Fight Like An Animal

Chapter Four: The Depth-Seekers. After life on Earth almost ended in a mass extinction ~250 million years ago, single-celled photosynthetic plankton evolved that mineralize carbon to make exterior shells. When they die, they drop to the bottom of the ocean, and this carbon becomes geologically stable. This ushered in an age of greater climate stability. One of the most important of these marine organisms is the coccolithophores, whose beautiful calcium carbonate shells form seafloor sediments that are sometimes kilometers thick. Coccolithophores appear to have already done a great deal of heavy lifting to mitigate current climate change, with their populations fluxing upward, forming new sediments. 

Could we enter into a coevolutionary process with them to take even more carbon out of the atmosphere? We examine a virus that constrains their population abundance, and a conceivable path to conferring resistance to it: by experimenting with new bacterial symbionts. Numerous bacteria already have mutualistic associations with coccolithophores, and experimental work in commercial algae cultivation has already shown promising results in increasing biomass. Like the biobot experiments we examined last time, such a research paradigm would allow us to explore a vastly wider range of possibilities, far more quickly, than trying to achieve organism-scale outcomes one gene splice at a time. 

Chapter Three: Rise of the Xenobots. Can life be persuaded to take novel forms and behaviors that stabilize the Earth system? The only way to find out is to find out. Let's look to the strange frontiers of experimental biology for a framework of inquiry. Two kinds of so-called biobots have been constructed, one from embryonic frog cells and one from human lung cells. These cellular collectives become autonomously mobile, begin differentiating, and take on novel problems to solve. We can't know what problems they will solve without exposing these new biological entities to new settings and developmental influences. Work in bioelectricity is showing how cellular collectives make decisions about things like anatomy through the same signaling logic as in brains and nervous systems, just on slower timescales—leading researchers to speak of scale-free cognition. So we can also say we don't know what kinds of cognition biobots, or any other biological entity, will exhibit until we experiment. Bioelectric perturbation is creating new body plans in multi-cellular organisms. This is one example of how experimentation with new forms of life does not require or necessarily imply genetic engineering. If you like strange news from the far reaches of science, this episode is for you. 

What does it feel like, in our bodies, to be in a Marxist reading group or an anarchist direct action collective? What unexamined stories, from our profoundly traumatizing experiences of development, do we carry into political organizing structures? What relational patterns do we experience in situations ranging from families to graduate school that we then repeat, using new language and frames of reference, when we try to save the world? What does it mean to be a revolutionary, in terms of the core relational and perceptual shifts we wish to effect in ourselves and others? Do political groups kinda resemble cults sometimes? 

In this episode, Arnold and Adam speak about their highly overlapping experiences of political engagement and philosophical reflection. Adam, a psychotherapist and social worker with an extensive background in Marxist theory and practice, is the host of the Subjective Conditions podcast, which returns from hiatus this fall, focusing on “the mind and the body under capitalism.” His other projects include the Red Library podcast, the Capillaries theory blog, and a forthcoming book called Saturn's Maw, draft chapters of which are spread between Capillaries and his psychotherapy website. 

Chapter Two: The Poison Eaters. In this chapter, we examine some possible experimental biology-assisted climate interventions, such as mineralization of rapidly-produced biomass. We then return to the question of massive, rapid methane release from undersea deposits, journeying to a place called Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Oregon, where two very different organisms form a symbiotic association to metabolize methane. This seafloor filtration is similar to an organ like a kidney, keeping the concentration of a certain substance within a manageable range. If it is overwhelmed, can we assist it? In search of answers, we look at the biology of methane-consuming species, or methanatrophs, and one of the wilder frontiers of current biology: that of the biobots, the “novel constructs” that are not exactly organisms but are definitely alive.

Chapter One: Will the Wasteland Blossom? Here we search for synthetic biology-assisted interventions into runaway climate change and other catastrophic Earth changes. Our first chapter looks at the current state of climate science, and the schools of thought within it. We look at the physical metaphors we use to think about planetary change, such as “thresholds” and “collapse,” and how they constrain our ability to speak of the dynamic range of conceivable futures. We examine the sparse and contradictory literature on one particularly distressing climate feedback: the possibility of massive undersea methane release, discussing recent science indicating methane destabilization is quite possible in the near-future. We also examine the biology of the seafloor methane-sulfate transition zone, where a symbiotic association of microbes consumes methane from destabilized hydrates, maintaining atmospheric equilibrium. It is here we will begin a speculative case study in stabilizing the climate system with techniques at the forefront of experimental biology. 

The structure of a society is the sum of the different kinds of agency different kinds of people exercise. Here we tell a story of the rise of the current intrigue-riddled, paranoid state of the world by examining the roles played by four individuals. Each is a case study in a distinct political personality. One, Noel Field, who we will call the Idealist: a pious Quaker activist whose naivete entangled him in a plot that got a truly astonishing number of people tortured and killed. Two, C. Wright Mills, who we will call the Renegade: a motorcycle-riding sociologist whose 1956 book The Power Elite informed subsequent revolutionary movements. Three, John F. Kennedy, who we will call the Celebrity: a man who was no stranger to Dark Triad traits, but who lacked the monumental propensity for deception of his rivals in the national security establishment. Four, Allen Dulles, who we will call the Councilor: a man who lacked the charisma of true celebrity, but who ultimately succeeded in his power struggle with Kennedy. We examine how people with extreme psychologies can often outmode others because of their very rarity, enabling them to concoct strategies no one sees coming. And, using cross-species comparison, we see how psychological traits vary so massively in part because there really is no evolutionary optimum, contradicting the idea of species-typical psychology—and by extension, species-typical social structure. 

How did we come to live in such an intrigue-riddled, spook-haunted world? In this two-part series, we tell a story about the ascent of the post-WWII espionage establishment, and the permanent sense of crisis and unreality it has created. We tell this story through the lens of revolutionary biology, examining a few of the different political personalities involved: the critics, the pawns, and the conspirators. We examine how ritual deception is a common instrument of domination in traditional societies, and how a very similar psychology is involved in what we call false flag operations today. We look at the truly shocking prevalence of the Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psychopathy—in human populations, and the difficulty more empathetic and honest people have coming to terms with this reality. We do this by focusing on the story of how former CIA chief Allen Dulles, a paradigmatic case study in Machiavellianism, helped create a clandestine Nazi power structure that survived and thrived after World War Two. 

Thomas Zeitzoff's No Option but Sabotage: The Radical Environmental Movement and the Climate Crisis explores the tumultuous past and uncertain present of movements for a habitable Earth. In this interview, we explore the data he gathered, showing trends in the intensity and frequency of different kinds of ecological action. And we explore the myriad factors his many interviewees cited as shaping the movement's trajectory, from the distinct phases of the punk scene to the psychological shifts that come from living at long-term forest blockades. Throughout it all, we orient to that one great question we all know we can't definitively answer and know we must keep asking: what happens next? 

We're not exactly asking what the true nature of the UFO phenomenon is. It's more like we're asking how people form the beliefs they do (which turns out to be a pretty good way to structure an inquiry into the true nature of something). What does being exposed to lots of stories about encounters with UFOs and their occupants, from people who are clearly emotionally impacted by those encounters, do to someone? What if they tell stories that are similar enough to corroborate one another, but too different to add up to any stable, coherent picture? We examine the long history of researchers, after years of immersion in the details of many cases, coming to the conclusion that the UFO phenomenon is real, but deceptive about its own nature. 

We focus on one particularly compelling argument for this position: the bewildering number of supposedly crashed or malfunctioning crafts people have encountered over the years. Could vehicles capable of interstellar travel really keep getting tangled up in power lines and crashing into mountainsides? Are all the astonished crowds who see such things really just telling versions of the same idiosyncratic lie, in an unbroken chain down the centuries? And if neither of these scenarios sound very plausible, where does that leave us? Perhaps we might feel deceived. But there are so many ostensible crashes, involving such a bewildering diversity of UFOs and their pilots, that it almost feels less like being lied to, and more like, paradoxically, being told we're being lied to. Perhaps there's just no making sense of any of this. Or perhaps to make sense of it, we need to examine the nature of our own attempts to communicate with, and conduct research on, other species. 

In this episode, you will find the only valid interpretation of the UFO phenomenon in the world. It involves: how psychological experiments conducted by humans on other species are structurally similar to what we call paranormal; how propaganda is best understood as the selective curation of truth to create false impressions; how some spooks got the guy from Blink-182 to hype the kids on secret military programs; how almost every definitive story about the nature of UFOs amplifies some accounts while excluding others; and how people have been leaving us written records of UFOs all over the world since antiquity, describing them in a wide variety of tones, from casual bewilderment to embarrassment to religious awe, always utilizing existing concepts like lamps and moons to describe what they were seeing.