Back to my original thread project of section by section comments on the original white paper:
"Key Objectives
To build and let thrive an economic and political statement and proof of concept for human sociocultural arrangements. The purpose is to have those forms of organisation and operations that are proven to be possible and preferable in the experiment be adopted into the rest of the sociocultural sphere. Including but not limited to developmentally informed deliberative democracy governance (for state, corporation, and any other human organisation) and collaborative economic models. In other words, to have good ideas demonstrated as practicable through manifestation, making irrefutable what is currently offhandedly dismissed as ‘naive’ utopian ideation.
To have the ecosystem achieve independence from capitalism, to engage with capitalism out of strategy and not necessity, and thus outlive the social order’s potential collapse and out into whatever comes next.
To scale this affordance to fully support all individuals, projects and organisations willing to participate in an ecosystem that strives to align all interests towards a common understanding of the purpose of humanity on this planet.
To protect and bring to bear the real wealths of humanity - not gold, stocks, bonds, and debt obligations, but knowledge, wisdom, trust networks, landed & grounded communities (to name but a few kinds of wealth) - for the benefit of the next generations of peoples and species and the next generations of sociocultural arrangements."
In another thread today, I went full “doomer” and asked Gemini for essentially a “Noah’s Ark” plan if 99% of humanity go to their graves in a orgy of climate change denialism. (That Gemini response linked again below). MetaChakra strikes me as a milder version of Noah’s Ark, perhaps a fleet of arks, with more carrying capacity.
Putting on my Fat Tony hat (wanting to keep things, very, very real, no matter how uncomfortable the conclusions), I’d say read the “doomer” paper below first. Then go read the MetaChakra paper. From a Fat Tony POV, it’s pretty clear to me quite a few people are willing to go down with current systems as complete “suckers”, believing all sorts of things that just ain’t so. History points to many analogous prior examples. MetaChakra (and similar parallel models), will do best with the non-sucker community. But what the “doomer” session makes pretty clear is that MetaChakra will work best on the down low. Get the audience you can get. Figure out how to set up anti-fragile proof of concept models on favorable turf (see the doomer session on that). Hunker down for when larger systems hit inevitable walls. The MetaChakras of the world will be what’s left after the grain is sorted from the chaff.
good that you ask, but sorry I don’t recall and I don’t think I have any records. However if it’s important I could forward the request to people who had a hand in the organisation of the Festival…
Yeah wow that’s dark. Some plausible scenarios there. Meta-modern elites incorporating solar flare protected seed banks into their tax haven bunkers?
I know this Noah’s Ark angle has some juice. But the flood may be slow. Like the frog in the pot as the water gets imperceptibly hotter. Rather than scaring people into collaboration, there is a sort of spiritual, or existential kind of choice to make.
I think in hindsight my own white paper was tinged with some doomery. Looking at the world since, collapse seems to have many pathways to unfold. Specifically, I think the economic crash is already happening but can happen silently as invisible wealth transfers (a rising stock market is a type of inflation which is a type of taxation). At the very least, the control grid for the new political economy (CDBCs\stable coins + AI-powered social credit scores + UBI = control through money) needs to be ready enough for the powers that be to commit to political and economic rug-pulls (crashing the world economy is about a couple of phone calls away for the truly powerful players on the board).
Another thing altogether from practical survival strategizing is the question of complicity. I think people who see the faults of modernity prefer to live another way. Transition is uncomfortable, let’s be honest. Meaningful change takes effort. So it’s key that the alternative be a clear and tangible upgrade, rather than a compromise. As any metamodernist would say, we want a sober, grounded hope for something better.
I don’t know how capitalism falls. It may survive for another horrid century in a new, worse form. Rather than trying to plan specifically for the worst-case scenario for business-as-usual, I’d rather be creating the ideal alternative.
That being said, I don’t propose inviting people into some kind of gated community for those who “get it”. I’d rather work to bridge pre-existing communities in the ecosystem, to empower, connect, and work on making the shared context the alternative. The interstitial fabric between the communities holds the key. These communities (like 2R) already act to bring people to these new, post-postmodern ways of thinking. What is lacking is a tenable, stable, compelling, obvious alternative. What I am suggesting is that rather than one community coming up with this alternative, we want to fashion it from the interstitial space between the communities.
Only by creating a substantive alternative will the new wave of thought be taken as a serious contender. Rather than creating it ex-nihilo, it can be created by the communities coming together. The more of the communities we bring together, the less the model looks like isolated silos, and the more it looks like a new Earth grid that can support something real, and the more our collapse becomes a transition, THE transition we’ve been building toward.
Here is a “skin in the game” personal case study. I retired last week. Had increasing financial assets been a personal necessity, I could have well kept working at full salary for several more years. But what do any of us know, really, about 1) how long we might live and 2) what will become of financial markets and the global economy over many years into the future 3) likewise what sort of political regime changes might impact tax rates, government pensions, health care, etc.? To retire is to place bets on all that. Before taking the plunge, I tested all the waters from many, many angles, doing all sorts of math, watching hours of financial advice on YouTube, meeting advisors, and throwing a bit of AI at it all. The article below summarizes some basic potential risks, even within the current system’s general parameters.
Notice that points 2) and 3) align with your analysis, even if we subtract the metacrisis and just stick with straight-up capitalism. Points 1) and 4) flow from being mortal, so apart from the spiritual dimensions of grappling with that, it is also prudent to manage money through the lens of personal fallibility. An acceleration of metacrisis factors would not likely reduce any of the risk factors above!
I waxed so poetic about all this at a recent faculty retirement ceremony, that one of the other retirees requested a personal Zoom call for my help with allocating her pension resources. My own personal research overdid it by a factor of 10x or thereabouts, which reveals that me “retiring” from the substance of the professorial role will never truly happen - preparing lesson plans and organizing content is just what I do. So figuring out how to offer strategic retirement advising to wider groups is one current idea I am toying with. To bring all that home right here (and to circle back to your original thread topic), check out the Gemini session below.
Prompt: “Suggest changes to the TIAA risk analysis through the lens of the metacrisis.”
Viewing retirement planning through the lens of the metacrisis—the convergence of deeply interconnected global crises such as ecological overshoot, geopolitical fragmentation, technological disruption, and meaning/epistemic crises—requires a radical shift in perspective.
TIAA’s risk analysis is fundamentally built on the assumptions of late-stage modernity: that the global economy will continue its trajectory of infinite, predictable growth; that institutions will remain stable; and that the primary threats to an individual are personal bad luck or cyclical economic dips. The metacrisis shatters those assumptions.
Here is how TIAA’s four common retirement risks must be adapted when we acknowledge that the systems underpinning our society are fundamentally fragile.
1. Longevity Risk: From “Outliving Your Money” to “Outliving Institutional Stability”
The TIAA View: You might live for 30+ years in retirement, so you need enough capital to fund a prolonged lifestyle.
The Metacrisis Lens: Planning to live until 2056 means living through the most volatile decades in human history. The risk is not merely outliving your financial portfolio, but outliving the stability of the institutions (fiat currency, state pensions, healthcare systems, globalized supply chains) that give your money its utility.
The Adaptation: Longevity planning must shift from mere financial accumulation to building localized resilience. This means investing in multi-generational living arrangements, deep community networks, and healthspan optimization that reduces reliance on strained, complex medical systems.
2. Market Risk: From “Cyclical Downturns” to “Structural Paradigm Shifts”
The TIAA View: The stock market fluctuates, and sudden drops can harm your portfolio, which can be mitigated by diversifying across traditional asset classes.
The Metacrisis Lens: Traditional market growth is intrinsically linked to energy consumption and resource extraction on a finite planet. As we hit the limits of ecological overshoot and transition away from cheap fossil fuels, the paradigm of infinite exponential economic growth may end. “Market risk” now includes massive structural shocks: stranded carbon assets, climate disasters destroying physical infrastructure, and the weaponization of trade.
The Adaptation: Financial diversification (stocks vs. bonds) is insufficient. You need capital diversification. This means converting abstract financial wealth into tangible assets while you can—productive land, deep home energy retrofits (e.g., solar, geothermal), access to clean water, and tools. Your portfolio must account for a world where ecological reality forces economic contraction.
3. Inflation Risk: From “Monetary Policy” to “Resource Scarcity”
The TIAA View: The purchasing power of your money will erode over time due to normal economic inflation, making goods and services more expensive.
The Metacrisis Lens: Future inflation will likely not be driven merely by central bank policies, but by hard, physical resource limits and broken supply chains. As climate change disrupts agriculture and global instability fractures trade routes, the cost of basic human necessities (food, energy, shelter) will likely outpace “core” inflation dramatically.
The Adaptation: A variable annuity will not protect you if supermarket shelves are bare or energy grid prices quintuple. Hedging against metacrisis inflation means securing the means of your own sustenance. This involves developing local food networks, investing in off-grid energy capabilities, and cultivating practical skills that hold value in a localized economy.
4. Cognitive Impairment Risk: From “Memory Decline” to “Epistemic Collapse”
The TIAA View: Organic brain aging makes you vulnerable to poor financial decisions and traditional scams.
The Metacrisis Lens: We are in the midst of an epistemic crisis—a breakdown in our shared understanding of reality, accelerated by algorithmic manipulation, deepfakes, and generative AI. Scams are no longer just Nigerian prince emails; they will be hyper-personalized, AI-driven, real-time voice and video clones of your loved ones. Even a fully cognitively healthy adult will struggle to navigate the coming informational chaos.
The Adaptation: You cannot rely solely on your own cognition to make safe decisions in a polluted information ecology. You must build sensemaking networks and distributed decision-making systems. This means legally binding your financial decisions to a trusted “board of directors” (family, fiduciaries, community members) who must co-sign major moves, creating a social firewall against both internal cognitive decline and external technological deception.
The Verdict on TIAA’s Solution
TIAA recommends a “diversified income strategy” consisting of Fixed Annuities, Variable Annuities, and an Investment Portfolio.
Through the metacrisis lens, relying entirely on these financial abstractions is inherently fragile because they are all derivatives of the same vulnerable macro-system. A true “diversified strategy” for the coming decades must balance financial capital with social capital (who you know and trust), natural capital (your access to resilient ecosystems and resources), and skill capital (what you can physically do or repair).
Trying to get an empirically informed grip on “how capitalism falls” and related macro questions, I do quite a bit of reading. For example:
From all that, I’ve mashed up some plausible scenarios that ought to pass both theoretical and Fat Tony pragmatic smell tests. Of course, due to complexity, chaos, Black Swans, etc. I’m not “predicting” anything. Just trying to aim in the most promising directions.
The big heavyweights that say the most to me are Kojin Karatani and Peter Pogany. Karatani shows how the current system is locked in. He calls it Capital-Nation-State. Pogany shows how on global scales it was bound to break down (he wrote that in the 2010s), very much as it is in fact breaking down (in the 2020s). Karatani and Pogany both point to better global structural arrangements available to the future.
Let’s start with the material economy - Pogany’s forte. First, we need to live within entropic boundaries. So GDP is of course a bad metric, and something like a Nate Hagens Great Simplification will be required. But as for the global money economy, fiat money issued by Westphalian nation-states has to go. Hard money - tied strickly to physical and bio-captial - has to come in, and that money must be issued through global multilateral structures. Karatani, commenting on Kant and many others, suggests the mechanics of how such global multilateral structures may come into play. To get there, Karatani (a post-Marxist, mostly), leans on Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan! Not exactly a “kumbaya” sort of vision, there. The gist of it is, Karatani is placing political “realist” bets that nation-states will value their own survival above all else, and will yield to a global super-state in the interests of preventing nuclear-armed war of all against all. Thus Karatani shifts the Hobbesian analysis from warlike individuals in the theoretical state of nature to warlike nation-state actors in the current pragmatic world we empirically have.
What I like about this is all anyone needs to believe about human motivations is that people want to survive and will do what they must. That’s a very low Hobbesian bar to leap over. Of course, people in general may be even worse than that, in which case we are all very screwed. If we are indeed going full Mad Max, nothing to do about that but stock up on spikes and leather! But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that even rapacious political and economic elites see value in their own survival. For that, Pogany-Karatani offers the basic outlines of a plan.
Where something like Second Renaissance comes in, IMO, is in creating the cultural preconditions that will allow something like Pogany-Karatani hard multilaterialism to win the day over nationalist or race-base populism (which is currently enjoying its moment). Capital-Nation-State has no incentive whatsoever to adapt until it hits Pogany’s entropic wall or confronts a balance of terror so daunting that people are willing to readjust in their own heads what “pragmatism” and “realism” really add up to the current situation. France not invading Germany any more, and Germany likewise not invading France, is a promising step in the right direction. Can we generalize that more globally? Maybe it will work, maybe not. But in any case, it’s the best idea I’ve been able to identify through a rather considerable review of the literature.