TRASHFUTURE - We Wish You a Polycrisis feat. Dominik Leusder

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Riley, Milo, and Alice festively discuss some Christmas presents granted by the news, including the arrest of the dread pirate Bankman Fried and Elon Musk posting himself into penury. Also, Dom Leusder joins Riley in the second half to talk about the concept of “polycrisis” that appears to now be inescapable, to attempt a more firm definition of a nebulous, but useful, concept. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this very Christmas-y edition of Trash Future. It's me, Riley. Hi, hi, hi. I'm joined by... Now I have a machine gun. I'm joined by Alice, who now has a machine gun, and Milo, who does not have a machine gun. That's right. Mine has been given to the ambulance driver.

Yes. I am also going to be joined in the second half of this episode by Dominic Loisder of the EuroTrash podcast, who is also an economist and historian. We are going to be talking about what is the poly crisis? What do people mean when they talk about it? What do lazy people mean when they talk about it? And I happen to remember from the past that that is a pretty good conversation. So do stick around for that. However, before we get into that, I have some Christmas presents that have been given to me by the news to strike a stick out in particular.

The first one. Our best friends, right? Because we have this thing where we don't like the police very much apart from international financial investigators. Wait, what? Oh, God, I'm going to have to get rid of that poster. We love Buffin. We love the Securities and Exchange Commission. We love the Serious Fraud Office because they bring us Christmas presents like this. The SEC and the FBI have arrested SPF, Sam Bankman Freed. To be honest, I'd say this could also have been one for the Obvious Fraud Office, realistically.

Yes. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The many shirts we haven't made. Oh, yeah. I forgot about the Obvious Fraud Office shirt. We're backing up in the pipes. We've got a big shipment of shirts that could have been. Actually, wait, it was going to be an Obvious Fraud Windbreaker like the FBI wants. That was it. That like aborted baby sister meme, but it's like a trash future shirt that never got made.

I could have kept you so warm. It would have been a really high quality print. That's right. You could have struck up so many conversations with other trash future fans at like, I don't know, the anime store or wherever they're going out. But as you say, Sam Bankman Freed has been arrested. I don't know if this was on purpose, but there is a photo of him. No, they arrested him by accident. They bumbled into him and they were like, oh. Well, I mean, again, with the amount that was going on there, the fact that it took

them that long, you might as well say he got arrested by accident. I was just at the fraud trying to get directions away from there. This is all the business understanding officer. What was very funny to me was that he was, when he was arrested, I don't know if he was like wearing a French cuff shirt that was just had the cuffs undone or indeed if he was wearing a pirate costume because he also had a belt across his midsection over top of the shirt. A hundred percent pirate.

I've already been sent a meme side by siding his arrest picture with Jerry Seinfeld in the puffy shirt episode. I choose to believe this is a pirate costume because where does he get arrested again? He got arrested in the Bahamas at his home. Yeah, a hundred percent he would go to the Bahamas and then sort of don a pirate costume. And then he got arrested. It's like one of those things where he knew that he was going to jail and he wanted to have like one more LARP group sex session with his awful friends.

Maybe. They caught him. He wanted to go to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville one more time. Absolutely. He wanted to really experience it. And the feds put him on like an extraordinary rendition style private jet and they're flying him back to New York to try him, which is very funny. They're taking him to a black site in East Timor.

They're going to find out exactly what the rules of this polycule are one fingernail at a time. How much money did you ever actually have? It's no more than $10, please. So that's one thing that's been a lovely little gift from Santa. Another present from Santa through the newsreels has, of course, been Tesla's stock price going into what is now a pretty big freefall based solely on the fact that Elon Musk cannot shut the fuck up.

It's been interesting to me because one thing that's been surprising. I don't know if it's going to surprise either of you, but the number of Tesla investors, and I mean major investors who just genuinely seem not to have been paying attention to Elon Musk, they give him X million quid and they're like, okay, fine, electric cars, whatever, pay no further attention. And now, like us, they have to be aware of him because of him posting all the time and they hate it. Imagine you are, I don't know, like a portfolio manager or an associate or whatever at somewhere

like Bridgewater, right? Like a big asset manager or investor. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I can't check Twistedrama over the sound of me driving my Porsche sideways into like a blind curve and dying. Or even better, right? Wait, Paul Walker.

Paul Walker, hedge fund manager. Let's imagine that you're like Yeebs Vander Blumken and you've been making great money for Twunkel Capital, just sitting by just buying Tesla stock and then just sitting in an expansionary like a monetary environment more or less for 10 years and enjoying the hype and all that other good stuff. You can't attribute the entire like crash in the price to Elon, of course, because a bunch of it is just, but a bunch of it is also just the thing that made it worth so much going away because, you know, Jerome Powell decided to turn the money tap slightly

down. But nevertheless, right, you could definitely say it's been exacerbated. They're all on Twitter now doing the sort of like finance guy version of the Grimes tweet where he said like pronouns are dumb or whatever and she replies to him like, please give me a call or text me. I know this isn't your heart. Like they're all doing the financial version of that where he's like, we're going to like rip the cathedral out of the walls and they're like, Elon, I've supported you for years,

I know this isn't your heart. Please text me. Look, Elon, we were fully behind you when you had a company with cars that exploded and that was never making any profits whatsoever. However, this is too far. Stop tweeting like a divorced man. It's now embarrassing for us when we go meet our other hedge fund managers at like the charity gala where you eat sushi off the naked chick or whatever.

It's embarrassing for me to have this large Tesla position. Please be normal. Yeah. He's a joke at the eyes wide shut party now. It sucks. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because he was rich enough to be going to those.

You know, and now it doesn't matter. He's too embarrassing, which is like, if that's the story that I guess keeps happening again and again and again is that the institutions that are supposed to, let's say, maintain the mystique of power, whether that's stuff like the presidency, number 10 Downing Street, whether that's the CEO position, all these various companies, so many of those institutions have been so broken or distorted that extremely embarrassing people are able to just leapfrog their way into them. And such as the various cavalcade of, you know, buffoons that embarrass mostly their fellow

elites, right? Because if they trust the prime minister, yeah, you have to take her seriously while she's prime minister, if you want to take the idea of like, elite-ness seriously. And so she just throws a pall over that whole thing, just like, you know, it doesn't, like, Tesla is no better or worse of a company than it was before Elon Musk took over Twitter, right? It is about as stupid. The cars are about as shitty. And the fact is, right, it's, it always, okay, there's this comparison when you talk

about the tech world, right? Which I think is, you know, it's illustrative, usefully illustrative to bring up, which is why a company like Garmin or Fitbit always struggle, or you're Uber even, always struggles versus a company that does more. So why the Apple, the Apple Watch is a fitness tracker, they always have an advantage over something like Fitbit, even though they do so many, they don't do just fitness stuff. So something like GM, right? They have a gigantic advantage over something like Tesla because, well, they have a lot of

plants built already, and they don't need to create a bunch of extremely dangerous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like Lava Waterfalls, in order to just make a bunch of relatively inexpensive electric vehicles. Which I think is a shame. I think there should be more Charlie and the Chocolate Factory going on in every, in every factory. Like, I want to go to the box factory, and for some reason, there's like a huge buzz store that just comes down in the middle of the factory floor for no reason. With no warning.

The factory where they make that club, the box. That's right. Yeah. And so, you know, it is funny, though, that what has happened essentially is that all of these guys, these like East Coast, not the West Coast tech guys who loved this already, but now the East Coast rich guys who want to be taken seriously and are probably, and are maybe from like old families or whatever, they now also are all being forced by circumstances into like knowing the difference between a Pepe and a Greifer.

Oh, and you know what? They fucking deserve it. Yeah. But it happened to a better group of people. The culture war is now subsuming everything into itself and, you know, great. Yeah. A Greifer sounds like a kind of deep fried cheese pastry you could buy in Wisconsin. It's delicious cheese Greipers, yeah.

Post, everyone, post rare cheese Greipers. Please do post that. Send us your Greipers. Do not, do not post rare cheese Greipers. Milo, for your information, a Greifer was like when Pepe was no longer racist enough after sort of 2017, they got like a more racist frog. Pepe low-key fell off for real. He did.

He did. He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he got, he got normie, you know. Exactly. He got to normie and then they did another one. Who knows what they're doing. Yeah. He's, yeah. Since Pepe started hanging out with Toad of Toad Hall, became a lot more boring.

Yeah. So, you know, I'm, I'm a jeers to, to Elon, but most importantly, to all the people who he has basically just forced to know about him in his nonsense. Well, he's going the right way about ending up in like an oil draw mandora suitcase. We can hope. We can hope for the Yan master like speedrun. Although we, what, are we just living in Russia with other American embarrassments? Other Western embarrassments rather?

Would also be really funny. Yeah, I'd be, I'd be really glad to see Elon Musk at the like Steven Seagal, Aikido exhibition in like, you know. Him, Steven Seagal and Edward Snowden hanging out and eating a big carrot with Alexander Lukashenko eating one big cheese griper. Of course, being, being presented with like a, a, a lot of Neva and they're like, this is Russian Tesla. I mean, realistically, this is also the best way we're going to see Kanye West do an original

score for a Steven Seagal film. That's true. And if you said that, that, that sentence to me, you know, a decade ago would have been a very different vibe. Yeah, yeah. No, we're, we're, we're going to get, I, I for one am looking forward to the, to hit, to all of these guys continue descent in entirely self-inflicted descent into strangeness. To more metaphysical form of getting divorced than just getting divorced.

That's right. Anyway, in other things though, that have sort of grabbed my attention as we sort of drift into the Christmas season has of course been some things in the, in the world of Britain and in the, in the metaverse known as Britain. Oh no. The world in itself. Like everything's falling apart. If you, if you call an ambulance today, you might not get one.

If you call an ambulance yesterday, you certainly wouldn't get one because they're on strike against you not being able to get one. So this, the solution to us needing a 5% amount, as having 5% of the ambulance coverage, for example, that we need is to say, no, we, we cannot have more ambulance coverage. More people with broken legs, oh heavens, no. No, no, of course not. More people with broken legs are just going to have to adopt me. Hey, you know what?

Tiny Tim seemed to do fine as the career as an actor. You could consider being a tiny Tim if you have a broken leg. I feel like if you're going to do this libertarian shit, you have to follow through on it. And like if people are going to have to like take their friends to hospital anyway, let me put blue lights and a siren on my car. Let me do it. What's, what, what is the justification for, for restricting it to ambulances when there are no ambulances anymore?

Let me do it. It's just, it's just a no blue lights and sirens rule now. It's none at all. So yeah, your ambulance has got to be a regular car. I mean, to be fair, too long have the British public suffered under the jack boot of fat cat ambulance drivers. You know, you see them driving around in their gold ambulances with rims, you know, throwing rocks at the poor and rightly the working people of this country have had enough.

Yeah, to specifically, of course, there are, they're doing it. They're basically ambulance, ambulance queens. They've got their flat screen TVs. They're wearing their trainers. The nepotism babies of the ambulance service. You just try getting a job in the ambulance service if your father wasn't in the ambulance service. In addition, in addition to the ambulance strikes, of course, nurses are going on strikes. So even if you could get to the hospital, you would unlikely to be seen.

Of course, this is in, in stark contrast to what it was the day before the nurses went on strike, where if you could get to the hospital, you would still be unlikely to be seen. Because as you said earlier, Alice, the thing to remember is what they're striking against are the circumstances that make it so that if you get an ambulance and you'd be lucky to get one, you're likely to face between a like six and 12 hour wait, possibly on a gurney, where let's say the gurney lucky on a gurney death rate has skyrocketed in the last several years, which I think is probably something friend just keeps dying. Something we probably shouldn't have generally speak.

Well, actually, Riley, I'm very glad that you brought this up because I think, you know, too long have the British public suffered under the jackboot of fat cat nurses, you know, you see them driving around in their gold kia, kia, pikantos with the rims, you know, throwing rocks at poor people. And I think rightly, you know, the British public have had enough. Why should a nurse earn four million pounds a year when the average Joe does? And the thing is like the reason why we're in this state is because the NHS has been like the public service of last resort for a long time. Like there's a lot of people who might not have needed to go into hospital had they like had their needs addressed in other ways earlier.

There's a lot of like social care and stuff that's been cut. There's a lot of like mental health stuff that's been cut. And so people end up in hospital where it places like a burden on the NHS and they can't like get them back out of hospital again because there's nothing, there's no other services left. But this is like a recurring pattern, right? Because the one thing I will say about the British government, and this is distinct from the Americans in some respect, is that I've mentioned this before, our leaders are so ruthlessly committed to austerity that they are even willing to do austerity. Enthusiastic in fact, about doing austerity to like the bottom Jenga blocks, like the only Jenga blocks left

after they've pulled out all of the others. And the NHS is one of those... Yeah, there's no tower left to collapse. The top Jenga blocks are just gone. And they're like looking at this one Jenga block sitting on the table. It's like, I could take that out. It'd be fine. Two trunkless Jenga blocks of stone remain. In this case, just a table without any Jenga blocks on it. Yeah, which gets me to my other sort of public service of last resort, which is the sort of bipartisan consensus right now that if stuff doesn't work, whether that's the NHS, ambulances,

trains, whatever, we should just get the army to do it. We should get the military to do it. So I'll give you the actual sort of quote here, is that West Streeting, the shadow health secretary and sort of favorite by all of the people who I guess matter when it comes to picking who's the leader of the Labour Party after Starman. Leslie Streets. Yes, exactly. The man himself, action star. So he is, when asked if he favors bringing in the army, not just to like provide the

public service of last resort due to the massive funding cuts, which itself is an insane idea, but specifically as a measure to break the nurses' strike. He is now fully in agreement with the, let's say, the wildest Tory backbench MP fantasies that the rabble has gotten out of control and it's time for the army to come in and instill some discipline. This fantasy organization that is just able to marshal perfect obedience that has a perfect, let's say, sympathy to the needs of British elites, right? Because it's been crucially one that has also been subject to ruthless austerity measures, because we don't fuck around. We don't do this like, we'll do austerity except the police and

the army. None of this American austerity. Everything. Well, the thing is, Alice, too long have the British public suffered under the jackpot of the common private soldier, driving around in their gold tanks with the rims, throwing rocks at poor people, or shooting people in Northern Ireland. Oh, sorry, they actually did do that one. The vibe in the male series, as I currently am given to understand, is weird as hell,

because they are worse paid than either nurses or ambulance crew. And both private soldiers and officers have been vocally getting a bit sick of being the last ones left to do vital public service, whatever it is, that is currently on strike for being unsustainable, and do that in a continued unsustainable way. I have a quote here, actually. This is a quote given to the Telegraph in an article entitled, Army Fury as Soldiers Told to Give Up Their Christmas to Cover Striking Workers. Any article that begins with, Army Fury that doesn't end with, at loss to navy in football game, should be some cause for concern. The quote is, this is from a senior defense source,

quote, you've only got to look at a private soldier on 22k a year, and whose pay scales have not kept up with inflation for the last decade, having to give up Christmas or come straight off operations to cover, to cover for people who want 19% already paid in excess of what he or she would be. Now, again, this is the Telegraph, I suppose they have to add the wrong part, but they go on to say, we've got it to the stage now where the government's first lever it reaches for every time there's any difficulty, where their flood strikes, the rest of it, is the armed forces as opposed to it being the last resort. And as you say, Alice, it's because they've gotten rid of all the other ones, but I think there is this

long standing British fantasy. I think there's a sense, again, among British elites, what are so many institutions of Britain for? Not just the government, but things like the press as well. It's to discipline and punish, but also to like entertain, control, etc, etc. Right? But ultimately, it's based on this idea that there is a rabble, and the rabble have to be kept away from the crown jewels. And as more and more of the things that are designed to keep the country ticking over smoothly and keep the crown jewels firmly away from the rabble, crown jewels not being the literal crown jewels, but the crown jewels just being positions of esteem and importance and wealth and nice country houses,

and all of these things that are the preserve of the Great Britain. Gold aminances with rims and so on and so forth. Yeah, the rims and such the like. All of the institutions that are designed to keep the country ticking over in its current social order have been so, so degraded that the only thing really left is the fantasy of the people who are perfectly aligned with elite wants. I mean, Alice, you mentioned this to me earlier, but even the elites, someone like Caitlin Moran, who reacted to the London Riots in 2010 by saying, wouldn't it be great if the army rocked up right now just because these are people who I shouldn't have to see or think about. As a rich person,

I shouldn't have to see or really think about the NHS. It's put there as a social release valve that I sort of resent having to maintain. It's no surprise to me then that if you combine that callously stupid attitude with the stupid callousness of neglect, of course, you end up living in the fantasy world where let's say the army can and not just can, but is willing to step in and just put everything to rights and let you sleep comfortably in the evening. And the best is they can do this and legally they're not allowed to complain. They're not allowed to unionize. I think that bet will probably pay off. It just can't keep paying off together, like forever, which is why you have every general officer in the world briefing

against it. I'm not saying that this leads us to a cool zone, but it's a dangerous time. It's a dangerous precedent in civil military relations, something which the United Kingdom has previously struggled with. We don't necessarily have the same traditions as the Americans in this regard. And I don't know, if this ever gets to a point in the near future where the military makes some kind of political intervention, God forbid, then it will be like the thought of the center right, the far right, Caitlyn Moran, and just everybody who was okay with the idea that the chief of the defense stuff could go on BBC News and say, actually, I think Jeremy Corbyn is quite dangerous to this country. That precedent, that sort of

the thin end of a wedge that has now widened a little bit further, and that's something that should be concerning. Let's hope this wedge has a flared base. Well, exactly, yeah. Don't do not get anything stuck up your arse this Christmas, because no one is coming to help you. You will have to self-rescue. I mean, okay. No, no. Corporal Jones from Two Rifles will be sent round to your house to pull that cucumber out of Uranus. And believe me, he is not going to be gentle about it. It's like, listen, do you want this thing extracted from your arsehole by a private soldier from the Royal Logistics Corps, or do you want like a 60-hour wait on a trolley

with the thing still up your arse? Because those are your options. Yeah, the question is, who would be better, Logistics Corps or Royal Engineers? Hmm, having to do the like, it's a real head scratcher. The race where you disassemble a field gun and run it across an arena, but for like, extracting errant cucumbers. A bunch of guys from the Navy carrying you over obstacles. I don't want to alarm anyone, but it seems as though the regiment that will be covering the North London cucumber for mass extraction purview is the Paras, thousands dead.

Yes, yes. No apology, no surrender, the time we prolapsed a guy. Yeah. So, you know, this is, it seems that as we are entering another, entering another phase where this thing that is happening cannot necessarily keep going on forever, which doesn't mean the thing that replaces it's going to be better. Heavens no. We are, and when the usual button of, well, let's just send in the Army, sort of doesn't give the, let's say, desired result, then British elites have to be wondering what's next? How do you keep this thing going as a going concern?

Or do we just asset strip it and sell the rest of it to Goldman Sachs as kind of add on to the pension fund obligations that they purchased? Yeah, I mean, well, so many options. You had this joke about sort of like winding Britain up as a going concern a while ago, and it's not sounding so much like a joke anymore. I genuinely think they might just like expect to turn the lights off on us. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're just trying to close Britain.

We're just trying to like, the British government wants to retire. They're shuttering it. Yeah. So, soap, I can't get hold of it. It's too slippery. He's looped it up good. Yeah, the new call of duty, call of duty, Britain 2023, sure is there. Driving an ambulance. Remember, no Russian. Call of Duty, Britain 2023 is basically just, it's more or less just like a first person

version of SimCity. Great. That's right. Perfect. Yeah. Can't wait. Look, I think we've about hit our part one quota. So, I'm going to hand proceedings over to me.

Me from the past, according to our perspective, but me from the future, according to your perspective. Riley's actually going to hand over to Corporal Jones of two rifles who's been drafted in to handle the second segment. So, Corporal Jones of two rifles will be once again talking to Dominic Leuser and we are going to be discussing the idea. Great mates, those two. The idea of the poly crisis.

What do we mean when we talk about it? What do lazy people mean when they talk about it? And I happen to remember from the future that it was a really interesting conversation. So, do check that out and we will see you on the bonus episode this week, which I believe will be one from Australia. Outstanding. And then we'll be back in real time in 2023. I wonder what the world will be like.

The years keep coming. What's it going to be like? They don't stop coming. And don't get me started. How many sacks will the woman not come in? Much like the guy with the cucumber up his arse. The years, they don't stop coming. The years and years.

They've made a guy from two rifles make me come. Continue coming. They see essential public services like making me come have now been delegated to the armed forces. Very depressing. Okay, well, that's right. Hang on, that's not such a... Is that such a bad thing?

Yeah, it's time to use some like military. I've got to jack someone off. I've been trying to get out the capstone line of this segment, which is, and don't get me started on ISIS for quite a while. Okay. Thank you very much. I've gotten my word in edge wise. That's corporal chains of zero.

Yeah, we've had to replace essential services like ISIS with the army. It's very confusing. I'm being made to behead the killer. Yeah, we just gave that to the Paris. The Paris are now in ISIS. Hmm. We will see you soon, but you'll hear from me and Dominic...

Well, meet Corporal Jones from two rifles and Dominic in just a moment on the rest of the episode. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. So that's the common sense view of poly crisis, at least as I understand it, as Matt Iglesias might use it. Let's talk about a more useful concept, especially one that we can compare

to some concepts in Marx. The main defining element of the poly crisis is the backdrop against which is taking place is climate change. And if you accept that, then you can't really come up with a historical parallel. Then you accept that the poly crisis is very much specific to our time and place. And then I think if that's your premise, then the conventional view as you outlined it

boils down to because of the interaction of the climate crisis with everything else with industrial modernity, which is inherently prone to producing risk in a way that can be violently and exponentially increased by our reactions. Interaction of that risk society, as is described by someone like Ulrich Beck, who's the famous sociologist, with climate change means, yes, now it's unique to this period. And what is remarkable about it is this interaction term. In other words, when statisticians speak about interaction, they mean the effect of

one variable in a system depends on other variables. In other words, all these different things interact in ways that amplify each other's effects. And the whole thing is, quote, more than the sum of its parts. If I could jump in for a sec, the way I would understand that, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that modern industrial, especially globalized, highly financialized society, has so many interconnecting nodes that has become an extremely complex system in the complex and the actual formal definition of the term, where inputs have unpredictable

relationships with outputs because, as you say, there are so many interactions, but also the system generates emergent properties of its own. And so that relates to the risk society where we say, okay, well, we as one node of this network can no longer really dictate its outputs. But what we can do is try to minimize the risk of those outputs. And the way I see that as relevant to this is that the way of managing society like that, which is, I think, a pretty good way of describing a lot, not all of, but a lot of North Atlantic politics, is that we are basically reactive, or it's very hard to be proactive except in

relation to something that you think is going to happen to you. Things happen to us. We don't necessarily do them. Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, there's a need for collective action, which is higher than has ever been before, and a need for expertise and state capacity that also greatly outstrips the abilities of any individual actor or institution to deal with dynamic of a crisis, where all these moving parts, as you described it, and that unlike the former period of industrial society that have this sort of risk, a characteristic to it, take place in exponential time. In other words, it's time variant. The further we go along the hockey stick of global warming,

if you like, so exponential warming given feedback effects between greenhouse gases and so on and so forth, the worse certain actions or failures to deal with the climate transition, the worse they become over time. That's the main difference between the complex system that we have in the industrial society framework now compared to in the 50s or something like that, and a different thing. The 50s, say, and the Bronze Age complex systems collapse, if you like, a few thousand years ago, is that now we live in an industrial society that's even more complex, and we've added on that global macro finance, global trade, far more sectoral actors, corporate actors, and as I said, the climate change hockey stick, which interacts with literally

everything at any level of analysis, and that's why you need a different concept that's different from the complex systems approaches you need that's historically grounded and that makes use of this concept of the public crisis. Yeah, I can see how that would make sense, because the thing I was actually going to jump to wasn't the Bronze Age collapse, even though listeners to this show will know that we talked about the Bronze Age collapse quite a bit in the last few months, for no reason. But also, I was thinking about the collapse of feudalism in Europe with another sort of similar set of interacting effects. We're talking, of course, about a pandemic, a much worse pandemic, mind you, and also the start of the little ice age

around the 15th century. It's plain to see that when these things come together, when let's say, and you can just listen back to your episode with Patrick Wyman, where we sort of do a very detailed worked example of how these things interact with social structures, with the possibility for trade, with the development of complex trade networks, and so on and so on, then you see regional collapses. In the case of the collapse of feudalism, it was a very big regional collapse, and it was a quite stark transformation that sort of led to most of what we have now. But I think what I'm sort of getting, what I'm understanding from you here is that the utility of polycrisis is that during this time, in the 15th century,

Tenochtitlan was still a thriving city. We had civilizations that were sort of untouched by goings-on in Europe. One of the differences in polycrisis is that we live in a world of butterflies flapping wings, where these complex interconnections up underpin so much more of the livelihood of more people in the world. Is that one of the key qualitative differences that we're getting at here? Yeah, I like that you invoke the collapse of feudal Europe at the beginning of the collapse, at least, because many of the elements are there. You have a big environmental exogenous shock, or actually two, which is the Black Death and the change in global average climate over a couple of decades or however long it was.

The same way you have this exogenous shock of COVID, and you have the climate disruption, which you also had similar elements in the Bronze Age collapse. You had earthquakes and famines in Western Europe, and that's why you saw these movements of people to the east, and with instability. From the sea, some say. Some say, yeah. What do they call those people again? I'm also bringing them back by the way. I think that would be a neat solution to our problem. That's the thing that we're going to go to Brussels, so I'm going to be like, we have the solution for all you Eurocrats out there. Sea peoples. It's the great leveler. We need the sea peoples again, and only like Egypt survives this time

again. The difference is that the dynamics are different this time, because this time the disruption is ongoing exponential and time variant. That's why if you could create one big circle, which is complex systems theory, and within that circle is a smaller one, which is a sort of Becky and risk society thinking, which is more specific to all those same things, but added to that the complexity of modern industrial society, and a smaller stuff within that would be the poly crisis framework, which is building like the elements, the complexity evolved over a couple of millennia is cumulative. All of that is building on top of each other, and one frame of them becomes obsolete over time, because all these new elements require a different approach.

That's my sort of ad hoc, if you like. I think that makes sense. Because ultimately what we're talking about is an accumulation of complexity, and one of the properties of complex systems is they create new emergent properties. I think that the idea that interconnection would produce its own specific kind of risks unique to certain levels of interconnection, it makes sense to me in the systems theory sort of way. Yeah, that's why I don't understand. There's a certain kind of arrogance in the terms of criticism as well, because it says, we already know, we already have the framework for this, we already know what's happening. What they're saying in effect is, well, what you're describing is

just geopolitics, macrofinance, climate, energy, and global finance, as if that was something we understood in the way it interacts now. There is no historical question there for we don't understand it yet. The most important word in that sentence isn't any single one of them, it's the word and. Yeah. Yeah, that's the issue. Yeah, but there's also the thing that I completely agree with. That's why the interaction term is so important. It is all of them and it is not one interacting with the other. It's every single one of them interacting with each other in ways that can hurl you into that equilibrium very quickly. But it's not just para-taxes, if you like, one lying against each other, linking chains to another. There's an order

here as well. Some causal mechanisms are much more important than others and much more driving. Climate change, I think, is the main one, but also geopolitics and global financial instability and a capital flow with fits and would also come to mind. That is some of the theory building that still needs to be done. I think it's one of the reasons why I would also say that just saying that this is purely a crisis of capitalism is slightly reductive, because I think you can certainly say that, but for capitalism, and the incentives created by capitalism, where every country, if it is to compete, must compete in these terms, regardless of whether or not it's formally capitalist, that provides a very good explanation,

I think, of a lot of how we got here. But I don't think it's enough to theorize it. I don't think it's enough to understand what's going on, if only because it would be very difficult to predict something like climate change from our early framework, or predict something like climate change as we now understand it, to the magnitude that it's happening with some of our early frameworks of critiquing capitalism. It's way too broad, obviously. I'm not, normatively, I'm not terribly keen on capitalism, I suppose. I don't know many people who are normatively. They all work at the Adam Smith Institute. Coolest people the entire world.

It's like, these are all problems that are unique to industrial society, not capitalism. You would have climate, if for some how we made, if the Soviet Union had won the war in Poland, and if somehow global industrial socialism had spread to the world, and we were living that that sort of utopia, if you like, would still be faced with massive climate disruption, simply because it's a byproduct of industrial society. We still have trade in goods and in people, and we still have geopolitical conflict. We live in a capitalist world, and you need to have those political economy tools to think about that world, but it's not, it's only a subset of the tools you need to talk about. I think the way that I tend to think about that

is that you could very easily have created that problem, and that there would certainly be forces in that state that would exacerbate the problem. China, they've banned all financing of foreign coal plants, but they're still, let's say, not exactly doing a lot of wonderful things for the environment at home, but that at the same time, you might understand how politically to solve that problem within a sort of more, let's say, powerful state that was, again, at least more concerned with appearing to be concerned with something like popular sort of thick, like worker democracy, for example. You can make those connections where you could say, okay, well, if we have a central authority of power, say, and power generation is done for the sake of power

generation, not for the sake of profit making, and that the state has authority over what sources of power get used, it's easier, I think, to imagine that solution. It's a solution that doesn't require interacting with as much complexity. It's a solution where you can sort of say, okay, well, this is going to take a lot of, say, doing and retooling, but you can see from A to B in that sense. Just to modify that slightly, I think that China is a good example of why people may not like this framing, because it seems to me that one of the implications is, well, maybe our current sort of frail, constitutively pluralistic and coalitional democratic systems and small nation state unions have to sort of respect each other's sovereignty and cooperate with each other,

maybe they're not very good at dealing with all of this. This is the question about, you know, what will, how will we solve climate change? Will it be climate leviathan, or will it be, you know, global energy or whatever? China is an example of we're contributing enormously to the crisis, but we also have the capacity to install more solar capacity per year than exists outside of China. And we'll do it every year from now on. And we can brute force our financial system, we can lock capital flows out. But I think that the idea that something about the poly crisis requires a great deal of technocratic management and centralized decision making that is not subject to the vagaries of everyday politics, which also makes me uncomfortable,

frankly, but that might just, that might just be part of the solution. I think that also makes people sort of, you know, rich when they, when they hear that word and think about it a bit more. Well, I think I suppose it's because, you know, as you, if you say we think we rich and we hear technocratic, largely because again, like so many words that I think are concepts that get under theorized, we end up understanding technocratic to specifically mean, you know, neoliberal, right? I don't think it necessarily has to. And if only because we are dealing with a, we are dealing with a considerable, a problem that is technical and requires expertise to solve. And that I think one of the issues is, right, and one of the issues that

causes liberal democracies, such as they are, to struggle with the poly crisis is that they aren't really set up at the moment to solve problems. And again, this is one of these other emergent properties of complex system. Well, why aren't they set up to solve these problems? Well, it's because in a lot of the reasons that they aren't set up to solve these kinds of problems, a lot of the reasons that we have diminished state capacity is related to how we started solving one of the first iterations of this problem in the 1970s. You know, this is why I sort of suggested that this is a bit of a zoom out on our, our energy sector discussion. If only because, you know, what we were looking at was dealing with trying to be, you know, deflationary, try to take out cost

and so on and so on, or try to try to reduce state interventionism and all this. Well, at the same time, trying to, let's say, promote, say something like an energy market, right, but then creating something very, very, very fragile. And, you know, if we look at what liberal democracies have done is we've removed, say, if we think of an example like housing, right, we are in a long-term housing crisis, especially in Britain, we're in a housing quality crisis that's in that quality crisis is exacerbated by the more extreme weather of the climate crisis. And the state's capacity to respond to that is incredibly limited. They're not even able to agree on, say, a campaign to get people to voluntarily save energy by turning down their thermostat. And one of the reasons they're not

able to do that is we've all agreed that we're going to drastically reduce state capacity, privatize a lot of stuff and so on and so on, and that these trends started in the 1970s. And they started in the 1970s in no small part in response to a previous energy crisis that was, again, a knock-on effect of a macroeconomic, not just a macroeconomic, but also a geopolitical conflict. So you can see these layers and layers and layers of both crises of our production and our reactions to these crises as building on one another. And where I come back to the critique of capitalism and neoliberalism as being, I think, very core to the theory of this is that if you ask why we were never able to address any of those crises in a way that didn't necessarily create more crises,

it's because we were unable to redistribute. It's because we were unable to build state capacity. It's because, ideologically, the things that might have worked to increase the variety, if you want to talk in sort of systems theory terms of the state, to deal with these problems were always out of bounds. Do you think that makes any sense? Completely. I mean, the core of that problem is our reaction time and our adaptability institutionally, politically, and socially is so unbelievably out of step with the pace at which these mechanisms evolve and how the material basis of the crisis proliferates over time. It's obviously much more quicker than we react to it. We do it half-heartedly or much too late,

much belatedly, and therefore we might even worsen the crisis in the process. I think what that is is, I mean, the generic conclusion is the more adaptable system is, the quicker it can change, in other words, the better it is. And I think from a sort of Marxist dialectical perspective, you have to say, well, capitalism is, if anything, not dynamic. So in other words, there are some ways in which, because it sort of automatically coordinates by incentives and the actions of so many individual players, it's actually quite useful in this sense, but also it destroys itself because it captures the stage and then the state can't do what it has to do to counteract some of these deleterious developments. So I agree with that,

and I think that what we have to think about is what does the sort of post-capitalist system look like that can prove our society against the climate crisis and the poly crisis at large, but that doesn't preclude, I think, markets and because they're not going to go away. So the reality of global trade and global finance is something that you can talk about the longer term, but it has nothing long term at any relevance for solving current extremely quickly proliferating dynamics. So I think the broader capitalist critique probably doesn't have that much relevance now, but it's definitely not how a lot of relevance are thinking about how did we get here and how should our future systems be sort of robust in dealing with these

crises? I would agree with that more or less. I think you could say if there was to be a sort of wholesale, say like replacement of capitalism with something else that included in with it a number of state institutions ready to say retrofit every single dwelling in Britain, for example, that would be something that would be equal to the levels of crises that are being faced. However, I think it's very easy to say that. It's also one of these things where if you are truly concerned with, let's say, I sort of mentioned earlier that concept I want to bring back, which is the sort of drastic reduction in quality of life for people, which is how I conceptualize of the effects of the crisis, of the poly crisis is how many quality, what do you

want to call it, quality adjusted life years or just the simple quality of life, the amount of birth rate, the life expectancy, however you want to define it, it is a negative force on those things. If you want to ask how do you do that with the government and social institutions that we have, that is, I think, a harder problem because it doesn't allow you to just say to make the, I think, probably theoretically correct diagnosis that just replacing everything with a much more, let's say, dynamic and democratically accountable state probably, yes, would go quite some way to fixing things, but those that's not the world that we live in, that's, and so if you want to ask yourself, how do you mitigate the reduction in quality and length and amount of life that you

can as much as possible, right? How do you absorb as much of that shock as possible? That's a harder question. It's incredibly hard because it's like we're several steps ahead. We haven't even solved the first step, which is agreeing on a diagnosis of the crisis and the interaction term at least. Not even that, we don't even have the structures or the expertise of people who can think about it. I know people who are working for, let's say, the Canadian government on setting up sort of market governance institutions to deal with the climate transition and they realize, well, there's actually nowhere in this, in the entire state apparatus of the state of Canada, that even knows what they don't know and what they have to do and what they have to set up

institutionally to have the capacity, let alone is the expertise and the inside at the political level and not at the public as well, but you can't blame the public and some of their trial people who go about their everyday lives. Oh, financial times commentators are trying. Yeah, Martin Wolf, Adam Tooze's column in the final time is not enough. I mean, that's like... I would say they are trying to lay the commentate, not the commentators, the commenters below the article. I looked at some of them recently and I was like, boy, they're just like so many sort of middle-aged men talking about putting on a jumper. It's quite astonishing. It's amazing. See, that's why, I mean,

with several questions away from, well, you can think about it individually. You can say, well, there's an ex-ante case to improve isolation and housing in Britain, which by far the worst in Europe, temperature losses are by far the largest and I think you and I, me, I'm sort of playing Russian roulette with my finances by putting on the heating now, but I have to because we're freezing indoors because nothing is insulated here. So there might be an economic case to doing it. It creates a lot of demand. There might be a democratic case because it's popular to do so, but then it's not even clear that you might have a majority fear because it involves spending a lot of money. It involves investment. It involves mobilizing private

investment and then that you have all these, the usual obstacles, the deflationary block that's been weighing down on any sort of investment and expansionary macro policy and anything that might move prices too much. It's inconsistent with the growth model of the UK as a whole, which is based on asset price and valuations. So you can think about individual policies, but what you need is a whole suite of policies over a certain period of time in different policies around the world in conjunction with global players to even have a chance to address these problems in a concerted manner. So it's a complete nightmare to think about, Frank. And I think the word that I would tackle, the one that what I might consider possibly

to be the maybe the most under theorized word and probably the most scary one from what you've said is the word we. Just like the word and is the most scary word in the description of the poly crisis, the word we is, to my view, the hardest part of its solution because there is not a, again, thinking about systems theory and about the variety of systems, the things it can do in compared to the challenges it faces, the level of complexity it has to face, the disruptions that it faces in order to stay homeostatic. The size of the we that is required in order to face up to the complexity of the poly crisis is truly staggering. Absolutely. I mean, it's all state actors. Even if you narrow down the pool to state actors with

a certain prejudice on public policy, on global policy, who are the main contributors to global warming, who are the biggest source of investment globally, potentially, who have the most geopolitical cloud, even then you need the buy-in of other actors. And that's basically everyone. And it's basically every private actor as well. It seems like if you look at the South African case, how people are dealing with solving South Africa's dependency on coal to energy needs, but also its decarbonisation goals, that's a coalitional approach to solving climate change, or aiding the transition, which is now emerging as sort of the preferred way to govern this process. Yeah, again, it requires a billion different actors and all of them have vetoes.

And we were barely even able to handle COVID. I mean, by we, I now mean the city of New York. I had to say the city of Seattle, just because New York had a couple of more veto players, you know, the subway unions, for instance, and Seattle, which is a couple of big tech firms, just because of that difference at this micro level of the city level, New York did a few things two weeks too late. And because of the exponential dynamic, which you saw to see in the poly crisis, those two weeks meant a couple of hundred thousand deaths. And that is the terrifying thing. It's the amount of people who are included in we and the time it takes to coordinate all of those. Yeah, and so it's one of the reasons why it's, on the one hand, it feels very important

to theorise, but also theorising it feels like an unbelievably optimistic thing to do. Yeah, but I'm going to get a look at this asteroid, and maybe I can figure out what to do about it. The asteroid is already on entry to Earth, but I'm going to look at it and see if I can do something. I always asked her, too, how do you do it? You know, you want you to productive for God's sake. You know, well, I have a very good therapist, but that's always just go to answer. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, basically, you pay someone a couple of thousand bucks a month to tell you to adopt quasi-Buddhist approaches to life. And that's the only way you don't lose your insanity. So yeah, no, I agree. There's something terrible about it, but we've landed things on

moving asteroids, so we can probably solve this thing, too, eventually. And the thing, this is a last thing, and we sort of want to talk about a little before we go as well, is I think that, you know, some probably listener hackles might be raised by the discussion of technocracy as well, right? And I don't think that something like technocracy is necessarily opposed to something like democracy. Something like technocracy, as it has been implemented, is frequently anti or very contemptuous of democracy. That's because we have neoliberal technocrats. But I think that really, what this requires is a fundamentally, like so many things, I think that fundamentally our, I think, very elite driven, let's say, view of the world among

people who matter and can act and so on. Yeah, the restriction of power among a sort of cost-added few who also look out for themselves and their friends and so on, has been an unbelievably significant driving force in the growth of the poly crisis as it has developed through industrial society and then being solved in ways that make it worse later, basically. And that a more robust concern for democracy, not in terms of voting in veto players, but in terms of asking ourselves who is all of this society, who's it all being run for, right? And how are we going to say, where is power? Is power going to be in the hands of, you know, like Chevron banks and so on and so on? Or are we going or power going to be, say, devolved, right? That this is possibly, it in

my view, anyway, the answer, it has to at least involve a much thicker conception of what democracy is and where it is situated. Just using the example of Britain, just because that's where we both live, that's where we talk about it a lot, we think about it a lot. Yeah, of course, bitch about it quite a bit, is that, you know, if you want to talk about unions, one of the forces that you could say is pushing back against one of the sort of, if you almost think about it like a solar flare, right, the sort of tendrils of the sun of the poly crisis that is coming out and lashing people and reducing their quality of life and so on, is thinking about the NHS crisis. If we can see that the one of the elements of the poly crisis is a health crisis

that is only going to get worse as climate change gets worse, we have novel diseases and so on and so on, gigantic, predictable, but highly dynamic state coordinated healthcare that's not sort of going to ask, am I going to treat malaria? How much can I get for it? Well, it's going to kill people so I'm going to gouge as much as possible, which means we're never going to beat malaria because it's not profitable to really fight in any considerable way, right, the way I'm describing by capitalist enterprise. The people fighting to preserve the NHS, which, again, is one bulwark against one bit of it, not the whole thing obviously, but one bulwark against one bit of it, is the nurses unit, because they're not just fighting for higher pay for themselves.

That's like one element of it, right? They're fighting to keep the job good and attractive so people do it, so we have enough people, but they're also fighting for things like quality of care, or fighting against privatization, or if you want to talk about prevention of climate change, you say, okay, well, who are the people who are still stopping or who have spent years keeping an additional gas pipeline being built in Canada? It is native defenders of unceded land. The people, I think, who frequently are who suffer the most contempt at the hands of liberal democracies and the elites in those societies who find themselves again and again on the front lines of trying not to make this thing worse.

The thing you said about technocracy really resonates with me, that you have to not only define what democracy, redefine what democracy means, but also what technocracy means, and the broader goal being make it very clear where power in society lies and where it has to lie. I think one of the reasons I'm lefty, but who's still optimistic about the Eurozone as a project or the European Union is, because despite the fact that it is, I think, buying definition and necessity in elite-run technocratic projects, is that technocracy can mean something quite different. It doesn't have to be neoliberal. Technocracy can be a technocracy that is very much accountable and that is subject to democratic oversight of some kind.

You might call it popular technocracy. TM. I'm fucking trademarking Mark in that one. Yeah. I think that's probably quite comforting, because I think it's inevitable if you think about these crises, that you need a great deal of expertise in state bureaucracies with a great amount of capacity, but it also means state capacity isn't just resource and expertise, it's also the ability to guard yourself against state capture. What that relates to is, you know, Arthur Moogle and Robinson's book, The Narrow Corridor, their view of history and national society developed in ideal forms in, let's say, the Anglo countries, because there's a

narrow corridor between state coercion, like between coercing the states and being coerced in society. So you need a strong society and a strong state, but neither can be too strong. So I think that you need, that has to have more dimensions. You need capital coercion as well. You need to coerce everyone to the right degree that everyone has enough power, but not too much in order for a democratic society not to become lopsided in the current context. So unions, for instance, have been extraordinarily weakened over the last decade, and that has thrown everything into disequilibrium politically and economically, and that has all these rippling effects throughout society, and that's what we're reaping the consequences

right now. But of course, if unions are too powerful and not ensconced in this centralized wage bargaining system, they can do things that may benefit the workers in their union, but at the expense of all other workers. What were you talking about, basically, is syndicalism at that point? Yeah, or even German-style coordinated market economies, if you like, not as it exists today. I mean, the Germans get much more credit for that. It's not utopia, obviously, but that kind of industrial society that used to exist in the Nordic world and in Central Europe, which no longer exists anymore, but that never existed here, and which is also, I think, part of the reason why the UK is such an outlier among industrial

countries. Indeed. So I think this is a very interesting concept. I think it's one that we're certainly going to see a lot more of, and I hope this little chat has prepared you, the listener, to understand when to react with contempt if someone uses the word polycrisis, which should be if they don't explain what the fuck they mean, and why and why it's important, where it came from, because ultimately, if you're not going to think about this stuff, then what you mean by polycrisis is the news is scary, basically. And block everyone on Twitter, he makes the polycule joke. I mean, it wasn't even funny. It was always a sweaty sort of boomer joke, and now it's just become terrible.

That's right. In fact, just block everyone on Twitter. Yeah, that's good. Go ahead and do that. Subscribe. Anyway, Dominic, I want to thank you for coming and chatting with me today. This has been very interesting. It's great to be back early. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And I, hey, I will talk to you, the listener again in just a moment,

in a segment that will be recorded, and hey, this is new in the future for me, and that you'll hear in the future, but that I'll have recorded at the same time as the thing in the past. So update your calendars again. Bye, everyone.