This year I am going to write something short, mostly daily, about what is going on – “2 cents on the Arrived Ecological Debacle” (2cotAED). I have to write it; you don’t have to read it. If you DO read it, feel free to tell me how wrong I am (and hopefully why). Re: the debacle aspect: in 2004 the English writer Sara Maitland wrote about the “pending ecological debacle.” The expression stuck with me; it’s a debacle because it was foreseen, warned about and was avoidable. Well, it’s no longer really “pending” is it?
Recently I had an interaction with someone who believes the tabloid bullshit stories about “oh, woke children identifying as cats.” You try and explain how tabloids work, but it’s no use. This person takes GBnews, the Daily Heil/Mail, Daily Express as fucking gospel truth. “They wouldn’t print it if it wasn’t true.”
There are bunches of people who, for whatever reasons, never learned to reflect on what they were being told or to think about their thinking and its limitations.
And of course, that’s not just “stupid people” (i.e. anyone who doesn’t recognise you are right and they are wrong) but ALSO the technocrats who rule us. Because technocrats have gotten as far in “the system” (man) as they have because they’ve learned how to parrot back the “right fact”s, or else to perform relatively simple function, following a protocol, and you know, the world is going to be “just so.”
My current favourite example of this is… (drumroll please) sudoku.
In sudoku there is One Right Answer, and if you apply the correct mechanisms, then sooner or later, you’ll get that answer. And the more mechanisms you have, and the more diligently and systematically you apply them then – everything else being equal – the quicker you “get it” and – self-evidently the smarter you are.
Hmm
But I’d like to compare sudoku with the 1997 film Cube, where it turns out [spoilers, but it is almost 30 years old] the misfits wake up in a giant er, cube made up of thousands of identical cube rooms some with deadly boobytraps. After initial bickering, the think they know what they’re doing and set out for the way out… until one of them almost gets killed following the protocol.
They’re forced to reflect and then again, more spoilers, they realize the grid is not stable. The noises they’ve been hearing are the grid moving everything around..
And there, my friends, is the title of this blog post. The grid is not stable. The grid was never stable. It was always a myth that the grid was stable. People wanted to tell it, and people wanted to believe it, and a lot of us are going to die because of these myths.
But then, lots of us (and so so many other species) die in the “normal” operating of “the system” man).
As per Hickel et al 2024.
marchudson.net 
So very true, we suffer public inertia, for fear of destabilizing “the grid”. The thought seems to be, if I stand still nothing will change, for better or worse.
I like the example of cube (great film btw) also if you remember the end only the person who could add numbrrs quickly but had no insight or practical skills got out. Everyone else was buggered.