Hi! How's everyone? Today we're going to discuss an especially cheery topic — extinction.

How do you feel looking around the world? Depressed, anxious, bewildered, bereft? We have the pathetic spectacle of the first criminal trial of an American President — and the current front runner for the next Presidency. If you needed a sign about how things are going in this age, that's one that'll go down in history.

How did we get here?

By the way, if you haven't already, join us over at my new publication, The Issue. There's tons there to read already, so click away, have a browse, spend a few hours, join the many thought-provoking discussions happening. I'd be delighted to see you there.

There's a phrase that came into vogue a few years back. "Late stage capitalism." I won't go into its provenance, per se, suffice it to say that it's sort of an academic term, that's supposed to summarize this phase of history, this age. But now I think we're in a whole new phase: extinction capitalism.

By that, you might imagine that I'm referring to the planet, and what's happening to it. Scientists are bewildered that we now find ourselves in "uncharted territory," warming's happening so fast. That's one aspect of what I mean, and it's a crucial one, to be sure, but funnily, sadly, I mean the term "extinction capitalism" in an even broader sense than that.

What else is going…extinct? Or is on the road to it? Here's a little smattering.

• Democracy's at just 20% of the world right now, declining at 10% a decade. That puts the extinction of democracy within today's lifetimes. And that's an historic, crushing loss.
• Generations are in downward mobility, and the sort of central idea of modernity, an upwards trajectory of living standards, is going extinct, or already is. Most people don't think their kids and grandkids will have better lives than they did, and given current trends, they're right.
• How about…just prosperity itself? The majority of the world, in a stunning reversal, is now getting poorer. I say stunning because this upturns decades, if not centuries, of progress — and in a very real sense, we may be watching prosperity itself going extinct, in civilizational terms.
• Then there's capital-P progress — which has flatlined and or gone into reverse, for the first time in centuries, too. It's sort of sputtering, or "flickering," as I discussed recently, a technical term for what systems do before they wink out. We're witnessing what appears to be the extinction of big-picture human progress itself (and no, chatbots aren't…are you kidding…a substitute.)
• How do we feel about this age? People are more pessimistic than any time since the 1930s. In some respects, they're more pessimistic than the 1930s. Feelings of anger, despair, sadness, and rage have skyrocketed off the charts — and young people say they "can't function anymore." We're witnessing sort of the extinction of fulfillment and well-being, too, as people buckle under the strain and distress of a world going haywire.
• Then there's sociality itself. Social bonds have ruptured, imploded, and been torn apart — and hence, societies are riven into social groups perpetually at each other's throats. Meanwhile, crises of loneliness and isolation and friendlessness are becoming endemic. Are we seeing the extinction of healthy sociality itself?

I could go on. That's just a short list. All of that's kind of an intro to what I mean by "extinction capitalism." It's eminently true that this variant of capitalism's killing the planet, but it's also devastating a lot more than that — from politics to society to economies themselves.

Now. When I say that kind of thing, people imagine me as some sort of beret-wearing revolutionary. I'm not. I like capitalism. But this version of it is…out of control. What's gone wrong with it?

All the classical problems that generations of thinkers predicted, sort of multiplied a thousandfold. How is it that all those things are going wrong at once? What's happening is that capitalism's eating through all these things, these possibilities, in the eternal quest to capitalize, to profit, to make more and more money. But this crusade is completely haywire at this point, because, for example, this decade, we're going to see the world's first trillionaires, and meanwhile, we can't raise a few billion to fight climate change. There's something deeply wrong with that picture.

That something's pretty simple. Capitalism's sort of chewing through all these various forms of capital. Social capital — relationships and trust. Human capital — our well-being and sense of fulfillment. Emotional capital, or how we feel about ourselves and the world around us. Natural capital, of course, aka the planet. And what it's doing is what it's programmed to do: convert all these other forms of capital into financial capital.

So imagine a machine that takes trees, people's happiness, the possibilities of entire generations, the social bonds of societies, chews them up, and spits out…money. This is what capitalism — this variant — is doing. And that's why so much of the world around is going extinct.

I often say this feels like a joyless age. Doesn't it? That's because we're experiencing all these forms of extinctions as deadenings. Not just the planet, but our possibilities, our inner lives, our relations, our connections to the world, our sense of faith in the future, the stability of our polities and societies. The result is a kind of mass blunting of emotion, and a pulsation, a convulsion, of despair, ripping across the world.

All of which feeds demagoguery, and creates the sort of vicious circles that result in Trumpism, Brexit, the rise of the European far right.

So that's extinction capitalism. And the ironic thing is: even capitalism isn't that simple and monstrous. Not really. Even capitalism properly defined has a function, which is to maximize capital. All the kinds of capital. Not just to turn them all into one kind, which is financial capital.

But that's what's happening. And worse, when that conversion of natural, social, creative, emotional, etcetera, capital to financial capital happens, what happens next? The gains are concentrated in an incredibly tiny number of hands, like Musk, Bezos, and so on. But a handful of ultra billionaires piling up an entire world's wealth, converting its resources, possibilities, and fundamentals, to money…that's not good or healthy in any way.

What does it do? It starves societies of the funds they need to invest in the social contracts and systems of the future. It robs the world of what it needs to address tomorrow's great challenges, like climate change. It destroys people's beliefs in each other and themselves. And it destabilizes societies, ripping apart what used to be stable middle and working classes, and thus begins to set fire to polities, as fanaticism gains ground as a result.

So. That's extinction capitalism: a system which is converting all the other kinds of capital into one kind, financial capital, money, cash, and piling it up in a tiny, tiny number of hands. Even as all those other forms of capital approach extinction. And when they do, what will be left? To convert into money anymore? What's the plan then? I know: some will say it's to jet off to Mars, or retreat to a private island, or what have you, but I mean the plan as a civilization.

Extinction capitalism is a failure. Even in capitalism's own narrow terms. To maximize one kind of capital at the expense of all the rest is just a fiction, taking with one hand what's given with the other. It yields no actual gains, and that's why, as a civilization, we're now going backwards — precisely because little real wealth or value is being created in this system anymore: instead, it's suctioned up to the very top, which is what all the above means.

So where does that leave us? We need to reinvent all that. Even if you're a die-hard fan of capitalism, you're probably going to have to concede that this form of it isn't working. If you're not, I think that you probably might want to contend with the idea that even "late capitalism" doesn't really describe anymore the phase we're in anymore. And if, like me, you're sort of not ideological, it's time to begin thinking about what comes after all this, what a system that maximizes real surplus in all these forms is called, how it works, and what it's made of, organizationally, institutionally, and economically.

That's a lot to chew on. Take your time with it, mull it over, reflect on it. What I'm increasingly certain of is: extinction capitalism doesn't have long left. It doesn't know that, and it doesn't care — and that means, I suppose, the rest of us should.

Join us at The Issue — we've discussed all this, climate change, the economy, Trump's trial, and much, much more lately. Head on over if you need some more brain food — I'll see you there.