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Good old fashioned advertising does that to a degree. But Facebook is much more powerful, adaptive and efficient.

Facebook is designed to do specific things. It’s an engine to understand people’s minds and then manipulate their thinking.

Those tools are refined for revenue making but can be used for many other purposes. That makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting.

The core of all second wave Internet commerce operations was finding network models where costs grow mathematically and revenues grow exponentially.

The network and its dominance is the product and once it takes hold the cost inputs remained constrained while the revenues grow almost without limit.

Facebook is best understood as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy company whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the road and accepting frequent accidents and explosions as inherent to the enterprise.

That’s why these companies employ so few people relative to scale and profitability.

That’s why there’s no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter. If half the people on the planet are ‘customers’ or users that’s not remotely possible.

The core economic model requires doing all of it on the cheap. Indeed, what Zuckerberg et al. have created with Facebook is so vast that the money required not to do it on the cheap almost defies imagination.

Facebook’s core model and concept requires not taking responsibility for what others do with the engine created to drive revenue.

It all amounts to a grand exercise in socializing the externalities and keeping all the revenues for the owners.

Here’s a way to think about it. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out of the ground. You set up a little engine and it generates energy almost without limit. What makes it ruinously expensive is managing the externalities – all the risks and dangers, the radiation, accidents, the constant production of radioactive waste.

managing or distinguishing between legitimate and bad-acting uses of the powerful Facebook engine is one that would require huge, huge investments of money and armies of workers to manage

But back to Facebook. The point is that they’ve created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine

The core business model is based on harvesting the profits from the commercial uses of the machine and using algorithms and very, very limited personnel (relative to scale) to try to get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses which the engine makes possible.

Zuckerberg may be a jerk and there really is a culture of bad acting within the organization. But it’s not about him being a jerk. Replace him and his team with non-jerks and you’d still have a similar core problem.

To manage the potential negative externalities, to take some responsibility for all the dangerous uses the engine makes possible would require money the owners are totally unwilling and in some ways are unable to spend.

Judging the moral meaning of Mr. Trump’s bout with Covid-19 — and our reactions to it — is no easy task.

while it is true that life is sacred, and we must honor the dignity of all persons, including Mr. Trump, society also has a legitimate moral interest in seeing wrongdoers face consequences for their actions.

The sense that justice requires punishment for wrongs runs deep and is not the same as a mere thirst for revenge or a desire to get even.

On the contrary, punishment plays an important role in any healthy moral ecosystem. When the moral order has been ruptured, punishment for wrongs helps to repair tears to the social fabric and to reinforce the validity of the moral expectations that were violated.

Imagining Mr. Trump’s illness as a metaphorical punishment for his misdeeds helps to satisfy at the level of fantasy a legitimate need to see justice done

The moral complexity becomes greater still when we consider that from a purely consequentialist point of view, there are reasons to view Mr. Trump’s potential incapacity as the best moral outcome.

consequentialism is the philosophical position that affirms that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future

a consequentialist argument can be made that his speedy recovery from Covid-19 would not be the best moral outcome.

The consequentialist argument, while repugnant from the perspective of human dignity, tells us that a world in which Mr. Trump is unable to commit harm would be morally better than a world in which he continues to harm freely.

This philosophical approach to weighing moral outcomes conflicts with the principle of individual human dignity and offers no easy guideline for reconciling these powerful yet opposing ways of thinking about what is best.

the punishment that Mr. Trump’s bout of Covid-19 represents is merely symbolic, a stand-in for the real punishment he deserves, which is necessarily social in character. Mr. Trump deserves to be punished at the ballot box and to be held accountable for any possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law.

An outbreak isn’t a double pendulum; it’s much more convoluted. Myriad chains of events, operating in overlapping networks, conspire to chart its course.

It’s the double pendulum, and as a physical object, it’s very simple: A pendulum (a string and a weight) is attached to the bottom of another. Its movement is explained by the laws of motion written by Isaac Newton hundreds of years ago.

But slight changes in the initial condition of the pendulum — say it starts its swing from a little higher up, or if the weight of the pendulum balls is a little heavier, or one of the pendulum arms is a bit longer than the other — lead to wildly different outcomes that are very hard to predict.

The double pendulum is chaotic because the motion of the first pendulum influences the motion of the second, which then influences the entire apparatus. There isn’t a simple scale or ratio to describe how the inputs relate to the outputs. A one-gram change to the weight of a pendulum ball can result in a very different swing pattern than a two-gram change.

It teaches us to understand the mechanics of a system — the science of how it works — without being able to precisely predict its future. It helps us visualize how something that seems like it should be linear and predictable just isn’t.

That’s why, when pressed, epidemiologists have to say they don’t know what’s going to happen.

Climate scientists clearly tell us adding CO2 to the air will increase global temperatures. Yet they argue about when the worst effects of climate change will be felt and how bad it will be

Still, they know the mechanics of outbreaks. The chaos “doesn’t necessarily mean we know nothing,” Kissler says. They understand the conditions that make an outbreak worse and the conditions that make it better.

There is a tough tension of the current moment that we all need to work through: The future is clouded in chaos, but we know the mechanics of this system

Here are the mechanics. Scientists know that if we let up on social distancing, without an alternative plan in place, the virus can infect more people. They know this virus is likely to persist for at least a few years without a vaccine. They know it’s very contagious. That it’s very deadly. They also know that its pandemic potential is hardly spent, and that most of the population of the United States and the world is still vulnerable to it.

Will residents keep up with mask-wearing and social distancing, even when their leaders relax regulations? Plus, there are scientific questions about the virus still not understood: Will it diminish transmission in a seasonal pattern? Do children contribute greatly to its spread? How long does immunity last after an infection? Why do some people breathe out more of the virus than others? The answers to these questions will influence the future, and we do not know the answers.

Scientists are still unraveling what makes the difference between a sprawling outbreak in one city and a more manageable one in another. Some of it is the result of policy, some is the result of demographics, some is about structural inequality and racism, and some comes down to individual behavior. Some of it is just luck. That’s chaos for you.

“I don’t see uncertainty as a lack of knowledge,” says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a physicist who studies the chaos of a different sort of viral dynamics. “I think it’s a fundamental part of how our world works. It’s not our fault we do not know where this all will go.”

Newton clearly told us what happens when an object drops from the sky. But follow his laws, and find that the path of a double pendulum is very, very difficult to predict.

There’s a simple mechanism that is helping me understand the many possible futures we face with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Epidemiologists are clearly telling us what happens when you bring masses of people together during a pandemic. But they can’t tell us the exact shape this outbreak will take.

Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.

To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.

group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater

without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.

Diamond and Dybvig offered a stylized but insightful model of what banks do. They argued that there is always a tension between individuals’ desire for liquidity — ready access to funds — and the economy’s need to make long-term investments that can’t easily be converted into cash.

Banks square that circle by taking money from depositors who can withdraw their funds at will — making those deposits highly liquid — and investing most of that money in illiquid assets, such as business loans.

So banking is a productive activity that makes the economy richer by reconciling otherwise incompatible desires for liquidity and productive investment. And it normally works because only a fraction of a bank’s depositors want to withdraw their funds at any given time.

This does, however, make banks vulnerable to runs. Suppose that for some reason many depositors come to believe that many other depositors are about to cash out, and try to beat the pack by withdrawing their own funds. To meet these demands for liquidity, a bank will have to sell off its illiquid assets at fire sale prices, and doing so can drive an institution that should be solvent into bankruptcy

If that happens, people who didn’t withdraw their funds will be left with nothing. So during a panic, the rational thing to do is to panic along with everyone else.

There was, of course, a huge wave of banking panics in 1930-31. Many banks failed, and those that survived made far fewer business loans than before, holding cash instead, while many families shunned banks altogether, putting their cash in safes or under their mattresses. The result was a diversion of wealth into unproductive uses. In his 1983 paper, Bernanke offered evidence that this diversion played a large role in driving the economy into a depression and held back the subsequent recovery.

In the story told by Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the banking crisis of the early 1930s was damaging because it led to a fall in the money supply — currency plus bank deposits. Bernanke asserted that this was at most only part of the stor

a government backstop — either deposit insurance, the willingness of the central bank to lend money to troubled banks or both — can short-circuit potential crises.

Such arrangements offered a higher yield than conventional deposits. But they had no safety net, which opened the door to an old-style bank run and financial panic.

So banks need to be regulated as well as backstopped. As I said, the Diamond-Dybvig analysis had remarkably large implications for policy.

From an economic point of view, banking is any form of financial intermediation that offers people seemingly liquid assets while using their wealth to make illiquid investments.

This insight was dramatically validated in the 2008 financial crisis.

By the eve of the crisis, however, the financial system relied heavily on “shadow banking” — banklike activities that didn’t involve standard bank deposits

But providing such a backstop raises the possibility of abuse; banks may take on undue risks because they know they’ll be bailed out if things go wrong.

And the panic came. The conventionally measured money supply didn’t plunge in 2008 the way it did in the 1930s — but repo and other money-like liabilities of financial intermediaries did:

Fortunately, by then Bernanke was chair of the Federal Reserve. He understood what was going on, and the Fed stepped in on an immense scale to prop up the financial system.

a sort of meta point about the Diamond-Dybvig work: Once you’ve understood and acknowledged the possibility of self-fulfilling banking crises, you become aware that similar things can happen elsewhere.

Perhaps the most notable case in relatively recent times was the euro crisis of 2010-12. Market confidence in the economies of southern Europe collapsed, leading to huge spreads between the interest rates on, for example, Portuguese bonds and those on German bonds. The conventional wisdom at the time — especially in Germany — was that countries were being justifiably punished for taking on excessive debt

the Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe argued that what was actually happening was a self-fulfilling panic — basically a run on the bonds of countries that couldn’t provide a backstop because they no longer had their own currencies.

Sure enough, when Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank at the time, finally did provide a backstop in 2012 — he said the magic words “whatever it takes,” implying that the bank would lend money to the troubled governments if necessary — the spreads collapsed and the crisis came to an end:

Psychological avoidance is akin to an ostrich burying its head in the sand, choosing ignorance over confrontation, all while a storm brews in the background.

depression and anxiety disorders cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity.

avoidance, a strategy that not only fails to solve problems but fuels them.

Psychological avoidance isn’t about the actions we take or don’t take, but the intentions behind them. If our actions aim to squash discomfort hastily, then we’re probably 2favoiding

the three ways people tend to practice psychological avoidance.

Reacting

It’s when we reply hastily to an email that upsets us or raise our voices without considering the consequences.

Reacting is any response that seeks to eliminate the source of discomfort

Retreating

Retreating is the act of moving away or pulling back from anxiety-inducing situations

For example, my client with the fear of public speaking took a different job to avoid it. Others may reach for a glass of wine to numb out o

Remaining

Remaining is sticking to the status quo to avoid the discomfort of change.

Psychological avoidance is a powerful enemy, but there are three science-based skills to fight it.

Shifting involves checking in with your thoughts, especially when anxiety comes knocking. In those moments, we often have black-and-white, distorted thoughts, just like my client, who was worried about being in a romantic relationship, telling himself, “I will never be in a good relationship.”

Shifting is taking off dark, monochrome glasses and seeing the world in color again. Challenge your thoughts, clean out your lenses, by asking yourself, “Would I say this to my best friend in this scenario?

Approaching

taking a step that feels manageable.

The opposite of avoiding is approaching

Ask yourself: What is one small step I can take toward my fears and anxiety to overcome my avoidance.

Aligning

Aligning is living a values-driven life, where our daily actions are aligned with what matters the most to us: our values.

This is the opposite of what most of us do while anxious. In moments of intense anxiety, we tend to let our emotions, not our values, dictate our actions. To live a values-driven life, we need to first identify our values, whether that is health, family, work or something else. Then we need to dedicate time and effort to our values.

starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.

Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.

Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.

As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond

while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it

Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists

could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”

Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.

“You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”

In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.

his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.

Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”

It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful

But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth

Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.

In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes

All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”

Many of these predictions have since been borne out

Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”

Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.

eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.

Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.

A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.

In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.

According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.

This is not an easy way to live.

Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.

When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health

There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.

the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.

Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing

climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.

One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological

it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people

In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”

But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?

Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”

“It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.

“I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”

In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike

Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”

“If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”

“How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”

many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.

“I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”

Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.

Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.

She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.

then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”

Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation

Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.

It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?

Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them

many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.

They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.

Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction

eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice

she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.

Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing

It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.

There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.

What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries.

he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a “time stamp on [their] political view” that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form “a united front,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions.”

he does want leftists – and everyone else – to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun

Robinson believes that once progressives internalize the insight that the economy is a social construct just like anything else, they can determine – based on the contemporary balance of political forces, ecological needs, and available tools – the most efficient methods for bringing carbon and capital into closer alignment.

We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science.

Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop

Robinson’s imagined future suggests a short-term solution that fits his dreams of a democratic, scientific politics: planning, of both the economy and planet.

it’s borrowed from Robinson’s reading of ecological economics. That field’s premise is that the economy is embedded in nature – that its fundamental rules aren’t supply and demand, but the laws of physics, chemistry, biology.

The upshot of Robinson’s science fiction is understanding that grand ecologies and human economies are always interdependent.

Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention – from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean – from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

Robinson’s elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they’re sucking excess carbon down from the sky. In his novel, this happens thanks to a series of meetings between United Nations technocrats and central bankers. But the technocrats only win the arguments because there’s enough rage, protest and organizing in the streets to force the bankers’ hand.

Seen from Mars, then, the problem of 21st-century climate economics is to sync public and private systems of capital with the ecological system of carbon.

Success will snowball; we’ll democratically plan more and more of the eco-economy.

Robinson thus gets that climate politics are fundamentally the politics of investment – extremely big investments. As he put it to me, carbon quantitative easing isn’t the “silver bullet solution,” just one of several green investment mechanisms we need to experiment with.

Robinson shares the great anarchist dream. “Everybody on the planet has an equal amount of power, and comfort, and wealth,” he said. “It’s an obvious goal” but there’s no shortcut.

In his political economy, like his imagined settling of Mars, Robinson tries to think like a bench scientist – an experimentalist, wary of unifying theories, eager for many groups to try many things.

there’s something liberating about Robinson’s commitment to the scientific method: reasonable people can shed their prejudices, consider all the options and act strategically.

The years ahead will be brutal. In Ministry, tens of millions of people die in disasters – and that’s in a scenario that Robinson portrays as relatively optimistic

when things get that bad, people take up arms. In Ministry’s imagined future, the rise of weaponized drones allows shadowy environmentalists to attack and kill fossil capitalists. Many – including myself – have used the phrase “eco-terrorism” to describe that violence. Robinson pushed back when we talked. “What if you call that resistance to capitalism realism?” he asked. “What if you call that, well, ‘Freedom fighters’?”

Robinson insists that he doesn’t condone the violence depicted in his book; he simply can’t imagine a realistic account of 21st century climate politics in which it doesn’t occur.

Malm writes that it’s shocking how little political violence there has been around climate change so far, given how brutally the harms will be felt in communities of color, especially in the global south, who bear no responsibility for the cataclysm, and where political violence has been historically effective in anticolonial struggles.

In Ministry, there’s a lot of violence, but mostly off-stage. We see enough to appreciate Robinson’s consistent vision of most people as basically thoughtful: the armed struggle is vicious, but its leaders are reasonable, strategic.

the implications are straightforward: there will be escalating violence, escalating state repression and increasing political instability. We must plan for that too.

maybe that’s the tension that is Ministry’s greatest lesson for climate politics today. No document that could win consensus at a UN climate summit will be anywhere near enough to prevent catastrophic warming. We can only keep up with history, and clearly see what needs to be done, by tearing our minds out of the present and imagining more radical future vantage points

If millions of people around the world can do that, in an increasingly violent era of climate disasters, those people could generate enough good projects to add up to something like a rational plan – and buy us enough time to stabilize the climate, while wresting power from the 1%.

Robinson’s optimistic view is that human nature is fundamentally thoughtful, and that it will save us – that the social process of arguing and politicking, with minds as open as we can manage, is a project older than capitalism, and one that will eventually outlive it

It’s a perspective worth thinking about – so long as we’re also organizing.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal

Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies

According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.

In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.

in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.

Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased.

“We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.

Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.

“I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”

Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences

Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.

near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine

It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care

The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individua

Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.

Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain.

Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221.

Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries

“We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,”

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest

In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”.

Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.

That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques, and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.

scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.

In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest

In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.

That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain

Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.

In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down

To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead.

At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,”

In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,”

The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?

The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.

Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course,

“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.

n those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irre

something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.

Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.

In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.

“The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.

“The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?”

Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing.