Tag: the future ain’t what it used to be

Evil Makes You Stupid: A Case Study

John Michael Greer329 Comments

Yes, as most of my readers are probably aware by now, I’ve relocated. It’s been a little less than two years now since my wife Sara died; it’s been a rough road since then but I’ve dealt with it about as well as I’m ever likely to, and over the holidays just past it became…

A little further offline than usual

John Michael Greer237 Comments

Well, that was an entertainment I didn’t need. As I think most of you are aware by now, I’m relocating, and going through the usual shuffle of changing phone and internet providers. Here in Rhode Island, my service was via Cox, and I made the mistake of giving them advance warning about shutting off service,…

Situationism: Where Domination Ends

John Michael Greer203 Comments

The two interludes just past strayed some distance from the writings of the Situationists, the little clique of avant-garde Marxists in mid-20th century France whose reflections offer certain highly useful insights into the problems and predicaments of life in the twilight of the industrial age. Neither of those divagations, however, was irrelevant to the theme…

Situationism: A Voice From The Fringes

John Michael Greer402 Comments

There’s much to be learned from studying movements that thought they were the wave of the future, and weren’t. To begin with, there’s a distinctive tone of strident triumphalism that most movements doomed to fail seem to adopt, some at the very beginning of their trajectories, others once they pass their peak and start down…

Talking Back to Flying Heads

John Michael Greer312 Comments

As a writer with an unruly muse, I’ve gotten used to accepting inspiration no matter the quarter from which it arrives. Even for me, though, this essay is a little odd. We’re going to be talking about one of the weirdest movies of the early 1970s, which is of course saying something; about a widely…

Climate Change: An Unwelcome Future

John Michael Greer362 Comments

The audience reaction to the last two essays I’ve put up here turned out to be something of a surprise to me. A month and a half ago—has it been that long already?—I posted the first of two parts of an essay on climate change, listing three things that each side of today’s climate debates…

Lords of the Fall

John Michael Greer366 Comments

It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a…

The Nibelung’s Ring: Prelude

John Michael Greer365 Comments

(Theme music:  “Vorspiel” from Das Rheingold) Some years ago, back when I was blogging on The Archdruid Report, I mentioned in passing that if I ever got tired of having a large readership, I would do a series of posts on Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. That was partly a joke, but only…

The Flight from Prediction

John Michael Greer274 Comments

I think most of my readers know that my academic background, such as it is, is in the history of ideas. To some extent that was simply the best option I could find when I returned to college in 1991 to complete my degree.  Then as now, the University of Washington didn’t offer a major…

The Secret of the Sages

John Michael Greer406 Comments

Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited…