We are entering a period of overlapping crises
hamishcampbell.com
October 15, 2026
6 min read
48/100
Summary
Hamish Campbell argues that climate breakdown, inequality, technological disruption, war, political instability and weakening democratic institutions are reinforcing one another. He warns that responses centered on “exit culture” — including private security and bunkers for wealthy people, ethnonationalist politics, religious escape narratives, and technological promises involving AI, automation, space or digital transcendence — cannot resolve systemic ecological and social crises. Campbell also rejects the idea that institutional collapse is inherently progressive, saying it can produce mutual aid and democratic organization but is more likely to lead to authoritarianism, scapegoating, violence and stronger hierarchies when communities are unprepared. Campbell calls for grassroots democratic resilience built before crises intensify: local relationships, communication systems, knowledge of resources, practical skills, shared decision-making and methods for handling disagreement. He advocates shifting from individual survivalism toward mutual aid and collective care. He presents the Open Media Network (OMN), the Fediverse and ActivityPub as examples of federated technology that can let independent communities communicate, share knowledge and exchange resources without giving up autonomy. Campbell says technology should support social processes rather than replace them with centralized control, and argues that cooperation and solidarity can provide an alternative to fear-driven scapegoating and authoritarian politics.
Key Takeaways
- Hamish Campbell argues that interconnected climate, economic, political and technological crises require collective preparation rather than individual escape or survivalism.
- Campbell says collapse has no inherently progressive outcome and can strengthen authoritarianism, violence and scapegoating when communities lack networks and democratic capacity.
- The Fediverse and ActivityPub enable independent communities to communicate through federation while retaining their autonomy.
- Campbell proposes the Open Media Network as a model combining local relationships with open networks to build distributed resilience.
What the discussion said
The only meaningful AI-adjacent thread was not about the article’s argument, but about whether its awkward prose looked machine-generated. Commenters largely rejected that diagnosis. They saw the writing as human: someone immersed in a small political or cultural scene, carrying its slang and assumptions into an essay for a broader audience without translating any of it. That explanation fit the heavy jargon, distracting hashtags, abrupt shifts in register, and numerous basic errors better than an AI hypothesis. The discussion was still harsh on the result. Readers argued that malformed sentences, missing words, grammatical mistakes, and muddled reasoning make the piece difficult to trust or even finish. One sarcastic line treated the visible imperfections as almost a certificate of human authorship, but the point was not that bad writing is desirable; it was that this did not resemble polished generic AI output. There was no real debate over model capability, training, safety, or AI applications. The narrow consensus was that speculative AI-authorship claims distract from the more obvious editorial failure: niche, rushed human writing presented without enough care for readers outside its in-group.
Where opinion split
The point at issue was whether the article’s strange style indicated AI generation. Skeptics of that claim argued that the errors, jargon, and uncontrolled context-switching instead reveal a human writer steeped in a niche community; the opposing suspicion was raised but received little substantive support.
Community Sentiment
Positives
- Several commenters found the prose too idiosyncratic and uneven to be convincing evidence of AI generation, favoring a concrete human explanation over reflexive machine blame.
- The thread usefully distinguished generic AI suspicion from a more plausible diagnosis: an author failed to adapt specialized community language for a general audience.
Concerns
- Speculation that every awkwardly written online essay is AI-made was treated as a shallow shortcut that obscures identifiable human editorial and rhetorical failures.
- The article’s errors and fractured phrasing made readers question its reasoning, while also showing that conspicuous sloppiness is not reliable evidence of machine authorship.
