Apocaloptimistic Design
Principles for Building in a Time of Collapse
For the first two days after the Hurricane, our basement was filled with water, our roof was leaking, and we didn’t have power, water, or internet. Well, actually, we were pretty lucky. Unlike most folks in Asheville, we had a single bar of cell service, so were able to get some outside news about just how bad Hurricane Helene had devastated our area. In addition to the significant number of lives lost in the flooding & mudslides, over 40 children at the local elementary school were now homeless. We were living in apocalypse mode.
And this wasn’t the first major natural disaster that we’d been through. Ten years prior, my wife & I had a front-row seat to the Boulder Flood, which was also said to be a 1-in-a-1000 year geologic event. So, this wasn’t the first time we had been exposed, IRL, to the reality of climate chaos. And we knew it wasn’t going to be getting better any time soon. Living through two 1-in-a-1000 year events, in 10 years, makes you realize just how out-of-date our previous assumptions are.
So, how does one live wisely while the world around you, both the human-made one, and the natural one, are starting to show signs of collapse? Cue, my dear friend Lisa Sherman, who many years prior had introduced me to one of my favorite words: apocaloptimism
A simple portmanteau of both apocalypse and optimism, the apocaloptimist is one who maintains an attitude of optimism even as they watch the world around them, and within them, collapse. It’s almost as if the very ruins of the collapse become the raw material for building something new. But how? How can we build a new world out of the collapsing refuse of an old one?
Here, I’d like to present two principles of Apocaloptimistic Design that you can use to build out of collapse, called:
Good in Heaven, Good in Hell
Consider the Nth Order Effects
This first principle serves as an important mental filter that you can pass prospective ideas through. Are you planning on renovating your home? Are you thinking about improving your home security? Or installing back-up power? Any idea that you’re considering, that would affect how you live, you can run through this filter.
The basic process is to take your prospective idea and inquire: “If I did this, is it likely to be good in both Heaven and in Hell?” By “Heaven” and “Hell” I don’t mean the after-life, obviously, but rather different potential scenarios in this life that we’d consider either extremely good or extremely bad.
Being able to ask this question, requires that we explore existential risk scenarios, as well as our existential dread & anxiety around them. It also invites us to consider beautiful possible futures that our hearts know is possible. Instead of turning toward either one of these extremes, and getting fixated there, we’re instead considering what choices we could make, right now, that would be likely to be good, regardless of how the future plays out.
Let me share a practical example of using this filter in my own life. Before Hurricane Helene, our roof began to leak, and we discovered that we couldn’t repair it because the original shingles are no longer produced. This necessitated a choice around what to do, and we realized that replacing the roof was the only viable option. So we looked at the different options, the most common and affordable one being a new asphalt shingle roof, and the slightly more expensive, and less popular option, being a metal roof.
After considering whether an asphalt roof would be both good in heaven & in hell, we realized it wouldn’t be good in either. In hell, there will be more wildfires in our area, and more danger of blazing embers landing onto our roof and causing the house to catch fire. An asphalt roof, being made out of petrochemicals, is extremely flammable. No bueno.
Then we imagined a beautiful future, in which we were capturing rain water–~40,000 gallons per year runs off our roof–using this captured water to feed our garden, and as a back-up water supply. Well, it turns out that water running off an asphalt roof leeches petrochemicals into it, leading to poor water quality. A metal roof does not, which is obvious, since we drink and eat out of metal things all the time. Metal also has far less of a negative ecological impact in its sourcing, and lasts significantly longer. A metal roof, properly installed, can easily last for 100 years or more. After running the analysis, it was pretty obvious that a metal roof, although a few thousand dollars more expensive, would be significantly better in both Heaven & Hell. So, we invested in the metal roof.
Fundamentally, we don’t know what the future holds. So by asking if something will be good in both Heaven & Hell, we’re future proofing our choice-making. We’re living apocaloptimistically.
Also known as yellow teaming, this principle has to do with considering the downstream effects of our choice-making, should things work out well. In very simple terms, when we’re considering the Nth order effects, we’re asking ourselves, “If we were to adopt this solution, and it worked out, what kind of unintended 2nd, 3rd, etc. order effects are likely to come from this?”
“Yellow teaming” is a term that I was introduced to by Daniel Schmactenberger, and it plays off a common process already being implemented in both military and business contexts, called red teaming:
“Where red teaming attempts to assure that a plan doesn’t fail, yellow teaming attempts to ensure it doesn’t cause unexpected harms or problems elsewhere. It aims to account for how our typical approaches to solution design tend to make problems worse in the long run, and provide guidance to address such issues in advance, thereby minimizing the risk of negative externalities.” – Development in Progress, The Consilience Project
The historical Buddha used to quip about his teachings, known as they dharma, that they are “good in the beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.” For something to truly be good, it must be good in Heaven, good in Hell, and good ongoingly throughout time as it interacts with other things. This design principle invites us to consider the unexpected consequences of success, and to build that into our design thinking.
The Nth Order Effects of AI
In this interview, teal thinker Daniel Schmachtenberger breaks down the risks associated with AI. He widens the conversational frame to include yellow teaming and does a great job of challenging widely held technoutopian assumptions about the likely future that self-bootstrapping AI to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) is likely to follow as part of it’s evolution.
Ending with Execution
If something passes through these two apocaloptimistic design filters, you may have something worth building! From there it’s all down to execution. Fortunately, we live in a culture that, while terrible at deep & contemplative thinking, is good at complex execution.
Here you can pull on Lean start-up methodologies in order to break your idea down to something more manageable–a so-called MVP. You can then employ a Build-Measure-Learn loop in order to iteratively improve on what you’re building. And, of course, you can benefit from building with others, either those with more experience that can teach you, or those that want to help & learn.
Finally, if you’re doing something that’s novel, or which hasn’t been properly documented, think about documenting and sharing your process. By sharing your learning back to the Creative Commons you’ve just contributed to the collective knowledge base of humankind!
The Breath Kasina
I’m currently building a new technodelic meditation app called KASINA.
You can try out the Visual Kasina mode for free by signing up for a free contemplative technology account. Or, you can try out the premium Breath Kasina mode by joining this upcoming Breath Kasina Course. In this experimental course, each participant will receive a respiration belt + personalized instructions on working with a dynamic somatovisual meditation object.