The World Is Not Ending (Parts One & Two out of Three) (Patreon)

"The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

Part 1: The Uninhabitable Earth

It feels really hard to talk about the future.

We know that climate change is getting worse at a terrifying pace, and I think for lots of people it doesn’t even feel worthwhile to look into the problem in any detail because we all feel incredibly helpless in the face of what really looks like it could be the end of the world. Then you go look into it. That doesn’t help either.

In fact, the details and data about just how badly pollution has fucked up the planet bring you to the inevitable conclusion that this is a problem beyond voting, beyond protest - a problem that we just don’t have time to tackle by incremental reform or market solutions.

The opening page of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells describes this pretty perfectly:

“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the ‘natural’ world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will inevitably engineer a way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analog to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.”

The chapter titles of The Uninhabitable Earth read like a list of different ways that a recently divorced supervillain might try to commit suicide while taking as many people with him as possible: Heat Death, Hunger, Drowning, Wildfire, Dying Oceans, Unbreathable Air, Economic Collapse. David Wallace Wells does a meticulous job of bringing together climate data in ways that make the climate emergency come into focus as a cascade of overlapping apocalyptic problems and at the same time explains why the climate warnings that manage to make it into the news are constantly softening the problem. In short: scientists are bound by academic practice not to engage in too much conjecture, but this means that the big scary final warning gotta do something this time or else warnings that the scientific community is actually comfortable publishing are always about what we could avoid if we took drastic action right now.

That doesn’t sound unreasonable, but the actual trend is that the fossil fuel industry keeps growing, finding more sources of fuel, and industrial production powered by fossil fuels keeps putting larger amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere year on year. That means that at any point, what we could avoid by taking drastic action right now is pretty bad, but any reasonable person’s evaluation of the situation would read more like it looks like you are trying to accelerate towards a world where the topsoil is so scorched and poisoned nothing will ever grow again and all the oceans are barren, stop now or we will all die I am not fucking around, or more accurately, any reasonable person’s evaluation of the situation would read [unintelligible screaming]

And fuck, then there’s the attempts at telling us it’ll all be okay.

You see Bill Gates and, tragically, the science communicators that have been paid to regurgitate his gibberish saying that we’ll just invent our way out of the problem. How are we supposed to rely on a gizmo that hasn’t been invented yet being manufactured on a scale large enough to make any kind of difference? I will become violently ill if I have to watch another animation with a cartoon box fan that somehow sucks carbon out of the air with a cheerful liberal telling me that market economics will solve the problem that market economics got us into.

You see liberal politicians talking about a radical plan of action that will ensure a just and happy transition to green energy by 2030 or 2050 or 2080 or some date they’ve deemed achievable far beyond the realm of their electoral cycle. I’ll vote for the better candidate, and I’ll keep voting to try and keep them in, but I don’t even have a vote in American elections, and those seem to be the ones that like, matter at all, and even if my candidate gets in, and stays in, will the policies be enacted just like they want them to? Like we can vote - or like, according to my YouTube analytics most of you can vote - only every few years. How many elections do we even think are left before the literal end of the world?

Strapping on my waders and my air filtration mask to swim to the polling station so I can vote for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to please make transgenderism illegal next year not this year.

All of these liberal answers completely disregard the rapidity of climate change, and none of them take any kind of reasonable look at how we got here.

As David Wallace Wells puts it:

"Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, advertising scientific consensus unmistakably to the world; this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance."

And, somewhat whimsically:

“The majority of burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld”

Jerry! The world’s on fire out there!

Leave me alone Kramer I’m going back to bed.

And I suppose that brings me to the purpose of this essay: depression. Doomerism. The belief that we are all absolutely fucked and there is nothing we can do to stop climate change.

I’ve noticed a pattern in my friends offline as well as in the online leftist content sphere, where people keep invoking climate change only to say “everything’s fucked!” It’s always the last thing in a list of reasons why everything sucks: fascism and recession and so on and so on and not to mention climate change - it keeps being invoked only as a reminder that there is absolutely no hope. The “not to mention” climate change is extremely real, we’re not really mentioning it, just evoking the idea of it as a completely insurmountable obstacle.

I can’t pretend I don’t understand the impulse to not want to look at the problem, of course. I legitimately made myself deeply miserable by reading more into climate data and the politics surrounding it, the failsafe mechanisms, as it were, of climate change, that keep us locked on course for total climate apocalypse.

David Wallace Wells breaks down the escalating devastation of climate change according to the degrees of warming reached due to carbon emissions.

“At two degrees, the ice sheets will begin their collapse, 400 million more people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes, heatwaves will kill thousands each summer. There would be thirty-two times as many extreme heatwaves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing ninety-three times more people. This is our best case scenario. At three degrees, southern Europe would be in a permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last nineteen months longer and in the Caribbean twenty-one months longer.In northern Africa, the figure is sixty months longer - five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the mediterranean and sextuple or more, in the United States. At four degrees, there would be eight million more cases of Dengue fever each year in Latin America alone and close to annual global flood crises.There could be 9 percent more heat-related deaths. Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the United Kingdom. In certain places, 6 climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion - more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today. Conflict and warfare could double.”

Part of what makes the question of our planetary future feel too bleak to even consider - makes our total annihilation seem a certainty to many - is the nature of the problem of climate change as a socio-politico-economic issue.

We live in a world divided by global capitalist imperialism. There aren’t just rich countries and poor countries, global north and south or first and third world. There is an imperial core and an imperial periphery, and the definitional relationship is that the imperial core countries exploit and steal from the imperial periphery.

A map usually helps to be able to properly understand the shape of things like this.

Behold The Walled World. The most heavily policed and militarised borders in the world, and inside of them only 14% of the population but 73% of the wealth. This isn’t a perfect map, it doesn’t show for instance the varied relationships between the countries outside those borders or how they have different relationships to the countries within them. It also paints this as pretty black-and-white - countries that are “in” or “out” - and that’s unhelpful because of the ways that the boundaries and flows of imperialism can shift and change, and also because it can’t tell us a very important aspect of its own visualisation: that these borders are there to keep people in as well as to keep people out. The imperial periphery is in a very real sense thanks to the limits that wealth places on freedom of movement, ghettoised. As David Graeber put it in Direct Action: An Ethnography:

“A lot of us were already arguing that the whole point of “free trade” was in fact to confine most of the world’s population in impoverished global ghettoes with heavily militarized borders, in which existing social protections could be removed and the resulting terror and desperation fully exploited by global capital.”

Nonetheless as a visualisation it does bring together some political truths we are aware of implicitly - that the countries responsible for historic imperialism and their white-majority offshoots and settler-colonial projects continue to benefit from that legacy in a material way.

Liberal discussions of who is responsible for climate change and who should fix it treat global politics like an even playing field, as though all countries compete on an even footing in the marketplace of global capitalism. In fact, the richest country in the world and its allies - the other richest countries in the world - are responsible for not only a disproportionate share of emissions but also responsible through financial mechanisms for a lot of the way that other countries emit too.

International bodies like the UN measure the progress and success of countries according to a model based off the countries in the imperial core, using not only wealth but a specific pathway of industrialisation and then eventual shift from an industrial sector economy to something else. This framework of “human development” is ahistorical - countries in the imperial core underwent industrialisation off the back of colonialism and the domination of other countries and even chattel slavery. In the US & UK our economies “deindustrialised” - that is, shifted from an industrial sector to service sector economy - because the industrial workers were gaining organised class consciousness and the governments outsourced industrial manufacturing to the imperial periphery to force the working class into jobs without unions. Are imperial periphery countries supposed to follow this same pathway? How? This is starting to look more and more like America making a video in its garage with its two lamborghinis telling the poorest countries in the world how they can be just like this with a little hard work and a subscription to its private discord chat.

To describe the scope and nature of the problem of climate change requires these digressions into so much else because without it we have a sort of nonsense map of countries with enormous emissions but not enough resources to tackle their emissions and the best answer is that they just need to be given time to develop more, using fossil fuels is just a natural part of human development. In reality there is a system of incentives and coercion here that encourages every nation to be as invested in oil as possible, because to do so makes America richer.

It’s not just that the American Empire runs on oil, but the very concept of value and the primary financial mechanism of structuring the American Empire, the dollar, is intrinsically linked to oil.

Since the US was historically a net importer of oil, the correlation between the dollar value and oil prices was inverse until about 2010, when the US became a net exporter, and now the price of oil and the value of the dollar has reversed and when oil is more expensive the dollar is also worth more. The common element between both relationships is that the US always gets the best deal on oil sales.

This isn’t an informal relationship either. In August 1971 in a deeply jokerfied move Richard Nixon depegged the value of the dollar from gold and pegged it to oil instead. This was a response to the enormous debts that America was generating due to, among other things, the Vietnam war. As a result, oil is always traded in US dollars, referred to sometimes as petrodollars. Of course the Seinfeld premiere wasn’t until 1989 when Ronald Reagan left office, so we can’t pin this all on Nixon. What’s the deal with oil prices?

If your currency has more value, it has more power. It’s important to understand money as instructional tokens, the function of money is not to store value but to convey it, to move it from one party to another in exchange for something - so more money is more power, go figure.

So when people say “why would America invade the middle east for oil, it’s already one of the biggest oil producers in the world?” The answer is surprisingly simple. If your currency has a value tied to the value of oil, you have a vested interest in both controlling all of the oil supply or at least making sure it’s in a few reliable monopolies, and also in people using oil.

But to understand the shape of the power isn’t enough, because the next thought for many would simply be that the American presidential elections hold enormous importance in the question of climate - which of course they do - but voting in a completely green president of the United States is no magic bullet.

Franz Kafka has a short story called An Imperial Message, and it is very short, so I’ll just read it to you:

“The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his deathbed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow” actually, it’s a bit fruity even for me, so even though it’s short, let me paraphrase. The emperor is on his deathbed, and his last act was to give a message to his messenger intended for you, verified by everyone at the deathbed, and immediately the messenger set off, but the problem is the imperial bedroom is absolutely packed full of mourners. The messenger of course has the imperial sun crest on his uniform that he can show people and demand that they get out of the way but even getting out of the way is difficult for them with how packed it is, so the messenger makes glacial progress shoving his way through the crowd basically swimming through the bodies. Even if he got out of the bedroom he would have to get through the inner palace, though, and the whole palace is full of mourners, but he is determined. Even if he got out of the inner palace though, there would be a wall, and an outer palace, and another outer wall, and then the imperial city, and all of it completely dense with crowded people, so in effect he will never actually reach you.

This is how imperialism works. It has to create convoluted systems of power through which to enact the will of the empire, both to distance the people at the top from the imperial subjects and to legitimise the authority of the empire through abstraction and esoterica. The flip side of this is that the power of even the most powerful political figure in the world has to work through all these convoluted mechanisms, slowing it to a snail’s pace.

This shows how the shape of global power, while dictating much about the periphery from the imperial core, doesn’t allow for a change that could tackle the climate emergency through the existing channels of worldwide politics. As is often noted about imperial core-periphery relationships, the superstructure exceeds the infrastructure. The ideology of the free market, the patterns of behaviour in service of the idol of capital, are rampant and unrestricted and take place far outside of the ability for the imperial project to regulate them.

If Joe Biden actually wanted to stop climate change - I know folks, good stuff, I’m here all week. If President Biden actually wanted to stop climate change, and made the halting of global warming the number one priority of his administration, would they actually be able to do it? If they moved to shut down all fossil fuel extraction in the States and started using their political influence on the rest of the world to pressure every other country they could to ditch fossil fuels too, it wouldn’t result in the fossil fuel industry being shut down, it would likely result in either the removal of Biden from power or the collapse of America’s political power on the global stage. Most likely, in fact, it would just be used as a new frontier of imperialism, in which the poorer countries would be brutalised and sanctioned while America promised it was definitely moving away from fossil fuels as soon as possible, but the most important thing is to stop those other countries since America is already dedicated to changing but those other people, they’re holding it all up! In fact, we can see that this is already more or less the situation - that green imperialism is well underway and while America makes empty gestures towards domestic reform, the focus for many people has shifted to what China will do about emissions. Green energy has already been recuperated into one of those never-fulfilled but never-empty threats that makes American imperialism work at all.

The way that the system operates is not meaningfully separable from the climate crisis. You could even say that American Imperialism and climate change are just facets of the same thing, and we can’t rely on that thing to stop itself because to do so would be against its essential drive to exist.

Or to put it in more plain terms:

Climate change cannot be stopped without ending imperialist global capitalism.

So flooding, droughts, heatwaves, extreme and devastating weather events, unbreathable air and dying oceans are all the endpoint of the current normal way of doing business on which all of our political relationships are built. In order to stop those horrible things happening, we would have to dismantle the power of the most powerful nation on Earth, and probably even more absurdly, we would have to destroy the framework that gives it its power. Capitalism itself is the thing killing the world.

I think this is a part of why capitalists have been so successful in making us feel like individual responsibility and consumption are big factors in confronting climate change. The term “carbon footprint” was literally invented by the fossil fuel industry with the intent of shifting blame onto us as consumers. I think we are capable of accepting implicitly that the entire system that we rely on for food, housing, clothing, everything really is to blame, and naturally enough we’re paralysed by the knowledge that nothing short of total revolution could change the path we’re on as a planet.

Why do you even watch videos like this? Long as hell video essays about philosophy and leftist takes on media and communist political theory. I know the answer for a lot of my audience very clearly because I watch long youtube videos in a very similar way, albeit on different topics. I know a lot of you watching this are at your work desk, or in bed, or in some other way consuming this content when you should be eating, or sleeping or getting things done or tending to your life in some other way. I know this is a comforting space for people who need to procrastinate away from being healthy, and again, I know because I do this too.

When I do it I like to watch videos about how to grow mushrooms at home. I love mushrooms, I’ve always loved fungus and mosses and moulds, I remember being fascinated by - brace for a phenomenally gross name here - a type of slime mould that used to grow outside my bedroom window called Dog Vomit mould. I love the idea of these other kinds of organisms, neither plants nor animals, that grow in the dirt down where we can’t see them, that do all sorts of amazing things. Did you know that the mycelial networks in the ground beneath forests attach to the root systems of the trees and basically allow forests to think - like the trees can send little hidden messages to each other through the fungus.

Anyway I like to lie in bed and not sleep and not get up to do the day and not eat and learn about how I could grow pink oyster mushrooms or lion’s mane or chanterelles at home. I’m not doing any of those things though I’m just watching a YouTube video. It’s a kind of escapist fantasy for what I could be doing with my time if I weren’t so paralysingly depressed, and I know that a lot of people feel exactly the same way about the kinds of content that they consume, the kinds of content that I create, even. So I just lie there not buying a plastic tub, not mixing a bulk substrate, not innoculating a spawn bag, not growing any mushrooms, just… waiting. Incubating.

Other content creators and influencers on the left are very quick to say that nobody should listen to them about what to do politically, because why would you listen to an influencer about something as important as this? Maybe they’re right, it does sound pretty fucking silly to get your directions for how to build a better world from a video on the internet.

I mean what the fuck can I even do anyway? I’m just a youtuber, my sole qualifications are a gifted and talented program in high school, a silver plaque that says I got 100,000 subscribers and reading as many accounts of historical revolutions as I could get my hands on. Nobody expects me to lay out a step by step analysis and plan of how to not only ensure that a revolution succeeds but also how to shape the character of it to be as loving and kind as possible resulting in the best and most equitable and gentle world for everyone. That would be ridiculous.

So I’ll just keep making videos about the phenomenology of Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook conspiracy theories and you’ll keep watching them, and I’ll keep watching videos about how to grow mushrooms at home and enjoy the fantasy of it.

But what if we actually did it?

The World Is Not Ending

I started out quite ambitious with my mushroom growing. I skipped over buying grow-your-own kits and went straight for mixing my own substrate, which is a word which here means “expensive dirt”, that I could grow my mushrooms on. My substrate was mostly vermiculite, gypsum and cocoa coir, with water I had boiled to avoid contamination. I also made a pretty silly mistake and decided to grow Pink Oysters out of this tub of dirt. Pink Oysters grow best out of vertical surfaces, not horizontal ones, so the way my Pink Oysters grew was extremely whacky and probably would have come out better with a different setup. Nonetheless, they came out really well, which looking back was extremely lucky because the whole setup here was full of problems, but maybe that’s a testament to how easily Pink Oysters can fruit. And boy are they gorgeous.

I have footage of the first flush of these Pink Oysters, but I had to travel during the second flush, and that was during the big summer heatwave. If I’d been there, I would have put a lot of work into keeping them temperature regulated and hydrated, but because I was away the second flush withered and dried up.

Later on I got a grow kit so I could capture a timelapse of the Pink Oysters actually fruiting, and this footage shows off another of the big mistakes I made starting out - I didn’t make a separated, sterile space for my mushroom growing, so flies found it pretty fast and it got kinda gross. The reason I’m talking about the failures and the problems here is that I think it’s really important to expect that things will go wrong when you decide to actually get out of bed and do something. In fact, it’s good to expect everything to go wrong, but it’s also worth understanding what that really looks like. I was pretty heartbroken after the heatwave killed my little pink guys, and I really thought that the entire mycellium had died off, but a few weeks later a third flush started anyway. It turned out they just needed to rest and recuperate for a little bit, and so even though at first I thought that the lesson here was that I needed to be around to put in the caring labour to make my project work, it turned out that sometimes you just have to be patient, and when your mycelium gets burned out, it just needs to rest a little.

Let’s start at the worst case scenario and work backwards from there.

This might seem callous, which is really not my intention, given the scale of human misery that climate change is about to inflict upon the world. Discussing this problem sometimes drives us to say things like “if billions of people die” because, well, that’s a thing that could actually happen.

But sketching out the worst case scenario can actually be an exercise in reassurance. My mum taught me to sometimes do this when I’m worried - understand in totality what is the worst thing that could come of this, but only the worst thing that could realistically come of this. If I’m panicking that nobody will come to my birthday party I can’t say the worst case scenario is I get arrested for being a supreme billy no mates and sentenced to death for being a loser.

Okay, so when people imagine the absolute worst case scenario of climate change, it more or less goes something like: millions upon millions die directly, millions more are displaced. The migrant crisis drives far-right politics in richer nations that people flee to and neoliberal governments respond the way they do to everything by becoming more authoritarian, stripping away people’s rights to say, bodily autonomy, being queer, living in different lifestyles than 9-to-5 capitalist work. That’s where we’re up to so far. Then as the warming continues not only does the migrant crisis and therefore the far-right politics driven by the migrant crisis worsen but also certain resources become increasingly scarce, such as clean water, driving global conflicts based on previously abundant resources and after major population centres are nuked to fuck the stragglers find themselves living in a Mad Max wasteland, permanently sewn into their finest fetish gear and ready to garrotte, stab, scam and shoot their way through a dozen other human beings just to get the last vegan sausage roll on the irradiated shelf of the Wrexham Greggs.

But is any of that realistic?

For one, the reality of mutually assured destruction is that anyone actually taking the steps to fire nuclear weapons in a world so full of nuclear weapons as ours is would be taking a step to end all life on Earth, and I don’t personally believe that that will ever happen. Call it misguided optimism in humanity if you like, but if I’m wrong what are you gonna do? Say I told you so? Ok, I’ll be atoms so good luck. I don’t think that nuclear armageddon is a real possibility but the idea that it could be should be enough to motivate anybody to campaign to have all nuclear weapons disarmed.

For another, there is an assumption in our picture of the end of the world that we will be protected from the worst conditions. When we tell this story we can’t help but imagine ourselves as the characters in it and therefore the survivors. We imagine that if the richer countries that we live in descend into utter tyrannical chaos it will be because the rest of the world has become uninhabitable entirely. The relationship between our safety and comfort and everyone else’s will remain the same but the lowering tide wil beach all boats.

This is actually a quite silly approach that is borne out of the chauvinism of the imperial core. We refuse to contemplate, even in total collapse, that our relationship to the countries that our governments exploit would change, but I think it’s actually quite naive to assume that the power relationships that exist now would continue to hold firm through such an all-encompassing crisis.

We like this phrase about the future, “socialism or barbarism”, but it isn't socialism or barbarism, it's that we live under barbarism right now and until we build socialism. Never think that you don't live in a barbaric society just because you can get deliveroo. If you think we don't live in a cruel and desperate world right now speak to a homeless person, speak to a refugee, speak to a mother whose parents and children are freezing to death this winter because the people in charge could give them access to electricity for free but don't care to do anything about the soaring bills. For that matter, speak to your deliveroo driver.

So I think that imagining that the exploitative relationships will hold out is both the main way we construct a picture of the end of the world and also quite absurd. Implicitly when we talk about this we imagine American Imperialism riding out the wave of diminishing human population until President Robo-Trump is the last metahuman alive who then dies of quasar-variant covid because he refused to get vaccinated as a political stunt.

In fact let’s peel back from the worst case scenario now and look again at David Wallace-Wells’ projections for 4 degrees of warming. At that dramatic a shift in the Earth’s climate, will capitalism still be able to function?

“In certain places, 6 climate-driven natural disasters could strike simultaneously, and, globally, damages could pass $600 trillion - more than twice the wealth as exists in the world today.”

It seems like there is a point where the damage of climate change will make the normal functioning of capitalism impossible, and since the normal functioning of capitalism is what is driving climate change, there is a point at which at the very least capitalism is going to make capitalism impossible. This brings us back to the essential “worst case scenario” exercise: if billions of people die, will the people who survive be practising capitalism? At what point will people abandon the system that is killing the planet?

This seems at first blush to take us to a kind of “human nature” conversation, which is a kind of conversation I personally hate. Do people just love capitalism too much? Will we let billions die, will we continue producing and consuming like we are now until we are forced not to by powers beyond our control? Are humans beings just too greedy? Well I don’t think so, but I’m not going to argue it’s because people are fundamentally good.

As David Wallace-Wells tells us, at 4 degrees of warming climate change will destroy more than twice the wealth that currently exists in the world. Capitalists, and much western culture since the renaissance, wants us to see people, society, progress, and civilisation as separate from nature and not dependent on it. The reality is that climate change diminishing the resources that capitalist production can pull from will inevitably drain the wealth that the ruling class use to instruct the working class.

Let me put it like this:

If any capitalist state had no money it wouldn’t be able to make people do anything, because money is instructional tokens. Yes they could pay fewer people more, police to terrorise and control the population, but if the state - and by extension the businesses that step in to fulfil the roles of the state for-profit under neoliberalism - doesn’t provide ways for people to get the things they need to survive, people will organise to provide for each other. If people can’t earn a living wage they become divorced from the systems of the state, and if enough people are in that situation they will form structures of mutual aid, a parallel power to the state’s diminished presence.

It’s not that there’s an inevitable tipping point, but things will keep getting worse and the sooner people resist the better things will be, a calculation that will become more and more readily apparent to everyone, and if a state fails and the structures that come in to take its place aren’t oriented around meeting everyone’s needs, those new structures will immediately be on a rapid path to collapse. And again and again until structures are formed around care. It’s all about how quickly people withdraw their dependence on capitalist states and form those care structures instead.

This is actually a very worthwhile approach, because the damage of climate change is still, despite its suddenness, a sliding scale. As David Wallace Wells puts it:

“Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is ‘real’, too many of us have developed a misleading impression that its effects are binary. But global warming is not ‘yes’ or ‘no’, nor is it ‘today’s weather forever’ or ‘doomsday tomorrow’.”

This is what is fundamentally quite unhelpful about some of the media that talks about climate change - directly or indirectly - only in terms of total annihilation. It lets us think of a big ON/OFF switch for the apocalypse. If we do nothing, the switch remains ON, and it would be hard to push it over to OFF, so we’ll simply all die, I guess.

One very popular story tackling our societal approach to climate change is Adam McKay and David Sirota’s 2021 film Don’t Look Up. It doesn’t talk about climate change directly, but rather has a huge asteroid barreling towards Earth that will completely destroy the planet and shows the frustration and despair of the scientists who are aware of it and trying to get the government to act, as they first meet ignorance, then complacency, and then a kaleidoscopic horror of the ultra wealthy allowing the asteroid to get closer so they can make money off it, cynical right wing politicians fuelling a cult of denialism to maintain political leverage and the US government actively sabotaging other countries’ attempts to stop the asteroid. It’s a doomer classic.

In its exploration of these things, Don’t Look Up remains quite a sophisticated look at the political systems around climate change. It actually really helps to explain how and why the American Empire has accelerated gleefully towards the end of the world. The problem, of course, is that while the film can imagine looting and rioting, as well as last-day-on-earth drug fuelled orgies and selfish contingency plans for the ultra wealthy, it is quite determined to show us how inaction is forced on the population and ultimately take us right up to the final moment so that we can really see total annihilation in clear, absolute terms.

Don’t get me wrong, this too is a strength of the film in many ways. I think people need to take it deadly fucking seriously that what is happening could actually destroy everything. At the same time, it is the film’s biggest weakness. It fails to imagine that there could be more meaningful resistance both domestically and internationally to how the US government courts the apocalypse. It posits the people in America who would riot as separate from the mechanisms of the state. What do we imagine the soldiers and aerospace engineers and emergency planners in direct control of the technologies that could destroy the asteroid are doing? The film tells us that they’ll just do their jobs as instructed. I’m not sure I believe it. How hostile would the international community become towards America as the planet plunges to certain doom in service of American Imperialism? The film tells us that they wouldn’t dare oppose the United States. I’m not so sure.

Climate change is necessarily a generational question and a question of the old and established and the youth, and a lot of older people writing about climate change have correctly identified that climate change cannot be stopped without the dismantling of global capitalism, but whether they like it or not they have concluded that capitalism cannot be toppled. A lot of younger people however, in no small part because they understand it is the only way they can have a future at all, aren’t keen on capitalism sticking around.

This is observable in demographic data even. The classic trend is that people get more conservative politically as they age, but for Millennials and younger generations that just isn’t the case.

Arwa Madahwi comments on this very insightfully in Millennials aren’t getting more rightwing with age. I suspect I know why. Do I even need to say why? How would you even say it with the right level of –

“millennials have been royally screwed by an inequitable economic system and a runaway climate crisis. Only an idiot with loads of money would be happy with the way things are.”

Yep. That’s pretty much it.

So in very real terms, a lot of younger people are basically on board with having a revolution, with getting rid of capitalism, because even if it weren’t currently poised to annihilate their future in a you-will-literally-be-dead way, younger people can see that they won’t be able to own homes, have kids or retire under the current economic system.

It actually seems obvious enough when you think about the problem. Currently the objective of our society is to maximise profit, so if we wanted to make the objective of our society to be to live sustainably and peacefully, which is more or less what I think we are asking for, it will require a reorganising of the fundamental social relations. Incidentally David Graeber described a revolution as the reorganising of social relations on a fundamental level.

This makes better sense of things like the industrial revolution and the free love sexual revolution as revolutions. They were a fundamental reorganisation of social relations - the way people interacted shifted and changed so radically as to constitute a complete epistemic jump from one generation to the next. Now we have older generations stuck in the logic of capitalism and the younger generations seeking a world where our social interactions aren’t mediated by capital or by enforced hierarchies.

A lot of this conversation is actually just about what kind of world the younger generations are going to build, and because it’s those older people, generally the richer ones, so definitely the ones who are really really invested in capitalism sticking around, who get to dictate our mainstream cultural narratives, and they find the possibility of a post-capitalist world utterly horrifying, they’d rather we all imagined the end of the world instead. But actually what we should be talking about is how we want social relations to change. We need to give ourselves guiding narratives to understand what it is we are aiming for because it seems from quite a few angles like a really deep large-scale change is coming, whether because people manage to push that change sooner or because people have to form that change later after the crisis collapses in on itself.

We don’t need to get over excited and start making seditious threats that will get us all in trouble and not help anyone. What we need is to be calm, take a breath, look at the bigger picture and understand what the pragmatic next steps are.

Part 2: How To Blow Up A Pipeline

“What will we all do about climate change if we accept that our states have failed us?” is the question most central to Andreas Malm’s book How To Blow Up A Pipeline. The influential work, that has become an international hit and even had an adaptation into a narrative fiction movie about activists sabotaging oil infrastructure, is about the inevitability of the population as a whole deciding that the only course of action is the direct destruction of the physical infrastructure of the systems that are killing the planet. In a sense, the book doesn’t really advocate for anything, but rather explains in simple terms why people are going to do this.

How To Get Put On A Watchlist – sorry I mean How To Blow Up A Pipeline draws parallels to the suffragette movement which, acting at a time when women had very clearly delineated second-class citizenship in the UK, engaged in acts of sabotage and property destruction that targeted the very systems that were oppressing them. Sabotage, Malm makes clear, is simply the option that protest movements turn to when they can see they aren’t being listened to, and giving up is not an option.

Sabotage in the case of the fossil fuel industry of course, will mean not just property damage but massive market dysregulation. Sabotaging oil infrastructure will cause the price of oil to spike enormously just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has, and that’s kind of the point. This kind of sabotage is meant to put an even more extreme pressure point on fossil fuels by making them literally too expensive to stick with.

This gives states a choice: abandon oil or defend oil. Either they move to other fuel sources or start militantly defending oil pipelines, probably with the literal military if the Dakota Keystone access pipeline is anything to go by.

Malm makes a point of emphasising how the anti terrorism laws brought in post-9/11 were used extensively against climate activists in the early 2000s, how climate activists where seen by the state as the single biggest domestic threat and how the movement suffered a setback because of the massive wave of arrests and extreme sentencing. But as the socialists say: you can cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring.

On a planet with a collapsing ecology, the collapse of which could at the very least be halted by drastic action even if reversal is no longer possible, every year will only see more and more people politicised by the weather, and you know what they say about the weather: it’s fucking everywhere.

Malm also points out how no matter how strict the consequences or absurd the legislation of what constitutes an offence to the state, people will throw themselves at this problem because once you recognise the seriousness of the problem there isn’t really a deterrent that will stop you from fighting to stop, y’know, the end of the fucking world. This means that people fighting back will either get more extreme or more organised, or both.

More extreme acts of sabotage are likely because if we reach a point where you can get 50 years in prison for interrupting an oil executive’s speech at some bougie gala, you may as well get 50 years in prison for, well, blowing up an oil pipeline.

More organised actions are likely because the more people take part in large scale actions, the more organised power is being demonstrated and the quicker the state will back down. For instance, when we talk about a revolution - and again what we mean by that is a fundamental reorganising of social relations - one way that a revolution against oil could be quite peaceful is if workers who are concerned about our planetary future organised a general strike and refused to work until the state moved away from fossil fuels.

Malm doesn’t actually tell the reader how someone would go about blowing up a pipeline until deep into the book, at which point it really doesn’t matter because by this point both the inevitability of such sabotage and the diversity of actual tactics involved in the resistance to climate apocalypse have become quite clear.

Now, I really think the inevitability of extreme and/or organised resistance is quite absolute. See above: weather, fucking everywhere. However, a lot of people have a squeamishness about thinking too hard about this because of the understandable fear of retaliation by the state. If the army are patrolling oil pipelines and arresting or even shooting people who try to do property damage, how many hops, skips, and/or jumps away from out and out civil war is that? If more and more people are going to be politicised by the climate crisis and at the same time the systems that keep society running are falling apart, aren’t we looking at the Mad-Max-esque backstabbing libertarian wasteland situation that people think of when they talk about the end of the world?

The answer is complicated, and I need to give it in two parts. Part one: how far the violence dial cranks up is in the hands of the state, and how they choose to respond to the acts of resistance. Let’s unpack that.

In the novel Blindness, author Jose Saramago explores the nature of crisis and how people react to it. In the book, everyone in the world suddenly can only see blank white. I assume this is to differentiate from the actual disability of blindness and make the affliction more blindness-as-metaphor, but the short version of the premise is, suddenly nobody can see and society immediately collapses. Horrible things happen. The book includes scenes of violence, rape, exploitation, imprisonment and so on, as people who see a short-term benefit in this situation form a coalition of the greedy, stupid and cruel to take advantage of others. Then, at the end of the book, the doctor’s wife - the first character in the book to go blind - starts to see again. The implication is that everyone else will also shortly be able to see again, and whatever changes society takes on the people who have done horrible things will have to reckon with everyone being able to see what they’ve done.

The book is a harrowing read but its core idea is relatively easy to describe - if some people feel like there will be no consequences for their enacting of their most disgusting impulses, they will carry them out, but the idea of social repercussions, no matter what form they take, are a powerful deterrent because we are social animals. Of course the book also contains plenty of characters taking care of each other, but the question that hangs over the story the whole way through - whether caring can outdo cruelty - is entirely alleviated by the ending. I certainly felt almost robbed the first time I finished the book because it created such a powerful sense that although all the caring that characters had done for each other was obviously worthwhile, all the suffering that characters had inflicted upon one another was utterly pointless, and wouldn’t have happened if they knew that soon people would see again.

It’s really important not to just think about this in terms of the individuals who would do violent and fascist things during a crisis but crucially the state actors and the people involved in the fossil fuel industry, because they, arguably more than anyone, are acting like they won’t face any kind of social repercussion for perpetuating climate change.

None of them are thinking about what the people of tomorrow will think of what we are doing now.

Hang on. “What the people of tomorrow will think of what we are doing now”? What? That’s a strange concept isn’t it? Not just because it means imagining what people with a different culture, socialisation and set of material conditions will think and feel but like, on a really basic level:

It all hinges on the idea of there being people there tomorrow. Imagining what people tomorrow will think isn’t really the hard part. Imagining the people will exist to think anything is the thing we’re being actively pushed back from doing, because once we say that there are going to be people there tomorrow, we find ourselves saying things like:

The enforcement of legal protection of the fossil fuel industry will be looked back on by the people of tomorrow in similar moral terms to the legality of colonialism, the Holocaust and chattel slavery. The sheer scale of human death will be seen as morally indefensible.

And that leads us nicely on to part two of my answer: the resultant situation for people whose lives are in opposition to the state is no Fallout Desert free-for-all.

Our cultural picture of the end of the world tends to depict people fighting over tiny scraps with only tyrants able to create stable bubbles of social cohesion through violent enforcement, but that picture of some kind of world “after society collapses” actually comes from a particular ideological lineage.

This all relates to the work of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who Andreas Malm and other climate politics writers have spilled a lot of ink discussing and debunking. Hobbes, who lived during the English civil war, authored a book in 1651 called Leviathan, a seminal piece in social contract theory, and his argument was essentially that only a powerful, undivided body could rule in such a way that would create peace and stability.

The first political influencer to have a strong thumbnail game, Hobbes gave Leviathan a frontispiece depicting the king as a giant made up of people, an enlightening depiction of the nature of sovereignty. It also communicates a core part of Hobbes’ thesis on sovereignty, that to act with appropriate and meaningful power, a sovereign needs the unanimous support of their subjects.

For this same reason, Hobbes also explicitly argued that a sovereign should censor political discourse and tightly control religion within the state. Hobbes sucks, is the thing, and Leviathan is in many ways the ultimate authoritarian text. This guy is a goon and we shouldn’t be taking his ideas about society seriously. Sorry Tom, I get why people looked like they would descend into a bloody and violent war of all against all to you, like, you saw that kinda happen, but the English Civil War isn’t what human nature looks like stripped back to bare essentials, it’s a civil war, with sides who hate each other.

Allow me to sidestep another conversation about human nature and just say that if the issue is security, security doesn’t actually come from people willing to do violence first and foremost, but rather from people enacting systems of care. As unrealistic as it actually is, if the systems that keep society ticking over suddenly disappeared tomorrow, the largest social organisms to develop would be groups of people who figured out how to provide for each other sustainably.

Hobbes’ whole schtick is actually just smoke and mirrors, because what he is nominally positing as why an all-powerful sovereign is necessary for peace and safety is actually just an argument that the working class can’t govern themselves without a ruling class oppressing them. The essentially limitless imagined threats from a lawless stateless society that Hobbes cooked up in his average Telegraph reader brain will always be a sufficient justification for the power of the state. He even says that without the sovereign it would be reasonable for a man to kill his neighbour preemptively out of suspicion that his neighbour might kill him. How do we not see this guy as a GB News presenter thrown back 400 years through a wormhole? This is reactionary gibberish and I don’t need to make the essay any longer to accommodate it. Oh no scary spooky anarchy, everyone will stab each other if you don’t make me god emperor immediately. Shut up.

We still need to talk about what it looks like if people sabotage the oil infrastructure and the state becomes more hostile though, we just need to do so without imagining the working class immediately turning on Battle Royale mode. Realistically, as more people are politicised and the state’s defence of fossil fuels gets more extreme, the people resisting climate change are going to fall into certain social structures to create sustainability and safety.

At the moment, a lot of climate protesters deliberately get themselves arrested, both hoping that juries will acquit them and as a statement that they see their own actions as totally moral. This is a strong stance, and probably does a lot for their public image, but as inaction continues and more people resist, the only way the state can really respond is by being increasingly hard on arrested protesters. At that point, getting arrested isn’t putting your faith in society and your fellow human beings, but rather just getting captured by the systems that exist solely to protect the fossil fuel industry.

So when writers like Malm are calling for a plurality of tactics in sabotaging the machinery of ecological destruction, blocking roads, interrupting parliament, and yes, blowing up pipelines, I just want to say that the biggest diversity of tactics needs to come in ways of allowing people to live free from the capitalist system altogether, especially as the capitalist system loses its ability to provide more all the time.

Mass politicisation cuts two ways - a lot of the people forming systems to take care of people fighting back are just going to be doing it because they care about those people, not because they have the same politics. At the same time, as the mass movement becomes more politically informed, it’s likely that more of their attacks will be against the various organs of capitalism rather than just the parts most directly tied to polluting the atmosphere.

We have a lot of climate protesters in the UK, but truly our role as an international instrument of financial imperialism trumps any of our direct pollution. If protesters in the UK wanted to sabotage the systems of ecocide, the engines of finance capital would be a likely target.

This is how a mass movement becomes a parallel society to the established order. These people either are crushed by the state, or the movement gets bigger by virtue of people taking care of each other, and as that happens, the state is weakened because the state’s power comes from people.

We can come back to Don’t Look Up here actually, which is in a sense in conversation with How To Blow Up A Pipeline. For the people in the film, as the asteroid approaches there is nothing they can do but make internal peace with the fact that they are doomed, whether they do so indignantly, or out of their head on drugs sucking and fucking ignoring the problem, or interpreting the asteroid as a biblical apocalypse, because there is nothing they can do. It is too late and the asteroid is too powerful.

Climate change isn’t like an asteroid though. An asteroid doesn’t get closer to the planet’s surface because of a physical set of pipes located in land accessible to human beings that operate every day. An asteroid doesn’t fall to Earth annihilating everything instantly because people are making money off the asteroid getting closer. Climate change does. That means climate change can be stopped. In less pleasant terms, climate change can at least be stopped from getting any worse at an ever-increasing rate.

In this way, Don’t Look Up takes the position that the force of capital is simply undefeatable, that the extinction of the human race by climate change is equivalent to an asteroid because capital is too powerful. How To Blow Up A Pipeline takes the position that capital’s power depends entirely on human beings, and human beings do not want to die.

After having some trouble with the big box grows I got some grow kits where the seller gives you a block of fully inoculated spawn and the mushrooms just grow out of the block. There’s much less to go wrong with this kind of approach although it will be harder to keep it going past a few flushes of mushrooms because there’s just less material for the fungus to feed on. With the boxes you can dump waste like spent coffee grounds and keep feeding them, but here there’s just the block. I also cleared all the flies out and set up a mushroom tent in the room I’d been using so I could control the space they were growing in a lot better, with lighting and an automatic misting setup so I could just leave a time lapse camera running over a week and capture the mushrooms growing.

I’m not going to attack the people who are doompilled because I know they’re depressed. I don’t know about anyone else here but I’ve never once found it successful when I’m depressed to have someone stand in the room and yell at me Stop being depressed! Stop it! Stop being depressed! FEEL BETTER! I’m going to show why the people who act as thought leaders in this community are wrong both factually and strategically to say and to repeat that the world is ending and there is nothing we can do.

I may as well start with my beloved David Wallace Wells and The Uninhabitable Earth, since I’ve already used it to scare everyone so much. One the one hand, it might be a little unfair to call Wallace-Wells a doomer, and I’ll look at that more in a second, but at the same time he did publish a book with a dead bee on the cover called The Uninhabitable Earth which starts with the words “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

Wells puts a lot about himself into The Uninhabitable Earth. For instance at one point he tells the reader “I bought into bitcoin at the peak of the market”

Which is honestly just – wow, my guy. The CIA would not torture that out of me and you put it in a bestselling book. Incredible.

I bring up David’s insights into his personal life not just to roast him for being a crypto rube, but because in discussing the climate movement, a lot of people have commented on what they call “the Greta Effect”. Named after youth activist Greta Thunberg, the Greta Effect is the politicisation of people who would not normally be expected to be political due to climate change, and the seeming demographic-less-ness of the climate movement. Everyone has a stake in the survival of the planet so a lot of people who wouldn’t normally get into political discussions are being mobilised by this issue. As David Wallace-Wells says”

“I am not an environmentalist, and don’t even think of myself as a nature person”

But there’s something about lots of people becoming politicised - they bring a lot to the discussion that they aren’t aware of.

Now let’s be fair: nobody was born an environmentalist. We all bring our own politics to discussions to some degree, and for example I’m bringing “anarchist socialist pinko commie radical free love legalise transgender public joy for everyone” politics to the discussion. The crucial difference is, my politics have an answer to climate change.

I believe that unless other interventions get there first - and let’s be real, I don’t think they will - the result of everyone getting politicised and the state trying to suppress protest will be revolution. A fundamental change of social relations. Wells on the other hand only says the word revolution two times in his book, and one of them isn’t even technically in the book proper.

From the afterword to the paperback edition:

“The likeliest outcome, by far, is something murkier, achieved not through single silver-bullet policies or political revolutions or exclusionary nativism or the revanchist triumph of corporate self interest but some messy mix of all these and more.”

Now I find this to be quite silly, because while I don’t disagree this exclusionary nativism or corporate self interest are evidently going to be part of the response to the climate crisis and are even happening now and have been for years already, I wouldn’t call them part of the “outcome”. I see the “outcome” as the end point of the climate crisis, the resultant politics that end the destruction of the planet, and although both of those things will keep happening for the time being, they’re also things that are going to have to be stopped in order to stop climate change.

I think there’s something quite interesting in the other time Wells uses the word revolution:

“practical technocrats of the environmental center-left believe that what is needed to avert catastrophic climate change is a global mobilization at the scale of World War II. They are right—that is an entirely sober assessment of the size of the problem, which no more alarmist a group than the IPCC endorsed in 2018. But it is also an undertaking of ambitions so inconsistent with the present tense of politics in nearly every corner of the world, that it is hard not to worry what will happen when that mobilization does not happen— to the planet, yes, but also to the political commitments of those most engaged with the problem. Those calling for mass mobilization, starting today and no later, remember—they can be counted as environmental technocrats. To their left are those who see no solution short of political revolution. And even those activists are being crowded for space, these days, by texts of climate alarmism, of which you may even feel the book in your hands is one. That would be fair enough, because I am alarmed.”

I agree that the crisis in question is so vital and so scary that alarm is entirely appropriate, so I don’t know if I’m particularly invested in labelling people “alarmists”, but I also think that the act of raising the alarm is a response that implies you don’t have any answers yourself. It’s calling for help, right? The point of the book is to scare the reader into taking the situation seriously.

This makes The Uninhabitable Earth and Don’t Look Up excellent bedfellows, because they’re trying to get people to actually take the problem seriously and understand the scope of the devastation it could actually cause.

It may not have solutions to offer, but reading The Uninhabitable Earth does give an understanding of not only the science but also the political systems around it that will show you how useless all technological conversations about climate change are. Not only are the proposed technologies not enough to fight back the emissions, not only are they not actually being implemented, and not only is there no actual incentive under capitalism to implement them, but the notion of offsetting emissions that these only-partially-helpful, not-implemented, won’t-be-implemented technologies provides is actually just a political argument for why it’s okay to use even more fossil fuels. We’re offsetting it* so we can do even more!

[*that’s not actually my job, I just frack the indigenous lands, don’t ask me]

Before my next big box grow I hit another huge snag, this time so big I had to start over and order a new grain block for my mushroom spores. Because I didn’t manage to keep the grain spawn sterile enough, it picked up this green mould which spread through the whole bag more or less. I looked it up in case it was something toxic and apparently this is a parasitic mould that eats fungus that’s incredibly commonplace and it’s probably already in your house, which is why you have to do what everyone’s been telling you and keep the mycelium sterile, Sophie! There’s another lesson from failure here I think - your mushroom spawn needs to be kept safe from internal parasites that can cannibalise it and completely stop it growing.

So I set up another bulk substrate box and this time between the mould and the flies I was feeling extra hygiene conscious so I actually used boiling water on the cocoa coir so it would also sterilise the mixture at the same time, and then I broke up a big block of grain into it which was so inoculated with mycelium it was like a piece of polystyrene. I ordered this block on eBay and it was supposed to be Wine Caps, which - funny story - are illegal in Louisiana because of a mycological mixup. Apparently when magic mushrooms used to be classified as Amanita mushrooms, alongside Amanita Muscaria, another well known hallucinogenic mushroom, so Louisiana banned all Amanita mushrooms, which includes Wine Caps, even though they’re just a normal edible mushroom. The law is kinda silly sometimes, but sadly it is the arbiter of morality so I would never encourage anyone to break the law under any circumstances, because that would be wrong.

Anyway, I ordered Wine Caps but when I started recording the time lapse these funny little yellow guys started fruiting, which were definitely not Wine Caps but I couldn’t quite identify. They’re Golden Oysters, I think. It still ended up being my best time lapse so far, even if we couldn’t be sure what we were growing. Mushroom lessons number whatever we’re up to now, sometimes what you’re growing doesn’t turn out to be what you expected, but that’s okay.

Another source of doomerism I want to address comes from the works of communist writer Mark Fisher. In his most famous work, Capitalist Realism, Fisher describes the way that capitalism has eclipsed our imaginative landscape so much that the majority of us can’t even imagine a world beyond capitalism. In short, we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This was, of course, supposed to be describing an imaginative trap that we’ve fallen into, but lots of leftists have drawn pessimism from this, because they recognise the capitalist realism in themselves and don’t know the way out of that trap.

A lot of Fisher’s writing contains essentially half-complete thoughts, that I think lead to a lot of ambiguity in his work which in turn leads certain kinds of Fisher stans to be the dead cold worst people in leftist discourse. Arguably this is because the completion of these thoughts is always going to be more or less the same thing: “we should revolt and have communism”. You can’t just end every sentence like that because even if you fear no censorship or consequences for sedition, it will just make your writing deathly boring. So while Fisher remains an incisive critic of modern capitalism and arguably unparalleled in his discussion of the psychic effects of it on our lives, he ends up describing the problem very very well and then just leaving the reader hanging. “Capitalist realism is an all pervasive mode that eclipses our imaginative landscape and recuperates every rebellious impulse into itself, therefore we should revolt and have communism” becomes “yep, we’re fucked and there’s absolutely no way out.”

A good example of what I’m talking about would be Fisher’s well known discussion of Tory grifter Louise Mensch and her comment about leftists who are at once outraged about capitalism and also enjoy Starbucks, Apple products etc. This “gotcha” against leftists has become incredibly commonplace to the point of having an arguably even more well known meme popularised to dispel it.

Fisher’s comment about Mensch’s comment was essentially that she, no matter how flippantly and disingenuously, was highlighting something real: seemingly everything is mediated by capital, so the lives and habits and desires and pleasures of anticapitalists still reside very much within capitalism. This is where Fisher maybe felt it was redundant to say “so we should revolt and have communism”, and as a result the doomer strain of Fisher enthusiasts took to repeating Mensch’s point unironically but with more layers of self-congratulatory theory posturing.

For this reason, not Fisher nor his writing, but an eerie presence borne out of his legacy - a parasocial poltergeist - haunts leftist discourse. Let’s see if we can’t just perform an exorcism.

One very important half finished thought of Fisher’s relates to the state of the modern left in the imperial core. He said essentially that the modern left views power as something that bad people have and use, so seizing any amount of power would immediately violate their morality, so instead they focus exclusively on their own oppression and defeat with no concrete plan to actually change anything. Now as much as I want to just finish this thought with “so we should revolt and have communism” I think it’s worth pointing out that Fisher’s work actually also holds an answer to this conundrum, and if the Fisher doomers who repeat this criticism were a real fan like me they’d– because Mark Fisher put a big emphasis on the development of group consciousness, the overcoming of what Nietszche called Ressentiments and systemic understanding of oppression as the first and maybe most important step toward ending oppression. With that in mind, this criticism of the modern left is more of an evaluation of the early stage of change at which it currently sits. It’s not some impenetrable mind prison, it’s just a somewhat depressive first step toward actual revolutionary thought and praxis.

In exactly the same way, Fisher’s most famous line “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” is perhaps his most famous half-finished thought.

If we are trapped by the conviction that we cannot possibly win, the fact that we are imagining everyone else remaining idle is the thing keeping us stuck. If we wanna get unstuck, we need confidence in each other. For what it's worth, everyone I've talked to about the end of the world has started to see the future in these terms: the sooner we fight back the better the world gets to be as a result.

I’ve come to view doomerism as an interstitial step just like what Fisher described. First people seem to think that climate change isn’t that big a deal because the state and liberal establishment will deal with it, then when they find out how bad the problem really is they become doomers. Then they realise that if something has to be done, they can’t rely on anyone else to do it.

Fisher’s less known but excellent work Postcapitalist Desire, a transcript of his final lecture series, touches on the ways that capitalism has captured our imaginations, just like in Captalist Realism. Here however, Fisher specifically approaches our desires - the way that we can’t imagine things we want as anything other than consumer goods or provided to us through the medium of capital; the way that our desires have been shaped by capitalism into desire for more of capitalism itself.

To complete the thought here, and I could really give this a whole separate essay as long as this one, I think Fisher was asking us to think about how we find postcapitalist desire and how we capture human desire back from capitalism.

But is there a postcapitalist desire present in our culture already? I think there is.

Let me talk about my two favourite nouns in the british press:

Wokery, which seems to be some kind of troublesome ideological pixiedust that is sprinkled into educational institutions by mischievous elves, and WOKE as in “what WOKE wants” and “capitulating to WOKE” and “brave gigachad PM Rishi Sunak uses his rippling muscles to wrestle WOKE into submission”

“Woke” is a word with a very storied political history, from AAVE slang through left-liberal adoption, to an insult that right wingers use for absolutely anything that they don’t like. However I think that “woke” beliefs, the political positions broadly in favour of human liberation across various different axes of oppression, is an expression of postcapitalist desire. As young people have come to accept that they aren’t necessarily going to own homes, have kids and so on, they’ve imagined a kind of society where they could have the kind of future they want, and in doing that they’ve reimagined how society could work. The desires that they are driving at are largely just the simple things our ancestors could take for granted, but there’s a tangible political consciousness that getting those things is going to require a fundamental changing of social relations.

I think that there are lots of desires still captured by capitalism, but a lot of those could easily become uncaptured, and some of the most core desires that people seek in living in a society at all are vanishing over the horizon of the climate crisis.

Now seems like as good a time as any for a digression to talk about the  anarcho-nihilsm.

I really don’t want people to assume I’m hostile to anarcho-nihilists, so I should approach this section carefully. If I start discussing anarcho-nihilists by pointing out how much the chaos star reminds me of the greendale community college logo, it will seem like I’m setting out to start beef.

The anarcho-nihilist position is that with no hope for actually saving the world or changing the future to be better, people should still be fighting to sabotage systems of oppression and destruction wherever they can, creating spaces and moments for human freedom and joy. The position rejects the possibility of large scale organised revolt because of the tendency toward authoritarianism in the aftermath or even sooner, but rather pushes towards chaos (hence the chaos star) because anarcho-nihilists take something of the exact opposite stance to Hobbes, that the oppression of a state leviathan is the font of all misery and the disorganised human mess of chaotic association will be kinder and better than any hierarchical central power structure.

A lot of anarcho-nihilist thought is informed by a text called Blessed is the Flame, which examines and celebrates the history of resistances and revolts in Nazi concentration camps. This is sort of the same “worst case scenario” exercise I talked about earlier - even in the worst possible environment, knowing that the result can almost certainly only be execution, people still fight back.

Now I don’t want to belabour an allegory between climate apocalypse and concentration camps because I do find it distasteful. It’s something in David Wallace-Wells’ writing that I particular don’t enjoy - when he measures the scale of approaching death in numbers of Holocausts. So I’ll be clear that the similarities are thus: the perspective of very little hopes that anyone will survive, the total control of the enemy who is also feeding us into the machinery of death, the suppression of solidarity and morale by the conditions in which we find ourselves, and the active interference in organised resistance by bribery, inside agents and so on. These are our conditions and an anarchist nihilist framework based on them is a very appropriate response in my opinion.

To quote Blessed is the Flame:

“The myth that we are somehow moving forward forms the backbone of the socialist tradition [...] Like the trains bound for Auschwitz, this movement of history is heading nowhere good and needs to be sabotaged at every possible turn.”

I genuinely worry about my points in this essay coming across as cold and flippant, like “no the world isn’t technically ending, there will still be fungus so what are we complaining about” and that really isn’t what I’m trying to say at all. Nonetheless I want to allow a little space for people who find my position silly, because if I couldn’t tolerate being seen as a little silly I would be endlessly tilting at windmills and be all the sillier for it.

As one modern anarchist writer has it “nihilism allows for the possibility that there is no future”, and this is why I don’t feel any need to strictly oppose anarcho-nihilists or include them in my critique of doomers. Under nihilism, these anarchists have found a freedom to resist for the sake of resisting and for the willful declaration of their own humanity in the face of annihilation, and I find that beautiful. I think some people with more of a drive to engage in schismogenesis - to find reasons to make enemies rather than friends among fellow socialists - might say that anarcho-nihilists in rejecting the idea of large scale collective organised resistance are making that resistance impossible. I say that they’re just waiting to see it work, and to borrow a slogan from a movie about a sport I’ve never played, if you build it they will come.

What I mean by that is that anarcho-nihilist thought is at once a nihilist position that doesn’t expect to defeat capitalism and also an expression of postcapitalist desire, and it works in concert with larger organised resistance, not against it. Even if we anarchists ourselves won’t join any ascendant communist party, we’ll be fighting the same fight on our own terms.

If we only pay attention to bourgeois electoralism, the picture is unbelievably bleak. The far right has stormed onto the scene and has a growing share of the vote across a wide range of not only the most powerful countries on earth, but many others besides. Right wing governments work with, encourage and enable right wing militants and militias to act as a paramilitary wing of their neo-fascist project, the corrupt and gerrymandered pre-existing power structures enable them to easily capture vital political organs and make long lasting meaningful changes that will negatively impact the lives of millions of people, and we can do little but vote for liberal politicians who offer progressive platitudes with a practised smile while taking enormous checks from the wealthiest people in our society to protect their interests first and foremost. Shit is, in a word, bleak. Electoral politics, it seems, offers no solution to climate change, and only generates more social ills by the day, wasting everyone’s energy in trying to defend the rights that we are used to taking for granted. That’s the bourgeois political system, the politics of the elite, the spectacle we have all been trained to understand as the only game in town.

But what’s going on down in the dirt? What about the fungus?

After all, you can cut all the flowers, but the weather is fucking everywhere.

Climate change is so many little problems. The climate crisis is an ecological crisis, and a food crisis, and a migrant crisis, and a housing crisis, and a human rights crisis, and more besides.

They may not realise it yet, but they are in a political coalition of people who are assuming there will be people here tomorrow and their political enemies are in a coalition of people assuming that there will not. This action on a sort of measurable belief without necessarily stating this belief aligns with Marx’s definition of ideology:

Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es, which means “they don’t know what it is, but they are doing it”. In other words people don’t have to say “I am a liberal capitalist, I believe in free market trade” in order to participate in and uphold liberal capitalism. They don’t have to believe in it, or like it, or even understand it, to be doing it.

They sure don’t be wissen, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t tun.

And I have a little wordplay on this definition that I’m pretty happy with, so put a pin in Sie wissen das nicht aber sie tun es for a second and check this out:

Sie wissen dass es nichts ist, aber sie tun es

Yeah, pretty good right? Okay yeah I know most of you probably didn’t catch that, but according to my YouTube analytics I’m not being exclusionary to my english speakers I’m being especially inclusive of the 3.2% of my channel audience that is in Germany. That’s right sponsors, 3.2%. Bear that in mind next time you need an influencer to promote the new Fritzcola flavour.

I’ve never been someone who minds explaining my own jokes to the point of utterly killing them, so let me unpack my wordplay here.

Sie wissen dass es nichts ist, aber sie tun es, unlike “they don’t know what they do but they do it”, means “they know that it is nothing, but nonetheless they still do it” and to me that’s where some of the most haunting examples of ideology happen.

Imagine a Canary Wharf finance pervert - someone who works in the financial sector in London - she spins the wheels of the big nonsense machine, not even working with money she can touch and hold but making bets on whether companies succeed or fail to make line go up. Two huge investment sectors are construction and the fossil fuel industry, making the finance pervert’s work a contributor both to climate change and the construction of shoddy, overpriced and (personal gripe) ugly newbuild apartment blocks around London.

Huge numbers of these newbuilds are being constructed on London’s flood plains, too expensive for most people to buy but perfect for developers to rent out at extortionate rates to people with well paying office jobs, for instance Canary Wharf finance perverts. So our pervert, she gets up every day and she goes to work on the big machine that is going to flood her house. It’s not that she doesn’t know what she is doing, though her knowing doesn’t connect directly to what she is doing, hence Sie wissen das nicht. It’s that she believes what she is doing is harmless and abstract, Sie wissen dass es nichts ist.

Capitalist realism, the imagining the end of the world more easily than the end of capitalism, is itself a perfect example of Sie wissen dass es nichts ist, aber sie tun es. We are all to one degree or another, the canary wharf finance pervert making the wheel turn that will flood her house. We are all that guy from the meme where the survivors of the collapse are huddled around a campfire saying “well society collapsed but for one glorious moment we made a lot of profits”. But people who are fighting the war on WOKE on the side of WOKE are, whether they wissen or not, fighting as though there will be a future.

Capitalists are convinced that it’s grownup talk to dismiss the possibility of socialism and all talk of class struggle, but in a crisis a state can’t survive without policies that take the reins and provide for people directly, because if the people can’t survive neither can the state. This “mobilisation on the scale of world war 2” I hear about isn’t happening on the state level and emissions are still increasing at an increasing rate. In other words, capitalists convinced themselves socialism was impossible, then they found out capitalism had been killing the planet, so they started killing the planet much, much faster.

So again, doomerism is an interstitial step between two understandings of the world.

Either you live in a reality where climate change isn’t that bad, or a world where we may as well burn as much as possible as fast as possible in order to make the most of the end of the world. I don’t live in either of these worlds.

We have an imaginative problem.

In the UK it is perfectly legal to buy magic mushroom spores for the purposes of microscopy. Of course if you were getting these spores to grow your own drugs, that would be illegal, but if you’re purchasing them to look at them under a microscope, no issue at all. So legal that it will be written off in my taxes as a prop for a video.

Alone we are just like these spores, capable of so much but siloed, atomised, powerless. But together in fertile soil, spores reach out to each other and form a patchwork power - a mycellial network - and together these little spores can bear the most wonderful fruit.

Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Now just as many great thinkers and philosophers of the past before me, I feel the need now to talk about a tweet.

This tweet is fascinating as well as very funny to me, and not just because twitter did not die shortly afterwards, but also because you can just do those things, any time. This tweeter is mourning twitter changing into something else, and that’s fair enough because twitter does objectively suck now, even more than before. I just find this kind of mourning, this discussion of the rapidly approaching end times, really reminiscent of our discussion of doomerism. A big enough change, or even the uncertainty of what will come next, is being treated like a total ending.

You're mourning how life has been, knowing that it will end, and with that comes a mourning of what could have been, but never was: what you could have had, what you could have done, or been or seen. That’s okay. It sucks that all the stories we were told about how society was supposed to work for us were lies, and it sucks even worse that the people who lied to us didn’t even know they were lying.

As much as the next person, I am struggling constantly with feelings of hopelessness, of terror that push is coming to shove and nothing is being done and that we’re all going to suffer and die waiting for someone to for God’s sake do something.

But

Even writing those words feels ridiculous on the face of it. Not because I have some incredible unshakeable belief that everything will be okay. It’s not because I believe something that other people don’t, but because I think about other people when I try to say “I’m just as paralysed and troubled by these feelings as other people are”. What a ridiculous thing to say! I’m not as paralysed as some people, there are definitely plenty more people more paralysed than me, and I’m nowhere near so naive to imagine I’m the person most affected by climate change.

There are so many people who are dealing with the effects right now - uprooting their whole lives, moving everything they have, maybe moving away from tons of people they know and love. They don’t say “Ah well, we’ll all just die, it’s fine. There’s nothing I can do.” No, climate doomerism is absolutely borne out first and foremost from a specific kind of assumed security. We, living in the imperial core, benefitting from the shape that power in the world takes now as well as the legacy of the shape it has held for hundreds of years, are really used to at least the idea that our voices really matter. Our votes, we are told, have the power to affect not only the political landscape around us but deeply affect the lives of billions of people around the world who we can’t even see, and with the global rising trend in authoritarianism, the resurgent wave of fascism, we can see now that our votes mean absolutely nothing.

We’re really trying to deal with an emotional and imaginative problem, because we are looking at how much work will need to be done to change things and get exhausted before we even start. A big part of that is having no idea of what the future is supposed to look like once all the work is done.

But we can actually define our postcapitalist desire in the negative, because if the work is to defeat and dismantle things that are harming us now, and the rest of the work is just taking care of each other, that will itself give us a picture of everything we want. If we say that people are going to fight the fossil fuel industry because it’s killing the planet, and fight capitalism because it will always keep finding new ways to kill the planet, and fight borders and prisons and fascism and take care of each other, we actually just described a future, even if we did it in pretty vague terms.

In that case, I only need to rethink how I approach the idea of doing the work. In that case, I’m going to tell myself this:

Every time I feel like this I have to look at what needs to be done for me to not feel like this, and I have to decide I (and as many other people as it takes to get it done) am going to do it.

I’m not trying to give you hope. The purpose of this essay, despite the antagonism to pessimistic politics, is not actually to make you feel hopeful. If I am having that effect, if you are drawing hope for the future from what I’m saying, then that’s fantastic, but I am just trying to explain in logical terms why doomerism is both paralysing us and also an unrealistic approach to the politics of the future. The reality of the politics of the future cannot be written off with such simple summations as “things are going to get bad”. In fact, for a lot of people, the best way to describe the changes that are beginning now are a shift from a certain amount of security and dependability to a new life that includes a lot more precarity. We don’t want or like to interrogate what it means when we say “things are going to get bad” but the underlying analysis of that statement is that a lot more of us are going to be living a lot more precariously.

So to move from an immediate reaction to the ecological violence to a model of what our next 100 years on this planet really looks like means understanding a bit better what it means to live precariously.