AI Monster vs. the Spirit of Moloch
We are very good at seeing things. We are much less comfortable seeing the relationships that make them possible.Last August was tied with July 2023 as the warmest month ever…
brian gibb
Burning Down the House
In order to change our collective future, we have to change the names we use to describe the present.The Pyrocene Has ArrivedWhen I reread my recent essay, “It’s the End…
It’s The End of the World As We Know It
Welcome to the PyroceneFive years ago, I wrote an essay about a succession of catastrophes that had struck British Columbia. First came the heat. In June 2021, a heat dome…
Storytelling with Enhanced Intelligence
Recently, I finished the first iteration of The Ascension of Mont Royal, a dystopian science fiction novel, audiobook, and story-cast: a serialized audiovisual narration of the story. The project took…
Modern Futility
How the enchantments of consumer society keep us attached to a failing world-systemThere is something eerie about living in a civilization that cannot stop doing what is destroying the conditions…
The Ontological Design of Agentic AI and the Shape of Our Coevolution
As agentic systems move from the browser into our operating systems, we are no longer just using intelligent tools — we are embedding a worldview into machines that will quietly…
From Things to Flows
How Changing Our Metaphors Changes the Worlds We Can Live InModern life is saturated with things.We speak of the self, the economy, power, the system, nature, the market, society—as if…