The Worm in Our Brain
"We are roughly 20 years into the Facebook Era of consensus by neotribal eyeball tally. "
The Icelandic company, Flow, has been winning awards for reducing mental illness in hospitals, nursing homes, among the chronically bedridden, and even into high towers of the corporate world and the busy lives of desk jockeys in pressure positions. It works its soothing and stabilizing mental magic through guided meditations set in panoramas of Icelandic natural wonders displayed by VR headset or AR facsimile.
When NASA Scientist James Hansen appeared before the House Science Committee in 1988, he opined that we humans had embarked upon a vast experiment. The metaphor of an unsupervised laboratory experiment was not original. We had previously heard the same from other distinguished scientists—Wally Broecker at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, Stephen Schneider at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Susan Solomon at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratories, among others.
And, four decades ago, climate change was not the only context for a vast experiment. What would be the effect of pesticides on honey bees? Of Teflon on cancer? Of accumulating radionuclides on our genetic endowment?
Science dutifully rolled up its sleeves and went to work to study these and other threats. Susan Solomon postulated that the ozone hole was from ultraviolet light reacting on chlorofluorocarbons—free radicals riding on the surface of ice particles in the high-altitude clouds that form over Antarctica. In the 1980s, CFCs were omnipresent in every refrigerator and air conditioner made since the Second World War. Solomon led a National Ozone Expedition to McMurdo Sound, where her team gathered the evidence to confirm the accelerated reactions. They measured levels of chlorine oxide 100 times higher than expected in the atmosphere. What came next was a global phase-out of CFCs, negotiated by the United Nations, that closed the ozone hole.
In 30 years of research on honey bees, we now know definitively that neonicotinoids impair honey bee navigation, thermoregulation, learning, and foraging. Agrochemicals significantly impact honey bee biology through both lethal and sublethal mechanisms, affecting individual health, colony resilience, and population stability. Glyphosate reduces beneficial gut bacteria like Snodgrassella alvi, essential for immune function and pathogen resistance. Organophosphates (diazinon, malathion) and chlorinated hydrocarbons (endosulfan) cause up to 100% mortality via bee contact or ingestion. Herbicides (2,4-D) and miticides (tylosin) amplify toxicity when combined with other chemicals, exacerbating colony collapse.
Likewise, epidemiological studies now link pesticides and herbicides to human neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Glyphosate, the most common weed killer, can cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in brain tissue, leading to persistent neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s-like loss of memory, anxiety and neurodegenerative pathologies. These damaging effects persist long after exposure ends, and even doses below current safety limits cause brain damage. The same is true of recent studies showing that unvaccinated people experiencing a mild bout of COVID-19 years later exhibit persistent neurocognitive deficits. Other viruses are out there, waiting to strike.
Chris Hayes, in The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, writes:
As some of these encampments build higher and higher fences, walling themselves off from science and empiricism, we approach a terrifying prospect—a society that may no longer be capable of reaching the kind of basic agreement necessary for social progress. And this is happening at just the moment when we face the threat of climate change, which is likely the largest governing challenge that human beings have ever faced in the history of life on the planet. At exactly the moment we most need solid ground beneath our feet, we find ourselves adrift, transported into a sinister, bewildering dreamscape in which the simple act of orienting ourselves is impossible.
Even as the sort of face-to-face social discourse that existed pre-Facebook, pre-X, pre-Truth Social—and was even more close up and personal before radio and television—has now been usurped by algorithm-driven dopamine cravings in a scroll to the bottom of our brain stems. Artificial general intelligence is poking into the corners of our eye-enslaving displays, promising arrival in an entire Molochian embodiment no later than the end of the current decade.
This is not some raving hysteria like that attached to the printing press, television, Mad Magazine, or rock n roll—each critique valid in its way. Those shifts were, after all, disruptive of long-established social orders. But even those precursor disruptions, extending back to the Middle Ages, were pin pricks compared to the earthquake now rumbling and the mega-tsunami soon to follow. We are surrendering our sovereign intelligence to a hive mind.
In preparation for climate Armageddon, we are self-lobotomizing.
Robert Gilman, who has devoted his life to improving the process of cultural evolution, writes:
That sense of separation, colored by defensive psychodynamics, leads many people to seek what they distortedly see as their own relative advantage. This then leads to a power-struggle-based world in which too many people don't want to collaboratively solve the world's crises. They would rather have the crises continue if they can't dictate the solutions. They are happy to "play chicken" with the fate of the world in the hopes of "winning" or at least retaining what they see as their relative advantage for as long as possible.
The social media brain worm feeds on this internal struggle with separation and alienation, infecting “from top government officials, CEOs of big corporations and political activists to the most grassroots of us, regardless of political orientation.”
We are roughly 20 years into the Facebook Era of consensus by neotribal eyeball tally. Time enough for a child born in 2005 to mature, be socialized into the contemporary zeitgeist, check all rationality at the door, and form enough of a bond with another of similar mind to breed. The cycle repeats, with the pace of change quickening, driven by ever more powerful, well-engineered drives that elevate consumerism, tribalism, and trutherism and degrade trust in science, law, medicine, and education. We are thus two generations into digital immersion; now semi-, soon full. Neuroscience, computer science, and hardware engineering are now deeply intertwined.
As we slouch towards Moronoligarchracy, great danger lurks in shadows ahead. The candle is burning down and may soon go out.
There may yet be another source to light the darkness.
I predict that within ten years we may begin to see communities around the world, and possibly even some governments, declare cyber-free zones (CFZs). It could start in preschools and gradually extend to K-6. Some brave ecovillages, summer camps and retreats, or van-lifers, could follow, then lead. Eventually, many of us might come to see that life after Facebook is not dumber, just a whole lot less mean and crazy.
Let's go camping.
And, if we can’t access actual wilderness, we can jack into Flow.
Good News from 2044?
by Andy Revkin
Don’t know how I got here, 2044.
Somehow the world avoided nuclear war.
Somehow the climate didn’t go to hell.
Somehow the Constitution never fell.
That change didn’t happen on its own.
Sun let out a flare and all our circuits were blown.
A.I. fried. Satellites died.
People had to live without a telephone.
Don’t know how I got here, 2044.
Somehow the world avoided nuclear war.
Somehow the climate didn’t go to hell.
Somehow the Constitution never fell
Of course that is a dream.
The sun won’t set us straight.
It’ll take a lot of work to make this country great
… again.
References
Caesar, L. Et al. 2024, Planetary Health Check Report 2024. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Gilman, R. 2024. Foundational Keys: Our guiding framework for co-evolving a bright future
Hayes, C., 2013. Twilight of the elites: America after meritocracy. Crown.
Nguyen, M.H., 2025. Carbon: The Book of Life by Paul Hawken–A different way to think about carbon.
Wedderburn-Bisshop, G., 2025. Increased Transparency in Accounting Conventions Could Benefit Climate Policy.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
Could you help me get my blog posted every week? All Patreon donations and Blogger, Substack and Medium subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! Donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
Comments