Andrew Curry

My suggestion here is that a politics of the future that might make a difference would be about reimagining our relationships, with each other and with nature.

The only question is whether we manage degrowth or just let it happen to us. This isn’t a neutral question. I know which one of these is worse.

I’ve been digesting tariff chat for the past few days, like everyone is, and trying to make sense of the political economy of it. ‘Make sense’ as in trying to piece together the MAGA mindset and then think it through, beyond the economics of it.

One of the things that all of this reveals is that the dystopian world in which AIs have taken our jobs and left us all destitute is not so much a scenario which needs endless public policy discussion. Instead it is the return of the repressed. It’s the story that our tech billionaires wish for, but still have to pretend that they don’t.

Marion Nestle’s blog recently signalled a striking development in the world of ultra-processed foods. An extensive selection of the companies that make them have just been served with a lawsuit in an American court.

Thinking about civilisations as being time-limited immediately leads you to a particular perspective about them, which is in effect, that as civilisations age they are more likely to show signs of decline, in the same way that we can make the same kinds of assumptions about people.