Late last year I published a series of notes around the theme of ‘what time is it?’ (first note, second note, third note), reckoning with the sense of confusion and change we are feeling and experiencing. This culminated in a presentation I shared asking the accompanying question, ‘where are we?’, in which I tried to offer somewhat of a synthesis.
has recently shared a lecture he gave in November 2024 on ‘Polycrisis and the Fraying of U.S. Hegemony’ (title chosen before the election, lecture given after). Tooze is someone who I think alongside, and so it is not unsurprising that the two talks cover some similar ground. For those who have not checked them, I would propose a ‘polycrisis pairing’, with my presentation as the entrée and Tooze’s as the main course:
In a following note I will engage more directly with Tooze’s rendering, here I will recap and update some of the main ideas from my presentation and recent notes.
Disorientation and dysregulation of people mirrored in a planet that is out of balance. See the new annual climate summary by the EU’s Copernicus programme, which is poorly titled, ‘Global Climate Highlights 2024’:
Anna Karenina reading of international politics: Each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. This is a point I have made repeatedly: the tendency to focus on great powers and relative capacity means what is often missed is generalised stresses and challenges. The problems and weaknesses in democracies are more readily apparent, but many / most of these should be seen as wider governance problems that all states are struggling with.
COVID-19 pandemic as unacknowledged background factor shaping present. Nancy Bristow writes:
The military conflict trumped the epidemic in public discourse, keeping the pandemic both literally and figuratively relegated to back pages and small type.
This is from American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (2012). Bristow examines how having survived the Spanish Flu, there was little appetite to dwell on experiences of vulnerability, harm and trauma. It was not a story people wanted to tell themselves. And so, the loss and disruption was soon pushed from the collective memory. A reminder that even if there are parts of our condition that appear unprecedented, there are parallels and prior experiences we can turn to in helping to comprehend the contemporary.
American exceptionalism is … exceptional. So many predictions, so little clarity, but whatever is happening, it is safe to assume that there is a considerable widening aperture of possibility. A good time to recall Alice:
Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
China as manufacturing superpower. Instead of the ‘flying geese’ model, China has adopted the ‘Pacman approach’ to economic development and security: it will eat as much as it can. Low end manufacturing through to high tech, coal to solar, anything and everything. To restate a conclusion from my series of notes on the country: ‘China is too important to be left to the specialists’.
Israel as wrecking ball. Completing the demolition job of the ‘rules based order’ that began in late 2001 with the US response to 9/11 and China joining the WTO. Pankaj Mishra describes it as a, ‘war that has ignited a bonfire of international legal and moral norms and deadened and perverted consciences.’ From a new study published in The Lancet:
Our analysis suggests high mortality rates and substantial under-reporting of mortality due to traumatic injury in the Gaza Strip during the first 9 months of the Israeli military operation. We estimated around 64 000 deaths due to traumatic injuries from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024, implying 41% under-reporting in the MoH estimate over the same period and corresponding to approximately 2·9% of Gaza's projected pre-war population (2 227 000), or approximately one in 35 inhabitants. …
Our findings underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation.
For a strategic review of conditions in the Middle East, see
’s careful commentary on the Middle East, as well as the Russo-Ukraine war. I would also strongly recommend the podcast, ‘These Times’, with Tom McTague and Helen Thompson, which consistently offers thoughtful and balanced commentary around these themes.Closely related to conflict, famine has returned and is deepening in severity. From the IPC:
Over the last month, Reuters has published an extensive series, ‘The Starving World’, that details the way the current system for dealing with food shortages is failing. As for the consequences, Alex de Waal examines how it turns society against itself in a powerful recent lecture:
In the gray zone of collective starvation, people inflict unspeakable cruelties on their kith and kin to survive. It is societal torture, turning the biological survival instinct against the bonds of social solidarity.
Famine is a societal catastrophe. Those who inflict it do so with knowledge, sometimes with genocidal intent. Famine is a memory that endures among survivors, a shame that lives on among the perpetrators. In every one of the cases I have mentioned, inflicting starvation causes moral decay among those perpetrating the act.
‘Moral decay’ is a powerful, precise term here and speaks more broadly to our present.
Digital disruption and destruction. The prior note returned to Neil Postman’s insights, and the key point that we need to think about what a technology does and undoes. What are the costs that come with the benefits? From this perspective, the debate over banning TikTok in the US is remarkably stupid: to what extent the app is influenced by China or not matters less than it is incredibly clear that it is causing ‘industrial scale harm’, as a new post by Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch describes in detail. TikTok can perhaps be considered the crack / fentanyl of a much wider problem of social media addiction and digital distortion. Consider reports that the failed attempt by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol to impose martial law was likely influenced by a ‘YouTube addiction’. And for a truly dark deep dive, another series by Reuters, this one on OnlyFans, which is as bad and worse than you would expect. ‘Flood the zone with shit’, this is Steve Bannon’s world.
Meanwhile,
’s latest piece again emphasises that advances in AI systems are rushing ahead:Whatever their incentives, the researchers and engineers inside AI labs appear genuinely convinced they're witnessing the emergence of something unprecedented. Their certainty alone wouldn't matter - except that increasingly public benchmarks and demonstrations are beginning to hint at why they might believe we're approaching a fundamental shift in AI capabilities. The water, as it were, seems to be rising faster than expected.
Time to invoke Alice once again:
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.” "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
A world defined by acceleration, escalation, entropy, extraction and force. Behaviour shaped by anger, fear, greed, identity and ressentiment.
Despite the length of this note, it is a short and incomplete discussion of stresses and shifts. To the list could be added the return of the nuclear threat, debt and economic growth challenges, the half-hearted attempt at an energy transition, and and… One could even reach the conclusion that it might be appropriate to describe these conditions as resembling something like… polycrisis.
As a way of ending, Nate Hagens’ podcast, ‘The Great Simplification’, appears as a genuine effort to see and stay with the whole. At the end of a recent episode with Helen Thompson, the two of them were struck and stuck with what their discussion suggests about our collective future. Thompson cautiously suggested, ‘we have got maybe some time to adjust to reality before it overwhelms us’, and proposed:
I do have some sense that all of us have some kind of responsibility to each other, to ourselves, to try to think through as clearly as we can what is coming at us, and… in terms of the coming crisis whatever forms that it takes, we will better endure it, whatever it turns out to be, if we've got some kind of mental preparation for it.
I finish with this as it is a sentiment I strongly agree with and am trying to work towards here. Facing forward, looking back, scanning for blind spots.