I am the kind of person who likes to explore possible futures, to make the best of them happen and close off the nefarious ones.
It seems we are a rare breed.
Or maybe this is simply how life unfolds: every major societal change is preceded by a storm before it can take form.
This is what happened with the printing press: decades of heresy, censorship, and wars of religion before the storm settled into literacy, the public sphere, the Reformation itself.
It is what happened with the French Revolution too: Terror and chaos and a Republic that took a Napoleon and a century to steady, before democracy could properly take form.
It is also, surely, what is happening with AI. We are only seeing the beginning of massive job displacement and heavy disruption.
Yet, at the same time, humanity has rarely seen such an expansion of its cognitive reach.
As I write these lines, it is genuinely unclear where this leads. Will we cure the diseases plaguing us? Solve our energy crisis? Enslave us all? Everything, everywhere, all at once?
One thing is not in good shape: getting back within planetary limits.
This cognitive edge could serve that goal, but the way it is currently powered demands ever more data centres, ever more energy, fossil fuel for most projects, and an unclear toll on clean water.
This splits into two antagonistic positions.
The accelerationist one says the faster we storm, the sooner we form. The other refuses the technology outright, so as not to add fuel to a fire already burning. Literally.
Countless heat waves have exhausted both our bodies and our water tables. Fires almost never seen before are raging across France and Spain. A terrifying glimpse, perhaps, of an unbearable future our children may have to live in.
I am calling for another path. One where empowerment and frugality coincide.
Climate denial has won so far. Those of us warning, trying to amplify the scientists' message, have been mostly ignored and mocked. Prosecuted, sometimes.
Inaction is the only punitive ecology there is. The longer we wait, the less power we will have to reverse course.
Yet. I refuse to surrender to this defeat. I refuse to leave such a world in my child's hands.
I resent my parents' generation for that: for taking every joy on offer at the expense of their children and grandchildren, and calling it living. I will not do the same to mine.
I don't know where this fits into the storming-before-forming narrative. But I sense the need for new, frugal, empowering tools; tools that give builders the power to create the post-carbon world we owe our children.
So, let's build the tools that ask less and give more: frugal by design, empowering by intent. Not yet another gadget or AI slop sucking the last drop of resources for a selfish uselessness.
The storm will not skip us.
It rarely has.
It’s heading our way, gaining momentum.
A storm we created in the first place.
But storms move Earth. They also clear ground. Somewhere in this one is a crack a post-carbon world can grow through.
Can we become an even stronger storm getting Earth out of the heat-doomed trajectory it is currently?
I don't know who widens that crack into a door. I know I would rather spend what is left of my strength on that than on watching it stay shut.
I will fight with the tools at my disposal. What could a post-carbon design lab bring to this world?
To desirable futures,
Thomas