“Breakfast with monsters”

Co-evolutionary pathways for the emerging Eco-opolis

(From substack post 05-07-026)

“I’d like to say a few words about “Breakfast with Monsters: Co-evolutionary pathways for the emerging Eco-opolis” .. This is the working title of an emerging project / book at the Mind-Lab / ‘Laboratory for Urban Collective Intelligence’.

This year of 2026 is not short of monsters… headed by the rogue USA presidency, there is a terrifying resurgence of warlords, dictators and populists who thrive on lies and hatred. In parallel runs the seemingly unstoppable disruption of climate and ecosystems, and mutation of social and economic (so-called) orders by dynamic forces which we can hardly understand.

The monster also has a kind of political-cultural meaning for the ‘interregnum’, based on Antonio Gramsci’s prison diaries with some collective rewording: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.

Here the monster is a mythological image that seems to express what we can now sense – superhuman forces, shaping and disrupting our world with huge speed and power.

Such monsters can be envisioned with many kinds of labels, such as those of ‘VUCA’ (with extensions): vulnerable / volatile, uncertain / unpredictable, complex / controversial, anxious / ambiguous….

This seems to express the challenge, which is to say we cannot say exactly what is going on. We do not have anything like enough data. If we ask the experts or the people who may claim to know, they are divided into opposing camps of power and ideology and social hierarchy. So the system is changing, beyond rational knowledge or control, with huge opportunities for what we might call monsters or ‘malefactors’… forces of extraction, hierarchy, colonisation, or plain destruction. Looking closely, the definition of who is a malefactor, who is a coloniser, depends very much on the point of view. There is no universal world order or accepted social-political ideology which can then define, for everybody concerned, “this person is nice and well-meaning, that one is a coloniser or war criminal.”

Such processes can be observed in every walk of life. Here we use the ‘STEEPC’ framework, a simple starting point for mapping the landscape of systemic change and transformation.

For the social dimension, it’s clear society is changing rapidly in ways which are not easy to understand: breakdown of traditional family and community structures, and the rise of fluid social networks based on digital-native attention services… all this combined with demographic change, longevity and birth rate reduction…
Technology is a powerful catalyst for economic change – starting with the techno-financialization wave and the platform economy: the techno-cultural wave as in attention / influence economy: the app economy which now runs essential services such as transport, housing, medicine and so on…
The globalisation and destruction of local and regional economies is nothing new, but we see this now at extraordinary levels where, for example in China, whole cities survive or fall on the basis of a social media trend. A
nd such technology can only accelerate the displacement of humans from their livelihood: as workers are fitted with cameras to observe what they do in order to train AI-enabled robots, it’s clear that much or most economic activity will soon be done at lower cost by machines, with game-changing effects on the social livelihood and the social order that supports.

So these are some of the monsters. Some talk about doom loops and addictive cycles of self-destruction, where monsters gather together – and any such map of doom loops can never be complete (but see pilot project on https://kumu.io/Joeravetz/loop-onomix-test#untitled-map ) . Some talk about ‘Poly-crisis’ and the intersection of many different systems of mutual destruction. Some talk about tipping points and the capacity for apparently highly ordered, structured systems to move towards a certain threshold and then to change dynamically and catastrophically.

For a simple doom-loop example, see the tourists who fly off to Mediterranean islands, which then catch fire due to the impact of climate change, caused in part by the air travel emissions of those same tourists. They have the option of getting back on a plane and escaping the fire: but the local’s only option is to risk their lives in a small boat run by brutal traffickers, as unwanted illegal migrants… This demonstrates the doom loop effect – it draws in not only the people who are the prime actors in that loop, but also others who have no part, no direct responsibility in causing their own displacement and destruction.

Many see these monsters as somewhere ‘out there’. They are the bad guys, the oligarchs, warlords, populists who profit from hatred, lies and division. I would argue it is more interesting and useful to see the monsters as ‘forces within’. They may be the well-meaning tourists who unwittingly bring storm and flood by simple physical impacts. It may be the enlightened middle class, the wokerati so-called, whose ‘good life’ depends on centuries of colonisation and extraction. We also have to look not only at the material structures of social, political, and economic systems – we look underneath, to the darker side, the inchoate mass of trauma, loss, guilt, outrage (I speak for myself…). From experience, it seems that if external conditions are suitable then internal challenges can maybe be contained or even resolved. If however, the external conditions are not resolved, then the internal challenges and darker forces (i.e. monsters) may break out or flare up into many kinds of destructive behaviour. On the macro level we build systems of patriarchy, colonisation, expropriation: and on the individual level we reproduced psychosis, guilt, trauma, violence or addiction, and their many combinations.

So the monsters here could be envisioned as dragons… and it’s very interesting that the dragon has a different cultural meanings around the world. In the West, the dragons are malevolent, fire-breathing monsters: while in the East, for example China, dragons are wise and beneficial, bringing vitality to agriculture, water and the human habitat.

So the rough and ready agenda is in. So how to ‘breakfast with monsters’, and begin a new kind of day?? Can we tame and transform them into well-meaning positive-thinking beings? Can we get smart or wise enough to learn how they work, to ride or even hijack that energy to mobilize pathways out of the ‘doom loops’, and towards ‘life-circles’? Can these combine and build a new kind of civilization, which we might call the Eco-opolis?

Maybe it’s more realistic to say we just don’t know – we cannot know collectively the final answers to any of these questions. What we can do, maybe, is to pick up, by whatever means, enough insights into the workings of the monsters and their games and loops and so on – to explore between the systems which are now falling to pieces, the seeds growing in the cracks of the rubble of a former order. We can nurture those seeds with water and nutrients, with insight and humanity and so on.

This opens the door to what we have called in other places the collective intelligence. Very broadly, this is not only problem-solving with 10 or 100 or 10,000 brains acting collectively. It’s also a journey, both individual and collective, of self-awareness and civilization building, with a full spectrum – emotional intelligence, technical expertise, cultural insights, even psychic awareness. In that sense we can talk about a ‘multi-versity’ of minds – the CHAI or ‘collective human-artificial intelligence’: the ‘CHOSI’ ‘collective human / other species intelligence’ – and so on.

Overall, this is the journey towards the Eco-opolis, the co-evolution of civilizations yet to come. This is not an end state, but an endless journey towards ecological sustainability, economic livelihood, social justice, political cooperation and so on.

So in this kind of journey, the monsters are not simply dark forces out there, waiting to take us down. They are also the dynamic energy, the ingredients for the breakfast, and the vision to start a new kind of day. So our ‘breakfast’ is more than a taming of monsters – it’s a transformation towards a wiser kind of dragon, as a force for co-evolution of a future civilisation.

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This is a sketch tour of the project / book now taking shape – “Breakfast with Monsters: mapping the multiversity and building the Eco-opolis” This one may not be written by a lone author in a darkened room – this is more a living program of enquiry and experimentation, a map of a landscape or vision in the mist. As such, it is a project of collective intelligence, a fungal self-organizing network of energy and insights with anyone who may share such visions. The more that network can exchange and learn and create, the more such collective intelligence can mobilise and take shape. We are fortunate to live in very interesting times….