Critical Collapsology & the Future of the Left – info ahead of the Metacrisis Meeting

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Richard Hames of Novara Media and his colleague Beau-Caprice Vetch, recently wrote an essay on what they call ‘critical collapsology’ to help stimulate collapse-aware innovation on the left of the political spectrum. They write:

“The question is not “when is it appropriate to lose hope once and for all?” But, instead, when are we required to give up on the specific forms of animating hope that structured much of 19th and 20th century left[wing] thought?”

You can read their full essay here. I asked AI for an 800-word summary, including a final paragraph assessing any resonance with the ecolibertarian ideas in my book Breaking Together. It follows below. 

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A new role for the UN in an age of collapse

jembendell

Not long ago, I sat across from a UN civil servant at a quiet café in Geneva. She had worked for over two decades in the UN system, from humanitarian relief to climate diplomacy. As she stirred her coffee, she confessed: “I feel disappointed, bewildered. Sometimes I wonder if anything we do makes a difference anymore.” Her voice was tired, but not bitter—more like someone watching a dam crack and realising she only had her teaspoon to stem the flood.

She is not alone. In conversations across UN agencies, I’ve been hearing similar expressions of despair. As institutions strain under the weight of cascading crises—climate chaos, ecosystem breakdown, spiralling inequality, violent conflict, and the abandonment of international law—many international civil servants find themselves in a moral and professional no-man’s land. They are loyal to the ideals of the UN, yet unable to reconcile those ideals with what they now see daily: the world is not just “failing to meet the SDGs“—it is unraveling.

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Let’s Turn the Tide on Surveillance – starting with radio biometrics

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Do you ever feel a quietly gnawing discomfort at the direction technology is taking us? Not just a concern about screen addiction or misinformation, but a deeper unease: that a world is being built in which our presence, thoughts, and behaviours are constantly detected, catalogued and analysed, often without us even knowing? Perhaps it’s the sense that the tools of surveillance, often accepted for personal convenience or public security, are being normalized in all aspects of our lives. Perhaps it feels like a tide: as if an inevitable force of nature, rather than a set of human choices. 

I have known that feeling of uneasy resignation for some years. But recently I came across a new study which snapped me out of that torpor. Suddenly I wanted to be clearer on what I think is unacceptable, what should be resisted, and to identify some small steps to take. Consequently, I realise this issue of technosurveillance should be firmly on the political agendas of any serious political party or individual politician. So I want to share with you some ideas on that and why it matters within my particular niche of the environment, metacrisis, and societal collapse. 

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Systems are Breaking – and That’s Our Opportunity

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A few months ago, I reconnected with a friend who I had worked with in initiative on ‘the sharing economy’. At the time, we were both ‘Young Global Leaders’ (YGLs) with the World Economic Forum. It was 2013, and we had volunteered our time to bring attention to how new technologies could be used to help everyone have a good life with less ecological impact. Personally, we were imagining a future of peer-to-peer resource sharing, community-based production, and cooperative ownership. Meeting up after years, we laughed that our work had oddly contributed to the World Economic Forum publishing the line that became infamous as a globalist’s dystopian injunction: “You will own nothing and be happy.”

Although we laughed, it was with a sense of ‘doomer humour’. My friend’s tone had shifted from a decade ago. She felt disappointment and defeat. “All we did,” she told me, “was write a love letter to the next wave of monopolists.” Her disillusionment was not unique. Many working in alternative economics—whether cooperatives, commons networks, or solidarity enterprises—feel similarly deflated. Despite huge efforts to get governments around the world to adopt policies to promote the ‘Social and Solidarity Economy’, the tide has been in the opposite direction. Monopoly capitalism has grown stronger, tightening its grip through unrestrained mergers and acquisitions, extractive digital platforms, and ‘techbro’ political interference. Now the big tech companies don’t compete in a free market, as they own the markets and can operate similarly to feudal lords. It’s why the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis labels this era ‘technofeudalism’.

It’s easy to feel like we failed. But that pain—of giving so much for so little change—is not a reflection of personal failure. It’s a sign of deeper structural shifts….

You can read more of this article that I wrote for Shareable, on the new, yet old, agenda for the Social and Solidarity Economy, or join myself and like minds discussing this during a ‘metacrisis meeting.‘

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On Sociocracy: if we won’t escape patriarchy with new rules on meetings, then how?

jembendell

I once quit a Men’s Group because the rules about the way we would engage each other seemed to become a shield rather than an enabler of connection and support. The group had been really important in my life for two years. Meeting every Monday, we used some process tools from the Mankind Project (MKP), but were not strict about the format, letting each week’s volunteer facilitator to guide us. We benefitted from many of the participants being skilled in facilitating specific processes that we might want to use to become unstuck with an issue in our lives. But over time, the MKP ideas and processes began to structure all meetings. Once that occurred, I noticed a couple of men participated in a different way. Previously we had been gathering as trusting friends wanting to both help each other and benefit from each other. The processes for our meetings were secondary to that. But now, some men were not expressing a brotherly sensitivity, but rather a desire to know the processes, do them correctly, and that we should all be committed to that. One man said he wasn’t with us to be friends but to do ‘the work’. At that time, I pondered whether to express a ‘withhold’, as they call it in the MKP, and probably dominate the rest of that meeting with exploring and releasing my feelings about his approach. Instead, I guessed that the group had shifted and people wanted more of the processes. I now wonder if that was a mistake. Both myself and the co-founder of the group quit soon after.

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Finding Joy in the Everyday Wild

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As a conservation writer and photographer, Jessica Groenendijk travelled the world to promote awareness of endangered environments and species. Due to her collapse awareness, she shifted focus on how to promote awareness. Jess has volunteered for the Deep Adaptation Forum and the annual Deep Adaptation Review, which is how we connected. I asked her to share with us how she has been refocusing her aims and talents in this new phase of her life. The result is a beautiful reflection, below. Jess will join us for a metacrisis meeting on how an artistic and creative mindset can help us to adjust to life on a disrupted planet. If you feel called, I hope to see you there. Thx, Jem

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Finding Joy in the Everyday Wild – through fractals in a fragmenting world, by Jessica Groenendijk

In the prime of my career, I boated up Amazonian rivers, like coiling cappuccino ribbons, in search of giant otters, tracked elusive black rhinos in Zambia’s dusty miombo woodlands, and shared meals with renowned ecologists in Peru’s flagship research station. My pen and my lens sought to portray Nature in all its glory, aiming to stir hearts and minds, and maybe, possibly, turn back the tide of loss.

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Some help with being fully alive during a metacrisis and collapse

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Despite more of the world waking up to disruption and collapse, and even experiencing it, does it still feel lonely at times to live with your understanding of what’s happening? 

There are many strange ways of understanding what’s happening, which serve factional interests and prejudices (something I call ‘collapsis’). 

Then there are people who seem to have adjusted to this upsetting situation by prioritising being nice to their online connections and not getting into difficult activities like resisting oppression or addressing their own impacts in the world. 

But if we feel alienated we won’t be as present to possibility as we could be. And we won’t enjoy the capabilities and blessings that we still have. So, if you want to enjoy being curious, radical and fully engaged in this metacritical era of collapse, I’m inviting you to join a small community of likeminds. 

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Here’s how we get serious about the awful monetary system

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I have been hearing more of my environmentalist friends mention that the monetary and banking systems are driving a metacrisis, where nearly everything is getting worse, nearly everywhere. Like me, they have come to realise that by incentivising endless commodification, debt, and growth, an expansionist monetary system is at the root of so much of what’s going wrong. But most of them are at a loss for what to do about it. Why? Because it’s big, vague, and hard to understand. In my case, it took years of study to feel that I could speak clearly on the subject – finally taking to the TEDx stage in 2011. In the years since then, I met many environmentalists who were so overwhelmed by the topic that they went back to what was familiar to them: fighting plastics, pushing for stricter deforestation laws, or calling for lower carbon footprints. All are important. But if we ignore the expansionist monetary system that drives such harms, amongst others, our situation will only get worse. That’s why it is important that more of us do the ‘hard yards’ in learning about the nature of current monetary systems, what the alternatives are, and how to enable them. That is important, whatever our current assessment on the pace of societal disruption and collapse; although a breaking of old systems can create space for the alternatives. 

The mainstream still needs to wake up to money 

Today, when I look at leading green groups like WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, I see that they are still focusing on what we did 20 years ago when I was head of the ‘markets and economic governance’ team at WWF-UK. For instance, they continue to criticise bank loans to oil or mining companies, but rarely mention how money itself is created. 

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What the farmers say

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In my experience, it is rare to hear farmers from the Global South discussing their challenges and aspirations, and what might be useful support to receive from successful restaurateurs and resort owners. That’s why I’m delighted to release a short film that brings you the voices of organic and regenerative farmers in dialogue with others in the food business sector in Bali, Indonesia. 

After 2 years of operation as a demonstration farm, school, and event space for organic and regenerative agriculture, at Bekandze Farm we hosted a meeting of organic farmers, distributors, NGOs and food retailers. The participants discussed why organic farming is such a small part of agriculture in Bali, despite the opportunities provided by the environment and the visitor economy. After discussing the challenges, we explored potential solutions for scaling organic farming on the island, and more widely in Indonesia. Achieving that would help all the people on the island, as it would increase their food security by decreasing dependence on agrochemicals. In that sense, organic and regenerative methods of farming are also methods of collapse preparedness, or practical Deep Adaptation. 

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