'As renowned physicist Paul Davies has famously argued, life can be defined as a profound combination of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’: the biological structure of matter as well as the complex information which, encoded via DNA, codifies how that biological structure is organised and behaves.'

[sigh] Nafeez needs to get off his computer and back to the real world. The basic energy analysis of society is sound but his technocratic bias prevents him from developing a critique of civilisation, thereby setting up new horrors such as lab grown food [sic] and renewable energy [sic - and conflated with electricity generation] to perpetuate the dominant culture and, incidentally, keep him in his nice metropolitan bubble where he never has to get his hands dirty or have any real engagement with the 'natural world' he writes about with no real knowledge of what it actually is. In fact civilisations are 'fundamentally different to life' in that they undermine, simplify and destroy biological diversity, with field-scale agriculture (which makes civilisation possible) epitomising the process: clear a forest or wetland and the thousands of species that lived there and supplant with a handful of domesticated species.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses/#toc2 (also written by a tech nerd, admittedly)

Also the political analysis is pretty simplistic, Trump:bad, Brexit:bad etc, and appears to take for granted that there are actual functioning democracies in the west capable of representing the will of the people rather than imposing the dictates of corporate power. There is no party-political 'left' remaining in the UK, US or much of Europe, and 'centrism' is well to the right of where it was 40 years ago. This is because of elite sabotage & manipulation of the political process and corporate control of the media, and doesn't express the will of the majority of people.

I agree there will be 'new shoots' and possibilities for renewal and building better societies, but I don't think they will look like Nafeez thinks they will. He says 'the heart of this crisis is our relationship with the natural world' but then immediately pivots to talking about energy, ie: fossil fuels, electricity, mined resources. This maintains a relationship of domination, whereas what we need is mutuality, repair, balance and to undo the alienation that views the 'natural world' as something 'out there' which we're separate from. This can't happen for people still living in cities, plugged into alienating technologies and having all their physical needs met via industrial processes occurring out of sight in the hinterlands. I hate to say it, but I think rural Trump voters and working class populists elsewhere in the west have a better grasp of this than Nafeez and metropolitan liberal-leftists like him.

As Vinay Gupta put it at the first Dark Mountain festival back in 2010, 'collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee':





cheers,
I