What the latest Internet kerfuffle reveals about the tragedy of our age — The current zeitgeist moment pits hyper-misogynist, musclebound Kickboxing champ and master scam-artist Andrew Tate against teenaged ecological-emergency-doomsayer Greta Thunberg. As many of you probably know by now, Tate brag-tweeted to Thunberg about his 33 cars, including two Ferraris and a Bugatti, and asked for her email address “so I can…

At the moment, I am having a splendid time in Paris. I just spoke at Purple Magazine’s 30th Anniversary Festival, held at the Palais Galleria, an elegant fashion museum. Purple put me up with other speakers at Hotel Grand Amour on Rue Fidelity, a stylish hotspot where little glass vitrines…

I met Ryze Conley, an enthusiastic, amiable crypto entrepreneur in Tulum last year. A few months ago, he reached out to me on Facebook. He was working on an innovative new blockchain-based cryptocurrency project, Tagcoin. As an admirer of my work, he wanted me to explore the project, interview the…

I find this time we are in now to be unprecedented, weird, disorienting. Perhaps most of you agree? This month, we reach ten years since “2012,” the prophetic end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. …

It takes time to assimilate Bernardo Kastrup’s idealist viewpoint — developed in The Idea of the World, More than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief, and other works — but it is well worth the effort. Kastrup’s philosophy is similar to what I proposed in earlier works. …

The current system of hyper-capitalism seems, on its surface, to operate without ideology. The structure is so totalizing that people accept it unquestioningly, internalizing it as a kind of second nature, as inescapable as Nature itself, or “first nature1.” But this system is an ideological construct that maintains itself via…

Anarcho-primitivists argue that our underlying problem is not capitalism, but civilization itself, or what author Darren Allen calls “The System”. Over the last ten thousand years, a number of civilizations around the world grew to a certain point, reached critical mass, and eventually imploded (as Jared Diamond documents in Collapse)…

In the last installment of this thought stream, I looked at proposals from a number of Radical Leftists who wish to emancipate humanity via a truly rational application of technology. This means reducing working hours to a minimum (or zero) and liberating people’s time to enjoy their lives as they…

This is Part Six of an ongoing thought-stream. Here are links to Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five. Where Do We Go from Here? In recent years, a number of authors on the Left have tried to define a new utopian vision and pragmatic program for the future. Relevant manifestos include Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism by Aaron Bastani, Post-Capitalism by Paul Mason, Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek, and Four Futures by Peter Phrase…