Facing the Abyss: Relaunching Dark Edge
Welcome back to Dark Edge, my future-oriented blog, tracking the unfolding of the polycrisis. I write about systems resilience in the face of collapse, and digital autonomy as a way to take back control over the technology that surrounds us.
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Figure 1: Photo by Javier Mirandaon Unsplash
Writer’s block
Five years ago I started this blog. But I got stuck. I wrote several posts that I didn’t publish. I missed a cohesive perspective on what it is I’m trying to do here. The writing stalled.
Then earlier this year, I decided to pull the blog offline. I was, and am, uncomfortable with the world wide rise in fascism, and the relentless data mining in the service of surveillance and AI. What am I doing, making my innermost thoughts and feelings visible to the darkest powers in the world?
I’ve come to realize though, that not raising my voice, exercising self-censorship, is exactly what you should not do when fascism is on the rise. That’s anticipatory obedience.
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy.
Instead, I’m turning that around. I’m so pissed off about the boorish brutality of what’s going on, that play-it-nice doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no more business as usual. I might as well make my stand. Hence, I’m now re-launching Dark Edge, this blog. I hope you’ll like it.
Have a look at some new pieces I wrote. Fly or slow travel? Tough choices. provides a photo essay and meditation, on how everything we do harms the planet. The AI bubble is going to pop argues that the tech industry is on the cusp of crashing the economy. Moving away from Substack is a short note explaining why I’m moving this blog to a new platform.
Facing the abyss
The main reason that I stopped writing, is that I have a hard time, to find words for the predicament we, humanity, have brought upon ourselves and our descendants. It’s not that finding words by itself is hard. God knows we are drowning in a deluge of words. We now even have machines spewing out nice sounding palaver on an industrial, planet-covering scale. What is hard, is finding the right words. To say something meaningful.
To say something constructive, in the face of⸺unspeakable realities.
We cannot know, because we cannot believe
One of the reasons it’s so damn hard to say something meaningful, is that our minds are not geared to comprehend the atrocities we’re witnessing. Climate Catastrophe Is Ungraspable Just like the Holocaust Was, Jonathan Safran Foer Says (Haaretz.com, free registration required) (Alouf 2019).
Faced with an onslaught of real-life horrors, our minds blank out.
The Holocaust was not slowed down
Indulge me for a moment and think back to 1943, when the Holocaust was in full swing. Jan Karski was a Polish resistance fighter, sent to the US to try and convince the Americans to take some action — bomb the railways carrying Jews to the death camps. He met Franklin D. Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (who was a Jew himself). No action was taken. Karski’s report was dismissed as propaganda, not because it was untrue, but because it was impossible to comprehend the enormity of the crime he reported.
Frankfurter didn’t question the truthfulness of Karski’s story. He didn’t dispute that the Germans were systematically murdering the Jews of Europe, but he was incapable of believing it. He said to Karski, ‘My mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot accept it.’
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
Ecocide denial
This mirrors our own response to the climate catastrophe.
It’s possible for extremely smart people, who are extremely well-intentioned and well-informed and have their hearts in the right places, to still be unable to believe what they know. That is where we are now. The scientists are the equivalent of Karski in our time, they are the messengers and they are presenting us with the truth and asking us to act on it. No sane person thinks the scientists are lying. The climate crisis is a solid scientific fact, and we agree with the factual situation but refuse to believe it.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
You and I, we say we believe in climate change, but do we really? Do we live that truth? Have you stopped flying and embraced slow travel? Stopped eating meat? Stopped driving a car?
I’ve tried, and I will keep trying, but I find it impossible to live without being complicit in this heinous crime that’s being commited world-wide. This crime that all of us are committing, against our planet and the future of our children.
[The hardest part is] witnessing myself saying one thing and feeling one thing but doing something different, accepting, but living as if we deny it.
Future generations won’t care what our feelings were; they will want to know what we did in response to what we knew or didn’t know. The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are: eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free and have fewer children.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
Dissociation
We are living in a fundamentally dissociated state of being. We are surrounded by the paraphernalia of consumer paradise: food, electronic gadgets, material comforts. We are drowning in instagrammed imagery of perfect holidays with perfect bodies. We search for spiritual enlightenment. Society is running like it’s a big feel-good fun factory.
But what society is actually producing, is climate catastrophe, death—the sixth mass extinction—, an ocean that contains more plastic than living biomass, fascist hate policies and a livestreamed genocide. The gulf is massive, between the espoused ethos of liberalism and humanism on the one hand, and the mind-numbing assault of a 24 hour news cycle on the other.
It’s all too much. Too atrocious to comprehend. Citing Claude Lanzmann’s prologue to his 2010 documentary “The Karski Report”:
What is knowledge? What can information about a horror, a literally unheard-of one, mean to the human brain, which is unprepared to receive it because it concerns a crime that is without precedent in the history of humanity?
(Lanzmann, quoted in Alouf 2019)
In the face of ecocide, human understanding withers. Not because we cannot understand, but because we cannot bear to understand. It’s too much for our hearts.
Pause right here
Foer then makes a jump. Even though we are unable to properly understand, he says we must still act.
It may also be the case that we’re putting too much emphasis on feeling and what we need to do instead is put the emphasis on doing.
The emphasis is on doing – you fulfill the commandments, and then through fulfilling them maybe you understand or maybe you don’t, but at least you fulfilled them. The change we need to make is not to wait for feeling or belief in order to act.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
I partially agree, and I’ll get to the part of taking action later.
But first I want to pause right here, at the dark edge.
The edge of the abyss
Yes: our hearts, our minds, are unable to comprehend the grotesqueness of reality. That should not be an excuse for inaction. But it should also not be an excuse to simply accept that state of affairs as given, or acceptable.
We must face the horrors of our felt reality. The planet needs you to feel its pain. We must perform the inner work of facing the consequences of our actions. To allow ourselves to be transformed by the mirror the world is holding up to what we have wrought in the world.
And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Nietsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Only by engaging with reality, as awful as it is, can we find an entry into changing ourselves, and through ourselves: the world.
We must work to improve our understanding of the world and of the dynamics that cause the ecocide to unfold. Understanding is necessary to dismantle the root causes. We must unlearn outdated thinking modes, discard retrograde theories. Embrace and embody new paradigms. ← That is what this blog is all about.
Yes, we must act; but if we act without proper understanding, we may do more harm than good.
Thinking and feeling and doing
It’s easy to get stuck here.
For me, learning never stops. Each time I try to articulate a thought, I gather more references, and then the one leads to the next. It’s daunting. Whatever I want to write about, thousands of people have wrote about that already. There’s no way I can integrate all of that. Moreover: everything is connected in myriad ways to everything else. And the emotional load of witnessing the suffering in the world can be overwhelming.
The logical consequence of those considerations is, to not write. Which I’ve concluded, is not acceptable either. The point of living, feeling and thinking cannot be to stop living, to stop feeling, to stop thinking.
There’s another response possible in that situation, opposite to that of paralysis. Instead of taking any detail and zooming that out to everything, you can take the opposite approach: given everything, you can act on anything. It’s all connected. Whatever local change you make, will ripple out into the universe.
Sure, we may not know the full consequences of our actions. The ultimate results may be the opposite of what we intended to achieve. But that’s not a reason to do nothing. It’s a reason to act with right mind. Which is different from just having the right intentions. History is full of the most awful crimes committed because the end supposedly justified the means.
The way I see it, stop even thinking in those terms. Stop trying to bring about some end state. Instead, what is the kind thing that you can do right now? The nice thing? The thing you do that falls within the remit of the Hippocratic oath, to first do no harm?
Acting by itself already improves understanding and resilience. By acting, which always involves imperfect understanding, we may gain more understanding. Me writing this post, putting my somewhat vague intuitions into concrete words, to be sent into the world: it helps me clarify my thinking. I hope these words help you to clarify yours.
On a psychological level, it’s important to have an active stance. To not just succumb to the overwhelming sense of futility that the climate catastrophe easily induces. To find ways to employ your talents, your energies, to server the world. To serve life. Having positive goals makes you more resilient in the face of adversity; to flourish. (Gaffney 2015)
The future will be radically different from what you’ve known
I already quoted Foer as to the importance of acting, regardless of the limitations of our knowledge and emotions:
Future generations won’t care what our feelings were; they will want to know what we did in response to what we knew or didn’t know.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
He illustrates the importance of acting with the following story about his grandmother. In 1941, a year before Karski left Poland to report about the annihilation of the Jews, Foer’s grandmother, who was then 20, left her Polish shtetl, days before the Nazis entered the village.
“She knew only what everyone else knew,” Foer writes in his book – meaning that the Nazis were advancing eastward into Poland and would reach the town within days. However, she was the only one in the family who grasped the meaning of what she knew, and the only one who took action.
“Those who stayed weren’t any less brave, intelligent, resourceful or afraid of dying,” observes Foer, adding that they simply didn’t believe that the future would be radically different from what they had known.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
Doesn’t that damning phrase resonate with you? “They simply didn’t believe that the future would be radically different from what they had known.” Isn’t that how we’re trying to live our lives, pretending that our current mode of being will go on and on, as if we don’t know that collapse is not only on the agenda, but unfolding as we speak?
The age of climate collapse is also that of social collapse, and our urgent challenge is to save as much as possible.
(Foer, quoted in Alouf 2019)
But how? To save as much as possible?
Think globally, act locally
Last week, I received a book I ordered to prepare for an upcoming conference talk: an original 1977 first edition hardcover hardcopy, not a Kindle, of Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language (Alexander et al. 1977). I removed the packaging and opened the book on a random page. I felt struck by lightning.
In some kind of magic serendipity, the book opened on a design pattern that cuts to the heart of one of my deepest held core values: the importance of autonomy. It’s worthwhile quoting this piece:
80 Self-governing workshops and offices
No one enjoys his work if he is a cog in a machine.
A man enjoys his work when he understands the whole and when he is responsible for the quality of the whole. He can only understand the whole and be responsible for the whole when the work which happens in society, all of it, is undertaken by small self-governing human groups; groups small enough to give people understanding through face-to-face contact, and autonomous enough to let the workers themselves govern their own affairs.
The evidence for this pattern is built upon a single, fundamental proposition: work is a form of living, with its own intrinsic rewards; any way of organizing work which is at odds with this idea, which treats work instrumentally, as a means only to other ends, is inhuman.
This holistic understanding is at the heart of agile software development. It is exactly why I’ve worked in open source all my career. It’s the reason I’ve founded and developed Quaive.
It’s easy to dismiss this source, 50 years old, as quaint and archaic. Doing so would reveal that you’re still enthralled by the progress optimism that has been the dominant paradigm since the Enlightenment took hold: the firm belief that the future will always be better than the past, that new knowledge is always going to be better than old knowledge. While that is partly true, it’s also partly false.
Our society is on a dead-end trajectory. Other choices were available in the past decades, choices that were researched on and experimented with, but did not materialize as the dominant trajectory. Those practices and knowledge nuggets may well hold the keys to our future survival, much like seed banks and preservation of traditional agricultural practices do.
In this specific case, dismissing the source as old and quaint is even more wildly off the mark. Alexander’s work has been a key influence in the software industry—that’s what my upcoming conference talk will be about.
A new focus: systems resilience & digital autonomy
We are living on the edge of collapse, facing a dark future. The darkness covering our future and present is so intense, that we shrink back from the horrors of the real, and withdraw into the consolation of imaginary worlds, of delusion. It’s just too much to behold. Meanwhile we’re enmeshed in wicked complexity that eludes our understanding and evades our futile attempts to influence our trajectory.
To disengage is an understandable, even logical response. It’s not a sane response though. The only sane response is to act constructively. For me, that translates into a focus in this blog on systems resilience and digital autonomy. Those key themes are connected with each other, and with concerns I’ve engaged with all my life. They provide an empowering lens to deal with collapse in an active way, instead of just suffering it in silence. This focus helps me break out of my writer’s block, and overcome the gloom and doom enough to at least write about it.
Systems resilience
Systems resilience is such a wide-ranging concern that I don’t have a separate category for that. It implies a constructive engagement with collapse. To point out where things are breaking down, for sure; but to do so from a frame of mind that sees risks of breakdown simultaneously as opportunities for transformation.
Our daily lives and everything we do, depend on global systems, that are beyond our control but vital for our individual survival. Food supplies. Energy systems. Information flows. Clothes. We are surrounded by objects we take for granted. Take any of those objects. Ask yourself: where were its components sourced from? Where did the raw materials for those components come from? Who assembled the whole thing? How did it get transported into my home? Imagine the thousands of people whose efforts made it possible for you to hold this “normal” thing.
Now imagine all those intricate supply chains to falter and fail. Maybe China invades Taiwan, and TSMC—the world’s leading chip maker— stops producing computer chips. Maybe a drought destroys crops. Labour unrest disrupts transport logistics. A heat wave overloads the electricity grid into blackout. Or another zoonotic pandemic crashes the world economy. Where does that leave you?
Systems resilience provides a lens to look at your life from the perspective of climate catastrophe adaptation. When the shit hits the fan, as it will, as it already does; how will you thrive, or even survive? How far and how fast can you decouple your life from the ever-more ever-faster ever-better world that’s driven by money? How resilient, that is: capable of absorbing shocks, are the systems you depend on? How robust is your way of life to systems disruption? This is not a call for prepping. It’s a call for prosocial preparation. For scaling down complexity, or to at least prepare for that scaling down.
Digital autonomy
Digital autonomy is the translation of that stance of systems resilience, into the digital realm. Digital autonomy means: having maximal control over the technologies you’re using. It’s about open source, resisting surveillance, and resisting the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few unbelievably rich sociopaths.
We live in a time of fascism, where imaginary realities and delusional bogus ideologies proclaim dominance over factual, observable reality. As if eliminating climate research eliminates climate change.
A handful of powerful American tech companies, aligned with extremist dystopian politics, dominate our information spaces. They facilitate and encourage the production and dissemination of disinformation at industrial scales. They exercise total surveillance to target everybody, and that includes you.
Most of the tech industry runs on advertising revenue and is relentlessly focused on behavioral modification, meaning making you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. Thinking you’re immune to that is beyond naive; it actually shows the system at work.
The sane response to this specific flavour of dystopia, is to try and decouple as much as you can, from the hyperscale megacorporate data mining. Run your own systems.
Now I know I’m privileged, having the skills and resources to actually do that. But even if you yourself cannot do that, the digital autonomy and open source movement is important and relevant as a site of resistance against the dominance of US tech monopolies. As a flag of hope. As a demonstration, that things don’t have to be this awful. As the seed for a different way of doing things. As a network of people, knowledge and systems you can tap into, to escape the grip of empire.
This is Dark Edge
If you read all of the above, you’re my guy or girl. Subscribe to this blog by RSS or email, if you like it. I intend to write infrequently about all of the topics covered above. I’m not somebody to commit to a regular posting schedule, or a fixed formula.
I tend to write long pieces, as you’ve noticed; but hey, better a long piece about a complex topic, than a short and dense piece about that complex topic, right? I don’t do non-complex topics 😇.
I’ve got some pieces prepared about economics and limits to growth, and am working on another track about AI and the philosophy of technology. The consistent focus in my reading and writing is at the intersection of technology, capitalism and ecological destruction; and how to engage with all of that without getting stuck. Or even with getting stuck, falling down and getting up again. It’s all in the game.
While I write on technology, I do so in a non-technical way, for a non-technical audience—that’s you! No source code on this blog. Plenty of big ideas though. Inasmuch as my R&D does involve software engineering, I maintain a separate, technical blog at cosent.nl. That’s where the how-to technical details go; here I’ll report back on the outcomes of my research.
Dark Edge is my journey of exploration into the unfolding of the polycrisis. I’m using systems resilience as an analytical lens, and digital autonomy as a praxis of resistance. I invite you, to join me on this journey of discovery.
Your feedback is more than welcome.