The Last Humans

This book arrives at a moment when the ground beneath us has already given way, though most are still pretending to walk on solid earth. What you hold is neither manifesto nor memoir, neither prophecy nor polemic. It is an attempt to trace the faultlines running beneath our feet – the deep fractures in how we have organised existence itself – and to ask what might be built once we stop denying the tremors.

The essays gathered here were written over several years, in different cities, for different immediate purposes. Some began as responses to events that seemed urgent at the time but have since dissolved into the general static of catastrophe. Others emerged from conversations with people who are trying, against considerable odds, to imagine ways of living that don't require our planet's systematic dismemberment. A few were provoked by my own bewilderment at watching intelligent people cling to frameworks that have demonstrably failed, as though repetition might somehow transmute delusion into truth.

What binds them is not a single thesis but a shared suspicion: that the dominant story we tell ourselves about progress, prosperity and human flourishing has become lethally obsolete. Not wrong in every particular detail, but fundamentally misaligned with the conditions that now confront us.