There is an inclination to recoil from prognostications of doom, not merely because such prognostications have often been wrong but also because they are often right. Human worlds have ended time and again. Yet, as we know with the benefit of hindsight, such endings are not permanent and in some cases have even ultimately given birth to better and more humane worlds. Not only can we not be certain about the future, but fixating on it can turn us into passive spectators in perpetual waiting, forfeiting our agency in the here and now. As Raoul Vaneigem has noted, whatever the future will be, it will be wholly natural to us, as it will be ours. The task then is not to issue sky-is-falling jeremiads about the coming apocalypse but to denaturalize the present, showing that the sky has already fallen and that the apocalypse is in fact already here.

Ira Allen’s Panic Now? (University of Tennessee Press, 2024) seeks to do just this. In a finely argued and persuasive account of four existential crises and how best to respond to them, Allen shows that the world as we know it has already entered a process of what he calls staggered collapse and that, critically, there is not only no political will (an obvious point) but also no technological capacity (a somewhat less obvious one) to save it. Focusing on climate change, mass extinction, novel chemicals, and AI, Allen moreover argues that the political economic system of Carbon, Capitalism, and Colonialism (or CaCaCo for short) that has produced these crises is not worth saving in the first place. Instead, it is time to come to grips with the fact that the current world system is not salvageable and to begin planning for the next one, prefiguring it in the values and organizational principles we might practice today.

Allen’s description of the four crises (he notes that there are of course many more) is convincing and useful. Of particular interest here, in part due to its relative novelty, is the human disaster that is AI. Karen Hao and others have described some of the most obvious problems with AI. For one, AI is reliant on horrifying amounts of freshwater and other resources (those sociology essays won’t write themselves!). And, as........

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