052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies

<p dir="ltr">An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: <a href= "https://twitter.com/zippyman818/status/1202258801765814272">“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.”</a> We must fully acknowledge that there is no human society without trees, rivers and air – just as there is no Earth without the sun. The web of one life lives along the lines woven by other lifeforms, so perfectly balanced, so perfectly clear as to be made invisible by what our eyes have thus far failed to see. No matter the pace or scale of humanity’s technological ingenuity, the Earth sets upon us planetary boundaries and immutable laws of its own ecology. But with DeathKult Capitalism’s insatiable drive to consume all that exists, our fragile planet is being  plundered and bruised beyond repair. In this final episode of a trilogy of vision-sketches, Jesse & Matt imagine what the world might be like if the starting point for organizing society was The Golden Square: food, shelter, healthcare and education, all equally and universally provisioned. What would Earth look like if these four tenets were fully realized? Is there a role for the State to play? Or, as we look back upon the cruel banality of so many failed and failing republics, should the State be recalibrated in radically innovative ways toward the city-state? To survive beyond the catastrophes of the here and now, we must transcend the tired old ghost-roads of feudalism and the broken and breaking embankments of endtime capitalism. The structures and ecologies of a world of The Golden Square illuminate an urgent pathway, guiding us away from the continual climate catastrophe of our pre-apocalypse toward an emancipatory project of repair and restoration. Much has been made of the technological notion of the Singularity in science fiction circles; but might remaking the world according to The Golden Square bring about a kind of Social Singularity – where impossibl