Category: Not the Monthly Post

Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish

John Michael Greer225 Comments

I’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between…

Futures That Work

John Michael Greer317 Comments

Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the…

Before Winter Comes

John Michael Greer508 Comments

I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to start talking about energy issues quite so soon. Granted, industrial civilization remains hopelessly dependent for its very survival on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, which are being used up at breakneck paces to prop up the absurdly extravagant lifestyles of a handful of rich nations. …

The Great Rehash, Part Four: A Hill to Die On

John Michael Greer331 Comments

One of the things I’ve had to get used to in writing these weekly blogs is that events sometimes move fast enough that I have to scramble to keep up. The self-inflicted epic fail of mass Covid vaccination seems to be turning into a good example of that phenomenon. Two weeks ago, when I posted…

The Great Rehash, Part Two: The Future’s Cold Eyes

John Michael Greer302 Comments

Two weeks ago, as regular readers will recall, we discussed The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the rest of the really rather dreary literature of planetary preaching in which that volume fills an overfamiliar role, and the usually disastrous consequences that follow when the clueless rich set out to tell the rest…

The End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer386 Comments

The fourth enduring theme of my blogging over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization, is also the one that most people try hardest to misunderstand. It’s not just that so many people blankly insist that it can’t happen and of course we’re on our way to the stars, just…

The Fire This Time

John Michael Greer340 Comments

Over the last sixteen years I’ve spent blogging, one of my most reliable sources of amusement is the experience of being condemned as a hopeless pessimist by some readers and denounced as a clueless optimist by others.  What makes this even more interesting is that the two groups of critics are usually incensed by the…

Whispers of the Fall

John Michael Greer354 Comments

It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the…

The End of the European Age

John Michael Greer369 Comments

All things considered, this is a good time to start talking about the geopolitical big picture. As I type these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war is still under way.  The assault on Kyiv seems to have been put on hold so that the Russians could focus on clearing Ukrainian defenders from the Donbass region, while pitched…

The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future

John Michael Greer352 Comments

As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week.  To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant.  That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…