The Metacrisis is here, and we know things will get harder over the coming decades and centuries.
What is the ‘Metacrisis’?
The world is facing an array of complex challenges, and it’s no longer possible to work out where one ends and the next begins.
A whole range of existential threats are hitting us at once. They’re all interconnected and each one would be difficult to face on its own. We have to contend with facing them all at once.
Shifting weather patterns across the world, leading to more extreme weather (hurricanes, droughts, storms, floods, landslides, etc). For now, this is primarily affecting poorer countries in the global South.
Ever greater economic instability, affecting both nations and individuals as everything gets more expensive and quality of life drops.
Eventually, the threat of global sea level rise as polar ice melts, which will inundate some of the most productive arable land in the world and swamp many cities.
In the UK we’ve seen the sabotage of healthcare and social services by profit-motivated leaders, meaning there’s only a safety net if you can afford one.
Rising political tensions as resources become more scarce, which means a return to the days of regional conflicts and mass wars.
Political apathy as we watch our world being killed by people who seem to face no justice, but rather just get richer. This political vacuum welcomes the rise of political populism and a lurch to the far right, as only these brutal and naive ideas seem to offer any solutions.
The breakdown of ecologies and the mass death of key species. Many of these species play essential roles in creating clean air, breaking down waste, pollinating crops, and other processes that have to happen for life to continue.
The breakdown of the very nature of truth, brought about by media giants, politicians who operate without concequences, social media echo chambers, AI content and content algorithms. This means there can’t be a coherent social movement for change, because there’s no shared understanding of the nature of the world.
A crisis in mental health around the world, as the disconnect worsens between people's daily lives and the obvious realities of the Metacrisis.
In the UK (and other Western countries), the dismantling of local infrastructure and resilience over the past 50 years. We cannot feed ourselves, we have destroyed much of our topsoil and farmland through intensive agriculture, and we cannot manufacture the things we need. In a stable, globalised economy this made sense. As international ties unravel, it leaves us vulnerable.
The dependence of people on technology and their modern lifestyles. Increasingly, nobody knows how to fix things, or things are manufactured so they can’t be fixed, and nobody knows how to grow food, purify water, generate electricity, create community with their neighbours, or anything else that might be essential in a collapsing economy.
Most people are not activists or scientists, most people don’t have the power or the perspective to engage with problems this big. So most people are:
Ignoring that there is a crisis, and focusing on their daily lives
Becoming fixated on the idea that billionaires and technology will save us
Campaigning for change, even as governments and corporations accelerate the harm they’re doing
Drawing on simplistic post-apocalyptic scenarios from Holywood
Making the crisis into a positive thing by turning to God and calling this the rapture
What is the organised response to these existential threats?
If things are so bleak, what is there left to do?
Political activism and campaigning, along with the efforts of people in every industry and sector trying to create positive change, still have a huge role to play.
There are many forms that the Metacrisis can take, and we need to slow the damage and build sustainable solutions wherever we can.
But we’re not going to avoid the crisis. It’s much, much too late to keep believing that the next hundred years will look anything like the past century did.
Introducing: the Beacon Project
This project is an attempt to find a meaningful way to prepare for all of the effects of the Metacrisis. We don’t have the power to stop it, or to stop all the men in power who are causing it, so what can we do?
We choose to create a place that will support people in the UK as the crisis worsens.