s, some white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups started using “accelerationism” to mean deliberately hastening societal collapse through violence. They took the core idea (“speed up the breakdown of the current system”) and applied it to an ideology of hate: by committing terrorist acts or inflaming chaos, they hope to destabilize society and trigger a race war, after which they fantasize a white ethnostate will arise. Manifestos of several mass shooters (e.g., the 2019 Christchurch attacker) explicitly referenced acceleration, encouraging others to create the chaos that will burn down the current order. Online extremist forums talk about “acceleration” as a strategy—essentially, make things worse to achieve your revolutionary goal. It’s worth emphasizing that this violent extremist accelerationism is not what the original philosophers—even Nick Land—had in mind. It’s a rogue mutation of the idea, sharing only the name and the abstract tactic of “speeding up collapse.” Nonetheless, its emergence in headlines has given accelerationism a sinister reputation in recent years, prompting mainstream awareness and concern about the term (contributing even to the production of the piece you’re reading right now).

• Accelerationism in art and culture on the left: A number of contemporary artists, writers, and theorists play with accelerationist themes. For instance, the collective Laboria Cuboniks published “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2015), which some describe as grounding left-accelerationist ideas in feminism​. They advocate using technology to dismantle gender constraints (even speaking of “gender abolition” in an emancipatory sense)—a kind of cyborg feminism that clearly aligns with the idea of leveraging tech for liberation. Another example is Aria Dean’s concept of “Blacceleration,” merging black radical thought with accelerationism, arguing that the historical trauma of black experience under capitalism blurs the line between human and capital in a way that recontextualizes acceleration​. These are niche, experimental ideas, but they show how accelerationism has permeated various intellectual subcultures (art, gender theory, race theory) as a tool for rethinking modernity.

• Intellectual Debates: Within academia and philosophy, accelerationism continues to be debated and updated. Younger scholars on forums and blogs (like the subreddit r/CriticalTheory or blogs such as Xenogothic) hash out distinctions like Unconditional Accelerationism (U/Acc)—a more apolitical stance that says “just accelerate whatever, without a specific end in mind,” versus the conditional approaches of conventional left or right. There are also intersecting discussions in fields like Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology about nonhuman perspectives, which gels with accelerationism’s interest in in- and nonhuman systems.

Other Major Works

Here are a few other major works that have informed the development of accelerationist thought, and might be of interest to those wanting to go deeper:

• Malign Velocities: Accelerationism & Capitalism (2014) by Benjamin Noys. This is a critical work against accelerationism. Noys—who actually coined the term “accelerationism” in its current usage in his 2010 The Persistence of the Negative​—lays out a leftist warning that accelerationism is a dead end that risks either apologism for capitalism or outright disaster. He memorably labeled the CCRU/Land school as “Deleuzian Thatcherism,” implying they mixed radical theory (Deleuzian desire) with right-wing economics (Thatcher’s market worship). Noys’ perspective is important as a counterbalance: he sees accelerationism as offering “always promised and always just out of reach” solutions, a kind of mirage that ends up justifying the status quo by glorifying its momentum.

• No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (2015) by Steven Shaviro. Shaviro is a cultural critic who wrote these essays to examine accelerationism in a nuanced way. He explores both the potentials and pitfalls, discussing figures like Land, Fisher, and even pop cultural artifacts that resonate with accelerationism. It’s meant to be accessible, a bridge between the high theory and everyday implications.

• The Dark Enlightenment (2012–13) by Nick Land. A series of blog posts by Land that have since been compiled into a book. While the subject here is neoreactionary politics (arguing democracy should be replaced by more “efficient” authoritarian structures), it ties directly to Land’s accelerationism: he contends that democracy, egalitarianism, and other Enlightenment values are “decelerators,” slowing the inevitable techno-capital rush. The Dark Enlightenment is significant (and infamous) for linking accelerationist logic with far-right elitism, and this connection has fed into alt-right circles.

• The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016) by Benjamin Bratton. Bratton doesn’t call himself accelerationist, but his book about planetary-scale computing systems (“the Stack”) analyzing how technology is undermining nation-states, and proposing an open-ended design for the future, has been described as accelerationist in thrust. It’s a dense work in design theory and geopolitics that nonetheless feeds into the same discourse of how technology is reshaping sovereignty and what futures that portends.

• The Question Concerning Technology in China (2017) by Yuk Hui. Yuk Hui provides a critique of accelerationism from a cultural perspective. He argues that accelerationism’s universal “speed up modernity” prescription may impose Western notions of progress on non-Western contexts, amounting to a subtle new form of colonialism. He points out that not all cultures have the same relationship to technology (citing different myths like Prometheus in the West), so a one-size-fits-all acceleration could steamroll diverse ways of being​. Hui’s work is a reminder that accelerationism, born largely in Euro-American theory, might not translate neatly to every part of the world.

TLDR: the evolution of accelerationism spans from 19th-century economic theory, to avant-garde French philosophy, to ‘90s cyber-theory, to contemporary political manifestos, and into extremist propaganda. It’s a trajectory that went from academic obscurity to something The Guardian would call “the future we live in.”

Criticism & Counter-Theories

Given its penchant for shocking proposals, accelerationism has attracted significant criticism from various angles—moral, practical, and philosophical. Critics range from Marxist traditionalists to environmentalists to mainstream commentators, and everything in-between. Here are some prominent critiques and counter-arguments to various forms of accelerationism (which you’ll note run the gamut of political and ethical positions):

• Deleuzian Thatcherism (Benjamin Noys): As mentioned, Noys was one of the first to call out accelerationism from a left perspective. He coined the phrase “Deleuzian Thatcherism” to accuse thinkers like Nick Land of essentially dressing up a Thatcher-era free-market zeal in radical theoretical language. Noys and others argue that accelerationism offers false solutions: it sounds revolutionary but in practice often just means letting capitalism run rampant and hoping for the best (which he argues is basically just neoliberalism). He points out the irony that accelerationists denounce the status quo yet embrace the very engine (capitalism) that produces that status quo. There’s a fear that accelerationism could slip into masochistic complicity (i.e., an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude). Noys also notes how accelerationist promises are perpetually deferred; there’s always the notion that the real transformation is around the corner, after we intensify things a bit more​. This starts to sound like an excuse to avoid tangible political action now, essentially handing over agency to “the process” itself. In short, this critique warns that accelerationism might be an intellectual dead-end that capitulates to neoliberalism (in Land’s case) or to a naive techno-optimism (in some L/Acc cases) instead of doing the hard work of building a just society.

• Capitalism’s Resilience (Franco “Bifo” Berardi): Italian theorist Franco Berardi, a veteran of 1970s radical movements, has been a vocal critic. He acknowledges that “acceleration is the essential feature of capitalist growth,” credits it with highlighting capitalism’s instability due to this speed, and argues that the core accelerationist hypothesis is flawed: it assumes that speeding up capitalism’s cycles will make it collapse, and that all its latent technological potentials will de facto blossom into a new system​. Berardi argues that instead, capitalism is highly resilient precisely because it thrives on chaos and instability. It doesn’t need stable conditions or rational control to survive; it can adapt to crises (indeed, often profiting from them). So accelerating into a crash might just lead to a perpetual state of crisis rather than a clear breakthrough. He gives a blunt answer to whether acceleration will end capitalism: “quite simply: no.” Capital can absorb shocks endlessly, as long as no alternative is built. Berardi is also attuned to the human cost: acceleration (endless competition, information overload, precarious work) is causing widespread anxiety, exhaustion, and nihilism. Rather than doubling down on that, he suggests we need to reclaim time and slowness, a view aligned with movements like degrowth or the “slow” movement, which directly oppose the accelerationist ethos.

• Degrowth and “Slow” Movements: Perhaps the antithesis of accelerationism is the degrowth movement (and related “slow” philosophies). Reminder to check out my degrowth primer and degrowth reading list! Degrowth advocates argue that endless economic growth and acceleration are leading to ecological collapse and social misery, and that we need to intentionally slow down production and consumption for a sustainable future. They promote localism, simplicity, and reduction of throughput—precisely what accelerationists deride as “folk politics” or romanticism​. Proponents argue that accelerationism is a recipe for eco-disaster; we should instead be finding ways to downshift global capitalism to save the planet and improve well-being. There have been dialogues between the two; some have asked, could there be a hybrid “accel-decel” approach (accelerate clean technologies, decelerate destructive industries)? This is aligned with some so-called “post-growth” perspectives (I also wrote a post-growth primer and reading list). There are too many diverging ideas and sub-theories to account for them all here, but by and large, degrowth is a direct challenge to something like an acc/dec approach: it claims the cure for the ills of modernity is not more of the same at higher speed, but a conscious move to less and slower. A 2017 article on Uneven Earth explicitly contrasts accelerationism and degrowth, suggesting they’re almost opposite responses to the same crises​.

• Existential Risk, or “X-Risk” (Longtermists and others): From a more mainstream perspective, many worry that accelerating technology blindly is incredibly dangerous. In the AI research community and among “longtermist” thinkers (like those in Effective Altruism who focus on existential risks), the idea of not slowing AI development is frightening. They essentially argue the opposite of e/acc: that we must be extremely cautious and deliberate with powerful tech like AI to ensure safety and alignment with human values. The specter of an uncontrolled AI (the “grey goo” or Skynet scenario) is a direct counterpoint to e/acc. Even outside AI, technological-industrial acceleration has brought us to a climate crisis; many scientists say we need to decelerate emissions immediately, the opposite of an accelerationist approach to industry. So, from an environmental and existential standpoint, slamming the brakes seems wiser than hitting the gas. As one Sydney Morning Herald piece criticizing effective accelerationism puts it: opposing regulation and going full throttle on tech can be seen as recklessly dismissing the catastrophic risks​.

• Moral and Humanitarian Critique: Some critics emphasize the ethical problem of intentionally exacerbating suffering. Accelerationism, especially in its pure form, might entail accepting or even welcoming crises—economic crashes, social unrest, et al.—as the price for eventual change (“progress”). But what about the real people hurt in those crashes? This criticism asks: Do the ends justify the means? And what if the “ends” never arrive, as Noys argues, meaning people suffered for nothing but a failed theory? Left accelerationists try to distance themselves from this by saying they want to use progress, not cause pain. But right accelerationism is open to this moral objection. The specter of “worse is better,” the idea that making things worse for people now will magically produce a better tomorrow, is historically associated with disastrous strategies (and typically entail violence). Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, who is actually sympathetic to bold radical strategies, has still said accelerationism is “far too optimistic” and deterministic, counting on one inevitable outcome of chaos (revolution or new order) while ignoring that chaos can also lead to fascism, barbarism, or endless decay. In an essay for Compact, Žižek analogized accelerationism to Freud’s death drive, a destructive drive with no guaranteed positive outcome​.

• “Imposing Western Models” Cultural Critique (Yuk Hui): As mentioned, Yuk Hui and others caution that accelerationism carries a whiff of Western-centric historical thinking. It assumes that all societies must go through the same fast-track modernity to reach some new stage. This is reminiscent of the 19th-century idea that “backward” nations must develop like Europe did—an idea often used to justify colonialism. Hui points out that non-Western cultures might have different conceptions of what a desirable future is, or how technology should relate to life​. For example, a society with more communal values might not want an AI-driven, hyper-capitalist future, even if it’s “advanced.” Thus, trying to accelerate everyone along one path could erase cultural diversity and replicate imperialist attitudes. A counter-theory here is pluralism, the idea that we should let multiple modernities unfold at their own paces, possibly learning from indigenous or slower ways of life rather than subsuming them.

• Psychological/Spiritual Critique: Some critics take a humanistic approach, asking: What does acceleration do to our minds and souls? They note rising rates of depression, anxiety, and a sense of meaninglessness in advanced capitalist societies—trends that thinkers like Hartmut Rosa (who writes about “social acceleration”) attribute to the high-speed, high-pressure nature of modern life. Constant change can be disorienting; humans need some stability and slowness for reflection, relationships, and happiness. From this angle, accelerationism could be seen as a nihilistic embrace of exactly what’s tormenting people. By taking a “pedal to the metal” approach, rather than trying to mitigate the pace of life (through, say, mindfulness, community building, or valuing time off), accelerationism sounds inhumane or at least tone-deaf to the very real burnout and alienation many feel. The counter-theory implied here is a kind of human-centered gradualism—the idea that progress should be calibrated to human needs based on evolutionary processes, not just abstract historical engines.

• Political Feasibility: Practically, many ask: even if one agreed with accelerationism, how on earth would you implement it? For left-accelerationists, this means who is doing the steering? If the plan is to use the state or some new institution to drive technology in a socialist direction, how do we get from here to there? Skeptics point out the left doesn’t have power in much of the world right now, and saying “we’ll seize the means of acceleration” is something of a pipe dream. In the meantime, uncontrolled acceleration is benefiting big tech companies and oligarchs, not the common people. For right-accelerationists, the question is what stops things from just descending into chaos or corporate tyranny. If you remove all regulations, and democratic oversight, do you really get a cool singularity utopia, or just extreme inequality and instability? There’s a political critique that accelerationism lacks a clear path from theory to action—except in the horrifying case of extremists interpreting it as a call to violence, which is obviously not what the philosophers intended.

For their part, accelerationists have tried to answer some critiques. For example, L/Acc folks would argue they do care about suffering and want to accelerate responses to suffering (like automating dangerous jobs, or quickly transitioning to renewable energy to combat climate change). They argue that the status quo is what’s causing suffering and ecological harm, and only a drastic transformation will save us by jolting us out of the status quo—thus, acceleration is the best (if imperfect) way to get there. They often acknowledge risks, but believe the risk of doing nothing (or of slow reform) is greater. Right-accelerationists, on the other hand, often just double down on “no pain, no gain”; they view things like equality or stability as sentimental baggage (or lately as an existential threat).

Modern Implications & Discussions

Hopefully it’s clear by now that accelerationism is contentious, to put it mildly; proponents of different political persuasions might hold diametrically opposed views.

Despite this divergent history, the prevailing form of accelerationism is right-wing, having found its place in the Trump administration, marrying politics to the desires of free market capitalism and the tech industry. VentureBeat called the 2024 election outcome an “accelerationist victory,” forecasting looser export controls and sunset clauses on safety rules—and Washington’s new “e/acc caucus” is pushing a hands‑off stance on AI and biotech, arguing that any regulatory damper puts the U.S. behind China (a go-to boogeyman for tech CEOs). This was nowhere clearer than in JD Vance’s speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris:

Across the Atlantic the mood is the opposite (or has been so far), with the European Union developing and working to implement the Artificial Intelligence Act, despite heavy push‑back from Meta and Google . That said, there is evidence that U.S. accelerationist rhetoric is even having an impact there; EU commissioners now hint at softening rules to avoid a talent exodus.

Whether one finds all this inspiring or disturbing, accelerationism confronts us with hard questions: If not capitalism as we know it, then what? If not by gradual reform, then how does big change happen?

Perhaps the ultimate value of accelerationism as an idea—even (especially?) for those who reject its propositions—is that it forces us to confront the trajectory we are on. I can certainly attest to this in my own journey. It dramatizes the choice between hitting the gas or stomping on the brake, and with 2025 already off to a volatile start, this debate is only going to intensify. I suspect that for many of you, where you land in your own thinking won’t be a blanket statement; different categories will demand different answers—accelerate here, decelerate there.

Whether we wanted to be or not, we are all now participants in a global accelerationist experiment. Where does this leave us, and what should we do about it? To quote Nick Land, “What does the process want, and what resistances does it provoke?” I’m still wrestling with my own thoughts and responses, some of which have already begun to appear across Reality Studies and Urgent Futures. No matter what, the answers we collectively envision for this question will define life on Earth for decades to come.

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Looking for more? Check out this piece on polycrisis and metacrisis:

A world in flux. Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, rising inequality—the litany of 21st-century crises can feel overwhelming, and fast. From record-high atmospheric CO₂ levels to mass extinction trends, evidence abounds that humanity is pushing beyond the planet’s limits. Underpinning many of these challenges is an economic system that prioritizes economic growth—usually measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—as the ultimate marker of success.

In a finite world, however, the pursuit of endless exponential growth looks increasingly silly and obviously untenable. This is where Post-Growth enters the conversation. As an emerging concept in economic and ecological discourse, post-growth offers an alternative vision for progress—one that seeks to maintain human well-being and ecological balance after we’ve let go of the idea that unchecked growth is a sustainable way to live. But what does that mean in practice? Let’s get into it.

Note: you can also find the Reality Studies Post-Growth Reading List here:

In this piece you’ll learn what post-growth is, why it’s gaining traction worldwide, existing economic and political post-growth proposals, as well as how it differs from the related notion of degrowth.

Speaking of degrowth, Reality Studies has also published a degrowth primer and reading list to help you along that journey. Some of the information in this primer will overlap with that one, so if you feel like you already have a grasp on a given section, feel free to skip on to the next one.

More of a podcast person? This conversation with of is a great, accessible breakdown about the promise of post-growth on the Urgent Futures Podcast—and therefore also makes for a great entry point! Find that on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube:

What is Post-Growth?

Post-growth defined:

Post-growth is an economic theory that advocates that societies shift away from GDP growth as the primary metric for societal success, instead prioritizing well-being and sustainability, recognizing the hard limits of resource extraction and environmental impact.

Post-growth thinking begins with the idea that societies can thrive without perpetual economic expansion. Post-growth is a stance that recognizes the hard truth of the limits-to-growth dilemma, based on pathbreaking research by Donella Meadows et al. in the 1972 Club of Rome Limits to Growth.

That hard truth? Put simply: on a planet with finite resources and fragile ecosystems, neither resource-intensive economies nor populations can grow indefinitely​. The term acknowledges that economic growth does bring benefits up to a point—helping improve living standards in developing stages—but beyond a certain threshold. Some studies suggest this number is around $20k–$25k GDP per person, as cited in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (though it would probably be higher now to factor for inflation since original publication).

Such studies argue that growth in excess of this baseline GDP yields diminishing returns for human wellbeing​. In other words, once basic needs and a modest level of prosperity are secured, ever-rising GDP doesn’t necessarily make people happier or healthier; and it can even begin to undermine quality of life through environmental degradation, social stress​, and the perverse incentives of capitalist accumulation.

Rather than equating “more” with “better,” a post-growth mindset envisions progress in terms of improved well-being, equity, and sustainability. Crucially, this perspective is not anti-progress—a common misconception among critics. It doesn’t mean halting innovation or prosperity. Instead, it asks what comes after society’s addiction to growth at all costs: How can we ensure people flourish within ecological limits, once we’ve overcome the urge to endlessly increase consumption?

Proponents argue that moving beyond growth opens up positive opportunities to redefine what we value in our economy​ and in our lives. In a post-growth world, success might be measured by health, happiness, and/or community and environmental stability, rather than how rapidly we can make “number go up.”

The post-growth school of thought has close ties to ecological economics and other heterodox economic frameworks that challenge mainstream growth-oriented economics. It draws from the insight that our economy is a subsystem of the environment, bound by planetary boundaries like climate stability, land and water use, and biodiversity—and not the other way around.

As such, post-growth advocates call for fundamentally transforming our economy to respect these limits. This concept has become significant not only among economists, but also in ecological and social policy debates, as leaders and communities search for models of development that can deliver prosperity without overshooting nature’s capacity. In recent years, even high-level forums (e.g., a 2023 European Parliament conference on “Beyond Growth”) have discussed what a “post-growth future-fit” society could look like – one that combines human well-being with respect for planetary boundaries​.

The Rationale Behind Post-growth

Continuous economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), requires ever-increasing resource extraction and energy use. Yet already in 2024 the global economy has overshot several of Earth’s biophysical limits, as evidenced by:

Why pursue a post-growth approach? In a word: sustainability. A growing chorus of scientists and economists warns that pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for ecological collapse. Already, by the 2020s, the global economy has overshot multiple Earthly limits:

• Climate Change: Atmospheric CO₂ concentration are expected to reach 429.6 parts per million this year, far above the ~350 ppm level scientists deem a safe maximum for a stable climate​. Surging greenhouse gases from industrial growth are driving dangerous warming and extreme weather.

• Biodiversity Loss: Wildlife populations worldwide have plummeted by roughly 73% since 1970, largely due to habitat destruction and overexploitation, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Ecosystems are struggling to cope with the scale of human economic activity.

• Resource Depletion: Humanity’s annual material footprint (the total volume of raw materials we consume) has more than tripled since 1970—from about 27 billion to 92 billion metric tons in 2019—and is on track to double again by 2060 if current trends continue. This trajectory indicates an ever-growing extraction of minerals, timber, fossil fuels, and other resources, which is plainly unsustainable. According to a recent analysis conducted by ecologist & ecological economist William E. Rees, using Ecological Footprint Analysis, even if we assumed no further growth in the human population, “we would need the bio-capacity equivalent of three additional Earth-like planets to supply the demands of just the present population sustainably.”

Such trends illustrate “ecological overshoot,” where human demand exceeds what Earth’s natural systems can regenerate​.

Post-growth emerges as a response to this predicament. By questioning the primacy of GDP growth, it addresses the root driver of overshoot: an economy structurally compelled to expand, no matter the consequences. Post-growth advocates argue that instead of single-mindedly chasing more production and consumption, we must intentionally shift focus to well-being, equity, and environmental balance​.

In practical terms, this means embracing policies that reduce throughput (energy and resource use) to sustainable levels, while improving quality of life through means other than sheer consumption.

Beyond ecology, there is also a social rationale to post-growth. Many advanced economies have reached a point where further GDP growth is no longer translating into broad improvements in people’s lives. Issues like inequality (with wealth consolidating in the hands of a few), stagnant well-being, and even declines in indicators like mental health or trust have been observed despite rising GDP.

In the tradition of Herman Daly, some economists describe this as “uneconomic growth”—growth that creates more costs (pollution, stress, inequality) than benefits. Post-growth thinking posits that we should stop pursuing growth for growth’s sake, especially in wealthy nations, and instead pursue better outcomes directly (better health, better education, better environment), even if that means GDP growth slows or stops. It’s a call to redefine progress—a switch from prizing quantity to quality.

A Brief History of Post-Growth Thinking

The roots of post-growth thought run deep, even if the specific term “post-growth” is relatively contemporary.

• As early as the mid-19th century, classical economists like John Stuart Mill speculated about a “stationary state” economy, suggesting that after a certain point, society could attain a satisfactory condition and no longer need to grow its wealth indefinitely.

• Concerns about the limits of growth burst into popular consciousness in 1972, when the Club of Rome released The Limits to Growth, a landmark report using computer models to warn that unchecked economic and population growth would eventually exceed Earth’s carrying capacity. The next year, British economist E.F. Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful, advocating for human-scale, sustainable economics that value quality of life over endless expansion. These works, along with the emergence of ecological economics (instigated by figures like Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly), laid the intellectual groundwork for post-growth ideas by challenging the assumption that “more GDP is always better.”

• The term “post-growth” itself began to gain traction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 1996, Herman Daly’s book Beyond Growth explicitly argued that sustainable development requires moving past the growth paradigm​. By the 2000s, frustration with both environmental crises and social issues like the “growth fetish” (to borrow Australian writer Clive Hamilton’s 2003 book title) fueled new calls for a post-growth future. Another influential work was Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth, first published in 2009 and later updated, which systematically questioned the link between prosperity and GDP. Jackson demonstrated that building a ‘post-growth’ economy is indeed “a precise, definable and meaningful task,” outlining practical steps such as changing the nature of business enterprise, improving the quality of work, redirecting investment, and reforming the money system.

• In the 2010s, an organized post-growth movement began to take shape. The Post Growth Institute, an international nonprofit, formed to promote the transition to economies of wellbeing within ecological limits. Academics and activists held conferences (for example, the EU Parliament’s “Post-Growth” conference in 2018, followed by a large Beyond Growth 2023 event) to discuss policy pathways beyond GDP. Meanwhile, related frameworks like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (a coalition of countries and organizations focusing on well-being over growth) and Doughnut Economics (Kate Raworth’s model to meet human needs within planetary boundaries) gained momentum. Although the labels vary, all reflect a growing mainstream acknowledgement that the age of pure GDP growth as policy gospel is drawing to a close.

• Now well into the 2020s, post-growth has become an umbrella term for this new wave of economic thinking that seeks to chart a path to sustainable prosperity after growth.

Key Principles of Post-Growth

What do post-growth proponents actually propose? Since post-growth is more of a broad approach than one rigid doctrine, its principles are best understood as a set of shared commitments and values guiding a range of solutions. Some foundational points include:

• Embrace Planetary Limits: Acknowledge that there are ecological limits to economic and population growth, and respect those boundaries in policy and planning. This means accepting scientific realities like climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion—and recognizing we must scale our economy’s material and energy use to within sustainable levels.

• Shift Beyond GDP: Redefine what success means. Rather than treating ever-rising GDP as the chief objective, post-growth calls for switching to metrics that track human and ecological well-being. Examples include indicators like Gross National Happiness, the Happy Planet Index, genuine progress measures, or other indices that incentivize health, education, equality, and environmental stability over raw output.

• Prioritize Well-being and Equity: Build an economy that first and foremost meets everyone’s basic needs and enables people to live secure, fulfilling lives. Once fundamental needs are met, focus on improving quality of life (community, leisure, health, environment) rather than accumulating more goods. This often entails valuing care, relationships, and community—things that don’t always show up in GDP stats, but greatly enhance well-being.

• Learn from the Past, Innovate for the Future: Post-growth doesn’t imply starting from scratch. It advocates using the wisdom and technological gains of the growth era to help drive a transition to new systems (this is one area where it diverges from degrowth, which we’ll address in the next section)​. For instance, advances in renewable energy, efficiency, and healthcare achieved during the growth-centric age are invaluable assets—if repurposed toward sustainable ends. Likewise, social innovations (democracy, education, human rights) are foundations to build upon. The idea is to build on what works in our current system, while discarding or redesigning what doesn’t.

• Foster Values of Cooperation and Sufficiency: Post-growth thought favors values like community, sharing, justice, and stewardship over hyper-competitiveness and individualistic consumerism​. It encourages cooperative models (e.g., co-ops, sharing economies, open-source knowledge) and the principle of “enoughness”—satisfying needs without excess. Culturally, this involves elevating non-material sources of satisfaction. Philosopher Kate Soper, for example, advocates “alternative hedonism,” imagining a new conception of the good life focused on the joys of community, leisure, and minimal ecological impact rather than status-driven consumption.

It’s important to note that post-growth is intentionally open-ended. Unlike a strict blueprint (say, the defined limits of a steady-state economy at zero growth, or the specific target of degrowth to downsize resource use), post-growth is more of a guiding philosophy. It looks at the challenge of sustainable prosperity through a complex systems lens, recognizing that economies are intertwined with psychology, culture, technology, and ecology. Therefore, solutions will vary by context—what a post-growth transition looks like in a European city might differ from a rural community in the Global South. The unifying theme is adjusting humanity’s economic trajectory away from expansionism toward regenerative and redistributive practices.

Post-Growth vs. Degrowth (and Other Related Ideas like Green Growth)

As aforementioned, post-growth can be understood several different ways, and it overlaps with other “beyond growth” movements, so it often discussed in relation to degrowth, green growth, and similar terms. So pinpointing exactly how it differs is more of an exercise in sensemaking and clarifying ideas on a Venn diagram than it is in drawing hard boundaries, which don’t exist. In fact, in Jan. 2025, a group of leading degrowth and post-growth scholars just published a major report on post-growth in the Lancet titled, “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries.”

With that in mind, let’s clarify how post-growth might compare to similar terms, especially degrowth, while acknowledging their common ground:

• Shared Ground with Degrowth: Both post-growth and degrowth start from the premise that infinite GDP growth is neither possible nor desirable on a finite planet. Both critique the current growth-obsessed economic model and call for a transition to an economy focused on human well-being and ecological balance​. In fact, many of the end goals overlap: reducing unnecessary consumption, cutting waste and pollution, improving equality, and adopting new measures of prosperity. It’s fair to say post-growth and degrowth proponents are allies in challenging the status quo of “growth at all costs.”

• Post-Growth vs. Degrowth: Degrowth explicitly advocates for a planned downscaling of production and consumption—a deliberate reduction of the economy’s throughput—as a strategy to bring societies back within ecological limits while improving social equity. The term “degrowth” thus emphasizes the process of shrinking harmful economic activity. Post-growth, by contrast, places emphasis on the outcome or era after the end of growth. Post-growth is often sometimes regarded in this “noun” form—that is, referring to the state in which humanity has successfully transitioned away from a growth/GDP economy and toward a wellbeing economy. Under this reading, degrowth can be seen as a set of principles, practices, behaviors, and policies which might bring about a post-growth world. An example of this used in a sentence: “And no continent is better placed to benefit from a degrowth transition towards a post-growth economy than Europe.”

• Keep and Cultivate: Post-growth entails developing practices that counteract excess growth and environmental overshoot while retaining those which are already effective. In practical terms, post-growth advocates often highlight building on existing positive initiatives (e.g., expanding renewable energy, local food networks, cooperative businesses, open-source innovation) rather than solely concentrating on dismantling the old. It’s a framing that asks, “How can we nurture the good in our society to flourish within limits?”

• Narrative and Tone: Partly due to this difference in framing, post-growth is sometimes seen as a more palatable or optimistic narrative for broad audiences and policymakers. The very word “degrowth” can sound negative (conjuring decline or loss), which some believe makes it a tough sell politically​. Post-growth, on the other hand, emphasizes the positive vision—a future economy that thrives in new ways once we’ve moved past the growth paradigm​. Advocates like those at Triodos Bank deliberately use “post-growth” to foreground opportunities and a sense of purpose, rather than focusing on less or “downscaling” alone. That said, this difference is largely about messaging. Many degrowth thinkers fully acknowledge the need for a positive vision (indeed, degrowth literature often discusses improved well-being, community, and so on), and many post-growth proponents acknowledge that certain sectors must contract (for example, fossil fuel industries) as part of the transition.

• Post-growth vs. Green Growth: It’s also useful to distinguish post-growth from so-called green growth or sustainable growth. Green growth advocates believe that with innovation, efficiency, and technology, it’s possible to decouple economic growth from environmental harm—allowing GDP to keep rising even as emissions and resource use fall. Post-growth thinkers are generally skeptical of this claim. They point out that while relative decoupling (less impact per unit of GDP) is occurring, there is scant evidence of absolute decoupling on the global scale sufficient to prevent ecological crisis​. Moreover, in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, Brett Christophers makes the case that this view overlooks a vital aspect of the energy transition: that decreasing costs of renewable energy isn’t the metric we should be using to evaluate the success (or not) of the energy transition: profitability is. And while wind, solar, and other renewables have seen incredible development in the 21st century, they remain less profitable under capitalism (for a whole host of reasons that would take too long to explain here). In short, efficiency alone hasn’t been enough to offset the sheer scale of growth. Thus, post-growth argues that we likely need to ease off the “gas” with growth rather than betting everything on an eco-efficient version of business-as-usual growth. Thus, if we might think of green growth as “having our cake and eating it,” post-growth is about choosing a different cake—one that nourishes society without breaking the oven (planet) it’s baked in.

TLDR: though definitions can differ, broadly speaking degrowth is more of a rallying cry to tactically downsize the economy’s excesses, whereas post-growth is a call to envision the economy after the growth era, cultivating new norms and systems, and working toward those today.

Practical Applications and Policy Implications

One criticism of both degrowth and post-growth has been that it’s more theory than practice—more of an academic study than real-world policy generator. There is some truth to this critique, but it overlooks many of the key proposals that have been made—and in some cases have already been implemented.

Here are some ways it’s being put into practice or at least has been seriously explored:

• New Economic Metrics: Shifting the focus beyond GDP has policy implications for how governments plan their budgets and priorities. A number of countries and regions are adopting alternative metrics of success. For example, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) index famously guides its development decisions, prioritizing citizens’ well-being over output. New Zealand launched a Wellbeing Budget in 2019, explicitly directing government spending toward improving social and environmental outcomes. Similarly, countries like Scotland, Iceland, and Wales are part of a Wellbeing Economy Alliance that shares post-growth-aligned goals of prioritizing health, education, and ecology in governance. These efforts represent first steps toward restructuring policy around quality of life indicators rather than chasing GDP growth for its own sake.

• City and Regional Initiatives: Cities have become laboratories for post-growth frameworks. A prominent example is the adoption of Raworth’s Doughnut Economics by cities such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen and Glasgow​. The Doughnut model provides a tool to ensure social well-being while not exceeding ecological ceilings—essentially a roadmap for a post-growth city. Amsterdam, for instance, has used the doughnut to shape policies on housing, food, and consumer goods, aiming to provide a good life for residents within a fair share of Earth's resources. Other municipalities focus on concepts like the Wellbeing Economy (choosing terminology that resonates locally​). Notably, very few if any governments use the term “degrowth” officially—they often prefer the post-growth lexicon when implementing similar ideas in practice​. This underscores how important framing is: prosperity and well-being are easier to champion publicly than "less growth," even if the underlying changes might align with degrowth’s goals.

• Corporate and Business Innovation: Post-growth implies reimagining the role and structure of businesses in our economy. One idea gaining attention is steward-owned companies (or similar models of ownership and governance) that move away from the traditional shareholder-profit maximizing model. In steward-owned firms, profits and growth are not the overriding objectives; instead, the company’s mission and long-term wellbeing guide decision-making​. Profit is treated as a means to an end (to sustain the enterprise and its purpose), rather than the end itself. This can remove the pressure for endless expansion. Some businesses, for example, cap their returns or reinvest most profits into social/environmental goals – aligning with post-growth principles. We’re also seeing growth in social enterprises, cooperatives, and B-corporations that pursue triple-bottom-line outcomes (people, planet, profit) instead of pure growth. Post-growth advocates encourage these models as they inherently aim to provide value to society without requiring constant exponential scaling, though there have been criticisms of all of the above in practice.

• Tax and Fiscal Reform: If an economy doesn’t rely on growth, government finances need rethinking. One proposal is to redesign tax systems to be less dependent on taxing income or transactions that presume ever-growing volumes. Instead, more revenue could come from wealth taxes, environmental taxes (like carbon taxes), and taxes on resource use or pollution​. Drawing from the notion of a “vice tax,” taxing “bads” (pollution, depletion, extreme wealth concentrations) rather than “goods” (like labor or basic commerce), governments can both incentivize sustainable behavior and secure funds without requiring a growing tax base. Broadening the tax base in this way could make public budgets more resilient in a low-growth or no-growth scenario. Some economists also discuss reforms such as sovereign money or central bank financing for public investment, to reduce the reliance on private debt-fueled growth for economic stability.

• Circular and Localized Economies: A key application of post-growth thinking is advancing the circular economy—where products are designed to be reused, repaired, shared, or recycled, thereby reducing the need for new resource extraction. This aligns perfectly with “beyond growth” goals: instead of selling ever more products, businesses in a circular model provide services or durable goods that meet needs with minimal new throughput. Rather than everyone buying and owning a power drill that sits unused most of the time, for example, tools can be shared in a community library, meaning fewer drills need to be produced overall​. Sharing economies (in the true community sense, not just corporate ride-shares) and local production for local needs (like local food cooperatives, repair cafes, makerspaces) are practical manifestations of post-growth values. They shorten supply chains, reduce transport emissions, and build community resilience—all while decreasing the pressure for constant new production.

• Redefining “Progress” in Innovation: In a post-growth framework, innovation doesn’t stop—it’s redirected. For example, technological and social innovation would aim to improve quality and efficiency of services, not to increase consumption. The focus could be on healthcare advances, renewable energy, conservation technology, education, public transit—innovations that enhance human well-being or reduce our ecological footprint, rather than those that simply drive corporate profits or spur new consumer cravings. This also includes revitalizing low-tech or traditional solutions that were undervalued in the growth era (like organic farming, passive building design, or community caregiving networks) where they prove effective. In summary, post-growth policy encourages “innovation for sufficiency”—doing better with less. In this way, it also dovetails with cyborg approaches to tech.

It’s worth highlighting that some financial institutions and businesses are already exploring these ideas. For instance, Triodos Bank explicitly integrates post-growth thinking: it avoids financing polluting or socially harmful industries, questions whether each investment is “really necessary” for well-being, and supports projects in renewable energy, social housing, and the arts that contribute to a rich life without high resource use. Such examples illustrate that post-growth is not about ending enterprise or creativity—it’s about redirecting human talent and capital toward truly sustainable prosperity.

Challenges and Critiques

Moving to a post-growth system is of course a formidable challenge. Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that capitalism’s “power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”​

But to realize such systems change, post-growth must address key challenges and critiques:

• Political and Social Viability: Perhaps the greatest challenge is that modern societies—especially in wealthier nations—are deeply conditioned to expect continual growth. Politicians win points for delivering GDP increases; companies are rewarded for quarterly growth; citizens equate growth with opportunity. Proposing to abandon that is liable to sound like heresy. Detractors argue that voters in rich countries would never accept policies that might slow growth or reduce material standards of living. There’s also the global justice concern: critics like economist Branko Milanović have pointed out that if rich countries contract their economies, they must be careful not to impose stagnation on poorer countries that still legitimately need growth to lift people out of poverty​. Post-growth advocates respond that their aim is not to make everyone poorer—rather, it’s to rebalance resources (downsize excess in rich areas, allow necessary growth where needed, and overall focus on well-being). But achieving international equity in a post-growth transition would indeed require unprecedented cooperation and trust. This raises a related criticism: coordinating a global shift beyond growth might demand more economic planning and governance capacity than we currently have, especially with far-right, authoritarian nationalist movements on the rise around the world.

• Economic Stability and Jobs: Our financial and economic systems are structurally built for growth. Companies borrow money expecting future growth to pay back loans, pensions and investments assume growing returns, governments rely on a growing tax base to service public debt, and so on. Detractors ask, how do we avoid financial crises or government insolvency in a post-growth scenario? There’s a similar fear of unemployment: if the economy doesn’t grow, will there be enough jobs? Transitioning to a post-growth economy likely requires redesigning financial systems (perhaps moving away from debt-driven money creation) and implementing robust social policies—such as job guarantees, shorter work weeks, or universal basic income (gasp)—to maintain full employment and social stability even if output doesn’t rise. These ideas exist (and some have been tested on smaller scales), but skeptics are unconvinced that we can overhaul the machine without it breaking down. Post-growth economists like Tim Jackson acknowledge these are serious issues, which is why they detail changes needed in investment, work patterns, and money supply to ensure a stable transition​. Nonetheless, the risk of disruption is a major challenge to navigate.

• Clarity and Cohesion of the Movement: Even supporters of the general idea sometimes critique “post-growth” as being too vague. Because it’s an umbrella term covering various approaches (sustainability, degrowth, steady-state, etc.), it can lack a single concrete policy agenda. Urban planning scholar Federico Savini called post-growth a “toothless word”—useful to counter the growth narrative, but not very specific on what to do next​. Indeed, in public discussions, terms like sustainable development, degrowth, post-growth, circular economy, and Green New Deal often get muddled, which can lead to confusion or diluted action​. Without a clear message, critics worry the movement could struggle to build popular support. Post-growth proponents are aware of this and often strive to clarify that post-growth doesn’t mean zero change or utopian stagnation, but rather intentional improvement of different kind. Still, the communication challenge is real: how to convey to the average person what a post-growth society looks like and why it’s attractive. Framing it positively—as more of the things that truly matter, less of the pointless stuff—is one tactic, but the narrative battle against decades of pro-growth ideology is an uphill one. Another response might be aligning with popular features or policy proposals of a post-growth agenda without using the word itself.

• Techno-Optimism vs. Sufficiency: Some economists argue that abandoning growth might be premature or unnecessary if technological innovation (think advanced clean energy, carbon capture, efficient recycling, even future tech like fusion power) could solve environmental constraints. They caution that a post-growth turn could curtail investment in innovations that, in time, might allow both prosperity and sustainability. Post-growth advocates counter that banking on miraculous tech while continuing business-as-usual is extremely risky—and that plenty of innovation can happen within a post-growth agenda, just oriented toward different goals. Nonetheless, this debate between those favoring a tech-driven “green growth” solution and those favoring systemic change is ongoing. It’s a philosophical divide: do we bet on human ingenuity to accommodate infinite growth, or do we redesign our aspirations to fit within hard limits? In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Wim Carton and Andreas Malm detail how belief in technological interventions has only fostered a culture of intensifying climate change—allowing for increasing fossil fuel consumption predicated on the belief of future “solutions”:

Despite these challenges, the post-growth discourse is steadily moving from the fringes into more mainstream venues, indicating that many people intuitively sense the current model is indeed destroying our collective home. Critics may label it idealistic, but proponents argue that clinging to an infinite growth paradigm in the face of ecological reality is vastly more unrealistic.

As environmentalist Donella Meadows famously noted decades ago, “Growth forever is not possible; the only question is, by design or by disaster.” Post-growth advocates are trying to ensure it’s by design—a managed transition to a new paradigm—rather than a chaotic collapse forced by nature. calls this . We will either ramp into “simpler” lives or blindly crash our way into them. If you want to go deeper on contemporary questions associated with post-growth, I can’t think of a better thing to do than subscribe to that podcast and listen to every episode.

Post-Growth: Imagining Sustainable Prosperity

In practical terms, a post-growth future might feature communities with shorter work weeks and more time for family, culture, and leisure; cities designed for people and nature rather than endless traffic; economies where innovation serves public good and sustainability, not just profit; and societies that measure success by the health of their people and their environment. It’s an inspiring vision, but also a necessary one, given the blaring warnings from scientists about our current trajectory.

Of course, realizing this vision will not be easy—it requires imagination, political will, and collective effort on a global scale. But the conversation has begun. As these ideas spread, they are influencing policy debates.

In the end, post-growth is about hope—the hopeful idea that humanity can chart a new course where we flourish within Earth’s ecological limits instead of racing past them (or throwing our hands up and trying to colonize Mars). It asks us to re-envision prosperity not as a line that goes up forever, but as a thriving circle that sustains and regenerates. Whether one calls it post-growth, beyond growth, or just common sense for a finite planet, the essence is the same: it’s time to write a new story about what economic success means.

Further Reading

I hope this article piqued your interest about post-growth, but there’s so much more to learn about the subject.

Find my post-growth reading list here. If you’d like to learn more about the adjacent concept of degrowth, find my degrowth reading list here.

I cover post-growth, degrowth, and other related topics on the Urgent Futures Podcast, so if you want to stay up-to-date, be sure to subscribe to the show on Substack | Youtube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify.

Last year I published a degrowth primer and reading list. I’d meant to publish my corresponding post-growth primer and reading list shortly thereafter, but it turns out good research takes time! Go figure.

I’m happy to report that at last they are both done and ready to be out in the world. Today I’m excited to present the official Reality Studies Post-Growth Reading List. (The post-growth primer drops Thursday—tell your friends!)

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of worthy reads that will help you get your arms around post-growth economics, as well as adjacent ideas that might also inform your thinking.

Note: I’m not going to be repeating the titles I published last in my degrowth reading list, for what I hope are obvious reasons, but there is a ton of overlap between the two. I encourage you to check those out as well if you’re looking to build out your alternative economics library.

9 Books to Understand the Post-Growth Movement

As with the degrowth reading list, this reading list has an intentional recency bias—obviously texts like Limits to Growth, Beyond Growth, Farewell to Growth, Small Is Beautiful, are foundational, and I do recommend those if you have the time and inclination. These texts certainly “hold up”—there are plenty of ways that the ideas in both LtG, BG, and FtG track precisely with contemporary degrowth/post-growth ideas and arguments. That said, the texts below recap the primary arguments and information, with the added benefit of reacting to events that took place during the many years following their publication.

One reading that is not a book, but is absolutely required reading, is the Jan. 2025 “Post-growth: the science of wellbeing within planetary boundaries,” a review published in The Lancet by some of the leading minds in degrowth/post-growth.

Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021)

Prosperity Without Growth is considered a defining text in the contemporary post-growth movement (more on that below). In this thorough, excellent followup, author Tim Jackson further explores pathways beyond capitalism, envisioning an economy that transcends the growth imperative and fosters human flourishing within ecological limits.

📖 Available here.

Post-Growth Living, Kate Soper (Verso Books, 2020)

One major critique leveled at post-growth and degrowth is that they don’t inspire progressive visions of the future; they give the sense of “stifling” or constraining the good life. Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living offers a powerful counter in the form of “alternative hedonism,” a new conception of pleasure focused on the joys of community, leisure, and minimal ecological impact rather than status-driven consumption. As someone trained in writing, storytelling, and communications, I love this reframing—which emphasizes how a shift in values can actually lead to a more fulfilling life, one that de facto embodies post-growth philosophies.

📖 Available here.

Post-growth Economics and Society: Exploring the Paths of a Social and Ecological Transition, Isabelle Cassiers, Kevin Maréchal, and Dominique Méda (Routledge, 2017)

This collaborative work examines the possibilities of transitioning to a post-growth society, focusing on social and ecological aspects, in more of a textbook format. The authors analyze current economic systems and propose alternatives that prioritize sustainability and social wellbeing.​ This book is for folks seeking rigorous academic research paired with practical proposals, whether coming to the subject for the first time or looking to deepen existing understandings.

📖 Available here.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Richard Heinberg (New Society Publishers, 2011)

The End of Growth builds on some of the arguments Richard Heinberg laid out about in Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (New Society Publishers, 2007)—namely that, counter to the explosive productivity of the 20th century, the 21st century had reached peak productivity and is now slowing down in the face of biophysical limits. Here, Heinberg discusses the limitations of continuous economic growth in the context of finite natural resources. He argues that society must adapt to a new economic reality where growth is no longer possible and explores strategies for achieving sustainability.​

📖 Available here.

Prosperity Without Growth, Tim Jackson (Routledge, 2009)

While I would normally try to avoid including two books by one author, Prosperity Without Growth is such a vital text in the development of contemporary post-growth ideas—arguing for redefinition of prosperity that prioritizes human wellbeing and ecological sustainability—that I’d also be remiss not to include it. Plus, it was “substantially revised and re-written” for its second edition in 2016, contemporizing an already landmark text known for demonstrating “that building a ‘post-growth’ economy is a precise, definable and meaningful task.”

📖 Available here.

Growth Fetish, Clive Hamilton (Pluto Press, 2004)

Perhaps the most provocatively titled book listed here, Growth Fetish focuses on the political, social, and ethical dimensions of the growth imperative. Clive Hamilton critiques the modern obsession with economic growth, arguing that it does not necessarily lead to increased happiness or wellbeing. He suggests that this ‘growth fetish’ contributes to environmental degradation, social inequality, and unhappiness—and proposes a politics of change for rich countries to navigate away from this unfulfilling way of being.

📖 Available here.

Adjacent Works

Post-growth lives within a “movement of movements,” overlapping with many different proposals and theories. The following books don’t center post-growth outright, but invoke necessary ideas in evaluating and expanding the concept.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Scribner, 2024)

Robin Wall Kimmerer explores “the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy” through the lens of Indigenous wisdom and ecological science. She advocates for a shift from the contemporary consumption-based economy to one that values reciprocity, community, and the gifts of the natural world, drawing on the serviceberry (also known as the juneberry or saskatoon berry) to “show us another model…where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” Gift economies rehumanize the exchange process, and draw us back into community with each other, away from the inherent alienation late capitalism creates. In the same vein as “alternative hedonism,” local (or distant) gift economies make for quietly radical disruptions to the consumerist status quo.

📖 Available here.

The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet, Brett Christophers (Verso Books, 2024)

Brett Christophers critiques the capitalist approach to environmental issues, i.e., so-called “green growth,” arguing that market-based solutions are insufficient to address the ecological crisis. Historically, many advocates of so-called renewable energy sources like solar and wind have pointed to the need for price to come down to compete with fossil fuels—but we’ve now reached a point where there is price parity, and humanity is burning fossil fuels at record pace. What gives? Christophers argues that we’re looking at the issue all wrong. Price is not the right way to evaluate the success of the energy transition—profitability is. And because of a whole host of factors he describes in close (but accessible) detail, renewables are still not nearly as profitable as fossil fuels, and perhaps never could be. Understanding why there may be incompatibility between renewables rollout and capitalism—given the role such energy sources play in any post-growth conception—this book is a must-read.

📖 Available here.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy, Stephanie Kelton (PublicAffairs, 2020)

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is another heterodox macroeconomic theory that argues government spending is not “revenue-constrained,” and can finance debts by creating money—a proposal with its fair share of criticisms and detractors. Still, MMT offers tools for funding policies that would support a transition toward a post-growth economy. Kelton is a leading proponent of MMT, and her recent book is a great starting point to understanding the theory’s basic claims.

📖 Available here.

Further Reading

I can’t help myself! A few other books that will deepen your understandings of (and appreciation for) the post-growth movement:

• Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm & Wim Carton (Verso Books, 2024)

• Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown, Mathew Lawrence & Laurie Laybourn-Leighton (Verso Books, 2021)

• How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050, Jennifer Hinton & Donnie Maclurcan (Post Growth Publishing, 2016/19)

• Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology, Vandana Shiva (North Atlantic Books, 2015)

• Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America, Glenn Hubbard & Tim Kane (Simon & Schuster, 2013)

• The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009)

And…if you made it this far, I’m rewarding you with a snapshot of a few of the books recommended in my Degrowth Reading List:

• Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel (Penguin Random House, 2020)

• Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito (Astra House, 2024)

• Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis (Melville House, 2024)

• Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Kate Raworth (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)

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🚨 SPOILER ALERT: This post contains Game of Thrones spoilers. Skip the middle section (designated) if you want to get the idea with minimal spoilers.

Depictions of superheroes have become so ubiquitous that even Marvel has recently felt the pressure to switch up its tried-and-trusty formula. But whatever hiccups the Disney juggernaut might be experiencing, the framing of uniquely gifted heroes with good hearts and lovable flaws still dominates in Western media. In this article, I’m not going to argue you shouldn’t watch Marvel movies. I’m going to argue that a hero archetype better suited to the polycrisis is Hodor from Game of Thrones.

Until Season 6 of the show, Hodor exists as a lovable giant who protects Bran Stark—and later Meera and Jojen Reed—with the tic that he can only utter one word: “hodor.” Actor Kristian Nairn elevates this from one-note comic relief by varying his delivery of the word depending on circumstance, revealing Hodor has a richer interior life than his limited vocabulary might imply. (Note: I’ll be focusing on the Hodor of the show in this piece, though the gist holds even if you’ve only read the books).

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SPOILERS BELOW THIS LINE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since it’s been a few years—and you’re probably more focused on Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower these days—a quick refresh on Hodor:

That his name is Hodor and he only says “hodor” goes unexplained until episode 5 of season 6, titled “The Door.” In it, we learn that this is a consequence of a supernatural event in which Bran is ‘warging’ into (entering the mind of) Hodor in the past while, in the present, wights (the reanimated undead created by the White Walkers) are closing in on Bran, Meera, and Hodor. In the moment of heightened danger, Bran blurs the realities of the past and present. Meera screams at Hodor (in the present) to “hold the door” to protect Bran by giving him and Meera time to escape. This call penetrates into the world of the past, in which Hodor (then known as Wylis and able to speak normatively) suffers a sort of seizure, falling to the ground in convulsions while repeating “hold the door, hold the door, hold the door,” until they converge into the contracted “hodor,” thus revealing how Wylis becomes Hodor.

Simultaneously, present-tense Hodor succeeds in holding the door against the wights, sacrificing himself to what we now realize is/was his life purpose. As Bran will later become king of Westeros, this is no insignificant feat.

Game of Thrones is full of heroes and villains and every shade in-between. As with all great fiction, the aspirational or cautionary aspects of the characters’ actions/arcs offer different insights depending on who is experiencing them—and when. Obviously the closing of Hodor’s character arc was poignant when I first saw it, but that was May 2016 and the world was quite different—hell, the notion of a “President” Trump felt preposterous. 8 years later I find myself returning less to the flashier characters in GoT and more to the metaphorical heft of Hodor.

Now more than ever, we need heroes like Hodor; heroes who aren’t plucky or glorious, but will hold the door for as long as possible, even in the face of making the ultimate sacrifice and never personally seeing the outcome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SPOILER-FREE BELOW~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Check out a recent episode of the Urgent Futures Podcast with scientist/mycologist Danielle Stevenson, where we talk about the ins and outs of mycoremediation, the politics of pollution, and more:

Why do I think Hodor should a prevailing hero archetype for us right now? Because we face a daunting, multifaceted polycrisis—the term to describe the many different but interconnected crises that pose major, even existential risks to humanity’s survival. Among these are global heating, catastrophic weather events, pollution, social inequality, systemic oppression, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, microplastics in everything, the threat of nuclear exchange, food deserts, increasing energy costs, brittle public infrastructure, attacks on queer and trans people, attacks on body sovereignty, rising authoritarianism, fragile supply chains, consolidating resources and power among the ultrawealthy, information echo chambers…the list goes on. None of these are problems with quick fixes. With some of them, even if we were to magically stop every associated harmful behavior today and enact rapid change, they still wouldn’t be “solved” in any of our lifetimes.

Our principle aim for the moment, then, ought to be mitigation. This might sound defeatist but I don’t mean it that way—every extra bit we do counts. If we want a chance of maintaining and regenerating a livable Earth for humans (and the countless other earthlings whose fate is inextricably tangled in our actions), it is imperative that we mitigate the speed and scale of the crises however we can, with the intention of mitigating as much suffering as possible.

Mitigation doesn’t often deliver quick wins, flashy headlines, or oodles of cash. You can’t track it in the language of quarterly returns. It’s a slog. And we probably won’t even see our efforts culminate in their intended outcome. In these cases, the question is no longer, “Can we fix [insert: breaking system] or return it to normal?” but rather, “Can we buy enough time to develop critical interventions and mitigate as much suffering as possible?” By doing so, we buy more time for future generations to subsequently buy more time, such that over the course of generations we begin to regenerate a healthy, livable planet and human societies under whatever the respective conditions happen to be.

In a recent episode of The Great Simplification, solar oven expert Luther Krueger describes “Goldilocks technology,” that is, technology that can be developed with basic or reused materials and require minimal energy to run (such as solar ovens). Developing and using Goldilocks tech is one example of Hodor heroism in action.

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I also contend that the concept of “holding the door” offers a decisionmaking framework regarding choices that involve Band-Aid fixes, or require us to hold our noses and accept a suboptimal outcome rather than expressing ourselves fully, or driving for the most satisfying outcome. I’ll have more to say on this particular point in a future piece.

This can obviously take many forms, and for those who currently have the luxury of abundance, it’s a cri de cœur: use your outsized ability to hold the door. Humanity won’t solve any problems right away, and many solutions will prove to have their own externalities which then need to be addressed (set, repeat). The path to healing and regeneration is inevitably a thorny one. We’ll need as much time and space to develop ideas as we can possibly get. The narratives and heroes we champion are one piece in a larger puzzle of maintaining livable habitats for ourselves on this planet, but they matter—so let’s celebrate the Hodors. For my part, you’ll be seeing a lot more of them on Reality Studies and Urgent Futures in the weeks and months to come, so stay tuned!

Subscribe to the Urgent Futures podcast on YouTube. Here’s the latest episode with polymath artist-researchers Eryk Salvaggio and Caroline Sinders:

The consolidation of wealth among the 1%. Resource depletion. Pollution. Soil desertification. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. Drought. Volatile weather and extreme weather events. Microplastics in everything. Supply chain breakdowns. The vanishing of the middle class. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of crises humanity faces, seemingly too varied for us to do anything about before time’s up (see my explainer on polycrisis and metacrisis for more on this).

Underlying all of them, though, is a global economic system that incentivizes specific narratives and metrics by which we assign value. Under the current iteration of capitalism (which Yanis Varoufakis argues isn’t even capitalism anymore, but “technofeudalism”), growth and competition are primary values, structurally superseding others. This is why the highest “good” a startup can achieve is exponential growth—to grow 10-100x in market capitalization. Yet we live on a finite planet with finite resources; it’s absurd to expect endless exponential growth forever.

What if there were an alternative to late capitalism/technofeudalism? One leading economic framework, “degrowth economics,” has gained traction among economists, alongside a growing body of other professionals and enthusiasts. Though its roots date back decades (even centuries, if you count the work of Thomas Malthus), the subject has received a surge of renewed interest following the recent (re)publication of Kohei Saito’s polemic Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto and Daniel Susskind’s Growth: A History and a Reckoning.

What is Degrowth?

Economic anthropologist and degrowth figurehead Jason Hickel describes degrowth as “a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”1

To bring humanity back within (or closer to) planetary boundaries, degrowth economics foregrounds the need to systemically downsize production and consumption through the implementation of key practices and strategies, which are outlined below.

For now, a simple degrowth movement definition:

The degrowth movement emphasizes the need for new narratives and principles about progress, a shift away from growth and productivity as the primary indicators of economic success toward factors like wellbeing and equity, and the implementation of new practices that transition systems away from modes of overconsumption and overshoot.

In academic circles, degrowth economics is regarded as a left-leaning economic philosophy that draws from Marxian economics. But given the broader degrowth movement’s spread across fields of study and national borders, it is now represented by a wider range of schools of thought and political philosophies.

The Rationale Behind Degrowth

Continuous economic growth, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), requires ever-increasing resource extraction and energy use. Yet already in 2024 the global economy has overshot several of Earth’s biophysical limits, as evidenced by:

• CO₂ levels far exceeding the proposed safe limit of 350 ppm for climate stability, with a recent NOAA report finding May 2024 reached 427.6 ppm.2

• Global wildlife populations declining by 69% since 1970 due to habitat loss and overexploitation.3

• Global material footprint climbing from 27B metric tons in 1970 to 92B in 2019, with current projections indicating that number will double again by 2060.4

“Ecological overshoot” refers to when human demand exceeds the regenerative capacity of natural ecosystems. By prioritizing growth, and therefore continued (and increasing) resource extraction, the current economic system risks overshoot across many different categories and scales.

Degrowth proponents argue this overshoot trajectory is fundamentally unsustainable. Thus, rather than humanity pursuing more growth—or even maintaining current levels of growth—they advocate intentionally ramping growth down as fast as possible to facilitate a transition away from an economic system based on increasing GDP and toward one that prioritizes wellbeing, social equity, and living within ecological limits.

The History of Degrowth

In 1972, French theorist André Gorz coined the term “degrowth” (“décroissance” in the original French) during a debate organized by the Nouvel Observateur, saying, “Is the earth’s balance, for which no-growth—or even degrowth—of material production is a necessary condition, compatible with the survival of the capitalist system?”5

This directly followed the publication of The Limits to Growth, a groundbreaking report by a group of 17 MIT researchers led by Donella Meadows, commissioned by the Club of Rome. The report demonstrated that continued unchecked population and economic growth would eventually surpass the planet's capacity.

After several other mentions throughout the 1970s, the term went mostly dormant until 2002, when the French magazine Silence published a special issue titled “Decroissance soutenable et conviviale” (sustainable and convivial degrowth). This reignited interest in the term in France, notably through the work of French economist and philosopher Serge Latouche, who published Farewell to Growth in 2007. 2008 saw the first “International Degrowth Conference on Ecological Sustainability and Social Justice” in Paris, from which it spread to the rest of Europe and the world.

More recently, scholars have taken up the task of analyzing and in some cases critiquing degrowth through the lenses of decolonization (Jamie Tyberg), feminism (Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk), Marxism (John Bellamy Foster), and more.

Degrowth Communism, Explained

In fact, part of the renewed interest in degrowth in the 2020s stems from Kohei Saito’s concept of “degrowth communism.” First proposed in Marx in the Anthropocene (2020), and reiterated in the English translation Slow Down (2024), degrowth communism draws its notion of communism from Marx’s recently rediscovered ecological notebooks, which Saito claims (building on earlier arguments by John Bellamy Foster) reveal Marx critiquing both capitalism and economic growth—that in fact he not only advocated for communism but for degrowth as well.

Degrowth communism not only advocates for ramping down economic growth, but establishing models for collective ownership models and equitable distribution of resources. The idea is highly contentious, and has been met with both zealous interest—with Marx in the Anthropocene selling 500,000+ copies—and intense skepticism, even among leftists.

Principles of Degrowth Economics

Degrowth economics advocates theorize a “steady-state economy” in which economic activities do not surpass ecological limits, as with the current overshoot we’re experiencing across a range of different resources and industries.

Though there are many debates throughout the degrowth movement about core values, priorities, and strategies, some simplified principles of degrowth economics might include:

1. Ecological Balance & Sustainable Consumption. The current growth-centric model has led to widespread ecological degradation and resource depletion. Degrowth economics seeks to reimagine and implement systems that restore ecological balance by promoting sustainable practices and living within the means of the planet, such as the circular economy.

2. Social Equity. Traditional growth-driven economies often exacerbate social inequalities, leaving marginalized communities behind. Degrowth economics challenges this status quo by redistributing resources and fostering greater social cohesion. This also applies geopolitically, with nations working together to distribute resources more equitably to fight poverty and inequality, especially among richer nations.

3. Resilience and Adaptation. A degrowth approach enhances societal resilience by reducing dependency on fragile global supply chains and promoting local self-sufficiency. This resilience can better equip communities to adapt to shocks and uncertainties, such as climate change and global pandemics. This means localizing economic activity and increasing community self-reliance to reduce transport emissions and vulnerability.

4. Human Wellbeing. By prioritizing wellbeing over material wealth, degrowth economics encourages people to focus on what truly matters in life—health, community, and meaningful relationships. Advocates argue that this shift can lead to a happier and more fulfilling existence. This means prioritizing quality-of-life vs. growth indicators such as health, education, and life satisfaction vs. increasing GDP. This also entails reducing expected or baseline working hours and redistributing employment to improve work-life balance and share prosperity.

Degrowth Transition Efforts

While still marginalized, the degrowth movement has spurred initiatives aligned with its ethos:

• The European Union's Circular Economy Action Plan aims to double circular material use rates by 2030.6

• Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales have implemented Wellbeing Economy frameworks centered on societal flourishing over GDP, with Scotland emerging as arguably the most advanced.7

• Community-led ‘Transition Towns’ across 50 countries (as of 2019) have emerged to promote local resilience through urban farming, renewable energy, etc.8

Degrowth vs. Ecological Economics, Ecosocialism, Green Growth, and Post-growth

Degrowth shares many features in common with other theories, including the aforementioned circular economy and steady-state economics, as well as ecological economics, ecosocialism, green growth, and post-growth. It is important to note that these are not mutually exclusive categories, but live within a “movement of movements”—and moreover that different practitioners will have different ideas about how exactly each term ought to be understand. Based on my research, I differentiate them as follows:

Degrowth vs. Ecological Economics

Ecological Economics is an interdisciplinary field of economics that addresses the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecologies, of which degrowth is one school of thought.

Degrowth vs. Ecosocialism

Ecosocialism is also arguably a broader field than degrowth. First proposed in 1980, Ecosocialism focuses on the abandonment of capitalism, combining ideas of ecology and socialism, resulting in a society without class hierarchies and wealth disparities—and one that is more balanced with the environment.9 Where it rubs up against degrowth is that proponents of ecosocialsm “[reject] the dualistic frame of growth versus degrowth, development versus anti-development,” because they see these binaries as quantitative rather than qualitative conceptions of change.10 A 2021 review of Jason Hickel’s Less is More proposed a more conciliatory approach, arguing that “Ecosocialism is the horizon, degrowth is the way.”11

Degrowth vs. Green Growth

Green Growth is another proposed economic philosophy, whose advocates hold that through new technologies and sustainable forms of development, GDP growth is still possible alongside shifts in consumption.12 They emphasize decoupling GDP from carbon emissions, reducing the environmental impact associated with each unit (i.e., dollar) of GDP. Green growthers tend to be more optimistic about human ingenuity and the future, and emphasize policy shifts as solutions. In a recent literature review, authors Max Polewsky, Stephan Hankammer, Robin Kleer, and David Antons evaluated how scholarship in Green Growth differed from Degrowth.13 They write:

Using a comparative analysis of the two research fields, we confirm several findings from previous reviews, including that Green Growth research is highly policy oriented, focuses on practical implementation and builds on empirical research methods, while Degrowth research is highly theory-driven, focuses on the analysis of complex human-nature interrelationships and builds on a sound theoretical and conceptual foundation.

Hickel and economist Giorgos Kallis, another prominent degrowther, have expressed skepticism of green growth (to put it mildly), claiming “it is not a thing.”14

Degrowth vs. Post-growth

Post-growth is used in two different ways. First, post-growth differs from degrowth by simultaneously developing practices that counteract growth and overshoot while retaining those which are already effective (i.e., advocates seek to not inadvertently throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater). In this way Post-growth might be seen as sitting to the (economic) left of Green Growth but to the right of degrowth. Advocates of post-growth view problems through the lens of systems thinking, and aim to promote, link, and expand existing ideas, technologies, systems, initiatives, and actions. Philosopher Kate Soper, for example, proposed the notion of “alternative hedonism” to imagine a new vision of the “good life” that recircuits hedonism away from consumerism and toward the joys of being.

Post-growth is also sometimes regarded in its “noun” form—that is, referring to the state in which humanity has successfully transitioned away from a growth economy and toward a wellbeing economy. Under this reading, degrowth can be seen as a set of principles, practices, behaviors, and policies which might bring about a post-growth world. An example of this used in a sentence: “And no continent is better placed to benefit from a degrowth transition towards a post-growth economy than Europe.”15

Degrowth’s Critiques and Challenges

Degrowth does not lack for critics, nor for challenges to adoption.

In “Degrowth: We can't let it happen here!” Economist summarizes three of the primary challenges facing degrowth economics by paraphrasing others’ arguments, writing:

• “[Ezra] Klein pointed out that major reductions in living standards would be politically unacceptable in rich countries.

• [Branko] Milanovic showed that meaningful global degrowth would have to go beyond rich countries; it would have to stop poor countries from escaping poverty, which would be both politically untenable and morally wrong.

• [Kelsey] Piper noted that coordinated global degrowth would take much more economic central planning than we’re actually able to do.”

Beyond the concerns about the impacts of degrowth employment, economic stability, international relations, and current models of governance are echoed, Smith goes on to deride degrowth as more of an activist agenda than rigorous field of study, with leading figures making unsubstantiated claims outside of their fields of study and promoting in-group jargon. He writes that they create “an alternative sphere of knowledge populated almost entirely by their own people … who are admitted to the club based on their shared acceptance of degrowth’s foregone conclusions.”

As a writer, a less esoteric and more practical challenge I see facing degrowth is that while the ideas are appealing, the language is not. “Growth” isn’t a term exclusive to the economy. Growth also refers to maturation and thriving, ranging from individual growth to growth in relationships to the growth of communities. With this view in mind, the first impression of the word “degrowth” insinuates a ramping down toward death or reversing a positive action. As trivial as this may seem, I actually see it as a major obstacle to the adoption of the idea at mass-scale. This is one reason I’m biased toward post-growth (but more on that in a future piece!).

Understanding the tension between the ideals of degrowth and the shape of its challenges comes down to two famous quotes:

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” —Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.

and

“[The] power [of capitalism] seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” —Ursula K. Le Guin.

Contemporary capitalism (or Technofeudalism) feels more overwhelming by the day—as inescapable as the ground beneath our feet, the air in our lungs. Seeking to dismantle such power, or to even make incursions into it, can feel like a fool’s errand.

For all the perceived flaws in the degrowth movement, and the challenges degrowth strategies will face in public adoption, its continued magnetism lies in the fervent, underlying belief that it is still worthwhile to fight, that perhaps there is a critical mass of people willing to fight for a new value system.

In Slow Down, Kohei Saito writes that Degrowth’s critics—who in this case also include those who can’t imagine the end of capitalism—suffer from “a poverty of imagination that simply accepts the status quo as unchangeable.”

One way of thinking about degrowth is as a vector rather than as an end state, the “radical flank” of alternative economics which busts open our collective thinking about how prosocial, liberatory systems could actually develop. Yes, it’s worth taking degrowth proposals seriously—whether that’s to put them to the test as real-world policy or identify their shortcomings and demand better—but most of all we can view the degrowth movement as an invitation to imagine otherwise and build solidarity toward futures where Earth is still habitable for human beings.

In fact, this is exactly what Serge Latouche outlined all the way back in 2007:

“To begin with, ‘de-growth’ is… no more than a banner that can rally those who have made a radical critique of development, and who want to outline the contours of an alternative project for a post-development politics. Its goal is to build a society in which we can live better lives whilst working less and consuming less. It is an essential proposition if we are to open up a space for the inventiveness and creativity of the imagination, which has been blocked by economistic, developmentalist, and progressive totalitarianism.”

Further Reading

I hope this article piqued your interest about degrowth, but there’s so much more to learn about the subject. Find a degrowth reading list here.

So you want to learn more about the degrowth movement? What follows is a non-exhaustive list of worthy reads that will help you get your arms around degrowth economics, as well as adjacent ideas that might also inform your thinking.

Before anyone takes to the comments with pitchforks: this list does have an intentional recency bias—obviously texts like Limits to Growth, Beyond Growth, and Farewell to Growth are foundational, and I do recommend those if you have the time and inclination. These texts certainly “hold up”—there are plenty of ways that the ideas in both LtG, BG, and FtG track precisely with contemporary degrowth ideas and arguments. That said, the “overview” texts below recap the primary arguments and information, with the added benefit of reacting to events that took place during the many years following the publication of LtG (1972, with a 30-year update in 2004), BG (1996) and FtG (2007—just two months before the Great Recession began).

This list is a small roundup meant to provide key invitations to the subject of degrowth.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel (Penguin Random House, 2020)

Jason Hickel is arguably the most well-known proponent of degrowth, at least in the West. Less is More was a source text for me (among many others) in developing an understanding of degrowth, and for good reason: it’s a concise, accessible synthesis of prevailing ideas across history, economics, and philosophy, with unambiguous advocacy for implementing degrowth practices.

📖 Available here.

Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, Kohei Saito (Astra House, 2024)

Degrowth has been lauded and criticized for being more activism than scholarship. If you want an emotional appeal in your degrowth education, Slow Down is the book for you. It’s one of the main reasons interest in degrowth has reignited in the 2020s, selling more than half a million copies in Japan as Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism (2020), and now available to the English-speaking world via this translation by Brian Bergstrom. Slow Down contains Saito’s formulation of “degrowth communism,” which as you can imagine has drawn the full range of emotions from curiosity and enthusiasm to ire and condescension.

📖 Available here.

The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, Aaron Vansintjan (Verso Books, 2022)

The Future is Degrowth is a great degrowth introduction or intermediate read for those seeking a more scholarly literature analysis. It progresses through a series of critiques of economic growth and the associated tolls of neoliberalism, ultimately developing an argument for degrowth. As promised in the title, it looks at pathways to degrowth as well as areas the authors believe researchers and activists should broaden the degrowth movement: class and race, geopolitics and imperialism, information technology, and democratic planning, which turns the critical lens back on the movement to contend with current perceived shortcomings.

📖 Available here.

Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide, Vincent Liegey and Anitra Nelson (Pluto Press, 2020)

Exploring Degrowth is another great place to begin for readers seeking a scholarly approach to the degrowth argument. It’s a short, densely packed book, which critically assesses the unsustainable nature of continuous economic growth and advocates for a societal shift towards ecological sustainability and social wellbeing. It establishes the intellectual foundations of degrowth as well as the importance of decolonizing the growth imaginary, outlines political strategies, and provides practical examples to advocate for bringing about alternatives to contemporary capitalism.

📖 Available here.

The Case for Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Frederico Demaria (Polity, 2020)

The Case for Degrowth emphasizes enacting real-world change through degrowth. The book progresses from outlining the clear why for degrowth before unpacking the sacrifices that this shift will entail (see: living well with less). It pulls from examples from around the world to advocate for collectively shifting toward societies that slow down of their own accord and promote values of wellbeing, equity, and sustainability.

Note: Giorgos Kallis is also a leading figue in degrowth, and the author of a number of other important important texts, including In defense of degrowth: Opinions and minifestos and Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care.

📖 Available here.

Adjacent Works

Degrowth lives within a “movement of movements,” overlapping with many different proposals and theories. The following books don’t center degrowth outright, but bring up necessary ideas in evaluating the concept.

Technofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis (Melville House, 2024)

Technofeudalism isn’t explicitly about degrowth, but in its attempt to describe the contemporary economic reality—in which capitalism has given way to what former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis calls “technofeudalism”—it operates as a critical text for anyone seeking to understand the challenges degrowth efforts will face in the next quarter century. This is my favorite new book of 2024 so far.

📖 Available here.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Kate Raworth (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017)

Doughnut Economics scrutinizes the thesis of perpetual economic growth without attention to human needs or environmental impact. The publisher’s description says it best: Doughnut Economics “identifies seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray, and sets out a roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet.”

📖 Available here.

Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)

If you saw that video of a Dutch historian artfully dunking on Tucker Carlson, that’s Rutger Bregman. Utopia for Realists is his beginner argument for unviersal basic income, written in an accessible voice that demonstrates how so-called unrealistic “utopian” ideas like the 15-hour work week or the elimination of poverty actually could happen in our lifetimes. Given the importance of UBI in many degrowth schemas (or the more en vogue Universal Basic Dividend), this is a great parallel read.

📖 Available here.

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Like this post? Check out some related work such as my metacrisis and polycrisis primer:

Reality Studies also produces the Urgent Futures podcast. Here’s a recent episode:

Ever since I started yapping about “Postreality,” I’ve gotten questions about what exactly I mean. Is it an extension of the notion of “Post-truth?” (in some ways!) Is it that I believe that there’s no such thing as reality? (nope).

Postreality is the reality paradigm that follows Modernity. Modernity arose in the wake of the Renaissance in Europe, built on ideas and social customs established through the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment. One outcome of Modernity is that reality was framed as a monolith; the notion that there is only one reality and there are universal values. The Industrial Revolution accelerated Europeans’ ability to assert these ideas all over the world through force.

Postreality, meanwhile, bubbles up in the wake of World War II and has come into full force through the advent of computing and the Internet (and the specter of human self-extinction through nuclear weapons). It gives rise to more decentralized approaches to reality. New communication tools—particularly digital ones—have placed reality-creating and -breaking tools in the hands of many. This has led to some of humanity’s most valuable progress and some of the scariest aspects of contemporary society.

I elaborate on the idea here, but you’re all set for the purposes of Postreality Bites. In this series, I curate odds and ends that capture some aspect of the postreal condition.

New Record for Busiest Day at U.S. Airports

Sunday, November 26, was the busiest day ever at airports in the United States. The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened 2,907,378 passengers for more than 51,000 flights. The previous record was actually logged on June 30 of this year, with 2,883,000 passengers traveled ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. Wild to imagine that nearly 1% of the entire U.S. population traveled on this one day.

Records always grab eyeballs, but the reason this one caught my attention has to do with energy. I’ve been reading Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, which makes the case that societal collapse due to climate change is inevitable, and that instead of trying to take action to return to previous normals, we need to instead prepare ourselves through deep adaptation. Cheery! I’m also a regular listener of The Great Simplification, and Nate Hagens consistently makes the point that we’re likely in the downslope of the “carbon pulse.” In other words, oil and other energy sources that have historically been easy to obtain will become more difficult—and therefore expensive—to acquire.

With those lenses in mind, when I see not one but two record-breaking days in a single year, my mind jumps to future scarcity. How much longer will the average person be able to afford this much air travel? When will air travel become a luxury good? Will airline tickets be subsidized by taxpayer dollars in order to sustain the companies and infrastructure? Travel has been an integral part of my own life—in what ways will the very notion of “travel” change in the years to come? How will future generations feel when they see a map like this? Even if we do manage staggering breakthroughs in energy ranging from improved battery technologies to fusion power that keep flight costs manageable, what will the experience of flying be in a world with more volatile climates and extreme weather events?

Check out the latest episode of the Urgent Futures Podcast, featuring award-winning artist Lia Halloran and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kip Thorne:

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Merriam-Webster announces Word of the Year 2023

The famed dictionary publisher announced its word of the year 2023, following 2022’s “gaslight.” The word? “Authentic,” beating out related terms like “Deepfake,” “Doppleganger,” “Dystopian,” and, uh, “Rizz.”

They explain that the word saw a substantial increase in search volume, spurred by conversations about “AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.” They write:

Authentic is what brands, social media influencers, and celebrities aspire to be. Elon Musk made headlines when he said that people should be more “authentic” on social media. Apps and platforms like BeReal make recording “authentic” experiences their main purpose. No matter how much artifice and calculation goes into the production of these videos, as Rebecca Jennings of Vox puts it, “wherever people are supposedly being ‘authentic’ on the internet, the money will follow.” Ironically, with “authentic content creators” now recognized as the gold standard for building trust, “authenticity” has become a performance.

Some folks have expressed frustration that this is the word of the year, but I think it’s perfect. It demonstrates how language and ideas evolve in Postreality while simultaneously serving as the ultimate validation that the word “authentic” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. Like “literally” before it, in some cases it might even mean its historical opposite. “Authentic” becomes more of a riff, its own kind of performance. Given its connection to celebrities and influencers, it’s also a vector for power, money, and fame, something to be cleverly wielded rather than effortlessly embodied.

Under Postreality, when ideas enter the public dialogue, we swarm them with takes—oh, the takes—coming to collective consensus (and dissensus) about what exactly we’re talking about, why it matters, and what it means for the future. Taking a long view, what we’re doing is establishing new techniques for fostering collective knowledge and dialogue.

It also reminds me of an idea in the graphic novel/essay The Extreme Self. Social media architectures have been built for engagement—to keep you on the respective site/app as long as possible—and this often translates to extreme content, the stuff that will surprise or provoke. Thus, we are subtly (and not so subtly!) encouraged to present extreme versions of our selves—perhaps rooted in real beliefs but cranked up to 11. And of course, these extreme selves don’t operate in isolation, they interact with other people, who themselves are engaged in their own extreme self performance.

Taken together, this swirl changes us all, not only in terms of how we are on the Internet, but the ways we metabolize these versions of ourselves (and other people’s selves) in our meat bodies. That authenticity is now fully whipped up in this swirl speaks volumes about the changing relationship of the self to society under Postreality. Doesn’t a self-conscious awareness of being perceived as authentic negate “being true to one's own personality, spirit, or character”? It’s a rabbit hole of abstract thinking.

As the notion of authenticity relates to AI: I could (and will!) spend multiple future posts and podcast episodes addressing the subject. But with synthetic media like digital twins and deepfakes getting better every passing day—to say nothing of the rapid pace of development in generative tools—questions of what exactly comprises “authentic” expression will only become more complicated for the foreseeable future.

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