I made a factual error in the first publication of this post. I referenced the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, when I meant to refer to the Palestinian Authority, the PA. I've corrected that error now. Thank you to Prof. Glenn Morris for pointing out the error.
Thanks for saying all this. Sitting with it. I know some of this but hearing your particular articulation about orgs like the nature conservancy is a way I appreciate. My frustration is validated. Hacked by experience and good research.
It's quite complex to navigate, Kelly, especially for people such as yourself who are doing hands-in-the-dirt work. It's difficult to critique an organization like The Nature Conservancy because of the legitimate good work that they do, and the compromises they make can be justified by the people within these organizations. But structurally, they are playing the role of controlled opposition. That becomes really clear in some of their activities, like the meeting I wrote about. Thanks for reading!
Thank you for explaining this so clearly, that explains a lot. We have been more marginalized than ever, but that's because we continue to refuse to compromise and will not join the mitigation game that gives Nature away chunk by chunk for $$$. Keep up the good work, Max, of educating us!
All my work builds on the foundational grassroots work that people like you folks are doing. Thank you so much for all your work. I certainly know the feeling of being marginalized. Keep up the fight!
What a mammoth , informative piece of work Max, very useful . I have long seen how the ‘Green Agenda’ has been hi jacked for financial and political intentions. Thank you
I'm seeing this STRATFOR-esque counterinsurgency strategy play out in a local debate about improving natural habitat at our park and small town golf course.
It's a ubiquitous approach, for sure. Unfortunately for us, the opposition is smart. If I were in their position, I'd probably do something similar. What area do you live in, Stephen?
Port Townsend, WA. It's a basic bring-your-enemies-close approach, get us
all "working together" on the same committee, then control the agenda and grind things to a standstill. When I worked for the the Calif Dept of Fish & Wildlife, Big Oil and PG&E would do this to us.
Joan Roelofs' book "The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States" shows a lot of what you do but with emphasis about military, and there are some references to Nature Conservancy, etc. with some examples, as you also cite, of how various organizations 'do some good stuff' too.
Max - Having just completed a decade working for the Population Council in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines I was a delegate to the first Japanese Population conference in Tokyo from July 2-4 1974. The World population was alarmingly just passing 3 billion and we were determined to slow the growth. Well, some say we succeeded too well in Korea and Taiwan (and in China and Japan). But world-wide we have now crossed the 8 billion mark and are still growing.
In January 2007 I got trained by Al Gore, in Nashville, to deliver his program, then called "The Climate Project" with all the well-known scary slides. I told the Gore crew that I was going to completely revise the program putting in only happy and positive slides about how we could all get to a clean and green future and they forbade me to use his name in my program so I went to schools in CT, MA, NY, NJ, MD and CO for over a decade presenting "Climate Change is Elementary," helping families make good decisions about both population and the environment.
My feeling was that we needed to start where almost all effective social movements begin, at the household level and we needed to start in k-5 and k-8 schools not at the national or international level. Our credo was then, and is now “bubble up beats trickle down” and “every family must become sustainable.”
Thanks to the "COVID Pause" I wrote a 250-page, fully illustrated, bi-lingual book entitled the "Green Actioneers Family Action Guide," and this Fall I'll be starting programs in elementary and middle schools all over the US and other counties with that book and our one-day school program that ends with a well-attended Family Night. So we’ll be creating bubbles of change at the household level that will rise through society with the aim of making every family indigenous to their own environment.
“It’s too late” is a cry I hear often, but if it’s too late now then we should all just give up. I did not give up when I went to East Asia in the 1960's to work in Family Planning, and I'm not giving up now.
Although the book will sell for $20 when we hold family night in a school we’re happy to give a free link to our book to families so they can all "play the game." And we’re working on charming comic book style illustrations we have created using AI intended for youngest learners. The output is a series of colorful, kid-friendly 4 panel cartoons and a series of 2 minute "hero's journey" videos that will be available for phones and computers, where kids focus today.
What we are really starting is a "strategic revolutionary environmental movement which incorporates both an integral biocentrism and robust critiques of the human cost of industrial civilization."
I posted this with a note to Substack notes and my Facebook account. I don't agree with everything here - I believe we humans have to continue industrial civilization to a much-reduced level, and I wish you had included militarism, especially world-bestriding US militarism, as the "muscle" and much of the money of late-stage capitalism -- but it's a great, challenging read. I'm already thinking of people to email the link to with a personal note. Thanks for your honesty.
And, here, Shadow Runners (see below below), gets into the whole AI rapid advance of this narcissistic world of green pornography and the Big Deals for Nature carbon offsets, etc.
Bill McKibben? Oh My Fucking God what a creep on so many levels, so many levels.
Cory Morningstar hit the propaganda wrong kind of green out of the ball park years ago:
Your AI buddy is the most devastating weapon of cognitive warfare the world has ever seen. The characteristics of the technology, and the historical context of its deployment, render its impact something far more powerful than any legacy forms of propaganda and consent manufacturing.
Right now, there’s almost one billion weekly active users of chatGPT. Two hundred million people use it daily (a rapidly growing number), and have made the chatbot a routine part of their lives. On average, 20 000 queries per second were logged by Character AI more than a year ago. You know, the spin-off system by former Google employees designed for roleplay and fantasy conversations whose Game of Thrones simulation prompted a kid to off himself last year.
But that’s probably just the tip of this burning mountain of garbage. Roughly half of the German population now regularly uses AI tools for simulated personal conversations, i.e. they’re talking to the thing with the exclusive purpose of social interaction as if it were a fucking friend — and most of the other half are of course nonetheless interacting with it on a conversational and personal level, even though they also have some other intention, such as cheating on a college assignment, plagiarizing artwork or faking their professional output.
This is unprecedented beyond words.
We now have an avatar designed by big tech for the purposes of surveillance, propaganda and marketing that in absolutely no time at all has penetrated the intimate social sphere of almost every single human being in modern civilization.
In that one sense, the hype is not lying. Even though any thinking human being who’s at least dabbled in philosophy knows full well that the very idea of artificial consciousness is just a bad joke for consoling a bunch of aging boomer atheists, all of this ubiquitous, awe-inspiring marketing in concert with the character and function of the technology still generates a social impact comparable to an alien invasion.
The problem is the slippery slope and shifting baseline. The AI is already baked into air travel, metro travel, car travel, boat travel, travel from your front door to the mailbox.
Every defecation urination consumption swallow book checked out and all other life transactions and desires are tracked. This reply is on a dumb phone, so my words are more in the hands of Jewish fanatics like Ellison and Karp are Dell and Brin and Stephen Miller and Adelson and Altman and Zuckerberg and Ackmam and the Mossad.
My syntax and sentence structure and vocabulary and punctuation are all now fed into precrime AI computational hell.
K12 and colleges are all on board with AI.
And each drone and each one of those 60,000 satellites (by 2040) will follow you even in the woods.
We need daily violent response to the billionaires and millionaires' and their Eichmanns.
Is the Genocide of 400,000 Gazans not enough evidence of the master race's intention?
Again, my dear Max, I respect your passionate analysis and efforts to remedy the multiple wrongs resulting from MASSIVE HUMAN OVERPOPULATION AND OVERCONSUMPTION, but you skip the core issue: too many humans using/depleting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs and climate collapse. We are 3,000 times more numerous than were our Hunter-Gatherer clan living INDIGENOUS ancestors, who were living in an ecologically balanced self-sustaining lifeway. What could go wrong? Everything. Have a blessed day!
Hi Diana! I generally like when people protest and rally, I think that while it's not a decisive action, it can play a shaping and sustaining role for our movements, helping create the conditions for future success. I don't trust 350.org at the leadership level. I wrote about 350 and their founder, Bill McKibben, in a previous piece: https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the
There are some great people involved in all these groups which are, in my view, politically compromised. My approach in the past has been to show up for these mass mobilizations, but come with a sign and sometimes pamphlets or handouts which challenge the political orthodoxies of the organizing groups.
I made a factual error in the first publication of this post. I referenced the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, when I meant to refer to the Palestinian Authority, the PA. I've corrected that error now. Thank you to Prof. Glenn Morris for pointing out the error.
Thanks for saying all this. Sitting with it. I know some of this but hearing your particular articulation about orgs like the nature conservancy is a way I appreciate. My frustration is validated. Hacked by experience and good research.
It's quite complex to navigate, Kelly, especially for people such as yourself who are doing hands-in-the-dirt work. It's difficult to critique an organization like The Nature Conservancy because of the legitimate good work that they do, and the compromises they make can be justified by the people within these organizations. But structurally, they are playing the role of controlled opposition. That becomes really clear in some of their activities, like the meeting I wrote about. Thanks for reading!
Thank you for explaining this so clearly, that explains a lot. We have been more marginalized than ever, but that's because we continue to refuse to compromise and will not join the mitigation game that gives Nature away chunk by chunk for $$$. Keep up the good work, Max, of educating us!
All my work builds on the foundational grassroots work that people like you folks are doing. Thank you so much for all your work. I certainly know the feeling of being marginalized. Keep up the fight!
What a mammoth , informative piece of work Max, very useful . I have long seen how the ‘Green Agenda’ has been hi jacked for financial and political intentions. Thank you
That's very kind, Susan. Thank you! Telling these specific stories can be so much more informative than simply making generalized statements.
Wowsers. Thank you, Max!
Thanks for reading, Katie! I know I owe you an email. I am, as is perpetually the case, behind on those messages. Hope you're well.
I'm seeing this STRATFOR-esque counterinsurgency strategy play out in a local debate about improving natural habitat at our park and small town golf course.
It's a ubiquitous approach, for sure. Unfortunately for us, the opposition is smart. If I were in their position, I'd probably do something similar. What area do you live in, Stephen?
Port Townsend, WA. It's a basic bring-your-enemies-close approach, get us
all "working together" on the same committee, then control the agenda and grind things to a standstill. When I worked for the the Calif Dept of Fish & Wildlife, Big Oil and PG&E would do this to us.
Amazing piece Max! You put a lot of your heart and soul into this, and I thank you!
Joan Roelofs' book "The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States" shows a lot of what you do but with emphasis about military, and there are some references to Nature Conservancy, etc. with some examples, as you also cite, of how various organizations 'do some good stuff' too.
I'll have to check that out, Mankh. Thank you.
You're welcome, Max.
Counterinsurgency on a dying planet.
Where are the guerrillas and real revolutionaries?
Every little thing is for sale.
Dead, in prison, or quietly planning and training in the shadows.
#3 please.
Great piece! Thank You, Max. And congrats!
Thank you, Erica!
Max - Having just completed a decade working for the Population Council in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines I was a delegate to the first Japanese Population conference in Tokyo from July 2-4 1974. The World population was alarmingly just passing 3 billion and we were determined to slow the growth. Well, some say we succeeded too well in Korea and Taiwan (and in China and Japan). But world-wide we have now crossed the 8 billion mark and are still growing.
In January 2007 I got trained by Al Gore, in Nashville, to deliver his program, then called "The Climate Project" with all the well-known scary slides. I told the Gore crew that I was going to completely revise the program putting in only happy and positive slides about how we could all get to a clean and green future and they forbade me to use his name in my program so I went to schools in CT, MA, NY, NJ, MD and CO for over a decade presenting "Climate Change is Elementary," helping families make good decisions about both population and the environment.
My feeling was that we needed to start where almost all effective social movements begin, at the household level and we needed to start in k-5 and k-8 schools not at the national or international level. Our credo was then, and is now “bubble up beats trickle down” and “every family must become sustainable.”
Thanks to the "COVID Pause" I wrote a 250-page, fully illustrated, bi-lingual book entitled the "Green Actioneers Family Action Guide," and this Fall I'll be starting programs in elementary and middle schools all over the US and other counties with that book and our one-day school program that ends with a well-attended Family Night. So we’ll be creating bubbles of change at the household level that will rise through society with the aim of making every family indigenous to their own environment.
“It’s too late” is a cry I hear often, but if it’s too late now then we should all just give up. I did not give up when I went to East Asia in the 1960's to work in Family Planning, and I'm not giving up now.
Although the book will sell for $20 when we hold family night in a school we’re happy to give a free link to our book to families so they can all "play the game." And we’re working on charming comic book style illustrations we have created using AI intended for youngest learners. The output is a series of colorful, kid-friendly 4 panel cartoons and a series of 2 minute "hero's journey" videos that will be available for phones and computers, where kids focus today.
What we are really starting is a "strategic revolutionary environmental movement which incorporates both an integral biocentrism and robust critiques of the human cost of industrial civilization."
I messaged you elsewhere, Dave. I'd be interested to learn about your work with the Population Council. I'm not familiar with that group.
I posted this with a note to Substack notes and my Facebook account. I don't agree with everything here - I believe we humans have to continue industrial civilization to a much-reduced level, and I wish you had included militarism, especially world-bestriding US militarism, as the "muscle" and much of the money of late-stage capitalism -- but it's a great, challenging read. I'm already thinking of people to email the link to with a personal note. Thanks for your honesty.
Thanks Janet! Militarism is a topic I've tackled in other pieces, as well.
Out of curiosity, why do you believe we have to continue industrial civilization?
And, here, Shadow Runners (see below below), gets into the whole AI rapid advance of this narcissistic world of green pornography and the Big Deals for Nature carbon offsets, etc.
Bill McKibben? Oh My Fucking God what a creep on so many levels, so many levels.
Cory Morningstar hit the propaganda wrong kind of green out of the ball park years ago:
https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2012/09/10/avaaz-imperialist-pimps-of-militarism-protectors-of-the-oligarchy-trusted-facilitators-of-war/
+--+
Shadowrunners:
https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/ai-cognitive-warfare-and-the-great
Your AI buddy is the most devastating weapon of cognitive warfare the world has ever seen. The characteristics of the technology, and the historical context of its deployment, render its impact something far more powerful than any legacy forms of propaganda and consent manufacturing.
Right now, there’s almost one billion weekly active users of chatGPT. Two hundred million people use it daily (a rapidly growing number), and have made the chatbot a routine part of their lives. On average, 20 000 queries per second were logged by Character AI more than a year ago. You know, the spin-off system by former Google employees designed for roleplay and fantasy conversations whose Game of Thrones simulation prompted a kid to off himself last year.
But that’s probably just the tip of this burning mountain of garbage. Roughly half of the German population now regularly uses AI tools for simulated personal conversations, i.e. they’re talking to the thing with the exclusive purpose of social interaction as if it were a fucking friend — and most of the other half are of course nonetheless interacting with it on a conversational and personal level, even though they also have some other intention, such as cheating on a college assignment, plagiarizing artwork or faking their professional output.
This is unprecedented beyond words.
We now have an avatar designed by big tech for the purposes of surveillance, propaganda and marketing that in absolutely no time at all has penetrated the intimate social sphere of almost every single human being in modern civilization.
In that one sense, the hype is not lying. Even though any thinking human being who’s at least dabbled in philosophy knows full well that the very idea of artificial consciousness is just a bad joke for consoling a bunch of aging boomer atheists, all of this ubiquitous, awe-inspiring marketing in concert with the character and function of the technology still generates a social impact comparable to an alien invasion.
And this is by design.
I'm astonished how many people happily use the thing. I refuse to go near it.
Maybe this will at least accelerate the collapse of industrial civilisation by turning so many people into drooling morons
The problem is the slippery slope and shifting baseline. The AI is already baked into air travel, metro travel, car travel, boat travel, travel from your front door to the mailbox.
Every defecation urination consumption swallow book checked out and all other life transactions and desires are tracked. This reply is on a dumb phone, so my words are more in the hands of Jewish fanatics like Ellison and Karp are Dell and Brin and Stephen Miller and Adelson and Altman and Zuckerberg and Ackmam and the Mossad.
My syntax and sentence structure and vocabulary and punctuation are all now fed into precrime AI computational hell.
K12 and colleges are all on board with AI.
And each drone and each one of those 60,000 satellites (by 2040) will follow you even in the woods.
We need daily violent response to the billionaires and millionaires' and their Eichmanns.
Is the Genocide of 400,000 Gazans not enough evidence of the master race's intention?
Again, my dear Max, I respect your passionate analysis and efforts to remedy the multiple wrongs resulting from MASSIVE HUMAN OVERPOPULATION AND OVERCONSUMPTION, but you skip the core issue: too many humans using/depleting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including GHGs and climate collapse. We are 3,000 times more numerous than were our Hunter-Gatherer clan living INDIGENOUS ancestors, who were living in an ecologically balanced self-sustaining lifeway. What could go wrong? Everything. Have a blessed day!
The fucking white race is the world's stain. Fuck the racist Malthusian crap. Socialism or barbarity.
Cloud servers? How's that new water and energy trick working?
Leavers versus takers.
One American kiddo from before birth to end of diapers used resources to equal a village of a hundred humans of their lifespans.
Max, what do you think of this? https://drawtheline.world/canada?r=CA&d=BC&lang=en
Hi Diana! I generally like when people protest and rally, I think that while it's not a decisive action, it can play a shaping and sustaining role for our movements, helping create the conditions for future success. I don't trust 350.org at the leadership level. I wrote about 350 and their founder, Bill McKibben, in a previous piece: https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the
There are some great people involved in all these groups which are, in my view, politically compromised. My approach in the past has been to show up for these mass mobilizations, but come with a sign and sometimes pamphlets or handouts which challenge the political orthodoxies of the organizing groups.
Bravo!