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“ We live in the interregnum between worlds, between paradigms ”
The Metacrisis
civilisation's total complex of interconnected crises, catastrophic risks and critical trajectories -and the causal conditions from it emerges: the evolutionary game-theory, political economy and cultural psychology of techno-capitalist modernity.
Core Definition
Catastrophic and Existential risk: threats capable of causing civilization-ending collapse, human extinction or severe irreversible harm to humanity's long-term potential. These include nuclear war, climate destablisation, engineered pandemics, and misaligned AI.
Critical Trajectories: current developmental pathways and locked-in trends whose momentum is driving us towards crossing irreversible threshold. These include accelerating AI capabilities without solving alignment, world-industry-x-ecology approaching planetary boundaries and capital acceleration without societally-stabilising redistribution.
Attractor States: stable equilibrium configurations toward which complex systems naturally evolve and from which they resist deviation. In civilizational dynamics: basin attractors that "pull" societies toward particular stable patterns. The two primary dystopian attractors are decentralized chaos (multipolar coordination failure) and centralized tyranny (power consolidation)—both self-reinforcing once reached.
Causal Conditions: the underlying structural and cultural mechanisms that produce metacrisis dynamics. Generators (e.g manufactured material scarcity, cultural conflict, ideological identity) create the conditions of possibility and drivers propel crises forward (e.g. competitive pressures).
Generative Mechanisms
Evolutionary Game-theory: the strategic incentive structures where individual rational choices lead to collectively destructive outcomes. Multipolar traps, arms race dynamics, tragedy of the commons, and Moloch-like coordination failures where agents are trapped in competitive games that reward defection and punish cooperation, even when cooperation would produce better collective outcomes.
Political Economy: The structural relationship between economic systems (capital accumulation, resource extraction, growth imperatives) and political power (governance, regulation, distribution). Under techno-capitalism: the fusion of market logic with state power, where economic imperatives colonize political decision-making and democratic capacity is subordinated to competitive dynamics.
Cultural Psychology: The collective belief-systems (epistemology) and value-systems (axiology) that condition how civilizations perceive reality and possibility (ontology, phenomenology). Includes: rationalism, individualism, materialism, nationalism, progress narratives, anthropocentrism, instrumentalist relationship to technology and environment, disenchantment, meaning crisis.
Civilisational Modality
Techno-capitalist Modernity: The current civilizational operating system combining: (1) technological acceleration as primary driver of change, (2) capitalist logic prioritizing growth, efficiency and commodification, (3) Enlightenment rationality divorced from wisdom traditions, (4) nation-state competition, (5) extractive relationship with nature and human attention. The total systemic configuration producing exponential power without commensurate steering capacity.
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