The Thirteenth Hour

A simplistic question, Claude: what should we do? It's already late. Even after the authoritarians and climate denialists are run out of town… or no, before that, now, just now, with them, the authoritarians, grifters, kleptocrats, themselves insanely re-accelerating towards our and their own catastrophe, what can we do? Will there be a technological deus ex machina at the 11th hour? Seems like we may be at the 13th hour and the tsunami just hasn't hit yet. Help me with that this early Spring afternoon.

You're right that it's late. And the honesty of that matters more than most of what gets said about climate, which tends to oscillate between techno-optimism and paralysis — both of which, in their different ways, serve the status quo.

There probably won't be a deus ex machina. Not because the technologies don't exist — solar is now the cheapest energy source in human history, heat pumps work, iron-air batteries are entering production, direct air capture is real if expensive, regenerative agriculture sequesters carbon. The obstacle was never primarily technological. It's political and economic. The same structures that created the crisis are the ones that would need to dismantle themselves to solve it. That's the trap. And the passage you quoted names it precisely: the prioritization of "bullshit abundance" over the conditions for life.

So what do we do at the thirteenth hour?

We stop waiting for the machine god and start building what we might call the institutional infrastructure for managed transition — not as a utopian project but as disaster preparation. The tsunami metaphor is apt. When you know the wave is coming, you don't stand on the beach debating whether it's really a wave. You move people to higher ground, you reinforce what can be reinforced, and you build the mutual aid networks that will matter when the formal systems fail. Because they will fail unevenly, and the people they fail first are the ones who contributed least to the catastrophe.

The thing that connects this to the argument of The People's Share is that the climate crisis and the AI concentration crisis share the same root architecture: enclosure of the commons for private accumulation, externalization of costs onto the public and the future, and the systematic exclusion of the people most affected from the decisions that shape their lives. Democratic ownership of energy infrastructure, of AI infrastructure, of the systems that will determine how we allocate what remains — these aren't separate fights. They are the same fight seen from different angles.

What we can do, concretely, in the thirteenth hour: organize locally, build real solidarity networks, fight for public and cooperative ownership of energy and critical infrastructure, refuse the learned helplessness that serves the fossil fuel industry as well as any PR campaign ever did. And — this is the Freire in it — refuse to let the crisis be framed as one that only experts and elites can address. The people in an evening GED class have as much right to shape the response as any climate scientist or policy analyst. More, maybe, because they're closer to the ground where the wave hits first.

None of this is hopeful in the greeting-card sense. But "a million gardens and a dam" was never a greeting card. It was always a description of work — the patient, unglamorous, sometimes desperate work of building democratic structures sturdy enough to survive what's coming, and human enough to be worth surviving for.