In terms of describing the odd mix of the present, Peter Chambers offers the formulation of ‘3SD’ - Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid + Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb. There is something quite remarkable how we seem to be threatened on the one side by incredibly stupid behaviours and decisions, and on the other side, the risk of all-powerful and all-knowing AI to rule them all. Real and artificial, intelligence and stupidity, all loop together in a demented, deformed Möbius strip.
From a prior note on polycrisis:
Describing the era of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot suggested that it ‘moved in a steady current, with back eddies certainly, towards anarchy and chaos.’ Perhaps we again find ourselves in comparable circumstances, with polycrisis a way of narrating in real time what socio-political entropy looks like. We are not dealing simply with late stage capitalism, but late stage everything: political, economic, societal institutions and forms that appear increasingly incapable of responding to the conditions we find ourselves in.
A judgment from December:
The models, measures and maps that helped to orientate our thought and action now confuse and conceal as much as they reveal. The prevalence for kitsch analysis is partly to do with the type of people that are rewarded in our information environment, it also likely reflects a discomfort with these confusing conditions. Employing tropes like fascism, speaking of a new Cold War or the beginnings of World War 3, all offer a kind of odd intellectual refuge, an easy guide for identifying where we are.
Ahead of a new semester of teaching, I have been updating the reading list for an introductory course on international security, and just struck by two observations: (1) how profoundly banal and piecemeal most many pieces are, (2) the same people saying the same things for years and decades. It is so evident how much of this fails to speak to the current moment and the new (dis)order that is (mal)forming.
From a really incisive 2018 piece by R. B. J. Walker:
Analytical cartographies tend to betray both disorientation and nostalgia. The quality of contemporary political judgement is especially unimpressive, even if we take account of the usual ideological, cultural, and ethical disagreements about what counts as good political judgement. Moreover, it is unimpressive in ways that should further destabilize any lingering attempts to maintain sharp distinctions between political and scholarly judgement…
Many scholars remain unperturbed. Distracted by specific events, tied to the policy demands of powerful interests, or consoled by the degree to which at least some trends can be forced back into the prevailing traditions of analysis and governance, it is easy to understand how many scholars have developed a preference for “middle-range theory” or for more closely focused forms of empiricism and attention to very specific practices and events. Some are simply prone to assume that we are seeing mere replays of “nationalism,” “populism,” and so on, as if such categories still name the same phenomena we have known all too well in some other time and place.
These conditions extend to op-eds and shorter pieces. So many of the gliberal elite commentators of a disappearing world refuse to stop opining. Simply put, it is time to stop reading and listening to these people, they are not the best guides for what might be unfolding. And so, if checking the FT, forget Wolf and follow Gillian Tett. For geopolitics, Helen Thompson and Michael Every both try to speak to what is dimly taking shape. For the dangers and delusions of the tech team Quinn Slobodian and Henry Farrell, alongside thoughtful humanist critique of technology, LM Sacasas. On the moral bankruptcy of the collapsing liberal order, read Pankaj Mishra’s, The World After Gaza. Venture further for translations of Chinese thinkers (such as here and here). Plenty more names and projects could be added to this collection, the point is an obvious one: we don’t need more op-eds from Brooks and Friedman. Taking the logic of attention seriously feels constantly more and mor important. We need to be more conscious in who and what we attend to, and in doing this, leave behind these old tired voices.
Recognising and reckoning with all of this, how to comprehend the present? There is little doubt we are in a period of tension and transformation, but what the defining event or feature of it is might not yet be clear, it potentially has yet to happen. It is in this sense that I previously described polycrisis as a ‘placeholder concept’. The point is a simple one: the ‘interwar era’ of the 1920s and 1930s only became that after the second world war commenced. And so, if a new post-modern Napoleon has arrived, the question remains, which Napoleon will he be? Napoleon I, III, or perhaps a Napoleon from the movies? Until dusk arrives we must make do with polycrisis.
Admittedly, the concept resembles the trajectory of a speculative asset: a rapid ascent in 2022, then peaking in value somewhere around 2Q or 3Q 2023 after its invocation at Davos, before being noticeably missing from the programming in 2024 and 2025. During this period, the concept has been trading closer to fair value. Tooze continues to invoke it in his broad-brush, intellectually expansive way; the Cascade institute and its partners earnestly try to define and develop it as rigorously as possible, and plenty of commentators and events use it is a sloppy, convenient catch-all way.
In 2022, I published a series of notes trying to work through the concept of polycrisis, building on an academic I co-authored. Given the fortunate timing of the article - which would have been earlier had the deadening hand of pusillanimous peer review not been at work - the polycrisis part received the most attention. Understandably so, it was the meat in that article sandwich. The way we presented it, however, was as part of a larger argument about a collective failure to master the moment. The title of the article ‘An embarrassment of changes’ was a reference to a piece published by Friedrich Kratochwil (1993):
An ‘embarrassment of changes’ is how Kratochwil described the dissonance between real world discontinuity and disciplinary stability that marked the end of the Cold War. It might also be an apt description of the current state of affairs.
In the same way that Kratochwil spoke to the way in which Cold War frames made it difficult to comprehend the world that began to appear around 1989, we were trying to stay with the confusion of the pandemic period, and with this, turned to polycrisis. One of the things we tried to do was build on Tooze’s invocation that felt powerful, albeit somewhat under-specified. This was the definition we offered:
A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:
(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.
(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.
(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.
(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.
(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).
(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.
(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge.
I think I would offer a tighter definition now, regardless, that is not what to focus on. The tendency is to understand polycrisis primarily in reference to properties (1), (2), and (8), about how different crises interact, related and reinforce one another, and to quote Tooze, ‘the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts’. Basically it is a way of describing the breaking down of a complex system, the ‘widening gyre’ in action.
All well and good, or not really. Not at all. To restate, these times are truly 3SD (Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid + Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb). With this front of mind, I would suggest thinking more about properties (4), (5) and (6) above. The way that stresses and tensions, problems and weaknesses are all combining and metastasising increasingly challenge our capacities to know and comprehend. To restate (6):
(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.
To the extent that our current predicament is some kind of polycrisis, it strikes me this feature is increasingly at the heart of it.