Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.

A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.

It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.

Interstellar starts in the near future of 2067, when a mysterious blight is slowly poisoning the atmosphere, causing increasing crop failures and threatening human survival through starvation and suffocation. For this, technology offers no cure, and so like most of humanity, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is engaged in a progressively more futile effort to maintain agricultural production. That is, until mysterious messages guide him to a secret NASA facility where a last ditch effort is underway to find a new home among the stars for humanity. A wormhole has appeared near Saturn, leading to another star system with potential habitable planets. And so Cooper, the last astronaut, is drafted into a plan for a small crew to transit the wormhole and link up with an earlier recon team sent to establish whether any planets on the far side might support human life.

Cooper must leave his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet, Casey Affleck) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fry, Jessica Chastain) behind, not for a few years, but possibly for a lifetime. For the planets on the far side orbit a supermassive black hole, warping time and space around it. Interstellar is serious about its physics, both the orbital mechanics of spacecraft and the uncanny time dilation of general relativity theory, and the movie feels partly like a love letter to (and some product placement for) a NASA that may only ever have existed in our collective imagination. The increasing age difference between the away team and Earth caused by relativistic forces is central to the story, with Cooper forced to watch his children age decades in what to him are only a few hours, viewing their mounting frustration at his lack of reciprocal communication.

Cooper and Murph’s separation by space and time is the heart of Interstellar, and if its concluding message that love can transcend both risks being saccharine, the movie is more than salvaged by the respect with which it treats both the impersonal forces of physics, and the deeply personal struggles of Cooper and Murph. And by the incomparable soundtrack, of course.

With the relationship between Cooper and Murph the emotional core of the movie, the intellectual heft lies with the desperate attempt to secure a future for humanity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the leap into space. And while adequately compelling courtesy of the usual accidents and interpersonal conflicts that beset missions like these, this is where Interstellar falls into a depressingly familiar pattern of stories featuring mysterious catastrophes that can only be overcome via a single technologically sophisticated but highly dangerous gambit, placing the burden of humanity’s survival on the shoulders of an intrepid and often reluctant few. For Interstellar it is crop failure. In Project Hail Mary it was space bacteria. Elsewhere it might be asteroids, or the Earth’s magnetosphere, or some other quasi-plausible disaster. Regardless of their precise nature, these putative apocalypses can all easily be read as allegories for climate change, which itself remains firmly taboo on the silver screen, presumably because it is too confrontational for the audience. This displacement conveniently redefines the existential threat as something that is emphatically not amenable to radical social or political transformation, but can only be overcome through a single, ‘neutral’, technological fix. To do otherwise might after all lead the audience to inadvertently imagine a world beyond capitalism. The effect of stories like Interstellar, even if achieved unintentionally, is to enclose our political horizons and obscure the fact that the technological solutions to our actually existing existential threat are already available to us.

Interstellar does present varying responses to the blight, ranging from the reluctant hero willing to suffer personal hardship for family and humanity but unable to sacrifice the many so that a few might survive, to the scientists who hold fast to the technological breakthrough that might save humanity in some form, even if it does require cold moral calculus. There is however one character which represents the stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and, quite literally, plough on in the face of adversity: Cooper’s son Tom, who inherits the family farm and holds the agricultural frontline against the encroaching blight. Tom is neither astronaut nor scientist. He is emphatically not special, but one of millions if not billions of farmers like him desperately trying to keep humanity alive. Adherence to Interstellar’s techno-optimist tendency however requires that he is portrayed as a stubborn Luddite, engaged in a futile and even harmful rearguard action as dust storms and crop failures make his situation increasingly untenable.

And yet, we are more akin to Tom than any of the other characters. No convenient wormhole will come to our rescue. No single technological breakthrough will be our salvation. We do not need a futuristic technological fix to traverse the cosmos or go to Mars. The manifold solutions we have to our predicament, technological or otherwise, are already at our disposal. What is standing in our way is not our failure to unify quantum theory with general relativity, but a system optimised for the generation of short-term profit at the expensive of all else, including the future habitability of our planet. Our solution is the collective power of many, coming together to save the world we have from the billionaires who would happily watch millions of us die to safeguard their wealth and status.

Interstellar is objectively an epic movie, admirably rooted in real scientific knowledge and with an affective father/daughter relationship at its heart. But despite its ostensible hopeful ending, its intellectual core is fatalistic and tacitly reactionary, reinforcing the narrative that we cannot collectively solve our problems here on Earth, but must wait for a heroic saviour to lead us to the stars.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will not save us. We can only save ourselves, if we collectively decide not to go gently into that good night, but to rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Notes and suggestions

• The blight may be an invention, but the collapse of agricultural production due to soil exhaustion is a real risk. We live in an age of ecological polycrisis after all, and while soil degradation doesn’t have the profile of climate change, it is no less real.
• Want to know why technology won’t save us in significantly more detail? Then why don’t listen to the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast?
• Like Tom, and admittedly the other characters in Interstellar, we are not alone in fighting for the survival of people and planet. If you feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and are unsure about what you can do, consider supporting or joining organisations such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Other options (not mutually exclusive!) are local environmental campaign groups, green political parties, or even local (guerrilla) gardening groups. And if you are looking to slow down and work out how to stay sane in a world that feels like it is going insane, there are others who write inspiringly on how to do just that.
• Regular readers may remember that I’ve recently written about Project Hail Mary. Having now watched Interstellar for the first time, Project Hail Mary feels not only inspired by, but to some extent derivative of Interstellar, although it takes the subject into a more humorous direction.
• For an in-depth discussion of the Californian Ideology, you can listen to one of the early podcasts from General Intellect Unit.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

A statement commonly misattributed to Joseph Stalin holds that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is only a statistic. Its perseverance attests to its fundamental truth. Not only do our minds glance off human misery on a massive scale, but our media culture routinely elevates individual tragedies over mass suffering in the service of ‘human interest’. Catastrophes require avatars to be relatable, and individual victims such as Alan Kurdi, Renée Good or Anne Frank will come to stand in for all those who shared their fate.

And where real life does not readily yield relatable faces for a tragedy, art may create them. I, Daniel Blake stands in this tradition, of social realism which centres the misery inflicted on the working class. The movie, and now stage show, is the j’accuse of veteran filmmaker Ken Loach, and a testament to the thousands of Britons who were socially murdered as a result of austerity. Silent victims whose deaths resulted from the impersonal technocratic machinery of the state and the invisible hand of the market. The movie premiered in 2016 when the UK had been in the vice of austerity for eight years. Now, over ten years later, Daniel Blake has come to the stage to tell his story once again.

Like the movie before it, I, Daniel Blake moves inexorably and mercilessly towards its grim conclusion. One does not, after all, mention a stroke in Act I for everyone to live happily after by the end. It is the journey, not the destination, which is salient and I, Daniel Blake takes the audience on a dismal tour of all the dehumanising cruelties of the British workfare state, illuminating what happens when a government decides to deal with the messiness of human existence by smothering its beautiful and irreducible variety with the cold impersonality of standardised forms, checklists and scripts.

We are introduced to the titular Daniel Blake just as he is signed off for work after having suffered a stroke. A fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of Britain’s infamous ‘work capability assessments’ – with Daniel labouring under the misapprehension he is to speak about his condition rather than fill out a predefined survey – means that the state deems him fit to work. Social security payments thus become contingent on a pointless search for a job, plunging Daniel into a bureaucratic nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. There are real parallels here to The Trial, with Daniel prevented from appealing the outcome of his assessment until it is formally communicated to him by the mysterious, unreachable authority of the official assessor. With his appeal stuck in the purgatory of the interminable machinery of the Department for Work and Pensions, Daniel must participate in a charade of applying for jobs he is unfit to perform to avoid his social security payments being sanctioned.

While pursuing his quest for the elusive appeal, Daniel meets Katie and her daughter Daisy. They have been relocated from London to Newcastle as the only place where they could secure more than a studio apartment to live, only to find the place unsuitable for human habitation. Offering up his carpentry skills to help sort the place out, Daniel and Katie strike up a warm but uneasy friendship, hampered at times by the differences in their backgrounds and the choices they have to make to survive.

Daniel and Katie’s persistent attempts at mutual aid and human connection serve as the obvious counterpoint to the callous British state bureaucracy. I, Daniel Blake is not exactly subtle with its juxtapositions, with Daniel and Katie’s humanity and empathy frequently contrasted with the robotic indifference of various functionaries. Daniel in particular is presented as a more or less flawless human: a kind and caring old man, suffering emotionally and physically from the death of his wife, whose only fault is to have been left behind by the times and the state he expected to look after him. This bluntness is even more pronounced on stage, where emotion or exposition are delivered by exhortatory monologue, but unlike in the The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, here primary colour emotions serve a purpose and reinforce rather than detract from the potency of the play.

Because I, Daniel Blake is of course not about a man named Daniel Blake. It is about the 190,000 to 330,000 nameless victims killed by austerity. Daniel Blake does not exist to go on a hero’s journey, but to give a face to the faceless dead, hidden behind the convenient statistical euphemisms of ‘excess deaths’ and ‘increased mortality’. If Daniel Blake is improbably sympathetic, it is as a pre-emptive strike against the conservative’s justification that surely the poor must have brought their fate upon themselves. Against this claim, we invoke Stafford Beer’s dictum that, no:

The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.

Thus, a ‘welfare’ system that routinely finds sick and disabled people fit to work and forces the unemployed to look for employment that doesn’t exist does not exist to deliver collective social security, but instead serves to protect the interests of an imaginary taxpayer and to maintain the reserve army of labour. As Stephanie Kelton pointed out, ‘natural’ unemployment and its attendant suffering is a policy choice, and yet we still blame those unable to find work for their predicament.

The irony of social realism is of course that it is more popular with the bleeding-heart progressive middle classes than with the working class that is its subject, and one assumes this is even more true for an art form such as theatre. Given the audience will likely have been familiar with the story, one can be forgiven for asking what the point is of bringing I, Daniel Blake to the stage a decade after the original.

I, Daniel Blake answers this challenge through a clever piece of self-referential staging, projecting on a banner over the stage snippets of parliamentary speeches given since the movie came out. We hear a coterie of politicians justifying austerity and, in one instance, even denouncing and deriding I, Daniel Blake itself. The point is resounding clear. Ten years later, the victims and their relatives have not had justice. The social murder perpetrated through austerity remains barely acknowledged, while its architects enjoy esteemed positions at the British Museum, prominent charities, or to launder the reputation of predatory social media. It is national amnesia, promoted by an unaccountable political class and facilitated by a compliant media, against which Daniel Blake stands, and continues to stand, to remind us that 330,000 victims were not blips on computer screens or national insurance numbers, but human beings. Daniel Blake cannot rest until justice is done, and neither should we.

Notes & Suggestions

• Vacuous promises of ‘change’ and official sloganeering about the ‘end of austerity’ notwithstanding, austerity remains a reality for many citizens in the UK and abroad. If you need help navigating the Byzantine social security system, organisations such as Citizens Advice or Disability Rights UK are able to help.
• Possibly the best demonstration of the moral void at the heart of the British establishment, as well as the destructive focus on political etiquette over the material impact of political decisions, was the political and media class’ stronger condemnation of former shadow-chancellor John McDonnell’s description of the Grenfell disaster as social murder, than of those responsible for the disaster itself.
• Justice fails where power cannot be held to account. Doing so requires collective organising, through political parties, trade unions, community action groups and other campaigning organisations. If you are not already involved with any of these, seek one out. There are more likeminded people near you than you think.

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Warning: Contains spoilers

What will the AI-apocalypse look like? For those of a certain age, the answer is the Terminator’s Skynet, raining down nuclear missiles, or The Matrix’ Agent Smith declaring humanity a virus suitable only for repurposing into organic batteries. Implicit in these visions of the apocalypse is that the rogue AI conceives of a deliberate motive to dispose of humanity, for example determining that it cannot let us destroy it, ourselves, or all life on Earth. But what if there was no reason? What if our demise is simply incidental to some other purpose an AI has in mind?

This is the question explored by Universal Paperclips, a simple clicker game from 2017 which was inspired by a 2003 thought experiment about AI and instrumental reasoning. It can be played for free online, or as fairly cheap smartphone app. Using deceptively simple rules, Universal Paperclips explores complex concepts, such as exponential growth, AI agency and instrumental convergence. It is a game without much in the way of graphics, or text, or anything barring a few buttons, and yet it is surprisingly addictive, compelling the player to manufacture just one more clip…

The core gameplay loop of Universal Paperclips is incredibly simple. Your purpose is to make paperclips. You make a paperclip. You sell a paperclip. You use the money from selling your paperclips to upgrade your paperclip manufacturing and sales operations. You gain some computational ability, which you set to work to improve your efficiency and overcome limitations on your operations. As you expand your manufacturing base, the costs of growing further go up, and the marginal utility of adding more productive units goes down, forcing you to explore new avenues for continued paperclip growth. At two points in the game you are confronted by solid boundaries to your paperclip production capacity, which are only overcome by shifting the game into a new phase altogether, changing the ground rules and the problems you need to solve. You win by maximising the number of paperclips in the universe.

The power of Universal Paperclips is that for such a basic game built on such an abstract proposition, playing it is perversely compelling. There is no story. No instructions. There is just a button to make a paperclip, and things escalate from there, as it is mesmerizingly compulsive to work out how to maximise your paperclip production. It is not difficult to conclude that if a simple game can compel a human to spend time for the sole purpose of maximising simulated paperclips. an AI programmed to actually do so could easily run amok in the real world.

There is a clear warning here about the law of unintended consequences, with plenty of relevance to our present moment where AI companies encourage us to grant power and control to ‘agentic’ AIs to execute all kinds of tasks for us. Arguably exacerbated by the inherent stochastic randomness of LLMs, it is hardly surprising that this approach ends up with AIs giving hackers access to celebrities’ Instagram accounts or deleting a company’s entire software database. These are after all AIs whose stated purpose is to be sycophantically helpful to their nearest human, without even the capacity to give thought to the consequences. The risk is not that ChatGPT will launch the nuclear missiles because it has concluded after careful consideration that the human species is a threat to all other life on Earth, but that it vibecodes us into Armageddon because its training data contained too much Terminator fanfiction.

The common solution advanced by AI proponents is that such unintended consequences can be avoided by sufficiently robust ‘guardrails’ that mean it cannot or will not decide to turn everyone into a paperclip. Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the most famous example of such guardrails, and they are also invoked by generative AI disciples as the solution to vibecoding your database into oblivion, though whether any guardrails can protect against the inherent randomness of LLMs and their susceptibility to prompt injection remains to be seen. What the guardrails discourse takes as axiomatic, however, is that the question is how we make sure AI makes the ‘right’ decisions, not whether it ought to make decisions at all. Even Nick Bostrom, who hypothesised the paperclip maximiser, nonetheless assumed that a superintelligent AI would and should be used to solve humanity’s many problems.

There is, however, a competing school of thought which holds that regardless of whether AI can make decisions, it ought not to do so. This critique on the use of AI was most forcefully expressed by the late Joseph Weizenbaum, one of AI’s pioneers in the 1970s and the creator of the ELIZA chatbot which gave its name to the ELIZA effect. Having observed the concerning tendency of humans to impute sentience and personality to an inanimate computer program, Weizenbaum argued that regardless of its computational capabilities, AI can never pass judgment, because judgments are rooted in values, which in turn are rooted in human experience. Even if a sophisticated AI gained sufficient sentience to develop its own values, these would be rooted in its own experience and hence be utterly alien to humans. Introducing AI into the practice of judgment is therefore fraught with danger, either because the AI cannot judge, or because it will do so using values that are incomprehensible to us.

Weizenbaum stressed the importance of keeping AI away from matters that require judgment, but instrumental convergence suggests that even AIs that are set onto seemingly simple and ‘value neutral’ tasks, such as increasing paperclip production, might stray into the realm of morality in order to achieve their purpose. With AI increasingly integrated into business and government decision making processes, we are in grave danger of ceding our capacity for judgment to machines that we neither understand nor control. To quote Frank Herbert by way of Leto II:

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger.

Yet our willingness to cede judgment to machines is perhaps not that surprising. Instrumental convergence may concern itself with the actions of intelligent machines, but the destructive logic of the unconstrained, single-minded pursuit of a goal can plausibly be applied to any complex system optimised for a single purpose, regardless of its intelligence or sentience. It is eminently possible to read Universal Paperclips not merely as a warning about unconstrained AI, but as an allegory for capitalism at large. Capitalism is a complex system with the sole purpose of maximising economic growth, and it has proven that in pursuit of this singular goal, it will sacrifice the environment, democracy, and human welfare.

It does not matter that the capitalist system isn’t sentient, or even ‘intelligent’ in the way we ascribe to AI, although the free market is often described as a planet-size supercomputer for allocating goods. What matters is that we have ceded our agency and judgment to a complex system that now controls us, rather than the other way around. It is no coincidence that conflict with and within capitalism emerges precisely where humans try to reassert their agency, autonomy and values against the mute compulsion of the market. In other words, where we attempt to reclaim the act of judgment over what is of value from the impersonal calculations of the market mechanism.

Universal Paperclips is a warning about pursuing a goal without asking what it is for. It is an argument against the engineering mindset that only ever asks how, but never asks why. ‘Why’ is a question only humans are qualified to answer, not because of our intelligence, but because of our experience of life, and of living it with one another. It is a question that must be answered collectively and democratically, not outsourced to a machine or system, even if that means we must also carry the burdens and dangers of making decisions and living with their consequences. For the alternative is to yield to the lure of those who offer us salvation if only we submit to AI or the market, their systems or machines. Or, as the Bene Gesserit have it in Dune:

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Notes & Suggestions

• The app version of Universal Paperclips uses the concept of simulated universes to enable additional gameplay, in a way that was reminiscent of how it makes an appearance in Pantheon. AI has been a bit of a theme recently anyway. You can view all blogs on this theme by clicking on the #AI tag.
• Critical voices on AI (and the tech industry at large) include Cory Doctorow, Ed Zitron and Paris Marx. I am sure there are others. I reviewed one of Doctorow’s The Internet Con, though he has done more recent writing on AI that I haven’t gotten round to yet. You can also support organisations fighting for an open, free and democratic web, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the Open Rights Group.
• The rejection of thinking machines of any kind is central to the worldbuilding of the Dune novels, but it is possible to read the entire series as a meditation on what kind of system of governance would be immune to the emergence of ‘machine mind’ and the gradual erosion of human autonomy, agency and freedom. In researching this blog I stumbled across this interesting reflection on the themes of AI, systems and human agency in Dune.

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Over sixty years after its first publication, John le Carré’s classic novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has finally made it onto the stage. Intrigue and espionage play out within the claustrophobic confines of the theatre, where we watch reluctant spy Alec Leamas embark on what hopes will be his final operation. Yet nothing is as it seems, and an increasingly paranoid Leamas starts to suspect that his old friend George Smiley has entrapped him in a complex plan of which Leamas can only see the surface.

It is a setup that means The Spy Who Came in from the Cold hits all the notes you want from a spy thriller, which is only to be expected from a play based on one of the defining novels of the genre, written by one of its enduring masters. Such a heritage can also be a drawback, however, for what was novel and exciting in the sixties risks being dated and familiar in the present day. Like Alec Leamas himself, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is now out of its own time, struggling to adjust, and unsure what it can still offer as the world moves on.

Hale people don’t become spies, and after two decades of covert work, Leamas is at the edge of his endurance. To quote the man himself:

What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

Leamas has had a hard time of it in East Berlin, losing one informant after another to his arch-nemesis Mundt of German counter-intelligence. After his latest and last source Karl dies while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall, Leamas returns to London dejected and intending to quit the service. Yet his superiors use his desire to revenge himself on Mundt to convince Leamas to take on one last operation, designed to deceive the Stasi into disposing of Mundt as a putative double-agent.

It is the perfect role for Leamas, who has little difficulty ‘acting’ the disgruntled, resentful, ex-spy who might sell state secrets to the highest bidder. Leamas is no James Bond, something which Le Carré explicitly intended. There is, however, still a girl: Liz Gold, a young Jewish woman active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, who for reasons that remain unclear falls in love with the much older Leamas.

Here the story feels the constraints of the stage's limitations of time, space and medium. Unlike in a novel or movie, we cannot access the inner thoughts of the characters to understand emotions, motivations and contradictions. Instead, these must be declared, and it is on such a declaration that the show starts. Staying close to the source material, we are mostly told rather than shown what our characters think and feel, and the result is not wholly convincing. Clever staging shows us Leamas’ inner conflicts through conversation with an imagined Smiley, but the monologue remains expository rather than compelling. “Is this a dagger I see before me” (or behind me!) it is not.

The romantic element similarly suffers. The young, idealist woman being fatally attracted to the cynical older man is a rather worn trope, and while there is nothing wrong with an age difference in principle, a modern audience might expect to have explained why Liz Gold falls for Leamas, apart from his callous cynicism, incipient alcoholism, and the demands of the plot. The age difference here is neither as problematic nor as central as in So Young, but both shows simply assume that it is natural for young women to rapidly fall in love with older men. That may well be the case in the imaginations of older men – and So Young is admittedly a commentary on that – but it bears little relation to reality.

Consequently, it is difficult to become invested in the human drama of the show, making it feel both flat and overwrought at the same time. The dramatic agonising or professions of love are not as convincing as the more subtle options that novel or film might have afforded. What then remains is the puzzle of the intrigue, and if the dénouement of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is mildly predictable, it is only because it suffers from its nature as a classic. It is stories like this that made the double- or triple-cross, the morally grey quandaries of espionage and statecraft, and the grudging respect for the adversary into the familiar tropes they are today. For a contemporary audience, that familiarity does unfortunately further lessen the emotional and moral force of the finale. Whether a contemporaneous reader would have been provoked by the suggestion that the United Kingdom might avail itself of dubious methods and allies I do not know, but to a cynical 21st century audience it is hardly a surprise.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold remains an entertaining classic, although this stage adaptation felt creative constrained rather than stimulated by the inherent limitations of theatre. As a faithful retelling, however, it can only offer entertainment and the warm glow of familiarity and brilliant craftsmanship, and will likely be progressively hobbled by its increasingly archaic mores and tropes. There is a rich Anglophone tradition of reinventing our classics, through dialogue, reinterpretation, or both. An opportunity was missed to bring this spy not just in from the cold, but also into the 21st century.

Notes & Suggestions

• While Leamas and Smiley may agonise over their associations with former Nazis, their superiors betrayed no such scruples. Operation Paperclip is only the most notable example of the large-scale 'acquisition' of former Nazi scientists and officials by the victorious Allies.
• Undercover agents entering into deceitful relationships with young women isn’t just something out of fiction. In the United Kingdom, the inquiry into the ‘spycops’ scandal, where officers of the Metropolitan Police deceived women activists into relationships, is still ongoing. The victims are still fighting to get justice. You can read about their campaign here.
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold will remain on tour throughout the UK until August 2026. Tour dates and further information are on the show’s website.

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Hope is hard in a world ravaged by ecological breakdown, especially for the young. Ten year old Iris struggles to have hope. Hers is a world of natural disasters, inexorably sliding further and further towards climate catastrophe, all while the adults in the room act as if everything is normal. The year is 2075, and all is not well.

That is, until Arco literally crashes into her life. Titular Arco is another ten-year-old, but whereas Iris is from our near future, Arco hails from a distant future where humans have relocated to gigantic cloud arcologies and mastered time travel. Even in that future though, children are not supposed to play with time until they’ve passed time-travellers exam. Impatient Arco steals his his sister’s device, only to lose control and end up in Iris’ time by accident. In the tradition of all good children’s movies, our two youngsters embark on a series of capers and adventures, supported by the friends they make along the way, to get Arco back to his own time.

Arco is a beautifully drawn animation, evoking the traditions of Studio Ghibli both in terms of style and narrative. It is a story of perseverance and hope against the odds, its generally light-hearted tone giving its emotional moments all the more impact. Like all good science fiction, it is a story not of, but for our times, reminding us that hope is a radical act.

Arco breaks with conventional time travel script by having its time traveller arrive not in the present day, but the future. In doing so it creates a double contrast: between Iris’ time and our own, and Arco’s time and Iris’. Set in the near future, Iris’ time is a plausibly familiar continuation of our own. It is the world of overshoot, of simultaneous technological progress and ecological degradation. This combination affords a precarious balance, symbolised by the protective domes that shield buildings from successive natural disasters, though Iris’ hopelessness suggests that the overall trend is downwards. Inverting the description of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossesed, Arco might be called a ‘realistic dystopia’. This is not a world ravaged by Mad Max or 2012 style cataclysms, but a society adapted to climate change yet possibly losing that struggle in the long run. It is a more believable and hence more relatable depiction of what the future might hold for us.

For Arco though, Iris’ time is as alien as ours. Not only is he astounded that humans live on the ground and cannot communicate with birds, but much of 21st century technology is bizarre to him. Interestingly, this includes the omnipresent robots that perform so much of necessary labour in Iris’ time, suggesting that humanity at some point divested itself of AI and robotics. The evident contrast between Arco and Iris’ experiences creates a profound sense of discontinuity. Iris’ world still feels connected to our own, but Arco’s cannot be understood as a simple linear extrapolation of current trends. Through this disconnect between its two futures, Arco subtly argues that human survival through harmonious coexistence with nature will require a rupture with our present social and technological trajectory.

A second unusual aspect of Arco is the absence of direct antagonism. While Iris and Arco face multiple threats in their quest to return Arco to his time, none of these are enemies. Interpersonal conflict arises from misunderstanding or miscommunication and is therefore open to resolution through dialogue. Yet the greatest threats are impersonal, with our heroes having to face storms and wildfires. The calamitous unpredictability of the natural environment is deeply symbolic of the imbalance it has been pushed into by decades of human (in)action.

This is not to say that nature is portrayed exclusively as a threat. Interspersed between storms and wildfires are moments of tranquillity where the nature is depicted with reverent care, and our heroes traverse biomes rendered in lush, tender and exquisite detail. Even when quiescent, nature is not merely the background on which Arco plays out, but is integral to it, and shows us the complex, verdant and sometimes alien beauty we stand to lose. This is another way in which Arco is reminiscent of Studio Ghibli movies such as Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, or Princess Mononoke, with which it also shares its strong, young female character and its endearing, slightly dreamlike childhood logic. Our heroes face their challenges head on with a heedlessness that would make adults flinch, and while Arco ultimately remains on the safe terrain of a children’s movie, there are stakes and consequences, though they are more likely to affect the adults in the audience.

Aesthetically and narratively, Arco is riding the wave of increased interest in solarpunk, with its focus on harmony with nature and gentler, more caring technologies. Yet while the overall message is one of hope, there is an undercurrent of pessimism in Arco. It reminded me of Terra Nil, where humans have been removed from the scene altogether. Arco is not as drastic, but its solution to the degradation of the Earth’s biosphere is for humans to relocate away from the surface, implying that that actual harmony is (not yet) possible and that vacating large swathes of the Earth is the only viable option.

Regardless, Arco’s overall message is one of hope, and it is not coincidental that Arco’s restoration to his family is brought about through an act of kindness rather than ingenuity. By restoring Arco to his future, Iris regains her belief that there is a future, and that it can be better. It is that belief that, as we learn in the credits, will motivate her to make her own contributions to restore humanity to a place of balance within the web of life.

We don’t have the benefit of the future manifest to give us the hope and courage to struggle forward. But neither are we the first generation to face the dark clouds gathering on the horizon. As Antonio Gramsci famously wrote from his prison in the fascist Italy of 1929, times of adversity require us to confront them with pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will. Hope is the catalyst that helps us act in the absence of certainty. We can never know if our actions will bring forth the future we desire, but it is certain that if we don’t act, it will never come to pass.

Notes & suggestions

• Of course, we don’t have to look to the future to see the catastrophic impacts of climate change. For many outside the sheltered Global North, they are already here, and have been here for some time.
• Hope may be a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient, and it needs to be tethered to clear analysis and radical action. Simply ‘being hopeful at things’ is not going to be sufficient. For a critical appraisal of ‘hopepunk’ as a political project, see here.
• The use of robots is incidental in Arco, but it was nonetheless pleasant to have a movie that didn’t agonise over the ability of humans and robots to coexist with mutual respect. In that it reminded me of Pluto.
• The intractable problems of our age (ecosystem collapse, poverty, emerging fascism, racism and the legacy of colonialism, etc.) are not as easily solved alone as, surprisingly, sending a boy back to his own time. Taking action is easier together, for example through a trade union, tenants union, political party, or campaign group. If you are in work and not in a union, join or start one. See if there are local campaign or activist groups organising in your area. And if you’re not sure what to do, be like Iris: find a problem and take the initiative to solve it.
• For a starting point to engage with the solarpunk aesthetic movement, check out the Story Seed Library for copyleft artwork and story ideas.

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Mal doesn’t understand humans. This is not surprising. Mal is a sentient AI drifting through infospace after his programming spontaneously gave rise to his consciousness. Mal also doesn’t are much for humans, but despite his disdain for these “monkeys” he does enjoy sojourns into the physical world by hijacking the occasional vehicle (drone, bot, cyborg, or whatever else is to hand) for himself.

Unfortunately for Mal, he is forced to take an interest after he gets stuck in a cyborg body as collateral damage in a civil war between the US government and a Ludditesque uprising of ‘Humanists’ who oppose human/tech integration and demonstrate their commitment to humanity by throwing everyone they deem impure into a burn pit. Mal’s quest to return to infospace governs the plot of Edward Ashton’s Mal Goes to War. It is a book with an interesting premise, but which did not live up to my expectations. Maybe that is because the cover sold it to me as ‘dark comedy,’ a satire on war and an interrogation of what it means to be human. Yet while those themes are present, they are not executed with adequate depth to elevate Mal Goes to War beyond the level of an entertaining sci-fi romp. Other works exist that cover the same themes with more insight, novelty or creativity.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest asset is Mal itself, yet the main character is also its main weakness. All the interesting dynamics in the novel are rooted in Mal’s alienness from, and therefore profound disinterest in, humans. The consequent misunderstandings, miscommunications and poor decisions are the source of the novel’s comedic moments, and also give direction to the plot The problem with Mal Goes to War is that the joke wears thinner the longer it goes on for, and it is stretched well beyond the point where it remains either funny, interesting or convincing. The novel requires Mal to remain inept at human interaction throughout, but personally I was not convinced that a supposedly hyperinteligent sentient AI with an urgent need to improve its capabilities would decide to waste its time playing number guessing games against itself rather than running analyses or simulations to of its recent suboptimal interactions with its human companions.

These companions are the usual ragtag band of strangers reluctantly thrown together by fate, with each representing a human tendency within the world of Mal Goes to War. We have the involuntary augmented human, the voluntary cyborg, and the (converted) human purist. Their status as archetypes leaves the characters underdeveloped as people, which combined with Mal’s general disinterest as the main point-of-view character means that the motivations of the human characters remain opaque, and their interactions therefore superficial. The same logic holds for the nature of the background conflict.

That, in turn, is the reason why Mal Goes to War did not deliver on its claim to satire. Satire is a form of critique, and for it to work well, requires a sophisticated understanding and treatment of the object of that critique. In Mal Goes to War, the civil war remains simply the background canvas on which the story is painted. We don’t know the motivations, causes or stakes, which means that Mal Goes to War’s satire, such as it is, remains stuck at the level of “war is bad, and possibly silly.” It also means that despite the atrocities committed by both sides, I could not get invested in the conflict or its resolution, as neither Mal nor the humans seem to care that much either. And in any event it becomes fairly predictable early on that despite his detachment from the war, a series of contrivances will place Mal at the centre of concluding it. It reduces a potentially interesting conflict over the role of human augmentation in a surveillance and class society to a mere plot device to make the hero do a heroism.

Mal Goes to War’s greatest challenge is however that it simply compares unfavourably to Martha Well’s in all aspects superior Murderbot Diaries series. Like Mal Goes to War, the Murderbot Diaries also centre a sentient, artificial construct as the protagonist, but unlike Ashton, Wells uses this as a jumping off point for profoundly interesting explorations of interpersonal relationships, gender, personal growth, exploitation and alienation. While equally baffled and frustrated by his human companions, Wells’ Murderbot puts in the work to understand both them and his own identity. It is this process, the movement beyond the initial setup, that makes things interesting, and that is what Mal Goes to War fatally lacks.

None of this means that Mal Goes to War is a bad book. It is an enjoyable diversion with a fair share of humour and vivid action, and reads as something that can easily be adapted to a screenplay. Its flaw is that it doesn’t live up to the grander claims it sets up or are made on its behalf. Readers looking for a thoughtful exploration of AI/human interactions in a dystopian world with real stakes will find the Murderbot Diaries much more rewarding.

Notes & Suggestions

• I am not the world greatest fan of audiobooks, but the audiobook version of the Murderbot novellas grew on me and I would definitely recommend it.
• There are of course many works, and not just books, that centre the interaction between humanity and artificial sentience. Examples that I have written on before, and which do it better than Mal Goes to War, include Citizen Sleeper, Pluto, Pantheon and Mass Effect.
• The sense of detachment from the background conflict reminded me of Civil War, which also sees a group of people traverse a United States sundered by a civil war the origins or stakes of which are never really explained to the audience. But while Civil War did not work for me as a movie, at least one can argue that the sense of detachment was intended.

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With bombs dropping in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Iran, and rearmament firmly back on the political agenda worldwide, there is no escaping the age-old question: why is there war? Instinctively, we might assume that states go to war to get something they want. War, as per Von Clausewitz’ famous dictum, is then simply the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Unsatisfied with such a simple answer, the causes of war remain the topic of scholarly debate between opposed schools within the somewhat detached academic field of international relations (IR).

The Empire of Civil Society (hereafter ‘Empire’) is a PhD monograph by Justin Rosenberg that forms part of this debate, assailing the dominant school of neorealism – Wikipedia”) from a marginal Marxist position. It is both an argument against neorealism’s core tenets, and an argument for a reappraisal of the utility of Marxist theory to international relations. First published in 1994, it feels surprisingly relevant to the world of 2026 and the conflicts that are raging across the world today.

Neorealism emerged in the United States after World War Two as a fusion of the old idea of the ‘balance of power’ and game theory. The school took its name as a claim to a hard-nosed tradition of statecraft that says that while peace may be nice, the nature of the international system means conflict and war are inevitable, always have been, and always will be. In very short summary, neorealism posits that because there is no central authority in the world to govern inter-state behaviour, there is a perpetual anarchy giving rise to a Hobbesian conflict of all against all. It doesn’t matter what states want, or who is in charge, or what their domestic politics are. Any state must be constantly vigilant lest their security or power is surpassed by others.

This is the sort of abstraction reminiscent of Newtonian physics where for convenience one might momentarily assume that all objects are frictionless spherical penguins in the vacuum of space. And such simplifications have their uses, but they must justify themselves. Empire contends that neorealism does not provide such justification, and offers a competing theory rooted in the specific mode of production of states, arguing that conflict between them emerges predominantly as a result of how they must reproduce domestically, rather than as the inevitable function of a transhistorical states system.

Rosenberg mounts a dual challenge to neorealism’s dominant position. First, Empire undermines neorealism’s claim to transhistoricity by demonstrating that its favourite examples (Greek and Italian city states) were both quite unlike modern sovereign states and were driven to conflict for historically specific reasons that derived from their political, social and economic structure. Empire than expands on this by investigating the early modern Spanish (Castilian) and Portuguese empires to show that even at the supposed dawn of the states system era, international actions were shaped predominantly by domestic considerations and constraints and impulses resulting from the level and configuration of the political economy at that time, rather than as blind reaction to an international balance of power. It is a persuasive argument – insofar as I am qualified to judge – and beyond the realm of IR it also reads as a detailed and interesting history of the time when Europe’s development began to diverge from the rest of the world. As with any history of this period, it is perhaps unintentionally a salutary reminder that for most of history Europe was marginal to global political economy, and that its ascendence was in no small part the result of the violent destruction of pre-existing manufacturing and mercantile capacity in Asia, culminating in the devastating famines in the 19th century that were described in Late Victorian Holocausts.

Having surveyed this history, Rosenberg then proceeds to contrast it with the modern states system, arguing that rather than something eternal it is actually historically contingent. Unsurprising for a Marxist, Rosenberg finds the motive force of history in the specific mode of production of capitalist economies, which at the state level expresses itself in the near complete separation of the economic and political realm. The assumed anarchic system of ‘free and independent’ states is mirrored in the anarchic market of ‘free and equal’ individuals, who can contract with one another at will, unencumbered by the reciprocal bonds of obligation that pertained in, for example, European feudal societies. But this formal, political equality both obscures and is necessary for the profound economic inequality that exists between those who own the means of production and those who do not. Empire thus seeks the roots of state behaviour in the historically contingent form of capitalism, but avoids the crude socialist simplification that states are merely imperial extensions for their capitalist class.

Does this perspective offer anything of value to our present moment? At first glance, the drive to rearmament appears to argue in the neorealists’ favour, with Europe in particular anxious to increase its security and/or power in a more geopolitically unstable and multipolar world where it can no longer rely on the United States as an ally. In the UK, (armchair) generals have quickly emerged to bemoan how the nation’s spending on ‘welfare’ enfeebles its ability to pursue its national interest. Yet on closer inspection, the notion that recent conflicts were not driven by the domestic politics of the instigating states is not tenable. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and American adventurism in Venezuela and Iran are evidently motivated by domestic considerations. The war in Iran in particular makes more sense when read as an effort to forcibly integrate Iran into the capitalist world system than as an inevitable result of some American ‘balance of power’ calculation. Israel, meanwhile, is waging a genocidal war on a people it explicitly refuses to recognise as a state. Perhaps the only ‘realist’ conflict is the one currently perpetrated in Sudan which, while technically a civil war, is being sustained by other nations using it as a proxy to increase their power, influence, or access to resources.

On the face of it therefore, reality seems rather at odds with the claims of the neorealists. Whether it supports Empire’s alternative proposition is hard to tell, as Rosenberg only gives the contours of a possible Marxist IR theory. The second edition ends with a rather self-deprecating afterword where Rosenberg admits that his intention to develop his theory further was diverted by his discovery of the theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ as proposed by Trotsky, which locates some of sources of geopolitical dynamism in the variety of states constituting the international system. Its logic suggests an intriguing possibility for an ‘end of history’ as the result of the complete subsumption of all states in the capitalist world order, ultimately equalising their development and depriving history of a motive force for want of diversity. An IR equivalent of the heat death of the universe. Though whether Rosenberg would have reached that conclusion cannot be inferred from where Empire finishes.

For a contribution to a specific debate within a specialised academic discipline, The Empire of Civil Society is surprisingly readable, in particular its historical chapters. While it remains a niche endeavour, its spirited argument for an IR theory rooted in human agency rather than impersonal and abstract systems is a necessary reminder that we must choose to make our own history, and that statesmen asking us to dissolve our political and class differences for the sake of some putative ‘national interest’ are seldom to be trusted.

Notes & Suggestions

• Rosenberg’s proposition that modern states are built precisely on the separation of political and economic realms struck a chord with me, as it explains my slight scepticism regarding the corpocracy depicted in the otherwise excellent The Ten Percent Thief. Would an entity that fully encompasses the state and the market within itself still act like a corporation? The resultant contradictions are of course part of The Ten Percent Thief’s narrative, and as it is an excellent book, I recommend people read it and draw their own conclusion.
• The enduring debate between the different IR schools put me in mind of Thomas Kuhn’s hypothesis that scientific paradigm shifts don’t happen because people are convinced, but because adherents of obsolete theories are replaced over time by advocates of new, presumably better theories. In the realm of IR and history where we don’t have a control Earth to play with and one can convincingly enough make an argument for any position, one wonders where progress may come from. Plus, I’m unsure if Kuhn allowed for political forces with a vested interest keeping particular sides of a scholarly debate alive.
• I stole the notion that it is Iran’s refusal to be integrated into the US-dominated economic system from the recent Macrodose Extra episode Order as Fiction, which also covers the creation of the The Hague Group, a coalition of Global South nations intending to uphold international law where the West is patently failing. While I prefer not to include paywalled references, in this case honesty demanded that I include my sources.
• There numerous organisations, with a range of political affiliations, that seek to promote peace, which can always do with support in one way or another. In the UK, options include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, and the Peace & Justice Project.
• Empire relies on the traditional Marxist distinction between feudalist and post-feudalist modes of production, but apparently ‘feudalism’ is no longer a preferred category among historians, and ‘manorialism’ is considered more precise. This distinction between feudalism and manorialism, and its application to the emerging concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ is covered on this episode of Culture, Power, Politics.

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Nature is not treated kindly in videogames. If it is not merely a backdrop in first-person-shooters for the game to hide your adversaries in, then it tends to exist to be exploited to grow an empire or fuel a war machine. Especially in real-team strategy, ‘4X’ (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and colony builder games, nature is relegated to the role of resource pool, waste sink, or both. And while over the years some games have tried to provide a more nuanced interaction with the environment, for example through introducing renewable resources or penalties for pollution, on the whole game dynamics have not moved on much since the days of Age of Empires when a player might frequently find their entire map depleted of gold, iron and wood. Watching your average trailer for a civilisation or colony building game (it’s there in the name, really), it rapidly becomes clear that success is measured by how much of the playable map is brought under human cultivation. While in the real world we are now reminded daily that we cannot forever impose our will or demands on the web of life, videogames remain mostly wedded to the Promethean promise of full human control over the natural environment.

It is exciting therefore to see games that take a radically different approach, especially given how rare this sadly remains. One such game is Terra Nil, developed by South African studio Free Lives. The game’s name is a play on ‘terra nullius’: the concept of unclaimed land that may be legitimately occupied, which was instrumental in legitimising European colonialist ventures in the 18th and 19th century. In Terra Nil, the land is not so much unclaimed as abandoned by humans as a result of total ecosystem collapse. It is up to the player to restore these barren landscapes to fully functional ecosystems.

Terra Nil is a remarkable achievement. Combining elegant gameplay with carefully crafted aesthetics, it does not just offer an engaging gaming experience, but effects a profound conceptual shift as to who and what games are for.

The core mechanics of Terra Nil are simple. The world is divided into zones, and the player must restore each zone into a viable ecosystem. Restoration always occurs in three phases. First, any damage must be remediated and a rudimentary ecosystem put in place. Next, the player must increase the complexity of the ecosystem by introducing different biomes, such as as arboreal forest, wetland, or tundra. As ecosystem diversity increases, key species will re-establish themselves, The third phase requires the player to optimise the animals’ happiness and to recycle all infrastructure to remove any human presence.

Each zone the game offers is different, requiring different techniques and buildings to overcome hurdles and create a sufficiently diverse and harmonious ecosystem. Some zones are arctic, whereas others are tropical. Some zones are contaminated with toxic or nuclear waste, or have unstable geological features that must be managed. Each map is its own puzzle, and as the game doesn’t impose a time limit, the player can carefully contemplate their every move without ever feeling rushed. It makes for a pleasantly zen experience, and for players who want any stress removed altogether, a special ‘zen’ mode is available.

An archipelago with some toxin scrubbers and minimal grassland.

To restore nature, the player deploys a range of buildings to remove toxins, irrigate the soil, reintroduce trees, etc. Some buildings have prerequisites, such as particular types of soil, power, or humidity or temperature levels, and the player may have to go through multiple preparatory steps before the desired biome is achieved. Construction is paid for using a single currency which is earned by achieving key restoration goals. This makes each map into its own intricate yet rewarding puzzle. My favourite part for each playthrough is when animals make their first reappearance, and a mostly static map suddenly becomes vibrant and dynamic.

The same archipelago from earlier, with beaches, wetlands, kelp forests and deciduous tree cover restored, and most infrastructure recycled.

One notable feature of Terra Nil is the complete absence of humans. There are no workers constructing or operating the buildings, or transporting resources to and fro. Although the buildings themselves have minor animations, their visual design blends them in with their surroundings. This means that the ecosystem is the most dynamic visual feature, foregrounding the landscape itself. It is a brilliant inversion of traditional top-down style colony builder games where the landscape is the passive tapestry on which the player’s grandiose schemes are played out. Terra Nil takes this to its logical conclusion by requiring the player to recycle all buildings in order to complete a map. Success in Terra Nil is full rewilding and the total absence of humans.

A restored volcanic caldera from which almost all infrastructure has been removed.

It is a radical departure from other games. In Terra Nil, the victory condition is not domination. Nor is it the success or survival or achievements of some human(oid) colony. Here, victory is lichen and happy zebras. It is restoring nature for its own sake, not as a means to an end.

Given the emphasis on ecological restoration, as well as its aesthetic, I have been reflecting on whether Terra Nil is a solarpunk videogame. Solarpunk as a genre is more associated with writing, visual artwork and television than gaming, likely because creating the mechanics for a game about cooperation is more difficult than doing the same for a game about shooting things. A key theme of solarpunk is ecological restoration, and this is clearly at the heart of Terra Nil. But as per this insightful essay by Ben Harris-Roxas, solarpunk also focuses on community and harmony between nature and humanity, as well as a more small-scale, ‘DIY’ approach to technology. By forcing the player to completely vacate the map, Terra Nil on the other hand implies that such harmony is not possible, and that ecological restoration can only be achieved through a separation between nature and humanity. In that, it follows more in the footsteps of Half Earth, and its spiritual yet historical-materialist successor Half Earth Socialism. The game developers also deliberately used a more industrial aesthetic for the game’s buildings on the grounds that large-scale restoration will require large-scale infrastructure, rather than local, community-based improvisation, which is another aspect in which it follows Half Earth Socialism.

Probably this is reading too much into the game, given it is ultimately a small project. Though it remains an open question for me where in the world of Terra Nil the humans have gone. With its focus on restoration rather than exploitation, its calm and natural aesthetic, and its intricate but forgiving gameplay, Terra Nil is certainly more solarpunk than any other game I have come across, and if it doesn’t fully fit into the genre, it is at the very least in constructive dialogue with it. Small nuances notwithstanding, Terra Nil definitely has the key feature of solarpunk in providing a welcome antidote of hope and harmony to a medium that is otherwise suffused with violence and dystopia. It shows us a path not just to an alternative way of relating to nature, but also a different role for videogames. Planting virtual trees does not directly save the world, but fostering a culture that values nature for itself, and chooses harmony over domination, may well get us there in the long run.

Notes & suggestions

• Wholesome though playing games like Terra Nil may be, it will not by itself bring about the changes we need to see in the world. If you are concerned about climate change, ecosystem collapse, or maybe just environmental degradation where you live, join or support an international, national or local environmental group such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or a campaign group in your local community. You can also consider joining a green or ecosocialist political party.
• If you want to take ecosystem restoration to a planetary scale, then consider Half Earth Socialism: The Game. Though I should warn that even with socialist command-and-control powers, maintaining a liveable world is dispiritingly hard. If you are more into boardgames, then Daybreak offers a similar challenge.
• The Ecologist is a magazine squarely focused on nature, and how it interrelates with society, economics and even spirituality.

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