Category: Monthly Post

Energy: Preparations and Possibilities Revisited

John Michael Greer68 Comments

Last month we started the process of looking back twenty years at my earliest and least accurate set of predictions about the deindustrial future, with an eye to learning from the mistakes and successes of my work in that earlier era, and drawing some conclusions for where we can go from here. This week I’ll…

Briefing for the Descent, Revisited

John Michael Greer414 Comments

It’s long been a source of wry amusement to me that some of my critics like to insist that I never admit it when I’m wrong. What makes that amusing to me is partly that it’s not true—I’ve discussed my mistakes tolerably often in these online essays—and partly that it’s very clear that what actually…

A Game of Musical Chairs

John Michael Greer333 Comments

Some turning points in history are impossible to miss. They involve battle-cries and the clash of weapons, gatherings making decisions that can never be undone, and equally obvious events. Then there are the turning points that slip past unnoticed by most of the people whose lives they will overturn. I’ve come to think that one…

Situationism: The Creation of Situations

John Michael Greer187 Comments

Some of my readers may be surprised that with everything else happening in the world, I’m returning to the ongoing discussion of Situationism, that bizarre mixed breed that came about when European artists who hadn’t lost their creative gonads ended up digging their way into a pen full of Marxists in heat. Still, there’s a…

Situationism: The Art of the Dérive

John Michael Greer230 Comments

Our explorations of Situationism, that eccentric twentieth-century offspring of a drunken amour between avant-garde European art and radical post-Marxist politics, have already led in strange directions. The ground we’ve covered so far extends from postwar Paris to Lower Slobbovia and from Marxist dialectical materialism to the occult perspectives that most Marxists despise utterly. Nonetheless the…

Situationism: The Art of Détournement

John Michael Greer285 Comments

It’s been a while since we last talked about Situationism, that giddy fusion of radical politics and performance art that seized the imaginations of a certain fraction of the European avant-garde in the 1960s. (Readers who missed those discussions the first time around, or simply want to review what’s been covered, will find those earlier…

The Laws of Co-Creation

John Michael Greer199 Comments

Last December’s contest over what theme would get discussed in the fifth Wednesday post, as I’ve noted here more than once already, was unusually lively even by the standards of my lively and eccentric commentariat. What’s more, all three of the leading contenders were themes I wanted to write about anyway. Long before the contest…

Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance

John Michael Greer418 Comments

As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest…

Situationism: Where Domination Ends

John Michael Greer203 Comments

The two interludes just past strayed some distance from the writings of the Situationists, the little clique of avant-garde Marxists in mid-20th century France whose reflections offer certain highly useful insights into the problems and predicaments of life in the twilight of the industrial age. Neither of those divagations, however, was irrelevant to the theme…

The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

John Michael Greer274 Comments

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery…