The Anthropocene is characterized by accelerating change and global challenges of increasing complexity. Inspired by what some have called a polycrisis, we explore whether the human trajectory of increasing complexity and influence on the Earth system could become a form of trap for humanity. Based on an adaptation of the evolutionary traps concept to a global human context, we present results from a participatory mapping. We identify 14 traps and categorize them as either global, technology or structural traps. An assessment reveals that 12 traps (86%) could be in an advanced phase of trapping with high risk of hard-to-reverse lock-ins and growing risks of negative impacts on human well-being. Ten traps (71%) currently see growing trends in their indicators. Revealing the systemic nature of the polycrisis, we assess that Anthropocene traps often interact reinforcingly (45% of pairwise interactions), and rarely in a dampening fashion (3%). We end by discussing capacities that will be important for navigating these systemic challenges in pursuit of global sustainability. Doing so, we introduce evolvability as a unifying concept for such research between the sustainability and evolutionary sciences.

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Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty).

These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.

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Kotz, M., Levermann, A., & Wenz, L. (2024). The economic commitment of climate change. Nature 628, 551–557.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0

The concurrent pressures of rising global temperatures, rates and incidence of species decline, and emergence of infectious diseases represent an unprecedented planetary crisis. Intergovernmental reports have drawn focus to the escalating climate and biodiversity crises and the connections between them, but interactions among all three pressures have been largely overlooked. Non-linearities and dampening and reinforcing interactions among pressures make considering interconnections essential to anticipating planetary challenges.

In this review, we define and exemplify the causal pathways that link the three global pressures of climate change, biodiversity loss, and infectious disease. A literature assessment and case studies show that the mechanisms between certain pairs of pressures are better understood than others and that the full triad of interactions is rarely considered. Although challenges to evaluating these interactions—including a mismatch in scales, data availability, and methods—are substantial, current approaches would benefit from expanding scientific cultures to embrace interdisciplinarity and from integrating animal, human, and environmental perspectives. Considering the full suite of connections would be transformative for planetary health by identifying potential for co-benefits and mutually beneficial scenarios, and highlighting where a narrow focus on solutions to one pressure might aggravate another.

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This article is the first to reconstruct the intellectual history of Milton Friedman’s criticism of business and its social responsibilities. Using original archival research and printed evidence, this article makes three major arguments. First, Friedman’s criticisms of business and its social responsibilities evolved over time and emerged from persistent anxieties among economic liberals about monopoly, business interests, and political authority that were explicitly read from Adam Smith. Second, the article contributes to the emerging intellectual history of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by reconstructing the development of Friedman’s criticisms, their transformations, and their reception within the context of American managerial thought from the 1950s to the 1980s. Finally, contextualizing Friedman’s criticisms demonstrates his concern about decision-making logics within organizations, which in turn explains his belief that CSR would contribute to collectivization and enhances the understanding of neoliberal political thought.

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The paper deploys the disclosive computer ethics (DCE) approach to reconstruct the ethics and politics of one of the sharing economy’s flagships—Airbnb. I investigate Airbnb’s technical design to identify the moral and political values that are embedded in the platform’s technology. I then analyze the platform’s ethics and politics towards a generalization of relevant ethical and political aspects by reconnecting them to the mechanisms, operations, rationales, and ideologies of the sharing economy in general.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by linking between the ethics and politics of digital platforms and their technical design, using the case study of Airbnb. Additionally, it explores Airbnb as a specific platform technology with unique ethical and political values. Thus, the paper refutes the neutrality thesis and similar claims made by sharing economy platforms. Finally, the paper makes a methodological contribution to the literature on the ethics and politics of technology. It develops a practical DCE research methodology for uncovering the values, ethics, and politics of digital technologies.

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Spier, S. (2024). Uncovering Digital Platforms’ Ethics and Politics: The Case of Airbnb. Philosophy and Technology, 37(2), 1–27.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-024-00742-y

Over the past two decades, hundreds of different commons around the world have arisen and developed working ties with peers, creating what might be called the Commonsverse. To elected officials, legislatures, bureaucracies, courts, and business people, the commons continues to be seen as a failed management regime, one that implicitly needs state or market intervention and control. As the essays of this special issue suggest, however, many projects and activists are seeing commons as a powerful, versatile force for change.

The piecemeal efforts to build a Commonsverse amounts to a quest to build a parallel polis. Commoning honors wholesome values and different ways of being, knowing, and acting while allowing ordinary people to assert some measure of self-determination in the face of capitalist markets and state power. This essay explores a broad range of contemporary commons activities, the “ontological politics” they are engendering, and the challenges they face in expanding and institutionalizing commoning. Future development should focus on the potential of commons/public partnerships, new infrastructures to make commoning easier, legal hacks to open up zones of commoning, the potential of relationalized finance, and new institutional structures of care.

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Bollier, D. (2024). Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse. International Journal of the Commons, 18(1), 288–301.

https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1389

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Decoupling has been and continues to be a discourse used to prolong business as usual growth strategies without confronting systemic and behavioural changes. While decoupling narratives have emerged in the past in the form of its close siblings such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, green economy, eco-efficiency, eco-innovation, and more recently, the circular economy; scholars, especially from the ecological economics community, continue to systematically challenge decoupling both empirically and theoretically. Many meta-studies have concluded that absolute resource, energy, and emissions decoupling, when internalising for trade and consumption in tandem, results in futile. Therefore, institutionalising decoupling for future policy prolongs the misconception of a persistent myth, propagating a deceitful narrative failing to tackle the urgency of the climate crisis.

In this chapter, several recent publications and developments are discussed and synthesised from a unique insight with contributions from the Barcelona school of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology. In conclusion, the chapter presents a case for the rejection of decoupling environmental degradation from economic growth and calls for just, inclusive, and biophysically grounded transformative futures.

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Sorman, A.H. (2023). Deceitful Decoupling: Misconceptions of a Persistent Myth. In: Villamayor-Tomas, S., Muradian, R. (eds) The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology. Studies in Ecological Economics, vol 8. Springer, Cham.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22566-6_15

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Starting from a comparison between the Belep Islands (Kanaky New Caledonia) and Oʻahu (Hawaiʻi), this paper aims to contribute to the debates about islands and the Anthropocene, highlighting the relevance of the social and ecological responsibilities deriving from genealogical connections to the islands: ʻthe weight of the ancestors’.

Considering the implications of these kinds of responsibilities can help to understand human an non-human relational entanglements better so as to value the agentive role of other-than-human perspectives.

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Borgnino, E., & Giordana, L. (2023). The Disregarded Weight of the Ancestors: Honouring the Complexities and Cultural Subtleties of Islandscape. Island Studies Journal, 18(1), 122–142.

https://islandstudiesjournal.org/article/81128

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This chapter traces the origin of racism and reviews the historical and contemporary debates around race and racialisation in western thought. There are persistent disagreements surrounding the origin and nature of racism. Because of the evolution of racist ideas, behaviours and institutional practices and policies, there are various views about the meaning and analytical application of racism. This chapter explores how ideas of race – understood as innate and immutable human differences that can be classified and ranked hierarchically based on race – has emerged in western history and evolved over time. It examines how this has influenced social and political practices and associated policies across the evolution of modernity.

The chapter specifically discusses the Atlantic slave trade and how it shaped the historical development of race and racism within the context of colonialism. It concludes with a discussion and critical review of some of the racist systems and policies which have been enforced across different multiracial countries.

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Elias, A. (2024). “Brief History of Racism”, Racism and Anti-Racism Today, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-56.

https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-512-520241002

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On March 8 it was reported that at least five residents of Gaza were killed by the airdrops of humanitarian aid at the Al-Shati camp, west of Gaza City. Less than two weeks ago, Zein Oroq, a thirteen-year-old boy who survived an airstrike on his family home in November, was struck by airdropped food items. He succumbed to his wounds in hospital on April 14. A fragile bridge to apparent salvation proved to be deadly. From the standpoint of the victims, does it matter whether death delivered from the air came in the shape of bombs or aid packages? In fact, this was more than a tragic incident, paling in significance compared to the staggering numbers of civilians killed in the Israeli bombardments of Gaza over the past months. Deaths by humanitarian airdrops are a clue to the broader logic of events unfolding today, especially in Gaza but also in other parts of the world.

Japan has gone through a gradual process of dismantling its self-imposed ban on exporting lethal weapons, a process that reached a new plateau with last month’s decision to permit the export to third countries of the next-generation fighter aircraft to be developed jointly with the United Kingdom and Italy.

When this policy change is read in conjunction with the U.S.-Japan Joint Leaders’ Statement issued on April 10, 2024, it is likely that Japan has agreed to jointly develop and produce missiles with the United States and export them to third countries. (It also marks the latest development in its departure from its pacifist defense policy that dates back to the immediate post-World War II era.) This article tries to explain the background and implications of Japan’s policy changes.

The High Court’s decision to permit Julian Assange to appeal his pending extradition is an important, if partial, victory. The judges are aware that, in reality, he has no case to answer. The US charge of ‘espionage’ is blatant nonsense. The fact that it hasn’t already been dismissed and Julian released is a sign of the UK’s generalized subordination to American interests.

A total of 1,153 executions took place in 2023, which does not include the thousands believed to have been carried out in China, marking an increase of more than 30% from 2022. It was the highest figure recorded by Amnesty International since 2015, when 1,634 people were known to have been executed.

How is it that modernity – since the Enlightenment – has not consigned war and terrorism to the barbaric past? In his book Ethical Violence (Polity Press, 2023), Italian sociologist Carlo Bordoni develops a complex picture of modernity – or rather modernities, in seeing a series of sociological and economic upheavals over recent centuries. These included the creation of state sovereignty, the rise of reason and science, industrialisation and the proliferation of technology. To these we must add the crises of modernity in recent decades, with its values of progress, human equality and rationality being questioned.

In the wake of the pandemic, we are witnessing the growing prevalence of aggression and emotionality in social and political life. We find ourselves living in an increasingly impatient and insecure society, which is sceptical of scientific thought and which takes refuge in the irrational. The decline of rationality and the growing prevalence of violence are increasingly common features of a society that has lost touch with the great Enlightenment narrative. We need, argues Bordoni, to rediscover the rationality we have lost and recuperate the positive side of technology.

The Palestinians’ resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocidal attacks has energized the largest mass antiwar movement in years, drawing out organizers among different communities and campaigns. In Los Angeles Chinatown, tenant leaders and organizers have been mobilizing to connect their immediate campaigns against gentrification and displacement to solidarity with Palestine against Israeli settler colonialism. This conversation features Richard Lai and Lynn Ta—two LA Chinatown organizers and Hoa refugees from the Vietnam War—who discuss the influence of their background on their solidarity with Palestinian struggle alongside fellow organizer Promise Li.

Many scholars committed to Palestinian liberation can no longer do their jobs. That’s because many of the professors most supportive of Palestine don’t have jobs anymore.

This is nowhere truer than in the Gaza Strip — where all 12 universities have been reduced to rubble, and more than 90 professors have been reported killed during Israel’s assault on the territory. The gravity of what United Nations experts warn could amount to U.S.-backed “scholasticide” has no equivalent on American soil.

Yet Israel’s attempted eradication of intellectual life in Gaza echoes far beyond the territory, with U.S. universities ensuring that some professors vocal in their support of Palestine can no longer do their jobs either.

Watching the effluvia-driven campaign cycle carom back and forth from the hoary (Biden is too old, special prosecutor claims!) to the bathetic (Trump debuts new line of sneakers and cologne!), it’s easy to lose sight of the larger forces that have produced the fiasco-in-the-making known as the 2024 presidential contest.

A long-standing shibboleth among elite political observers is that, in the end, “the party decides”—meaning that amid the unruly tumult of democratic life, sober political professionals are the adults in the room, dictating the basic terms of engagement by allocating resources and selecting leaders on a clear calculus of rational self-interest. All of this closely calibrated realist programming and counter-programming thus delimits the art of the possible in this, our sage, reasonable, and eternally difference-trimming American republic.

Yale economist Ray C. Fair, in the introduction to his 2002 book Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things, takes note of W. H. Auden’s lines “Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians nor commit / A social science.” “I am giving the opposite advice,” Fair writes. “Come sit with statisticians and social scientists a while and see what they can do.”

In my heart, I want to go with Auden over Fair. Could there be a less enticing seduction than “come sit with statisticians”? But every election cycle, the social scientists lead me into temptation. I pull up my chair, tug at my shirt collar, and watch in fascination as they unveil their models.

The evidence is clear and mounting: teenagers are increasingly miserable and anxious, and the grown-ups are desperate to allay this. But as we decry the factors contributing to the crisis—social media addiction, climate despair, collapsing public civility, economic insecurity—the work of great philosophers suggests the value of a different response. What if anxiety is less a problem to be solved, and more an enduring truth of the modern human predicament? What if its hallmark discomfort opens us up to unique opportunities for transformation? Teen suffering is not a good thing. But in our headlong rush to pathologise and medicalise, to diagnose, curb and treat it, it is helpful to turn to European philosophy for a richer view.

What are the parallels between earlier stages of colonialism and today’s digital world? Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias argue that instead of a land grab, we are today witnessing today a data grab whereby our lives, in all their aspects, are being captured and converted into commercial profits. How does this new era of informational power deepen existing global inequalities?

Living in Vermont, and working at the state’s flagship land-grant university, whose land-grant status was founded on a “gift” of land essentially stolen from Indigenous nations, has made it important for me to embrace the question of what it means to decolonize and reindigenize here, in this place. That’s where things get challenging. The remainder of this post goes into one particularly vexing question that faces anyone who tries to deal with the issue of how to “decolonize” and act as a “settler Indigenous ally.” (I use the term “settler” knowing full well that my parents came to North America not as settler colonists but as wartime refugees, but that they and I have benefited from the settler colonial state of Canada, and more recently, in my case, the United States.)

I recently took part in a debate organized by the IAI—featuring Donald Hoffman and Susan Schneider—on the question of whether silicon computers running Artificial Intelligence (AI) software will ever become conscious. As a metaphysical idealist, I believe consciousness isn’t generated by any substrate—biological or otherwise—for it is primary. But private conscious inner life, seemingly separate from the rest of nature and delineated by the boundaries of a physical entity, is clearly something that has emerged in conjunction with biology. So, to me the question translates as: can private consciousness potentially occur in association with silicon computers?

This question is very close to my heart, for I’ve been a computer engineer for longer than I’ve been a philosopher. To me, the hypothesis of ‘conscious AI’ is just about as plausible as that of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). I admittedly can’t categorically refute the hypothesis, for the same reason that I can’t categorically refute the FSM. But just like the FSM, I don’t think we have any good reason to take the hypothesis seriously at all. Here’s why.

Work has always been a significant source of ethical questions, philosophical reflection, and political struggle. Although the future of work in a sense is always at stake, the issue is particularly relevant right now, in light of the advent of advanced AI systems and the collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has reinvigorated philosophical discussion and interest in the study of the future of work. The purpose of this survey article is to provide an overview of the emerging philosophical field that engages with the future of work, with a special focus on equality and justice, and to outline a research agenda that can help the field to develop further.

Section 2 provides some historical context for the current surge in interest in the topic. Then, we discuss what work is and whether there is a philosophy of work (Section 3). The four main sub-debates we then turn to concern the value of work (Section 4), distributive justice and work (Section 5), productive justice (Section 6), and institutional reforms prompted by changes in how work is organized (Section 7). The final section discusses the importance of the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in philosophical investigations into the future of work.

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The belief that AI technology is on the cusp of causing a generalized social crisis became a popular one in 2023. Interestingly, some of these worries were voiced from within the tech sector itself. While there was no doubt an element of hype and exaggeration to some of these accounts, they do reflect the fact that there are troubling ramifications to this technology stack. This conjunction of shared concerns about social, political, and personal futures presaged by current developments in machine learning and data science presents the academic discipline of computing with a rare opportunity for self-examination and reconfiguration. This position paper endeavors to do so in four sections.

The first expands on the nature of the AI crisis for computing. The second articulates possible critical responses to this crisis and advocates for a broader analytic focus on power relations. The third section presents a novel characterization of academic computing’s epistemological field, one which includes not only the discipline’s usual instrumental forms of knowledge but reflexive knowledge as well. This reflexive dimension integrates both the critical and public functions of the discipline as equal intellectual partners and a necessary component of any contemporary academic field. The final section will advocate for a conceptual archetype—the Public Computer Intellectual—as a way of practically imagining the expanded possibilities of academic practice in our discipline, one that provides both self-critique and an outward-facing orientation towards the public good. It will argue that the computer education research community can play a vital role in this regard.

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Business schools have two interconnected, critical responsibilities: preparing students to lead in times of ecological and societal turmoil while, ensuring their education aligns with global standards. Adherence to neoliberal principles limits business schools’ effectiveness by stifling diverse perspectives, positive leadership development and evaluation of degrowth as a viable alternative. The constraining influences of neoliberal ideology—termed the “neoliberal straitjacket” is impeding the impact of the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).

Advocating for an expansion of student perspectives to alternate economic systems by critiquing the constraining influences of neoliberal ideology, this article introduces the Degrowth Pedagogy Framework (DPF) as a novel educational solution. By adopting a constructivist and multi-paradigmatic approach, the DPF aims to integrate degrowth principles into business education, fostering both a “childlike mindset” to imagine degrowth in practice, and a receptiveness to new paradigms. Doing so presents degrowth as a legitimate challenge to neoliberal capitalism. The DPF holds promise for transforming business schools to serve as catalysts and agents of change and to progress the PRME agenda. Business schools must educate leaders to think expansively, lead positively, and envision a more sustainable future for all.

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