Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
“At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”
For a decade we have experimented with different approaches to managing the studio as a shared living-and-working space. In 2016 we took some distance from the day-to-day management and production to observe our work from a more detached perspective. By the end of the year it became clear that FoAM bxl needed to become lighter and more mobile. […] In light of the changing nature of our activities we decided that we no longer needed such a large space, and that we would move out of the Koolmijnenkaai studio, no matter how beautiful and unique it may be. We remain grateful to have been able to inhabit the space for as long as we did, but it had become time to move on.
[John MacWilliams’s] more general point was that managing risks was an act of the imagination. And the human imagination is a poor tool for judging risk. People are really good at responding to the crisis that just happened, as they naturally imagine that whatever just happened is most likely to happen again. They are less good at imagining a crisis before it happens—and taking action to prevent it. For just this reason the D.O.E. under Secretary Moniz had set out to imagine disasters that had never happened before. One scenario was a massive attack on the grid on the Eastern Seaboard that forced millions of Americans to be relocated to the Midwest. Another was a Category Three hurricane hitting Galveston, Texas; a third was a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest that, among other things, shut off the power. Yet, even then, the disasters they imagined were the sort of disasters that a Hollywood screenwriter might imagine: vivid, dramatic events. MacWilliams thought that, while such things did happen, they were not the sole or even the usual source of catastrophe. What was most easily imagined was not what was most probable. It wasn’t the things you think of when you try to think of bad things happening that got you killed, he said. “It is the less detectable, systemic risks.” Another way of putting this is: The risk we should most fear is not the risk we easily imagine. It is the risk that we don’t.
Death and change are essential to growth and evolution. The bird has to leave the nest. New trees spring up in the forest where old trees decay. A species only acquires adaptive traits with new generations. The old must make space for the new; anything else is stagnation. This is especially true of purposeful work. Because you’re there for more than just a job, achieving the larger mission in the future can require the end of something in the present.
People have been following ghosts up Mount Everest ever since George Mallory and Sandy Irvine vanished on the mountain’s flanks in 1924. A front-row look at death is part of the allure: you climb in order to taste mortality and, should all go according to plan, defeat it. Following many of the highly publicized tragedies, including the deadly Into Thin Air events of 1996, the number of commercial outfitters on the mountain has actually increased. After the 2006 season, in which 11 people died, the number of Everest climbers increased from 447 to 572. “There’s always been a disaster mystique,” said Jennifer Peedom, director of the 2016 documentary Sherpa, who spent three seasons filming on the mountain. “The worse things that happen, the more people come.” The fact that inexperienced climbers could join the parade, given the lack of regulation, only contributed to the chaos, creating a deadly feedback loop.
If Germany succeeds in making the transition, it could provide a workable blueprint for other industrial nations, many of which are also likely to face pressures to transform their energy consumption. “This Energiewende is being watched very closely. If it works in Germany, it will be a template for other countries,” says Graham Weale, chief economist at RWE, which is grappling with how to shut its nuclear power plants while keeping the lights on. “If it doesn’t, it will be very damaging to the German economy and that of Europe.”
