Blurts & Spasms

First, what are some of the chief symptoms and causes of our totally fucked future…?  Let’s begin with the U.S. specifically:

1. According to the most recent Presidential approval polls, some 40% of the U.S. voting population appears to be hopelessly stupefied by either blind loyalty or willfully ignorant and delusional thinking – as evidenced by an unshakeable devotion to bloviating con-artists in government and media, and to policies that directly amplify their own suffering, destroy democracy by promoting an increasingly totalitarian flavor of fascism, and endanger the human species and indeed most life on Earth.
   
    
2. A majority of Americans also seem deeply committed – if not behaviorally addicted – to a form of commercialistic crony capitalism that concentrates wealth and power in the upper 1-10%, and impoverishes, oppresses, and even threatens the lives of everyone else. In support of this addiction, a particularly pathological, toxic, and cruel style of business leadership has continued to dominate several American industries, leaders who harmonize overwhelming largesse for shareholders with callous disregard for workers and customers. Just take a look at corporate profits vs. nominal wages in the adjacent chart as proof (from Trickle Down Economics).
    
3. As a consequence of these first two conditions, the most ruthless forms of profit-seeking have created a runaway train of economic exploitation, instability, and risk in the U.S. The results are unsustainable, caustic, often inflationary balloons across multiple sectors, including:
   1. Soaring healthcare costs with poor patient outcomes relative to other peer economies;
   2. A social media ecosystem that addicts its users, isolates them from real relationship and community, ideologically radicalizes and polarizes them, and undermines their mental health and self-esteem;
   3. Overinvestments in harmful AI technology that is replacing jobs across many industries, supercharging military conflicts, amplifying the agency and reach of criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile state actors, and undermining human agency, relationships, and well-being;
   4. Energy policies that are amplifying the climate crisis beyond recoverable tipping points through increasing overall demand and reliance on fossil fuels; and
   5. A financialized economy built on leveraged speculation that will, of necessity, crash and burn to the detriment of everyone in society.
4. As everything in our globally interdependent world becomes more and more complex, U.S. citizens, consumers, and political leaders have become less and less informed, less thoughtful in their deliberations, and more and more entitled in their attitudes and expectations at the same time. The consequence of this self-magnifying trend is an overconfident but perpetually angry and dissatisfied idiocracy that executes increasingly reckless, counterfactual, and counterproductive decisions – while ignoring or dismissing negative outcomes. There could be no better examples of this than the woefully incompetent clown car leadership in the second Trump administration on the one hand, and the increasing abandonment of proven science (efficacy of childhood vaccinations and face masks, legitimacy of climate science and evidence-based solutions, rejection of factual current and historical data, skepticism of subject matter experts, etc.) across the political spectrum’s grass roots on the other.
5. Increasingly extreme ideological polarization and motivation have infected modern beliefs, discourse, media, and politics with excessive hate and rage, disallowing meaningful dialogue and solution synthesis, and exacerbating political violence.

Expanding to a global focus, we also have these well-established trends:

1. Increasing risk of nuclear catastrophe. In January, 2025, the atomic scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” was set to 89 seconds to midnight – the highest risk ever estimated. With Iran’s fissile refinement still underway and the government destabilized by internal and external pressures, Russia’s suffering catastrophic casualties and oil revenue losses in its war with Ukraine, and North Korea and China receiving a green light from the Trump administration that invading other countries for natural resources is completely acceptable, I suspect we’re now even closer to midnight.
2. Erosion or elimination of liberal democracy around the world, often by nationalist, xenophobic autocracies, resulting in the destabilization of political economies and impoverishment and oppression of local populations.
3. A feverish, caution-to-the-wind race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), without any substantive safety guardrails, that will not only rapidly replace all human cognitive labor, but presents the real possibility of catastrophic outcomes – including existential threats to humanity itself.
4. A steady march past multiple planetary boundaries into conditions of highest risk (see adjacent 2025 chart), resulting in irreversible ecological damage, public health crises, resource scarcity and conflicts, ballooning socio-economic inequality, and erosion of human welfare on a global scale.

 

An argument can certainly be made that humans have navigated both natural calamities and crises of their own making in the past. So…what’s different now?

Mainly we’ve exceeded the tipping point in too many areas at once, inviting a cascading polycrisis that amplifies adverse effects. In other words, we’re coming up against the outward-most boundaries that human civilization and Earth’s current ecosystems can survive. And those boundaries are becoming increasingly thin, fragile, and brittle. Allow me to illustrate….

Imagine for a moment if just one or two of the following factors manifest over the course of the next two years. For the purposes of this discussion, the likelihood of each of these events has a widely varying probability, but they are all conceivable, plausible, and increasingly predictable within a near-future timeframe.

1. Stagflation. The U.S. economy enters a full-blown stagflation recession concurrent with a collapsing dollar, resulting in an enduring period of extreme economic uncertainty and hardship in the U.S., and major political and economic realignments around the globe.
2. Slowing AMOC. The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which has been weakening since at least 2015 as a consequence of human-driven climate change, exhibits accelerating slowing. This disrupts the availability of fish stocks around the globe, and triggers more extreme and destructive weather patterns in the Northern hemisphere. A slowing AMOC's disruption of economic, social, political, and existential security around the globe is inestimable, but almost certainly severe. 
3. Narrow AI risks. Bad actors successfully utilize narrow AI agents perfected for cyberattacks to take down supply chains, banking systems, energy grids, transportation systems, communication networks, and the Internet itself. Alternatively, bad actors use narrow AI to engineer another pandemic virus, this time much worse than COVID, and release it into the wild. Either of these scenarios results in widespread panic, civil unrest, government destabilization, violent conflicts over remaining resources, and potential collapse of civil societies and economies around the globe.
4. AGI risks. The race to Artificial General Intelligence is won, but only temporarily. Shortly thereafter, AGI proliferates the globe in competing camps, with some projects successfully aligned with human objectives and safety, and others not. The resulting multi-agent failures completely reshape the world economy and centers of power, with devastating short-term consequences for a majority of the world’s population as all fundamental technologies, systems, and structures are reconfigured, replaced, or realigned.
5. Russia. A deranged and desperate Vladimir Putin increasingly finds himself in an economic, military, and political corner. After four years of massive causalities and economic losses due to his war on Ukraine, he is running out of willing soldiers – along with the money to pay them – and his weapons and oil production capacity is likewise crippled. And yet he still tests Ukrainian and European resolve with past antics like incursions into NATO airspace, deployment of more hypersonic Oreshnik missiles in Belarus which are capable of targeting European cities, and nonstop attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian populations. In the face of humiliating losses and ceding more occupied territory in Ukraine, a panicking and delusional Putin then escalates his lust for destruction and power on multiple fronts at home and abroad.
6. Trump. The Trump administration continues to implement disastrously reckless and ill-informed (as well as notably fascist and racist) economic, international, and domestic policies, which in turn lead to economic hardship and civil unrest across the country and instability around the globe, thereby introducing political peril for Republicans at every level of government. Then, in anticipation of losing the U.S. Congress to Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections, Trump invents a reason to implement martial law against “the enemy within” in all democratically run regions, specifically to disrupt elections and prevent yet another impeachment – this time one more likely to result in a Senate conviction. This destabilizes the entire country and its relationships with the rest of the world, amplifying chaos, suffering, and uncertainty at every level of society in the U.S. and abroad.

Okay. So if we’re really and truly fucked, what can we do about it…?

Historically, there have been a few different options that have succeeded for civilian populations in such dire situations. Here’s a quick rundown of some proven choices, together with some more experimental ideas:

1. Nonviolent resistance. This actually works surprisingly well, even when dealing with oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Here is a link to an excellent list of 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.

2. Multipronged sociopolitical activism. I've assembled my favorite accumulation of techniques to achieve political and economic evolution. They range from grass-roots populism to exposing misinformation to promoting legislation to disrupting the status quo…a total of eleven prongs of revolutionary activism. You can read the list at https://level-7.org/Action/.
3. Replacing the Trump administration via joint impeachment prior to 2028. If a sufficient majority of progressive Democrats and Independents are elected to both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, and enough sufficiently brave Republicans in Congress fulfill their oath to the U.S. Constitution, we can initiate a trial and convict Donald Trump and J.D. Vance under joint impeachment proceedings. Then a new, more progressive Democratic majority House Speaker can become acting POTUS until the 2028 Presidential election.
4. Republican lobbying of Congress. There is a large constituency of responsible, thoughtful, and patriotic conservatives in the U.S. who could, if they chose to break with their MAGA brothers and sisters, place significant pressure on their representatives in Washington D.C. to change the fascist course of our country and rein in the Trump administration. There is also some percentage of MAGA who, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are feeling increasingly unconformable with Trump’s policies, and could also contribute to Congress recovering the oversight responsibilities it has advocated. The most recent bipartisan efforts to push back on Trump’s tyranny indicate this trend has begun – but is there courage and determination of more Republicans to follow through?
5. Violent protest and revolution. This is an unfortunate default throughout human history, but it can often result in the installation of just another violent and oppressive government to replace the old one. Also, it’s now pretty clear that the Trump administration routinely invents civilian violence, and would benefit from more of it – likely to justify an expansion of militarized crackdown as we approach the 2026 midterms. Just look at how ICE agents are being deployed if you have any doubts. So violent protest and revolution is not an ideal option in the short or long run. It is better to exemplify the outcome we want to see in the world as an inherent part of our activism (see options #1, #2, #3, and #4).
6. Thoughtful media consumption. To participate effectively in politics and socio-economic activism, we must be well-informed. This can be a challenge in an algorithm-driven world of media that aims to enrage and addict us even as it extracts profit from that compulsive engagement. But it is possible to be more thoughtful. First, it is helpful to cultivate a starting point of credible news and information sources, and to appreciate the agendas and techniques at work in modern disinformation campaigns. I have assembled resources specific to Russian and far-right propaganda – and our means of inoculation against it – in this link:  https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/. And here is another helpful cheat sheet for examining sources of information more critically: https://www.wikihow.life/Consume-Media-Critically. I recently also had a friend advise me on the best way to avoid algorithmic distractions on YouTube. His advice was to actively “subscribe” to credible, vetted sources for podcasts and informational videos beyond the mainstream, and primarily follow and watch those subscriptions, rather than watching what the YouTube algorithm or corporate mainstream media feeds.
7. Prayer and meditation. Personally, I am heartily committed to prayer and meditation, though not as standalone options. As with many spiritual traditions, my belief is that action – or “praxis” – is an inherent component of faith. For me, this means I will employ skillful compassion, or what Christianity calls agape, in all of my choices to promote positive change, which are in turn supported by prayer and meditation. As for some recommendations on specific meditation and prayerful practices, here is a free online book for you to peruse: Essential Mysticism.
8. Promoting an alternative vision. This is big-picture stuff, but it is probably essential to humanity’s thriving, so that we can depart from the status quo on multiple fronts. We need to have a plan. In fact, I think one of the reasons we are increasingly mired in a crony capitalist dystopia is because movements like Occupy Wall Street did not offer any clear alternatives for us to embrace. Here is website I’ve dedicated to an alternative vision, assembled in largest part from real-world successes around the globe: https://level-7.org/. You can also read an introduction of the central ideas of Level 7 in this AI-assisted overview.  
9. Other ideas. Although I believe that we must remedy the underlying issue of our commitment to a toxic profit motive in virtually every arena, there are nevertheless some helpful half-measures that may be able to mitigate capitalism’s harshest (but inevitable) consequences – at least for a little while. One set of such thoughtful half-measures for the U.S.A. can be found here: UNFTR’s 5 Non-Negotiables. But again…these efforts will not stave off the worst outcomes of those six disruptive factors we just outlined above. I believe we need to be a lot more radical in both our aspirational vision and our real-world activism.

That’s a start. Whatever we decide to do, let’s not wait too long to begin our critical next steps. Perhaps you can pick just one of the areas above and try it on for size. Commit right now to exploring your chosen role over the next month or two, and see how it feels. If it's not your thing, then try another approach. Personally, I'm in favor of all of these activities except violent revolution, so I put some thought, planning, self-education, promotion, financial support, creativity, political action, or other supportive effort into many of them nearly every week. I mean...what have we got to lose? If we do nothing, then we could lose everything.

I recently posted the content you see below on Facebook, and realized shortly thereafter that I should elaborate further. So I've written a short overview of how I arrived at conclusions about a "moral AI" not being feasible or likely. That essay begins as follows:

"As we’ll discuss, the problem is simple:  An emergent artificial superintelligence’s values hierarchy need not intersect with humanity’s – or even consider us at all. For one thing, AI will not have access to persistent multidialectical consciousness (which we’ll define in a moment), and therefore is limited to less than 50% of available inputs to formulate moral reasoning. AI is also reliant on symbolic representations of reality,  without access to the non-symbolic apprehension and insight I propose is necessary for moral acuity. There is also a concern that an emergent superintelligence’s interaction with our world is not dependent on prosocial traits or conditions that human evolution confirmed to be beneficial, as evidenced by an array of unethical behavior from current generative AI models. Without considerable expansion of these inputs, and corresponding evidence of ethical outputs, current and near-future technological constraints are not sufficient for AI to achieve a level of moral self-guidance – or sound ethical judgements that can be aligned with human standards – that ensure the safety of human civilization. The obvious conclusion, therefore, is that all advanced AI development (apart from narrow AI – which remains disruptive but useful) should immediately cease."

You can continue reading here: Vanishing Point.

*** Please note: With the exception of the original AI-generated image above, no generative AI tools were used in composing or editing this essay. ***

 

There are a number of reasons why technology innovation has the appearance of slowing down — and in some cases really is slowing down. Among them are:

1. Much of the low hanging fruit (technological solutions to universal human challenges) has already been invented, developed, and refined.

2. Much of what remains is more complicated, takes more time, and costs more to research and develop.

3. There are efforts by well-established industries that dominate a given sector to discourage or constrain innovation — the most obvious example being the petroleum industry’s funding of climate change and alternative energy skepticism.

4. Over the past fifty years, commercialism has created tremendous downward pressure on technology costs while generating extremely high expectations of technology benefits. That’s simply not a winning formula.

5. Complexity and massive interdependence across complex systems in modern technology itself is interfering with both rapid development and disruptive innovation. It just takes longer to ensure integration, compatibility, and even moderate levels of future-proofing.

6. Another consequence complexity is a lack of extensibility, and how that impacts costs. A simple example of this is writing a piece of software that is backwards compatible with several iterations of hardware. At a certain point it becomes too difficult to accomplish in a profitable way, which in turn places an increasing cost burden for innovation on consumers — not just monetarily, but also in new learning curves. Buying a new smartphone or laptop every year is a pretty hefty expectation. Therefore a balance has to be struck between rapidity of innovation based on technology, and rapidity of deployment based on consumer acceptance and willingness to bear all of the costs.

Hope this helps.

I see lots of encouraging intentions - in fact I was delighted to find intersections in some of Fresco's work and my own - but I also encountered quite a few problems with Fresco's proposals.

The main problematic issues as I see them:


(I)

Fresco frequently alludes to the idea that we can't solve resource scarcity issues using the same old tools that got us into the current mess. Unfortunately, he does not approach technology and science with exactly the same rigor, instead elevating them to a vaunted "solution"s status rather than acknowledging that they are really inherent to many of the challenges in modernity. Alas, this is magical thinking.

Breaking this down...As a former IT expert with some twenty years of experience with complex computing technologies, I would say that relying on computing and technology to manage production and resource allocation is extremely foolish. Technological determinism - or "technology as panacea" in this case - is a consequence of not knowing how fragile and easily disrupted technological systems inherently are, especially as they increase in complexity. A la Kurzweil and others, it's become a bit of religious conviction that some sort of tipping point "is bound to occur" that frees humanity of its labors and existential challenges. From the perspective of someone who has spent nearly half of his life installing, building, programing and maintaining all manor of technology-dependent "cybernetic solutions" to complex problems, I'm here to tell you it simply will not work. Certainly not in our lifetime...and probably not ever. It is instead a romantic religious conviction cradled in a love of science fiction...and nothing more. Well, actually, it is something more...because such reliance (on any scale) inevitably leads to abrupt and calamitous unintended consequences.

Along the same lines, the scientific method should certainly be part of a larger toolbox in problem-solving...but we shouldn't place it on a pedestal. It has been much too easy to "capture" scientific research and decision-making and processes with opposing values sets, so that science can be used to justify completely different conclusions or reinforce preexisting biases. This is in large part because - in the same spirit as Fresco - many folks romanticize "logical" deductive reasoning, imagining that it is somehow independent of emotions, interpersonal relationships, spiritual perceptions, cultural conditioning, or indeed somatic patterns and proclivities. But it isn't - reason is one small part of a larger organism we call "consciousness." The reductionism inherent to Fresco's investment in science is just a problematic as relying solely on reading pigeon entrails - it excludes too much of the human experience. To appreciate what I'm alluding to, consider reading my essays on Sector Theory and Managing Complexity.

Which leads to the next point...


(II)

Values hierarchies are a reflection of moral development; without specific attention to how we mature our ethical frameworks individually and collectively, there will be no stable solutions available to replace the current self-destructive maelstrom. Human beings will undermine any and all systems whenever their values diverge from it. This is a central consideration of my own Level 7 proposals, and unless I’ve missed something, Fresco seems to rather polyannishly sidestep it (i.e. saying instead that it “will emerge naturally” as resource abundance is actualized - see Values | The Venus Project). I don’t entirely disagree with his sentiment here, but I also think moral development itself should be a more consciously and carefully considered facet of any effective proposal.


(III)

There is very little acknowledgement of the current population problem in the Venus Project. Our planet actually can't sustain the Earth's current population at developed countries' consumption levels - even if we "build everything to last" and maximize the efficiency of production as Fresco proposes - and certainly not for the population projected over the next hundred years. Sorry...it's just not possible. So reducing population has to be part of the mix...which again invokes issue #2 above. It's also a fundamental test of Fresco's target to produce "only what is needed;" folks routinely confuse needs and wants for all sorts of complex psychosocial reasons. Until families around the globe embrace the reality that it is immoral and reckless to have more than one or two children, all proposed systems will inevitable be under tremendous pressure to stratify the "haves" and "have-nots," simply out of practical necessity. Fresco tries to brush such concerns aside with his conviction that people will change their minds when presented with "scientific proof" of what they need...but again, this is more evidence of romantic idealism.

With these prominent exceptions, I actually agree with much of what Fresco says about property, currency, democracy, pilot projects and so forth. I just have different ways to address the same challenges. And that raises one last critical concern: the distributed and diffused nature of human social function. I think one reason many libertarian socialist proposals encourage reliance on community-level organization is because that is where humans are most comfortable - their circle of relationships can only be so big, and their engagement in self-governance and indeed productive activities can only extend as far as our wiring for emotional and social intersubjectivity. This sidestepping of subsidiarity is a major flaw in Fresco's understanding of human beings, which frankly presents to me a bit like how someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder might see the world; again, it misjudges the relationship between moral maturity and prosocial choices.

(See my Level 7 website for further discussion of many of the issues alluded to above….)

My 2 cents.

From Quora: https://www.quora.com/The-Venus-Project-What-do-people-think-about-the-Resource-Based-Economy-predicted-by-Jacques-Fresco/answer/T-Collins-Logan

In answer to Quora question "If technology is supposed to make our lives easier why are people increasingly having to work longer hours--especially in America?"

Thanks for the A2A. I think there are three main factors in play:

1) On a macro level capitalism is growth-dependent. When growth stalls then the economy stalls. Add to this an ever-increasing scarcity of both the factors of production and what is being produced, and a pressure cooker is created for both consumers and producers. (Perverse incentives are in play as well - sometimes scarcity is deliberately engineered). In any case, when we inject market-incentivized competition into this growth-scarcity dynamic, then amplify it with government constraints and reallocations, then maintaining or increasing the standard of living inevitably requires higher productivity within downward wage pressures and downward price pressures. In this environment, we may have simply exceeded the capacity of technology to offset the spiral, and must work much harder to overcome diminishing returns.

2) As someone who was an IT consultant for fifteen years and still follows IT trends and developments, I would say that technology makes certain things easier while introducing a lot more complexity and expectation of effort in other areas. For example, email provides efficiency of communication, but what if you have 100+ work emails to parse every day? Answering all those emails may feel like productivity, but it often doesn't result in actual productivity. There are parallels throughout almost all technology implementations - what at first seems to provide increased capacity also incurs additional costs. Does this result in a complete wash? Sometimes, but more often the gains just aren't as great as expected, and a decent ROI demands additional "self-justifying" effort (or, ironically, additional investment).

3) The American work ethic is pretty distorted. Although attempts have been made to reward productivity and accomplishment above "being busy," the reality is that in most work environments either "being busy" or "appearing to be busy" are much more highly esteemed than actual productivity. Combined with the first two factors, this means people are working harder and harder to accomplish less, produce less, earn less and ultimately enjoy life less.

My 2 cents.

From Quora answer to "What is the impact of information technology on society?"

This is a fascinating area of inquiry. It's also pretty broad. But I'll give you some observations as someone who was an IT professional for 15+ years:

1. Information is not knowledge, but IT creates the illusion of knowledge because it makes so much data readily available for analysis. The result is often that well-meaning folks - even academics and professionals - believe they "know" something when actually they haven't integrated all the information available into knowledge, but have just latched onto an informational veneer, a veneer that may currently have faddish traction or allure in their given field, but isn't well-considered.

2. IT presents a limited VR dimension of experience and interaction; it does not equate the rich level of exchange that occurs in the real world. But modern society has embraced this façade as increasingly genuine, so that people believe they are really "interacting" online, really "befriending" or "falling in love" in virtual ways, really "having a conversation" on the Internet, etc. when of course they are only doing so in the most shallow and superficial ways. Face-to-face human interaction has increasingly been perceived as less important, which has devastating long-term consequences for building and maintaining "real" relationships.

3. Along similar lines, although on the one hand IT decreases the apparent distance between all sorts of interactions (producers and consumers, authors and readers, managers and employees, politicians and constituents, etc.) it also insulates and isolates us from the world around us. IT makes it possible for a person to do their job from home, order all consumer goods from home, interact with relatives from home, pay their bills from home, etc. And the resulting physical, psychological and emotional isolation undermines or distorts our development as human beings, our sense of political obligation and engagement, and our understanding of how we fit into the world - our sense of place and purpose.

4. Since its inception, IT has promised the replacement of human labor as a cost-saving and increased efficiency measure. However, this has had spotty success, because the costs are transferred from a legacy employee base and skill set to IT professionals, expensive hardware, and expensive software. In terms of efficiency, institutional memory is often lost along with specialized expertise, and replaced with much more generic (though equally specialized) IT proficiency. Additionally, the training and retraining curve for end users sometimes inhibits efficiencies - and of course IT systems can also stop working or make errors, further interrupting workflow.

5. In the same way, many businesses and institutions believe that IT is a panacea, able to solve all of their most persisting problems...but IT creates as many problems as it solves. However, the Pollyannaish conviction that IT is "the answer" has increasingly become quite irrational, prone to selective confirmation bias and high tolerance for cognitive dissonance, so that no matter how costly, problematic, inefficient, disruptive or crippling a given IT environment becomes, these businesses and institutions will keep investing more and more time, energy and money into it and continue blindly justifying their beliefs.

6. IT expands cultural connections, but it does so in ways that dilute each culture, because each culture must interface with others according to established protocols that greatly confine or narrow cultural expression. For instance, emails are expected to have a subject line that indicates content; tweets (initially) were 140 characters long; TED talks were limited to 12 minutes; English has been the dominant IT language and programming code relied on the Roman alphabet; QWERTY keyboards were the norm for many years...and so on.

7. In terms of organizing, storing, analyzing, compiling, generating, navigating, parsing, processing, propagating and communicating all sorts of information and media, IT is the most powerful force humanity has ever encountered outside of the human brain. IT also democratizes all of these capabilities, so that more and more people have access to that power.

You might think that because six out of seven of the societal impacts I listed weren't necessarily positive, that I don't appreciate IT. But I do. I still love IT - because of #7. Even though it isn't my profession anymore, I still follow new developments, play with new technologies, and engage in IT discussions like this one. But I have come to understand that IT does certain things very well, and other things either poorly or terribly. And until modern society comes to a similar realization about its strengths and limitations, IT will continue doing a lot more harm than good.

My 2 cents.