THE CLUB OF ROME PODCAST

What if the key to transforming capitalism lies in the law? In this episode, we speak with Katharina Pistor, Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia University, member of the Club of Rome and author of The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, about the legal foundations that underpin our economic system, and how they might be reimagined. 

Katharina argues that capitalism is not a free market but a "market economy on legal steroids," shaped and sustained by legal structures that govern everything from corporations and property rights to data ownership and financial markets. She explores how tools such as limited liability, asset partitioning and private contract law have enabled the concentration of wealth - and how those same tools could be repurposed to drive systemic change. 

From the enclosure of the commons to the rise of the data oligarchs and the Alaska Permanent Fund, this is a wide-ranging conversation about the unwritten rules of our economy and the potential for transformation. 

 

Transcript

Till: Welcome, Katharina. Great to have you on the show. 

Katharina: Thank you so much for having me. 

Till: We have often on this podcast talked about our polycrisis, overlapping different crises, eroding social capital, polarisation, of course, our ecological crisis. And in all of the debates, we often talk about economics, politics, but rarely about law. 

You now write in your new book that seeking change through law does not make transformative change easier, but arguably it makes it more likely. Why is that the case? Why should we talk more about law when we talk about change and transformation? 

Katharina: So I think before we think about change and transformation, we have to do a thorough diagnostic of the system. And my diagnostic of the system, now people might disagree, but my diagnostic of the system is that capitalism is a system that is effectively a legal system, a legal regime. Capital is coded in law, as I have argued in my previous book from 2019, "The Code of Capital," and in the new book, "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It," I'm basically extending the analysis to the system as such. 

And I'm arguing that the system is a legal regime. It is based on law. It is maintained by law. It's entrenched in law. And because of this, we have to seek change through law rather than from outside of the legal system. 

Till: What I was wondering when, when, when reading the book and, and, and listening to you, is law kind of then the foundation as you see it of then, the capitalist system? Or is it following logics of capitalism and kind of aligning with those logics to an extent? So is it preceding or following? 

Katharina: Yes. Well, that's a really interesting question. So I think from a Marxist perspective, you would say it follows, because it's all about the material conditions that create the conditions for law to evolve in a particular way. Also, Evgeny Pashukanis, one of the leading socialist legal theorists of the early 20th century, he argued that law takes a particular form in capitalism. 

He might even go as far as saying law is always necessarily capitalist. That I think would go a little too far. So in my mind, it's very difficult to do the chicken and egg analysis here because we have a long trajectory of legal institutions. Private law, the law of contracts and property,   even business organisations, you can trace back all the way to Roman times. 

Prior to the rise of the nation state, people used legal arrangements, and so the question is then what is really law? And I think law, in my mind, is when you start formalising the norms and institutions that govern social and economic relations. So once you formalise them, you abstract them, and then once you also add the capacity of a state or authority to back these contracts and property rights through enforcement mechanism, then you have something like a legal system. 

That's what I would call a legal system. And I think for capital and capitalism, that was really critical because capitalism is not just about having economic transaction within your small little community, it's about scale. And scaling requires more complex, more abstract, more formal systems of ordering, of social ordering, and you may not want to call this law what I would call that law. 

So in that sense,  the rise of the nation state, the scalability of socioeconomic relations, and their enforceability by mobilising the consolidated means of coercion is absolutely critical for capitalism. So if you push me, I would say that comes first, but in fact, of course, it comes in relation with. 

It is sort of, it's a correlation that it has to happen at the same time, but it doesn't... It's a sine qua non. Without this, it will not happen. 

Till: And what I found interesting in that context when you spoke aboutthis way of law and the expansion of economic activity in general in capitalism happened through it. You spoke about steroids of law enabled  the economic system to do, right? Yeah, maybe you want to refer to that. 

Katharina: Yes. So many people think that the markets are free and the markets kind of do what they do by whatever market means. So it's, you know, the price mechanism, it's demand and supply. You have those with this curve. Yeah, but you have to think about, okay, what creates demand and supply and through what means do people actually meet and then exchange goods and, and payment, and they rarely do this on the spot these days. 

They do this through a very complex financial system. So I'm basically saying capitalism is not just a market economy. It's a market economy on legal steroids. Even an ideal market economy needs contract law and property law. I think most economists would concede this today as well. I think capitalism goes much further. 

Just think about corporations. So corporations are legal creatures. They don't exist outside the law. They have to be created. They can't be created without some authorisation that actually you create a legal person, the assets of which are distinct from the owners of that legal person. That's a legal fiction, but it's a legal fiction that is absolutely central for a capitalist system. 

And you can't contract for this. You might, may be able to contract for limited liability. You can't contract for this asset partitioning because you can't easily enforce it. So there are certain features of the law that were created over time, and of course, were pushed for because theywere proven to be helpful, that enable the accumulation of capital over time. 

So corporations are critical because you can create basically separate pools of assets that can incubate over time and create wealth. The fact that shareholders are dominating,   corporations, the fact that we are,  you know, sort of making debt deductible from corporations, the fact that we allow all kinds of assets to be used nowadays as collateral, including financial assets that are themselves created in the law. 

So we basically have created an entire machine. The fact that we have a complex banking and money system where we have a central bank at the top that sort of governs liquidity, makes sure that people have enough liquidity, which means cash on hand if things go bad, when things are creaking. And if we didn't have this, we would have just many more crashes. 

So there's a whole apparatus which I think can be disentangled and dissected when we have a bit of an understanding of what the legal structures are that underpin it. So we can go beyond the illusion that this is a free market. It's a market economy on legal steroids, and capitalism would not be able to do the kind of accumulation that it does and allocate the resources that it does in the way it does without these legal steroids. 

Till: I think it's a very important point because it also takes away this pseudo objectivity of market transactions and kind of our system as we have set it up, right? It shows again that all of that are in a way also a construct, social contracts or constructs or at least enabled by humans, and shaped by humans, and there is no objectivity in market transactions per se. 

It depends on the institutions that are involved by that, and you argue then that those institutions very much depend on law. 

Katharina: Correct. I mean, like, you know, institutions, as Douglas North said, come in two forms, informal and formal, and the formal ones are the law. And I think for a scaled system at national and global scale, you can't rely exclusively on informal institutions. They still play a role. There's trust involved, and people know each other, and they know some, you know, traders better than others or trust some institutions more than others. 

But I think you can't have a multi-trillion global financial system without formal institutions, so it has to be the law. 

Till: And what those steroids led to is, of course, something the Club of Rome deals with since decades, the question of growth, right? We have seen massive, massive growth, of course, in financial activities in a way, this whole debate around financialisation. But it's of course never only kind of the mechanisms of, of economic systems are not reduced to, to financial systems in a way. 

It's, it comes with a massive offloading onto nature and kind of expanding what we now call planetary boundaries, as well as, of course, people, right? It comes with a breaking of certain social capital as well. And I was then wondering, because the steroids thing is, is something we actually don't want in that way. 

We don't want growth on steroids. We don't want massive expansion. We, in a way, want to reduce the impact we currently have on our planet. I was wondering what's, what's the role of law in there? Can law in our systems be designed without those steroids or even steroids in the other direction to help a transformation, or how do you see that? 

Katharina: Yes. So I think here it's again important that we think about how we would address this. So I think with environmental legislation in the '70s and onwards, we've tried to use, once again, public law to regulate private activities, and the private sector typically finds ways to mitigate the costs that are imposed on it. 

Till: And so for me, therefore, the question is also can we use the instruments of private law? Can we reduce the legal steroids, as you put it, that they're using to organise the system? And there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind. One is the allocation of responsibility, right? 

Katharina: That's what the law does. Who's responsible for what? Who has to internalise the cost of what kind of actions? So with corporations and giving the investors who buy shares in the corporation limited liability, we have created a license to externalise. Because the investors are not responsible for the damage that the corporations create, full stop. 

And that made sense in the 19th century when we had capital scarcity and we needed to get lots of savers to put their money into corporations as well. It makes no sense when you think about that brown assets that are issued by companies that are in the natural resource sectors or that are major polluters are,   giving you high monetary returns and the investors don't have to care about the polluting effects. 

So I've written an op-ed a couple of years ago where I said we just have to take away limited liability from major polluters. That can be done through a legislative act, unlikely, but some courts, including the UK Supreme Court, have developed new doctrines where they attribute, at least to the parent company, damages done by a subsidiary and by inference, I think you could go a step further and attribute the damages also to the investors behind the, the, the parent company. That has to happen. They have to bear the cost of what they are creating for their financial returns. They have to bear these costs so that you drive down the financial returns. 

Without this, I don't think we can make much headway. 

Till: How radical is the suggestion of reducing the limited liability of certain companies? Because it sounds a little bit technical, right? Reducing limited liability, and we know that it was maybe useful in a certain period of time to make sure enough capital goes into certain activities, and we know that might not be useful today anymore. 

But is basically reducing the limited liability, does it equal changing ownership structures in a way... 

Katharina: I mean, like, even if you look at property theory in economics, people like Harold Demsetz and others would say an owner has the control over the residual returns, but the owner also will internalise the cost of using the asset. They're basically accusing state ownership or the commons of a system where nobody internalises the cost of using the asset. 

When we now create limited liability, we actually are destroying the logic of property rights theory in accordance with economic theory. And so it’s like a theoretical proposition, I think it's totally consistent with ownership saying an owner invests and knows what, you know, has expectations about the returns of the investments, but also knows that there are costs, and if the company is being held liable for causing certain damages to others, then the owners will also have to bear these costs. 

In any other organisational form, like in partnerships, that is undisputable, and we have created limited liability as an artifact of a particular form of cooperation that was capital intensive. But I don't think we have to maintainthat, and I think you would have real owners at that point. 

You would have shareholders who really have to think about the cost that the corporation imposes on others before they invest. 

Till: And, and could one still go one step further? You have also written a lot about the enclosure, right? A starting point of kind of public land, dealt with by norms or public norms in private law into private ownership.  We have worked in the Club of Rome initiative called Earth for All on a concept called universal basic dividend,  where it was argued that basically the global commons in a way belong to all of us, right? 

And there should be dividends coming out of activities such as fossil fuel or even data or kind of activities that are related to the commons. So we see that in parts. There is something called the Alaska Permanent Fund, where kind of money is distributed across a population. You might argue that in Norway there are similar approaches. 

Is that something that could follow out of the changing  law debate here as well? 

Katharina: I think so. I think there is, however, a potential cost of this because we all might become used to the dividends from oil revenue, for example. And that argument has been made also in the US context for our pension system. So if you have your pensions in private stock markets, you want to have the markets go up and you're not really interested in how this happens. 

You just want to have a decent pension. So I think in the Alaska Permanent Fund, this was a really good solution to a very corrupt regime that existed until the 1970s to make sure that the people in Alaska had control over the dividends. They could see whether something came back into their accounts, because they were participating in this. 

So that was important for that particular reason. But I think there's also danger, especially where people's income in general stagnates, that they become hooked on income that is being produced by certain types of assets which create the kind of externalities that we have to get rid of, right? So it would have to be very diversified, if at all, and I think when you know, as a general first, as a first step to say, "Why does the wealth from pollution accrue to a handful of investors and they become super rich and then also dominate the political system?" 

That's worse. So I think in that sense, it's a step in the right direction. 

Till: Yeah. And I mean, you see variations of that, not exactly this, but you see, for example, that in Europe, the debate about internalising externalities, particularly through carbon taxes is more advanced. It's much harder in the US. And you have some countries, Austria, partly Switzerland, who then kind of share that, that money again amongst the population. 

But the question is if it has to be stuck with those externalities we don't want in the natural world, or if one could include even factors such as data, right? And kind of use it as a way of dealing with our digital world as well. 

Katharina: That I find an easier proposition and one that I would really support as well, is that I think we, as some forms of collectives and the organisation of which and the size of which would have to be determined, we should have control over how our data is being used. This is again, and it's an artificial decision, which is again deeply rooted in the law, to say that the data producers, you and I, do not have ownership of our, over our data. 

So the European directive says personal data is basically you determine with consent or not, but the consent is kind of meaningless. In the US, you have lots of cases where the courts explicitly say because to you and me, our data have no economic value. We can't sell them at a price, just the little data that we produce all the time. 

Therefore, we can't have property rights, and only those have property rights that basically have scaled the data collection already and put them on a device. There was already a legislation passed in 1986 in the US that the tech industry, industry lobbied for it,  which basically said if you then try to get these data away from them, this is hacking and it's basically theft, and thereby you create a new property right. 

So I, so I think the reorganisation of control over our data is absolutely fundamental, and that would include both control who can use the data for what type of purposes, and then the returns that are being produced with the data should be shared as well. And one can think of lots of different legal solutions to do this, public trust and also corporations and shareholdership and, you know, affiliations. 

Till: And I mean there are ways that, that we know we can organise both control rights and return rights in a way that would allow us to participate in the digital economy and not leave it to a handful of super rich. 

Super rich are sometimes called oligarchs in a way because you do see that the accumulation of wealth at the top is, is, is mind-boggling.   and,   you say there are different legal ways of dealing with that. Do those legal forms already exist or do they have to be created? 

Katharina: No, they exist. Interesting and good, good point. 

They exist, and I mean the data oligarchs are using them. These are corporations. They're using ownership structures and voting structures so that Mark Zuckerberg has over 50% of voting control over Meta. They are arbitraging with the legal tools that exist to give them absolute control rights, and they control both, everything that's being said. 

They also get a huge return from these companies. And I think on top of that with data, because they can control how we behave, certainly on the internet, if not beyond, they also have massive social control. So this is, this is a form of authoritarianism, I think that is kind of creepy because it's not as visible, but is massive, and I think we have to think about this. 

You know, what I'm arguing also in my new book is, there are lots of tools in the toolbox of the law that could be used in different ways. And of course, it's a question of the political economy and the relative power structures. What I'm trying to say to tell many people who don't really know what to do, and they always run to Congress or they might run to court, is that you also have tools in your own hands right now. 

Digital coding is happening by technologists, and there are many technologists out there who have different ideas of how to code relations. Similarly in the law, there are different ways in which you can organise businesses. There are lots of different companies. Think about Patagonia, which has completely reorganised itself using something as old and arcane as a trust structure to make sure that the mission of Patagonia will be withheld and, and, and protected in the future. 

So there's lots of stuff to play with. You just have to know about it and then have to find some lawyers who are not charging $3,000 an hour to help you set them up. 

Till:  Yeah. And what about this is that it kind of starts with this whole inequality debate at a different level, right? Because we often talk about redistribution and in a way it's- I support many of the suggestions there, right? And you now have also in, in New York, you have the debates about taxing the rich by the new mayor. 

But it is of course a present debate also within the Club of Rome. But to a certain extent, redistribution might already be too late, and we should think more about the pre-distribution. 

Katharina: Yeah. That, you know, it goes back to what we said at the beginning. It's about the diagnostics of the system, and I'm basically saying you're using a public resource, because our legal system is a public resource, and you could add the money system, which is also a public resource, to create enormous amounts of private wealth and,   plus all the negative,   effects that h- this has on inequality, on political systems, et cetera. 

So this social resource is available to us. We just have to know how to use it and also to imbue it maybe with different normative foundations so we can use it in a way that is conducive to more, to the rest and not just the few on the top. 

Till: Yeah. We did talk a little bit about the different kind of stages of capitalism and the varieties of capitalism from an economic perspective, I find it sometimes hard to describe what's going on at the moment even because you find certain things that are happening,    that 10 years ago in the US, let's say, the attacks on the independence of the central bank, right? 

Like 10 years ago, there were green progressive forces arguing against the independence in that way and including some issues such as, as green transformation,   as part of the mandate or things like that. Now it comes kind of from the right side and from the side many of us probably wouldn't want. 

Same with like tariffs. It's not the typical toolbox of free market policymaking in a way But you have people like Ha-Joon Chang who argued that this was basically also a way of protection of emerging markets to, to climb up the ladder  in a capitalist society. So it's confusing.  And what we try to do in the Club of Rome podcast often is also to make sense of complexity of the world. 

So can you help us to define what is the stage of capitalism we look at at the moment. How is our economic system and paradigm changing currently? 

Katharina: So I think in many ways, we've seen the movie before. If I think about Karl Polanyi and his analysis of "The Great Transformation," his point was that the process of capitalism, the process of industrialisation, the transformation of the entire institutional framework has subordinated the society to the market principle. 

And then society fought back, because they kind of didn't like to be subordinate to the market principles. The fallout was massive, and the results was communism and fascism in the 1920s. And I think, unfortunately, we have not heeded his advice after World War II to think about how we could make sure that we kind of maintain the upper hand by society. 

But we've allowed and enabled the market to completely control us to an extent I don't, I don't think that even happened in the 1920s or at the beginning of the 20th century. So globalisation of the financial system, the power of private financial industry, and now the data is basically a massive control of the private sector over society, and is trying to subordinate norms, values, institutions, behavior to the logic of a market, of a market system. 

And the worst, I think, is really on the internet. Our entire social interactions are being driven by how many clicks you get and how much-- what the return is and how many ads they can place. It has nothing to do with other types of form, of formal values. And so I'm not surprised that somebody like Trump, I don't... 

It doesn't matter what he believes. I don't think he believes anything. He just has an instinct. He has an intuition for what the people want. So his MAGA movement is kind of what we saw in the 1920s, both on the right and the left, a backlash against the subordination of the society to the market principle. 

They've had it. They have no control over the future of the system. They can vote whichever party they want to vote into office. The system will continue because the system has become relatively autonomous from the state as such. The state can't regulate it, but we still use law, the private law, to sustain it. 

And I think that's the reaction that, you know, the MAGA movement is built on and is basically using it. It has to sort of symbolically show that they're doing something for them, which is kind of the tariff game, which of course hits them too, which they may or may not understand. It's a different story, but you're making a big spectacle. 

"This is Liberation Day. We're now doing something for you." That's politics. It has nothing to do with economics. But I think the politics are a reaction of a system that has suppressed too many people for too long and has basically, even in democracies, and especially in democracies, the sense that we have lost control over our future is devastating. 

And I think that's why we see extremes, not only in this country, but also in, in countries of Europe. 

Till: Yeah, and I agree with you, the losing control, polarisation, insecurity in the future, economic insecurity - there are many contributors to this situation as we see it. And what would you say, then slowly coming to an end already, would be the role of, you know, organisations like Club of Rome, but also people and institutionswant to fight back? 

Katharina: So I think for me, the most important thing is to show that there are viable alternatives. We've been told for a long time by politicians that there is no alternative. If we want to have growth, then this is the system that we have.   I think there's also a case to be made that we maybe need less growth, but many people in many poor countries in the world are still trying to somehow get out of poverty, and so I think that we have to keep, keep in mind. 

But in my mind, there's a lot of creativity. There's possibility for creativity. There are lots of opportunities that you can take without necessarily having to fight it at the international la-law level with treaties or even at the national law with politics, because a lot of legal structures exist already which could be repurposed. 

That's what capitalism has always done, because it rarely has gone through legislative approval. In democratic systems, this would have been too complicated. They've basically used the law as is. Now, obviously, if we have a direct confrontation between powerful forces of, on the capitalist side and, and others, this will be difficult to win. 

But there are cases where cases have been won, and so I think just collecting these cases and showing that there are viable strategies and making them known to others and thinking of how in different systems, because there's no silver bullet. But in different systems, you can see different openings, different legal tools that might be available to push on a particular front. 

And I think for the climate, I think it would be, it would be climate finance, of course, also environmental regulation. But,   thinking creatively about how you could really use these tools and get people on your side, including people who might have made a lot of money in the capitalist mode but want to change their ways and want to help do something else. 

 I think the Club of Rome and other organisations that have a voice kind of in the political and policy debates. We shouldn't only talk to the politicians and policymakers in Brussels and elsewhere. We should also talk to lawyers and to private actors and think about how we can help them find a better path. 

Till: Thank you very much, Katharina. For everyone who would like to learn more about the law of capitalism and the power of law as well, I do recommend your latest book, "The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It."  It has been fascinating speaking to you. Thank you for listening to the Club of Rome podcast and thank you Katharina for joining us today. 

Katharina: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun to talk to you.

Why have a decade of global commitments failed to deliver a fairer world, and what would it actually take to build one? 

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Till Kellerhoff speaks with Jayati Ghosh, economist, member of The Club of Rome and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, about why the promise of 2015 — the SDGs, the Paris Agreement, a moment of collective ambition — has given way to a world of deepening inequality, democratic erosion and concentrated power. 

The episode explores how the neoliberal framework underlying the SDGs was always likely to undermine them, why progressive forces have struggled to channel public anger into transformative change, and how a tiny group of ultra-wealthy individuals has come to shape laws, institutions and the course of global events in ways unprecedented in history. 

They discuss the urgent need to shift from GDP growth as a proxy for progress towards economies that deliver dignity, decent work and basic security for all — and why communicating that vision in simpler, more direct terms has never been more important. 

This episode maps out where the possibilities for genuine systemic change still lie, and why, even now, there are reasons not to abandon hope.

Why are current peace frameworks struggling to meet today’s complex challenges and what would it take to create genuine security in the 21st Century?

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, Nolita Mvunelo speaks with Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome about why traditional peace frameworks are ill-equipped to address the deeper threats emerging from ecological breakdown, widening inequality and systemic instability. Drawing on The Club of Rome’s recent publication Planetary Peace for Human Security, Paul outlines a bold reimagining of what peace might mean today.

Together, Nolita and Paul dive into how conventional approaches shaped by military logic and colonial legacies often reinforce the divisions they aim to heal. They discuss the need for a planetary vision of peace that connects inner transformation, environmental renewal and social justice and why moving beyond analysis towards systemic action is now essential.

This episode invites us to transcend outdated paradigms, embrace an expanded understanding of peace and mobilise the transformative collaboration needed for a regenerative future.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Nolita: What does true peace and human security mean in the 21st Century? In a world of climate breakdown, rising inequality and the accelerating risks of AI and emerging technologies, our guest on today's podcast reminds us that peace must mean more than simply the absence of war. In a recent paper, planetary peace for human security, Paul Shrivastava, co-president of The Club of Rome, argues that traditional ideas of peace, shaped by colonial legacies, military power and post Second World War diplomacy, are no longer fit for purpose. Instead, he and his co-authors propose a concept of planetary peace, a vision of security grounded in the wellbeing of people, the planet and future generations. 

I am Nolita Mvunelo, and on today's podcast, Paul and I discuss why peace today must encompass inner development, the environment, technology, and our relationship with nature, and how collaboration can turn global crises into opportunities for renewal. That's all ahead on The Club of Rome Podcast, where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. 

Hi Paul. Thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? 

Paul: I am doing fine, Nolita, how are you doing? 

I'm good, I'm good, and getting right into it. So, what is planetary peace? Because you describe it as something that's much bigger than the absence of war. What exactly does this mean? And why have you chosen to pursue this topic specifically? 

So historically, peace has been cued in relation to wars, usually wars among nations and among sub national groups, and peace is what's supposed to stop the wars and take care of victims, etc. But humanity now faces a much bigger risk to human life that can cause 10 times to 100 times the number of deaths that even the largest wars in history have caused, and that risk is the breakdown of planetary ecosystems. These kinds of events can kill and injure millions of people at a time in specific natural disasters that we hear about, which are becoming worse and more frequent, but also in slow seeping harm that is causing excess number of deaths from what was normal before the pollution of Oceans and air became so huge. So planetary peace is a concept of peace and nonviolence that is responsive to these major sources of violence against humans and against nature and all species. These kind of dangers and risks ensue from breaching of our planetary boundaries. So, we kind of wanted to raise the discussion of peace from the narrow focus on international wars to something that is planetary in scale and responsive to the challenges of the planetary boundaries and also the destruction of ecosystems. 

Nolita: This was the title of the first version of this publication, and now the second one was on planetary peace in the Anthropocene. So, when I'm hearing your response is that it's very much nested into this idea that we have entered a new epoch. The Club of Rome is well known for its systems thinking, connecting the dots between economics, environment and human wellbeing. Why have you chosen this legacy and the Anthropocene as the way to observe and explore peace? 

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think some of it is specific to The Club of Rome, the way this discussion emerged amongst us. But on a more abstract scale, we are defining peace in systemic terms, because it is a legacy of The Club of Rome. And for us, there are three components of the systems of planetary peace. One has to be at peace with oneself. The second is peace with others, between neighbors and nations, etc. And the third is peace with nature. These systems of peace are interrelated. They're interconnected. They're very interwoven. So, we are very much following in the legacy of systems thinking of The Club of Rome. We also trace the roots of these systems of peace to other economic, social, cultural and political systems and practices. So, we connect peace with systems that govern everyday activities and the life of people. This way, we hope that each individual person will be able to see the role of peace in their lives, in the way they conduct their lives, and take responsibility for and do something about it. So, we wanted to not only do systems thinking around peace, but also a kind of people-enabling so that peace is not left to security experts. It is not left to governments to deal with. Because, frankly, the record of governments in dealing with peace is rather abysmal. We've had 2000 years of war, so we thought that we need to shift the locus of action to people, and that was the other reason for thinking about it in these systemic terms. 

Nolita: What are the considerations about the question of understanding or navigating power? Because this, this publication, was also coming in like a backdrop of over 100 global conflicts, two of which are really grabbing the attention of people, while also, you know, the political landscape in and of itself, is shifting. 

Paul: Yeah, so actually, we started a conversation within The Club of Rome as a response to the Gaza crisis. I mean, what is now widely acknowledged as being a war of genocide. And it shook a lot of people right at the beginning of the war, and we started having conversations within the club, among members, about what, what are we to think of this? How are we to make sense of what is going on in Gaza and what's going on in Ukraine, and what's going on in all these other wars that we have been engaged in? What does it tell us about being human? And so actually, before this publication that you are referencing, we had another publication called “Enduring Peace in the Anthropocene”. And I'll come back to the question of the Anthropocene in a second. I know I didn't fully address it, but in that publication, I invited about a couple dozen Club of Rome members to explore this question of that we are moving into this new epoch of life in which lot of conditions are changing. People are describing it as a polycrisis and so on and so forth. What do these particular events of war tell us about living peacefully in harmony as human beings? And each person took a very different view. With a kind of open ended invitation, we got these 20-odd essays from people from all parts of the world with very different backgrounds, and it made clear to us the limitations of the traditional notions of peace, which is what prompted us to say, hey, if, if all these dangers and wars and losses are not fitting in, and particularly the Gaza war, into a narrative of peace that we have inherited over the last 200 years of war, then we need a new concept of peace, and we call it planetary peace, and we worked on developing that paper. 

So let me go back to the Anthropocene, because there are pieces of that puzzle that we haven't really fully parsed out. The Anthropocene clearly, we are in a period that is characterised by great acceleration in human population and in economic production and consumption, in devastating extraction of earth's resources, with tremendous inequalities at the same time, and in socio economic activities that are literally, literally killing the soil worldwide, killing plant life, killing other species. I mean, we are killing 80 billion animals every year for food. These are not sustainable, these are not peaceful approaches to the economy, approaches to dealing with the challenges of the Anthropocene. These are nature extractive capital accumulation processes that are at the root of breaching planetary boundaries of life, and they spill over in several ways into security and conflict issues. First, in order to provide security to the resources that we want to extract and the logistics routes for these resources that we need to protect, we are increasing military expenditures, and military systems build out. 

In 2024 we spent about $2.4 trillion in defense, so called defense expenditures. And these expenditures are going to double in the next decade. The US is already for 2026 wanting to spend over a trillion dollars itself. And then China has increased its budget by 7% India has increased its defense budget by six and a half percent, and all the NATO countries, which sort of fell under the US umbrella, are now being pushed by the Trump administration to spend 5% of their GDP into defense budgets in 2026. And so, we are moving in the wrong direction, in to protect the exploitation of resources which actually caused the Anthropocene. So that is one link to the Anthropocene. 

Secondly, the extraction of local resources, whether they're in Africa or in other parts of the world, is itself a source of armed conflicts. Now, these extractive practices benefit very differential populations. They are very unequal, and most of them are quite unfair, at least in the view of the locals. So, there is resistance by local communities to exploiting their local resources for profits by some anonymous, private and public corporations. So environmental technologies and nature-based solutions must become part of the security solution. Human security is not just about protecting the resources for the rich, which is where the inequality equation is becoming so bad now that less than 2% of the world controls 90% of the world's wealth, and so this trajectory of the Anthropocene needs to be dismantled eventually, but at least disturbed right now. 

And the third reason I would connect Anthropocene, and wars and peace is that the impacts of the current security practices is probably one of the largest cause of climate change. Defense forces and wars consume an enormous amount of resources, as Gaza showed us, as Ukraine is showing us, as other wars have showed us, they use a lot of fossil fuels. They destroy a large amount of natural environment, and we don't even track it. We don't measure the ecological footprint of armies, militaries and wars under the Kyoto Protocol, nor under the Paris agreement. And this is a huge blind spot. So we need to tie together the discourse of the Anthropocene and reimagine a piece for the Anthropocene. And this is where we are. We are sort of proposing planetary peace as a way of thinking about peace in broader terms. 

Nolita: So, if I understand correctly, the Anthropocene is, or can be, in and of itself, a violence. And you know, like the extraction, the acquisition of resources, the acquisition of human labor, is kind of what seems to perpetuate this. I mean, even if you think of it like in like the traditional human evolutionary stories, that man starts to farm, man starts to want to protect farm. Man now starts fighting neighbor because neighbor is encroaching on their farm. Here we go. We've invented war. If one accepts that narrative, it seems like it's been this trajectory that has been happening for quite some time, so much so that scholars really start to then grapple around the idea of, when does the Anthropocene start? Some define it as Anthropocene starts when colonisation starts, because that extraction of human labour, kind of makes war almost inevitable, inevitable part of development. I'm thinking of a book called “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None”. I'll share a link after this. So, I guess my question then is, what does planetary reconciliation look like, or planetary peace? So, the reconciliation of peace with oneself, peace with the other, peace with nature. What are the emerging proposals that were coming up? 

Paul: Yeah, so, I mean, each one of them is a huge area of debate and discourse. The Club of Rome is involved in some of them. We have another paper that was put out just earlier this year on inner development, which spoke to the question of, What does peace with oneself mean? We need to understand the self in deeper ways. And I think we have the whole Fifth Element project thanks to you and all the people that you're leading in that team to try to fully understand what it means to be human. I think those are all elements of trying to understand what peace with oneself could look like. Now, there are also existing practices of people who are leading in that space. I read somewhere that over 300 million people are practicing meditation every day, and another 3 million people are doing things like yoga and other mindfulness things to cultivate the self in a different way. So I don't think in in regards to acknowledging that peace with oneself is an important component, that we are new, or we are the first one. There are a lot of people who already have this insight, but they're perhaps not connecting it to peace. They are kind of thinking of peace, mental peace, or peace with oneself as something that stands alone and is their individual responsibility and doesn't connect to the rest of the world. And we want to invite them into this conversation of planetary peace and say, no, what you're doing is actually a very essential and perhaps a central part of the systems that are needed to engage in planetary peace. 

Similarly, peace with others. I think it has been over the years and the academic discourse and certainly the practical positions have been captured by a kind of specialisation on international security and the international security world has a certain language, a certain narrative, to describe that, and in my somewhat naive judgment, it doesn't contain the key elements of this Anthropocene thinking that we just alluded to earlier. So that community needs to really deeply consider what the implications of the Anthropocene are, whether it started with slavery in the 1500s or 1600s or even earlier, or it started in 1700s with fossil fuel. I mean, the timing of the Anthropocene is, to me, less important than the core insight that it is the Anthropos, the humans, that are now at the center of driving conflicts and change and extraction and exploitation, and we really need to reconsider our way of thinking about the world and thinking about nature and thinking about peace in that light. 

Nolita: I then also want to add a challenge, because also the risk of the framing of the Anthropocene is that it creates this equality of humans, as if all humans have put us in this position we're in. If I take an example of like from an African context, is like the ability of an African person to have an impact on the environment versus someone from somewhere else, are very different. Of course, modernity, right, like how Bruno Latour describes it, or being removed from nature, seeing humanness as separate from nature, I think to some extent, most humans participate in that, but it's not the same. And I probably could then imagine that even the discussion of planetary peace in the Anthropocene probably faces a similar type of debate of that not all people, there is no equality in creating wars. So yes, we can have self-enlightenment. I mean, various cultures also have different forms of enlightenment, like there's Wudu in Southern African context. You know, there's various forms of consciousness in different Asian contexts that already within, embedded in culture has a level of reconciliation that is required. So then the peace with other and peace with nature, question that you've been addressing on the Anthropocene part, still to some extent needs to be addressed. 

Paul: Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you pointed that out, because I also feel that the idea of the Anthropocene is not to just homogenise and blame everybody uniformly. We know that is not true. I mean, I keep emphasising the Anthropocene when I talk about it, I put climate change, of course, as one of the big things. But my very next thing is inequality, because climate change is not happening because what you and I do. 10% of the wealthy and their jets and ships are producing more carbon than most of what the rest of the world is doing. So, even in the case of climate change, I think who produces and who suffers the impact is completely the opposite. And there are two extremes. The production of the Anthropocene can be very squarely put into the hands of the rich, the rich countries, historically, they are the ones who have produced all the carbon that is now causing the changes, and it's the poor countries that suffer the consequences. So, to me, Anthropocene doesn't mean that everybody is equally responsible, or so I accept that, and I think it is also a question of responsibility. So, if there are historical causes that we are now starting to understand, then the richer countries, and within the countries, the richer communities, have a responsibility to deal with it in a more aggressive way. So yes, I think we will, as we start developing programmes, we will need to not only be mindful of this, but we will need to go to some very uncomfortable conversations about what reparations look like, what solutions look like, what reconciliation really means. It is not that simple in my mind, at least, and while I might not have an answer to what that reconciliation might mean. But I think that if we truly want to become human in our full potential, that reconciliation would have to include those three components, forgiving ourselves as individuals finding ways to forgive others, our neighbors, other countries, and reestablishing a new relationship with nature. And it's a very rich area for research, for practice, for change, for leadership. And I'm hoping that what this paper will do is to entice these other communities that have been providing answers to the old questions to rethink new solutions. 

Nolita: You are listening to The Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas, from changemakers who are tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis to inequality and systems change. The podcast is over a year old now, and we have an archive including episodes on building wellbeing economies in turbulent times, Africa's war on misinformation and building climate resilience in the most vulnerable communities. You can find them on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion. 

One of the most hopeful ideas in the publication is what you call existential opportunities, which, you know, nice play on words. You suggest that even amid global crises, humanity has a chance to reinvent itself. What kinds of opportunities are you referring to and what would a regenerative civilisation actually look like and be like in everyday life? Karima Kadaoui, a Club of Rome member, she always does this exercise of you wake up in the morning and your dreams have come true. What does that look like? 

Paul: You're asking some really very piercing questions but let me just say that the reason for thinking about existential opportunities was my rather idiosyncratic reaction to the debate that a year and a half ago I was involved in with regard to existential risks. Everybody was talking about existential risk. We were kind of coming out of a pandemic, which was the newest existential risk, after being exhausted for 20 years by climate change and 50 years with nuclear Armageddon, that were all existential risks, and now this new one, and followed very quickly by AI as an existential risk. So I was getting scared, frankly, and if we are going to think about risks, and as a Chinese proverb that says every risk is also a kind of opportunity for someone, we started thinking about what might be a way to react to existential risks that would be at least of a similar scale as these risks. And so, we came up with this notion of existential opportunity, and what we need to open our minds we become human in certain ways, and some of those ways are actually quite unhuman or inhumane. And the Gaza war is just an example of it. I mean, here is a genocide of hundreds of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, and a destruction of nature. We are all watching it on TV every night, and somehow it is getting normalised by people. It is getting justified. And while at an existential level, I feel a complicity. I can't watch this without saying like I am involved in this. It dehumanises me even to watch, and I should be doing something about it, my moral and my social and my all kinds of antennas are going up on, on this and yet there is no language, there is no narrative to describe this opportunity that might be there. So we, we thought that maybe the most fundamental opportunity is what The Club of Rome has been alluding to, what the Fifth Element has been alluding to is, how do we imagine being human in a world where all these major threats and polycrises are all around us? And so at the most fundamental level, this is a personal question, and it's a question that I took hope from that, even at the age that I am, in where most of my life is in my background, that I can still ask, can I be human in a different way that would avoid and prevent these kinds of carnages from happening? And so, at a very fundamental level, I see this as an opportunity to redefine human existence in relationship to themselves, to nature and to others. And it will have different answers for different people. For some, it will be a professional thing. What can they do in their own organisation, and how can they change their businesses or their hospitals or their educational institutions? For others, it will be a more private response. How do we change our consciousness? How do we change our mindset? How do we change our value? And for still others, it will be a policy question that we can be create more humane policy, the educational policy, social policy, economic policy, etc. So, I think our purpose there was to just open the door, just kick it open, and say everything should be reconsidered. 

Nolita: One of the proposals was on this transdisciplinarity, or interdisciplinarity, producing of knowledge, of collaborating, of creating new initiatives. Why was that one of the pillars? What was the opportunity that you were seeing there? 

Paul: Let me say that transdisciplinarity is part of the solution. I still see it as a positive force, but I've been arguing this for like, 20 years, and I'm a little bit fed up that the debate of the discourse of transdisciplinarity is just hung up still around disciplines. Who is having this debate now? In 2004 and 2005, and this was 20 years ago, literally, it was academics who were boxed in small disciplines and started to say, “oh, we need to talk to each other, and we need to talk to people outside academia”. And unfortunately, that debate, while there was this acceptance that we need to break out of disciplines and silos which are narrow and allow us to go deep, but don't allow us to go across, that that was an important challenge. But I'm afraid that as academics, we haven't done a good job. And I consider myself as part of the one who was promoting transdisciplinarity, and as a result, academia now has a transdisciplinary hang up. They keep talking about doing the same thing that we were talking about doing 20 years ago. I would have liked to see that debate emerge and take root in business, in medical, in other fields where practices have to go across their sectoral confines and silos, maybe we failed. Certainly in academia, we're still trying to go across disciplines. And since there are 20, 12,000 or 15,000 I mean, it's an impossible task. So, I think in some ways, we have not truly understood transdisciplinarity, and we have not made that much progress, but the idea that we need holistic action and holistic knowledge, perhaps, and a more holistic, planetary or cosmological consciousness, that core idea is still very valid. The way it is being put into practice in different practitioner groups, like academics or is, is very disheartening to me. So, I would say, yes, we should continue to do it, but let's not just react to our own immediate environment of disciplines. Let us look at what that big insight is calling for and take those large leaps that need to happen, and some of it means getting out of our comfort zone of our discipline or our academic institution or our conference or set of practitioners or communities of practice into completely different ones, and learning what it means to be effective there, and becoming a new person as a result. That's what the core of transdisciplinarity now holds. 

Nolita: I've run a little experiment on transdisciplinarity on myself because I did my undergraduate in chemical engineering. I'm doing my master's in Environmental Humanities. So one day over coffee, I'm going to give you my unhinged analysis of what's going on. But I think, but if I, if I try to keep it professional for the podcast, I think a lot of it, when I try to analyse, like a case, an example of a water conflict in the rules of the Eastern Capes of Africa. And what happened and what continues to happen, a lot of it does have to do with does this learning actually create change, or is it knowledge that insists upon itself, you know, like knowledge that is so refined and so finite that it just insists upon additional knowledge. So hence, the response to the problem is, let's get funding for more knowledge and not let's now inspire change. That's my top line analysis of what I understand, having now put my foot in both worlds. Could this potentially be one of the invitations then that are coming from The Club of Rome to the listeners of this podcast is, how do we overcome some of the analysis paralysis? What does interdisciplinarity at the action level as well as the knowledge level as well as the consciousness level, look like? 

Paul: What you just said is probably the most insightful thing I've heard about transdisciplinarity in a very long time, that it is about action. It is about impact. It is about change. It is about being on the ground in the real world, and what does it take to do that? It doesn't actually have very much to do with the discipline. I mean, these disciplines and silos or whatever blinkers and bubbles we want to live with our choice we like chosen to self-censor ourselves from action, because action is not a trivial thing. It comes with personal responsibility. It comes with personal consequences, and one can play a lot of mind games to avoid taking those risks of action. And I think the transdisciplinary academic discourse is in some ways shielding people from going into action in that dramatic way. And what you are telling me is that as you have experienced life and engaged in projects, you've started realising the kind of connection between that action and understanding. And sometimes you need a lot of understanding to engage in meaningful life, sometimes you don't. You just have it. So, I would agree with you that action is the heart of it. There are some real problems in the world out there, and we can't just keep on understanding these problems. We need to go and solve them. And I think if there's one thing that we could be doing more is modeling. So, when I look at you, and I look at some of our other colleagues and our members, the ones that I'm really inspired by are the ones who are on the ground doing things, rather than just talking about doing things. 

Nolita: So, the invitation is more people on the ground doing things, and for them to please get in touch. Because my final and my last question was that you described planetary peace as both a process and a project. In a world that's defined by division, what gives you the hope that this particular vision might be the one that actually takes root? 

Paul: Very good question, and also it kind of behooves the question of, how are we going to bring some new initiatives into reality and establish some things so as we are taking this concept out, we are always looking for collaborations, and I am really amazed with the kind of reactions that we are getting from all sorts of groups, all the way from the InterAction Council, which is the former heads of state, to individual university like Kyung Hee University, Hiroshima University, to there's a group called The Elders for Peace that are mostly retired bureaucrats and academics who are interested in innovation in the peace space, to peace organisations, the traditional peace NGOs, which is a huge community in itself, to academics, to people who are victims of war and trying to bring about peace in hot areas like Gaza. 

All of these different groups that we are talking to, they get it. They get the need for expanding peace and creating a peace centric world, just like we were arguing for an ecocentric world 50 years ago when the ecological movement started. We are sort of taking that idea of ecocentrism to include peace, and we are kind of weaving the two together to create a peace and ecocentric world together. So it has great appeal, and that is perhaps the biggest source of hope, the fact that younger people are finding a kind of enablement in this notion that saying that, yeah, we can do something, perhaps not about what's going on in Gaza, but if we look around us and look at the economic system that we are embedded in, we see a lot of violence, violence to the earth, violence to our neighbors, violence, and we can hopefully do something to rectify that at our local level. So, this kind of enablement is another source of hope for me, but ultimately the proof of the concept will lie in how many action projects we can create. So, we're going around to foundations, proposing to them that we need to change our economies towards a peace economy. We need to change our political systems and our educational systems and our healthcare systems and our food and energy and all our systems. 

Nolita: Okay, thank you so much, Paul. Thank you for joining me today. 

Paul: Okay, thank you, it was a wonderful conversation. 

Nolita: Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast. Follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome and planetary peace at Club of Rome.org

As climate chaos, political polarisation and collapsing trust shake the foundations of society, we stand at a turning point. These overlapping crises are not just signs of collapse but symptoms of a deeper breakdown, a system that puts profit before people, competition before community and short-term gain before the planet we share.

In this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, host Till Kellerhoff speaks with members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed and Ginie Servant-Miklos about how this turmoil could seed renewal, a once-in-a-civilisation chance to reimagine how we live, work and care for one another. They explore why the far right gains ground amid chaos, why progressives struggle to respond and how tech billionaires exploit instability to sell the illusion that technology alone can save us.

Examining the psychological toll of losing our shared “normal,” the conversation invites listeners to move beyond despair, challenge outdated assumptions and engage in the collective renewal already emerging through new forms of economics, energy and education.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Till: Today, it feels like everything is falling apart. Climate chaos, political breakdown, collapsing social trust. But what if these aren't separate crises, but symptoms of a deeper systemic decline? At the heart of it lies a way of living based on self-maximisation and extraction from each other, from other species and from the planet itself. But collapse isn't only about ending.

I'm Till Kellerhoff, and in this episode of The Club of Rome Podcast, we explore collapse not just as destruction, but as a potential phase shift, a reorganisation of human civilisation, through the flows of energy, technology and culture.

We ask, why does the far right seem to thrive in this chaos? Why do progressive movements struggle to respond, and how can we avoid falling into despair and imagine new systems that deliver wellbeing for all on a finite planet?  

I'm delighted to be joined by not one, but two members of The Club of Rome, Nafeez Ahmed, member of The Club of Rome, systems theorist and investigative journalist, Nafeez has been writing and researching about the intersection of major global ecological crises from climate, energy, food water and how they intersect with social and political crisis.

His most recent book is Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. Welcome Nafeez.

Nafeez: Thank you

Till: And I'm very happy to welcome Ginie Servant-Miklos, member of The Club of Rome, an environmental educator and Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Science in Rotterdam.

Her most recent book is Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as we know it. Welcome Ginie.

Ginie: Thank you

Till: Ginie, so your recent book carries the term collapse in the title and Nafeez you also wrote an article already in 2016 titled Failing states: Collapsing systems, biophysical triggers of political violence. Before we get into the details of collapse, you both seem to share a certain fascination for this concept of collapse. Where does that come from? Why is that? Maybe we start with you Nafeez.

Nafeez: So, I think collapse is something which is often seen kind of taboo in our societies.

You know, the idea that things can be really falling apart is not something that we hear much systematic discussion of.  But I think increasingly in the last few years, even though the concept, or the, you know, the word collapse, is not something we're always seeing in the news media, but I think it's becoming something which we're all feeling, and a lot of people are now feeling this sense that something isn't right.

Something is falling apart. And it almost feels like everything is falling apart around us, but we don't really know why. So, the idea of collapse, I think, you know, begins to kind of put a bit of a specificity to what we're all experiencing. But what I hope, increasingly, we're seeing is that there's a body of quite strong scientific literature across both the natural sciences and the social sciences, showing that collapse is a real phenomenon in nature, and has therefore massive implications across our societies, our economies, our cultures, precisely because, as we're increasingly beginning to see, our societies, our economies, our cultures, are rooted in the natural world. They're not separate from it. They're actually very much part of it.

So, these life cycles that we can see in the natural systems, where, you know, we see systems growing, thriving, but then also experiencing collapses, and that's kind of a part of this, of a natural process. These are things which we can also see at a big macro scale in human society. And in my view, I think industrial civilisation as we know it is on the cusp of a very similar type of moment that we have seen across living systems. But it's we're seeing a process of breakdown in all the kind of big systems that we take for granted.

Till: Just to follow up here, because you did mention that the events we are currently observing, you describe them as global, systemic decline, in a way, due to a system that is no longer able to keep its current form without sparking father crisis. Which system are you talking about there?

Nafeez: Yeah, there's, I mean, says there's so much to unpack there, but I think at the core of any system you know, is, is energy, and that's not to reduce and kind of take away all the other important factors, because there's many factors, which is about how you organise energy and the way that you see the world in the way that you see and interact, and all of those play a fundamental role.

But I think what we're seeing is that the climate crisis, which is kind of like in a way, it's the in our face symptom of the catastrophes that we're seeing, of that collapse process we're seeing, but it's not the driving cause of the crisis. The driving cause of the crisis is the way in which our civilisation actually works. And of course, energy is at the heart of that. And you know, one side of that is the fact that the energy systems that we currently rely on, basically fossil fuel resources, obviously, are destabilising this natural balance in the carbon cycle when we're getting this increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses, and the planet can't cope with that, and it's having all sorts of destabilizing effects which are really difficult for us to understand.

But the other side of that is that the energy system itself, the fossil fuels that we rely on, are, in a way, experiencing their own forms of diminishing returns. And there's a concept called energy return on investment, which my colleague Ginie, has also written extensively about, which is a way of understanding the quality of energy, the amount of energy you use to get a certain amount of energy out. And so now there's, I think, a consensus that you know, amongst experts who've been studying this concept and using this metric, that the EROI of the fossil fuel system as a whole has been in decline for the last decades. And all of this, then, is interconnected. You know, the energy, the economics, the ecology, are all fundamentally actually just facets of one crisis.

So, Ginie, what is your approach? If we look at collapse, I mean, there's systemic factors. There's also something like the lived experience of collapse, right? How do you approach this?

Ginie: Yeah, I love that Nafeez talked about, that we're feeling it, because that's kind of my starting point as a psychologist. I realised, you know, we can look at the impact of energy on the ecology, on the economics, on production, but the key missing element is on the psychology. So, what is it that we understand as normal? What is actually our experience of normality and our experience, your experience, my experience, our experience here of normality is actually a historical aberration. In all of human history, a society with such large amounts of energy available has never existed.

And so what we understand as normal life, that kind of linear model that has been sold to us, packaged in a system that you might call American-style capitalism, something like that, the American Dream, let's say which is you go to school, and the longer you stay in school, the higher your earning potential. You hyperspecialise in a job, then you get married, you buy a house, you have 2.1 kids, you buy a car, and then you retire.

That kind of normality is an aberration that was only made possible by high amounts of energy in the system. This is not how a system with low amounts of energy operates. And the problem is that in psychology, we have this concept called schemas, which is how our brain processes and stores information to allow us to make sense of the work of like the world around us. And our schemas for what normality is are entirely shaped by a very high energy society, and as we enter this series of crises, the psychological reactions to having those schemas challenged, or even to being told what you think of as normal is not going to endure in the next 5, 10 you know, it's already falling apart now, that causes such violent psychological shocks that I think that that is something that can then be very easily manipulated or preyed upon by the kinds of people that Nafeez has done so much research into.

Like it is that psychological fragility, the lack of psychological resilience to collapsing schemas in a way that creates a wide-open door for people to come in with big, beautiful lies, let's say that soothes the psychological collapse that people are experiencing.

Till: Thanks, Ginie, I found that actually very interesting in your book. You do have the psychoanalytical approach to that. You, for example, bring in Žižek reinterpretation of the different stages of grief on how people also deal in times of collapse, right?

You say that there are certain mechanisms that people usually during phases of grief have stages one ideological denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression, and then seeing the situation as a threat, but also as a chance for a new beginning. How, in this framework, where are we today there? How do you in which stage do you see us in this stage of the collapse?

Ginie: Yeah, I'm seeing a shift, actually, from the moment where I wrote the book, which was 2022, around the time I started writing the book, and the reelection of Donald Trump, I think, like there's, there's been like a sudden psychological phase shift. I like that term, Nafeez uses phase shift a lot in his work, I like that term. So, I think that there is, on a one hand, an acceleration of what I called the phallic-techno magic paradigm, which is the belief that very powerful, very rich men will save us using increasingly phantasmagoric technologies that don't actually work, like carbon capture doesn't actually work on any kind of scale. We can't actually send rockets to Mars to solve anything.

But we are seeing, particularly on certain corners of the far right, an acceleration of that phallic-techno magic discourse, which I think is there's no better embodiment of this than the image of Jeff Bezos sending beautiful women into space, into his phallic shaped object as just a kind of grotesque manifestation of his feeling of phallic omnipotence.

And on the other hand, I'm seeing an acceleration, to an extent that wasn't the case even two three years ago, of despair. So, an acceleration of people just giving up, particularly on the left, so particularly people in the progressive movements who should be the ones leading the charge against fascism and against the right of far right, authoritarian, authoritarian movements have basically given up.

This is actually I'm working on new book, which is called The Left We Need: Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll and Climate Justice for All. Because I want to wake those people up and say, get out of your despair like you owe the world better than to just surrender and give up now, but I think that's kind of the moment we're living through right now.

Till: But Nafeez, Ginie mentioned already your analysis of phase shift and also these different stages, I mean, you basically refer to this concept that originally comes from ecosystems, right?

Referring to the life cycles of living systems and can kind of see that as a framework to also describe human civilisation, through the lens of like material, information, flows of energy. How do you see that coming in there the phase shift analogy of our time, and where are we with that?

Nafeez: Ginie kind of really nails it when she talks about, when you talk about this kind of sense of complete derangement that we're kind of increasingly experiencing from a psychological point of view. And I think the current system is reaching its limits and is now going through this. You know, people will call it a polycrisis, or we ever want to call it, but there is clearly an interconnected continuum of crisis related fundamentally to the way in which this structure of civilisation works.

That has meant that all of the normal, normalised ideas that we have generated to kind of manage this system, they don't make sense anymore. They don't work. They don't actually, you know, neoliberal capitalism, and you know, the kind of consumer, hyper capitalist culture that we've developed, and all the many different assumptions and lifestyles and things that go along with it, they don't actually make sense anymore. And I think so as that's crumbling, and as the business-as-usual approach, you know, which is, let's do more of the same.

Let's maybe try what we tried last time. Let's maybe try some more quantitative easing. Let's, you know, do this, do that, and we're throwing the same toolbox because we're in the same mindset, and that is actually accelerating the crisis, and people are feeling it.

And so, your ordinary people are looking for answers, but that normalised kind of sense of the prevailing norms and values are collapsing, and as it's a rapid change that we're really experiencing. And this is something that we see time and again when we're looking at the precursors to extremism and exterminatory violence in history.

Major social crisis driving that sense of the collapse of norms, existing norms and values is what drives communities and societies apart, and then people often gravitate to the most, simplest common denominator, oh, it's those guys coming across the border who are the problem.  “Oh, it's those, it's those people of color. Oh, they're trans, oh, blah, blah, whatever's on the surface of your consciousness.”

And what obviously makes it worse is that we have a status quo, a technological oligarchy, an economic oligarchy, you know, which is also fraying at the seams, but you have people in those positions of power, many of whom are deliberately weaponising that polarisation because they want to maintain their power, and so essentially turn the rest of us against each other.

And that obviously is extremely chaotic. It feels quite worrying. But I think there's a there's a positive side of this, which is, when we're looking at life cycles in history, the collapse is never the end. It's always a phase transition to something else, and the breakdown of the current order is creating an unprecedented space for renewal, and we're seeing those shoots of renewal in again, two different dimensions. On the one hand, there are these new infrastructural possibilities, which you might see in the way that clean energy is kind of rising up exponentially, and things like that.

At the same time, there are new breakthrough ideas about how to do economics, you know, like doughnut economics, and, you know, governments and local authorities are beginning to realize that, wow, this is a really important approach.

Let's, let's look at this. Let's learn from this. So, there are these opportunities that are emerging. And I think the key thing here is to recognise that there is a possibility space to, in a way, redesign the way we think about civilisation, in society, to create something genuinely new, but that's it's difficult when you're surrounded by this craziness.

Till: You're listening to The Club of Rome Podcast, the place to discover bold ideas from change makers tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis and inequality and systems change.

The podcast is over a year old now, and our archive includes episodes on Universal Basic Dividend, changing finance and building climate resilience in the most vulnerable communities.

You can find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the discussion.

Ginie: I'd like to react to something that Nafeez was saying. I think that I wouldn't qualify what's going on with the billionaires right now is status quo anymore.

Because, actually, they're going towards their own phase shift that basically divorces the billionaire class from the rest of humanity, in which and this is a phenomenon which I as a psychologist, and right now a lot of my research is focused on psychedelic drugs, and you see a huge increase in psychedelic use in Silicon Valley and in these places where they have all these like tech utopian ideas, and I'm very worried that these people are very serious indeed about switching to, let's say, silicon based forms of consciousness where they genuinely believe we don't need human bodies anymore, and they genuinely believe that it doesn't matter if we exterminate everybody who's not them on the planet, because future people, or rather, future consciousness, matters more, even if it's a robotic, AI kind of consciousness.

And you'll tell me, well, nobody in their right mind would believe that, but they're not in their right mind if they're well, you know, there's been reports about how much mushrooms, MDMA and Ketamine Elon Musk was consuming on a weekly basis, but he's not the only one.

And I think that's why drugs feature quite prominently in my new work. It's because I do think that that is actually a change in the status quo. So, I think it's dangerous to even call it status quo. I don't know if you agree Nafeez

Nafeez; I think it just depends. I mean, I think I think you're right, I think you're absolutely right to point out that what we're seeing, I think the key point really is that we're seeing a messianic effort to fundamentally re-engineer society in a way which is totally unprecedented and not the same as the current system.

The structures of wealth and power that have allowed these, these groups, to essentially amass their positions, is unraveling. It's this recognition that there is this unraveling that's taking place. And so, in order to maintain that, there's a realisation that will actually it doesn't require just keeping the current system going in its current form, but to maintain their power, they actually have to completely remake the system.

So, you know, while the material infrastructure of the system is going into crisis, the politics, the economics and the culture, are now moving into that phase transition element where there is a plasticity in the system.

So, we're seeing this weird situation where there is this kind of contradictory thing, where, on the one hand, they're going back to bizarre 19th century ideas. You know, traditional eugenics, scientific racist hierarchies. You know black people at the bottom, white people at the top. You know, the ideas of genetic, genetically determined intelligence, and that determining so very traditional ideas, but then those are becoming fused with these really bizarre postmodern technological ideas, which are being packaged in this kind of in a in a new centralised way, and that's creating something quite new, which you're absolutely right. It's not the same system.

It's a different type of system. It's not even capitalism, and people have been, you know, some people call it, is it techno feudalism? Is it hyper capitalism? It's not actually any of those. It's something very different.

But it's very much about maintaining this hyper extractivist power of a very narrow oligarchy.

And I think perhaps the most frightening part, which I think is really, really critical for people to recognise, is that you know you when you start looking at the inspiration that these people are drawing from figures like Curtis Javin, you know this tech bro that Peter Thiel funded, very influential in the Trump administration. And look at what his ideas, not only did he endorse really traditional racist ideas, now he used the N word repeatedly. Talked about how American, you know, again, the N word this group of people were suffered as a result of the end of slavery, you know, and then advocated this idea that there is an existential threat to the white race from a global majority of darker skinned people. That was his kind of founding position. And then he ends up with a combination of, let's talk about resurrecting monarchistic type of societies.

But ends up with, well, we should just get rid of national governments and sovereign borders, and we should just have societies run like Apple and, you know, talking about having a patchwork of authoritarian regimes which are not like anything we've ever seen before, you know?

And I think that's, that's the crucial thing, and you're absolutely right to highlight that if we don't do anything about this, and don't raise awareness of what's coming, then we are not going to be able to respond effectively. And I think right now, we're feeling like we're dealing with something traditional, and we're not. And there's, in my view, there's really two tasks for us on the left. One is really to name and understand what we're really up against in this extraordinary kind of new phase that we're in. But secondly, to really recognise that in that plasticity that's emerging, the only reason that the right wing is currently appearing to win is because there is already an incumbency which is channeling huge amounts of money into it.

But the fact is, is that what these guys are building can't really work, and we know that because it's ecologically illiterate, it's energetically illiterate, it's economically illiterate, it doesn't make sense, and it isn't going to work. And the danger is that it takes all of us down with it. But there is a possibility, as we've seen over the last decades, with the with the ideas and a different way of designing and utilising technology, that it is possible for us to create vibrant societies.

You know, there's brilliant research, you know, by like my colleague, Julia Steinberger, who's done research showing that you can reduce the material throughput of your society and increase wellbeing for an even larger population of up to 10 million people. But it's all about changing our mindset and changing our ideas. And I think right now that people's imaginal capacity to see and recognise those possibilities is being shrunk by all of this stuff. So that's, I think, that that important mission that you're undertaking with your next book, Ginie, I think, is so important. We really need to inject that sense of possibility and dynamism of what actually is possible in order for us to fight back.

Ginie: And it's not just in the book, like I actually do this in practice through the project I set up here in Rotterdam Climate School, which is a place where we take people from the whole education system, including the vocational students, who are all working class. So, I bring in working class people in with people from the middle classes all together through a programme that helps them cope with eco-anxiety and to, so we give them the real truth about the phase shift that's happening in the system, and that's really hard for them.

They get very anxious, but through an approach. It's a Danish approach called Bildung, which is based on, like, personal development and finding joy in aesthetics, music, we do music, dancing, cooking together, boxing, like re-embodying yourself. Because I believe that the key problem, like Nafeez is completely right, the shift in mindset, but the shift in mindset is never going to happen by just telling people: “Hey, but we'll all be better off if we don't use fossil fuels anymore.” Like no rational argument is going to break through it, and that's because we're fundamentally talking about trauma and anxiety as a result of trauma.

People are feeling well already, as Gabor Mate, who's one of my key psychological influences, Gabor Mate, said, in our modern world, everybody's a bit traumatised by the way that capitalism just alienates people and makes them feel detached from each other and has broken down our community and isolates families And so we're all kind of traumatised and on top of that, you're saying, “Oh yeah. and by the way, the world's on fire, and your kids might not have a house to live in, and, you know, there's war, and we're all watching genocide unfold in front of our very eyes.” And like all that trauma, you can't rationalise your way through it. And so, my approach is to really go back to people's emotions, feeling of belonging, a feeling of joy. And I feel like that's where the left has gone completely wrong. Identity Politics has never won any elections. Identity politics should have stayed in academe, where it was born as like an interesting tool of analysis. I am not saying that we should throw it all out. It has its purpose in academia, for the purposes of research and understanding certain things, but as a political tool, particularly when it comes to working with working class people, it just doesn't work.

It creates a whole lot of division. So, where we need to connect with working class people and talk to working class people on things that are hurting for working class people. And yes, that means that women and people of colour, we need to talk to white men. We really have to talk to white men, because they are the ones driving those, like, completely destructive political movements. We have to, we have to get over ourselves. Yes, it's going to be emotional labour. Yes, it's not fair that it falls on us again, but we've got to do it because civilisation, and, like, the future of humanity is at stake.

Till: Thanks, Ginie, and there's so much in there, and I think maybe we need to meet again at some point, but I we have to wrap up soon.  I just want to give Nafeez the possibility to respond to that, and maybe also out of what Ginie just said. Now, you know, it feels like we almost need a strategy for the more progressive groups to deal to, to deal with this current crisis. What, what would that look like? And also, what could be a role of an organisation like The Club of Rome in all of this, an organisation you both are a member of?

Nafeez: No, that's those are really important points, and I really appreciate Ginie's exhortation that we need to, essentially, you know, break through these barriers that we have, you know, assumed exist, but don't really exist. It's not about making people wrong. It's about creating a space where we can allow ourselves to be heard, and everyone has to be allowed to be heard. And I think if we take a different approach, which is, which is not what we've done before, it has to be new. It has to be a kind of a new paradigm approach. We can be we can have a huge impact.

Till: Excellent. Thank you so much. And there would still be many topics to discuss. Father, I recommend everyone to read both of your books. And maybe we have another possibility to speak soon. I want to end this episode with a quote from your book, Ginie, though, where you write:

"Our fate is not written. We are not predestined for uncontrolled collapse, untold misery and possible extinction. If we collectively rise up against the system and its enablers and demand its controlled demolition, we may yet preserve some of the organised civilisation and a habitable planet for generations to come.”

And with that, thank you for listening to The Club of Rome Podcast.

Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about The Club of Rome at clubofrom.org

Thank you, Nafeez and Ginie for being on the podcast today and for your time.

Nafeez: Thank you.

Ginie: Thank you.

Africa is on the frontline of a fast-moving battle against digital misinformation, one with profound effects for politics, trust and daily life.

In this episode of We Kinda Need a Revolution, host Nolita Mvunelo talks to Abdullahi Alim, award-winning economist and CEO of the Africa Future Fund, about how social media, YouTube rumours, deepfakes and adversarial AI are reshaping the continent, often out of the global spotlight.

From election hoaxes to ethnic divisions stoked online, they highlight the unique and urgent challenges confronting the continent and the lack of accountability from major tech platforms.

But the conversation is also about hope: practical solutions like investing in education, boosting community resilience and creating spaces for honest, offline dialogue.

Drawing on his own journey from Somalia to a different life in Australia, Abdullahi reflects on how lived experience shapes his vision of the risks and opportunities Africa faces in the digital age.

Watch the episode:

Full transcript:

Nolita: While the world's attention is often elsewhere, Africa is facing a digital war on misinformation. Nations across the continent are facing a quieter but equally dangerous battle for the truth in the age of social media and AI, one that is reshaping politics trust and power. Welcome to We Kinda Need a Revolution, a special series of the Club of Rome Podcast where we explore bold ideas for shaping sustainable futures. I am Nolita Mvunelo, and today I'm speaking to Abdullahi Alim, an award-winning economist and CEO of the Africa Future Fund. Abdullahi is a leading voice on how disinformation and adversarial AI are reshaping power and trust. These are ideas that he examines in his foreign policy essay, how Africa's war on disinformation can save democracies everywhere. In this episode, we dive into the war on misinformation in Africa and ask, what risks lie ahead, what role are young people playing, and what will it take to build resilience and reclaim the digital space? Let's explore what's at stake and what's possible. 

Hi, how are you doing? Thank you so much for joining us today.  

Abdullahi: I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Nolita.  

Nolita: Our discussion today is going to be on Africa's war and disinformation, but before we get into that, can you please tell us more about yourself and what led you into considering some of these challenges and these potentially existential risks?  

Abdullahi: I think every idea needs to be drawn back to its origins, and that also holds for me as a person too. I was born in 1992 in Somalia, and I am of the children of that initial conflict that earned Somalia, the unfortunate nickname of a failed state. And I think going from that early childhood experience in in Somalia to eventually where we settled in Australia, in a more low income bubble when you are a product of failed systems, be it, examples of systems of migration, systems of transportation, systems of housing, you have no choice but to think deeply about how those systems operate to advantage some people and how they operate to disadvantage others. So, I think I've always been a deeply reflective person, even from a young age, and I take that with great responsibility, because my story isn't the norm. I'm the exception to the norm, having had the life that I've had so far, and I want to use that responsibly. And I think that starts not so much with solving things, but asking the right questions, and that's why I lend myself better to systemic issues, systemic fault lines, like what we're about to discuss today. 

Nolita: So as a start, may you please take us through the challenge and the landscape? 

Abdullahi: Sure. So I think when we think of disinformation, we think of it through a US Eurocentric lens, largely because it's language borrowed from the west. When we think about the large disinformation campaigns that pique media interest, we're usually talking about events that's around the US election, or perhaps proxy conflicts taking place in Europe between pro-Russian voices and pro NATO voices. But the world of disinformation actually expands beyond that, and I think it gets the least amount of attention in Sub Saharan Africa. Least amount of attention, but some of the most profound impacts. Why? Because, I think for the most part, identity on the continent is still delineated against clan, religious and ethnic lines. So, somebody could be of X nationality, but at the same time, they may have an additional loyalty, especially when conflict comes to rise. At a more granular level, the loyalty again, could be to their ethnic group, it could be to their religious group. It could be to their clan. Now, when you have an unregulated landscape of that sort, and when you have less sort of resources deployed by the big tech companies who have a large monopoly in the information highway in these parts of the world, what it means is that those regions, and principally Africa, in this moment, is most vulnerable and most at risk to the kind of disinformation tactics which seem quite analogue relative to what we typically think of disinformation. It really could just be somebody edited to look like they've said something when they haven't. It could be a court attributed to a particular leader of a group, any of those forms of misappropriated text or deep fakes, anything from one end to the other, can have real life ramifications. 

Nolita: Do you have any like specific examples or cases where this has happened and what has the impact been? I say this also, like in the current context, where there is a lot of conflict right now, is that at the same time, Africa doesn't get the same type of global attention at times of conflict.  

Abdullahi: I think the example that I can give again would be in Ethiopia, because it sort of happened at the worst possible time when the conflict in Tigray broke out in Ethiopia. And of course, this has been brewing for some time. I think it came off the backs of a lot of. Tech companies culling their trust and safety teams, budgets, councils. And what you had was one moderator, for example, for every let's say I'm giving an arbitrary figure here, just to sort of give you the scale one per million of population, so that really when you, when you reduce her to that level, you're never going to be at the scale necessary to be able to tackle this issue. We saw examples in Ethiopia where one faction would basically share an image of a leader from another particular faction. This is, again, was based on ethnic lines, saying a particular, particularly provocative statement against them, or suggesting that they were about to incite violence, which they never did. It got so bad that it reached the stage where that particular misappropriated community leader from the other group was killed off the backs of this misassumption. Now, when you look at the death toll in the Tigray conflict, clocking something around 600,000 people, you cannot disassociate that from social media and the role of disinformation in this particular form of warfare. 

Nolita: So then I sense that there's an element of accountability and infrastructure, like what is available for governments or maybe even people to, you know, hold platforms accountable for the lack of infrastructure, like the lack of moderation, etc, but also who chooses what gets moderated, what is right, what is wrong, what can be shared, what can't be shared. Are there any initiatives, even at the state level or even at the international organisation level, that are addressing some of these challenges? 

Abdullahi: Most of the efforts now are calling for more moderation, which would have worked a few years ago, but in the age of AI, actually, it's it's going to prove quite inconsequential. I'll tell you why. So I could literally put out propaganda that calls for and incites violence against even an individual, let alone a particular group, and in such a way that I use the latest, what we call adversarial AI, to change and augment the detail of the image from the back end in such a minute way that the naked eye won't see the difference. But a machine might misread as something completely different. So it might read it as, oh, that's a rose, or that's something that isn't inflammatory. So imagine that at scale. So the question then becomes, where do we go from here? Now, unfortunately, the AI ecosystem is quite closed around the world. A lot of these big companies are running closed models. We're outsourcing this huge responsibility to smaller teams behind these tech companies, who, for the most part, don't have the incentive and may not have the interdisciplinary expertise to be able to tackle this issue at their core. So that, I think is the number one issue at the moment is that we've got closed innovation ecosystems that as these problems get more and more advanced, these disinformation tactics become more and more advanced, it actually shuts the door from a global community of experts, both technical and non-technical, being able to come to the table to figure out how to counter that from an algorithm perspective, and we're outsourcing this important duty and responsibility to smaller and smaller companies whose main incentives is really just to win the AI race, as it's called. And so I think who bears the cost? Unfortunately, it will be the continent. It will fortunately be parts of the world that don't have that. Don't have that same level of fluency with these kind of more advanced disinformation campaigns. I also think nalita, we're paying the costs for decades long poor education systems and decades long lack of investments, lack of even just community spaces to heal divides, to create spaces where tension will arise when you bring up narratives and experiences, lived experiences in particular, but not doing it unfortunately means that those issues fester to the point where, when a new medium emerges that's able to sort of take prey on that it resurfaces at a way that we're unable to sort of tackle it, as much as if we were actually looking at the issue from its core. So I'm concerned because disinformation is evolving at a technically rapid rate. The tech companies are becoming more closed, which means that other experts aren't able to figure out the exact inner workings of these models that are being co opted and as a consequence, how to sort of counter them from a technical perspective. And at the same time, we're becoming less and less invested in the social in the educational systems that would have made us more resilient to start with,  

Nolita: There is a paper that I read. It was a paper about systemically transforming governance and the development space. And they speak about deliberative spaces that for for there to be new models of governance, you need to have more spaces where there is deliberation around what country are we trying to become? What feature are we trying to create?  

Abdullahi: To add to your point, because I think it's an important one about creating deliberate spaces to host these courageous conversations. I also think it's even more important for relatively, quote, unquote. New countries. Our borders are not real, but they are our current reality. So we have to sort of contend with the current moment and create spaces to almost talk as if we are a new ecosystem, 54 of which make up this continent. So unless you are intentional about creating those spaces, these issues will go unchecked, they will fester, they'll go underground, and they'll resurface in ways that a political voice of this future, an opportunist, maybe from another space, can really just set that on fire. 

Nolita: It's ripe with opportunists. I think, I think it's become less of a conversation of whose ideas are most likely to be able to lead people, and more about who is more likely to capture the attention of people. I think I've fallen to the AI misinformation videos, because one is that, think it's the latest Google update where the videos look really realistic. And there was like a geese caster standing next to a big pothole, and she was like, Yo, you know, infrastructure problems in Kenya, and then, and then the lady just falls in. And I was like, Oh, my God, the roads are so bad in Kenya. And I actually, like, just like I listened to that, I moved on, and then I saw a similar video about Ukraine, and I was like, okay, that means the other one was false. Growing up, it's like the young people know technology. I didn't know it's going to be on the old people without understanding technology side so quickly, 

Abdullahi: But it's how we engage with social media. It's at the click of a finger, so you're not really dedicating too much bandwidth to literally, like, delineate between what's real and what's fake. So very quickly, you could just assume that anything. 

Nolita: Obviously public opinion then changes based on that right like, if someone had seen that video, and they didn't see the UK version, and they were just like, oh, wow, the roads here are so bad. I can definitely see myself changing who I vote for, just based off of that, being like, that lady almost died in that pothole. But the point I'm alluding to is that, like, technology is changing politics. So you made a point earlier, that there it is increasing the chance of conflict, like there is violent conflict happening at the hands of misinformation and disinformation, but it's also just like entirely changing the landscape of how even democratic elections are turning out, like South Africa's last election, someone probably could credibly say that this was the first Youtube election, like there was so many YouTube Interviews by politicians making their case, etc, endeared me to some people made me even more convicted as to why I don't like certain people. Is there research happening about how these modalities are trans like, these different formats are transforming how elections happen? 

Abdullahi: Um, I think there's a growing Pan African ecosystem of fact-based reporting, which I think is taking more and more interest, taking more and more shape. I think the challenge nowadays, and this might sound harsh for the continent, but I don't think social media shapes politics. I actually think culture is the ultimate point of reference. Everything else is the derivative. So you are only susceptible to this extent, to this extent if you are truly a set of communities that lack resilience. And that becomes the broader question, I think that becomes the question that we need to sort of tackle. And unfortunately, those questions don't get as much attention because scalability is it becomes a secondary question, like, how do you scale resilience if they require so much offline engagement?   

Nolita: What does it mean to be culturally resilient? What would it take like tangibly, also? 

Abdullahi: I think it's to know your identity intimately. We have complex stories where in some parts of the continent, we are the descendants of those who obviously endure a great amount of conflict, and that becomes almost like a shared trauma. There's such power in creating space for that, but there's also shared power in also creating spaces for ways in which we are descendants of folks who also contributed to conflicts and really sitting in that discomfort. But unfortunately, unless you go down to that nuance of saying, I also come from a part where the conflict was a result of what my community did, and I'm able to take stock of that, I'm able to sort of turn the tide against that. Unless you're able to have those that level of healing, I think it'll always just sort of fester into this more like identity politics game, where each group really needs to reinforce itself through a set of false beliefs to maintain sort of control of its own narrative, over and above the national interest, over and above the continental interest.  

Nolita: If the resilience comes from, I guess, the acknowledgement of conflict one's community's role in it or or struggle, is that not the same as identities? Because then I think, does it not then create an environment where it is the Olympics of suffering is I have suffered more than you, or I have suffered at the hands of you, because there are generative parts of like being African that are more positive, that probably could create more positive energy. 

Abdullahi: But that's the thing like this. I struggle with Pan African thought is that it stays at the continental level, meaning it stays peripheral, and it doesn't become proximate to like your My specific role in what it means for me to say like I take stock of your, of you, you take stock of me, if, if you are still running in a space where, and I'm talking maybe more about the more pronounced parts of the continent. Maybe I'm talking about Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, DRC, where you've got very entrenched forms of violence that were drawn on these very granular lines. If you stay at the abstract unfortunately, which is sometimes what the Pan African level looks like for these parts of the continent, and negate how it shows up in the immediate you are bound to make the same mistakes 

Nolita: You are listening to The Club of Rome podcast, the place to discover bold ideas from change makers tackling the world's biggest challenges, from the climate crisis and inequality to systems change. The podcast is nearly a year old now, and we have an archive of episodes that include an episode on the universal basic dividend, on using music for social change and women silencing the guns. You can find them on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the discussion.   

I want to go back to the discussion about the digital race, or Africa's lack of participation in the technologies that are emerging is, in your opinion, is it? Is it hopeless for us? I mean, the I, when I'm listening to like news from the US, they speak about as if, like, this is the next race to the moon? Are we nonparticipants in the race towards the moon? 

Abdullahi: I think there's a privilege, in some ways, in being a last mover, because there are a lot of legacy infrastructure projects that countries have invested hundreds of billions of dollars on across the world that they're still paying debt on that are almost futile at this moment of time. So the fact that we don't have the same legacy systems, I think, could potentially be an advantage, because we have less institutional burden and also less sort of mental burden towards old ways of thinking. Having said that, it means we've got a very narrow window to take advantage of any economic wins that we can over the next few decades, and purpose that towards what's most strategic for us. I don't know that it makes sense to invest massively in being like the number one infrastructure maker of like data centers. I don't know if that's truly strategic, but if we had economic wins from strategic other strategic sectors that have nothing to do with AI, for example, and repurpose that towards building a skills pipeline to service this new kind of industrial wave, that could be a very, very strategic asset for which the different countries can play sort of an interesting geopolitical role as well, and how they engage with with other countries. So, for example, a Middle Eastern country that has large energy supply, if they were to say, “Oh, we will help generate the energy baseload required to help power the data centres that you might need to power your economies. In exchange for that, we will have a skills transfer between either your universities and our talent, or your talent with our companies.” You can actually become competitive in this new configuration of the economy, but I think we've got a relatively small window to be able to do that. I don't think we have to create basically our own ChatGPT, is what I'm saying. I think there's other ways to win the to sort of win as well. 

Nolita: I struggle with optimism when it comes to that point, because if those mechanisms to use this technology to our advantage existed, I think even with the social media wave, we would have done more to participate create alternative channels than to essentially just use what is already there, because that's what we started this conversation with. Right that infrastructure exists from elsewhere. There is a lack of investment in moderation and curation and all the things that are necessary to maintain democracies. And as a result, although, like it's often a pretty useful business, like a place to do individual business is not particularly helpful for nation building across these 54 countries. I don't know if that dynamic is going to be overcome when it comes to this particular problem that is even more closed, because at least with social media, you could just, like, make a website and just try to get critical mass of people to participate. This means a type of investment that we have not proven to be capable of doing before.  

Abdullahi: Yeah, I get what you mean, but I think it's the economics of it that I'm leaning more into. Like, if we had adequate trade assets, meaning like roads and ports and rails and aviation networks, we would have been able to take full advantage and, of course, internet infrastructure, we'd be able to take the full advantage of what e commerce could have provided for the continent, as far as the transfer and exchange of goods in the online domain. What I'm basically trying to say now is, if we're able to radically industrialise our economies and reduce those bottlenecks that still persist, and by that, there are strong stories, for example, in Côte d'Ivoire. So, the example that I often would cite in workshops is the fact that it literally produces most of the raw cashew nuts in the world, but doesn't gain much in return for that, because much of it is the supply chain is captured in India and Vietnam. Côte d'Ivoire used to just share raw exports. You'd get roasted toasted in South Asia and then sold at a premium to European clients for the most part. Now, I think Côte d'Ivoire now has 20% of the full supply chain since 2008 and I think they started like 5% so just to say that trend is persisting. Now, if you had that where people, where the content is capitalising on its natural assets, on its skills, its strategic proximity, and leveraging that, leveraging the financing wins and headwinds from that, to really re educate its base, because no one has cracked, to be honest, the code when it comes to AI and education. You know, we know that there was a seminal study, actually from Nigeria that the World Bank conducted that said that, you know, students who participated in a 16 week after school program and used AI were able to obtain the same learning outcomes in that 16 weeks that a student typically shows in two years. And it's still one of it's actually now one of the most effective education interventions ever in West Africa. So we are this. There's an advantage in it being a nascent sector, and it being somewhat considered a last mover as well. But this requires a level of coordination, and this requires a level of ambition and imagination that I'm not seeing too much of just yet.  

Nolita: The last point I want to make being the type of row is on the climate discussion. Right? The technologies are not climate benign. We have an additional we, being Africa, have an additional risk of being climate vulnerable. Are there any cases that you know of at this stage about like the climate impact that is happening or is potentially going to happen, and any opportunities to overcome it? 

Abdullahi: Nothing, nothing definitive. There's speculations, of course, and there are some kind of foresight activities around that, but nothing defined to suggest that there's strong evidence in this, favour or against this definitely by the level of water it requires, and of course, the energy demands of it as well. Does it put a significant strain on Earth Systems, land and water systems, yes, but I think, independent of what the continent does, this trend is going to persist. Unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately. I wonder, truly, I wonder if what it might take for the continent to be a true climate vanguard of the world is for it to become a powerhouse when it comes to energy efficiency, water efficiency and restorative generation, all of which require strong investments towards very technical forms of education. The question then becomes, who's going to finance that? What will it take for us to take full advantage of our strategic assets, of our strategic location, of our strategic skills, which we can definitely nurture? And some where we have strong examples of in Nigeria or Morocco, Egypt with strong tech talent pools, and South Africa as well. If we're able to optimise that even further for more and more parts of the continent, I think we'd be better placed to lead that those kind of efficiency questions as it relates to water, as you were talking about the level of water consumption that these data centers require, the base load energy that requires to power them, efficiency conversations, which perhaps we are more rooted in those environmentally conscious traditions and may be able to translate that once we have more economic might as well. I think at this stage, we're still, in my view, in a very traditional lens of keeping those conversations to more indigenous circles, who, for the most part, lack the level of international power to really shift economic systems. 

Nolita: So that brings me to my last question. So, if you could imagine a single transformative action that could revolutionise the fight against disinformation Africa, so if you could do it at the click of a hand, what would it be and why? 

Abdullahi: But I need two. 

Nolita: You need two clicks? 

Abdullahi: Two clicks.  

Nolita: I'll make an exception just for you. 

Abdullahi: Thank you. Thank you. Nolita, really, I think the obvious one is these safe spaces for courageous conversations. Unfortunately, for those who sort of double down on the power of social media and other scalable technologies. I still think it's largely an offline conversation that needs to happen, and I think it's going to happen at the community level, between groups, between different generations, between different maybe even sometimes organisations or factions. I think that needs to happen in parallel. I. With more economic industrialisation. Because I think sometimes that gives people the headwinds to begin to imagine a future beyond just the past, beyond just the current. You know, when you're able to sort of show headwinds towards a new norm, I think it has a ripple effect, a cascading effect, in as far as saying, what else can we part ways with, and how else can we imagine a new reality for us? So I think it kind of has to be in parallel. It has to be a social and economic effort largely rested on government to be honest.  

Nolita: Thank you so much for joining me today, and I guess it really is time to reinvent the future. Thank you for listening to The Club of Rome podcast. Follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, learn more about The Club of Rome at clubofrome.org.