The Post-Partisan Emporium

  An Unfamiliar World John Michael Greer Last month’s post  on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide.  Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust. A twentieth century problem. It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies.  I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.)  That human population is near a peak and will be declini

  Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance January 31, 2024 John Michael Greer Leave a comment This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly.  The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither of them has been working out the way that our politicians and pundits insisted they would. A genuine revolution in military affairs is taking place right now, and no, it’s not the one that was so loudly ballyhooed in intellectual circles a couple of decades back. The claim in the 1990s was that computer technology had opened the way to a new kind of war, in which information would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hug

  Harvesting Discontent: The Global Farmer’s Revolt  An agricultural revolution, farmers uprising worldwide, seeking to seed change… Kristian James 21st Century Wire When the ancestors of modern humans began to observe the cycles of plants, understanding the rhythm of the environment, and started utilizing the seed to plant the next crop. This knowledge solidified the formation of the beginning of agriculture. The end of roaming and hunting for food, the decision to gather together, and to prepare and wait for the success of good crops. Thus, farming developed as a skill integral to the development of all worldwide societies, defined by thousands of years of learned cultivation under the belts of countless generations, the ability to feed yourself and grow abundance, and also the ability to sell and trade. This is the very basis and crux of the world economy.  As we enter 2024, the year of the Dragon, Earth’s population has surpassed 8 billion, and the vital role of farming in sustaini