I was recently introduced to a concept called the “metacrisis,” a term used to describe a multi-pronged set of causally interrelated existential crises that converge and exponentially multiply the threat to the continued existence of humanity and/or the Earth itself.
Definitionally, the term is a merger of the term “crisis” with the prefix “meta-,” which means in this context a crisis that is “comprehensive,” “all-encompassing,” “universal, “transcendent,” or some combination thereof.
Related: Techno-Hell: The Four Horsemen of the AI Apocalypse
Via Civilization Research Institute (emphasis added):
As humanity’s reach and impact has grown, our power has collided with hard limits of a finite planet. This has led to a new set of catastrophic risks. Issues in one sector or country can now cascade rapidly into others, causing unforeseen problems elsewhere. If we are to avoid a future that is significantly worse than the present, we need fundamentally new approaches to the management of global-scale risk. The range and scale of risks we face in the coming years necessitates a major transformation of the basic structures of civilization.
Our work shows that the world’s great challenges are deeply interconnected. There are shared drivers of global catastrophic risks, wicked problems, and civilizational collapse. This suggests that there may be shared solutions and mitigation strategies.
The roots of the metacrisis lie in a set of underlying features of human systems that may be referred to as generative dynamics. These are the patterns or deep structures of our world that give rise to our more familiar problem set.”
So the basic idea is that various, synergistic crises with similar origins emerge and multiply each other’s destructive potential. “Metacrisis” is sometimes used interchangeably with “polycrisis.”
Another similar term, which I have written about extensively elsewhere, is “permanent emergency,” in which the governing authorities seamlessly transition from one emergency to the next, forever keeping the population stultified in terror and therefore unable to resist their various social engineering machinations.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken
Conceptually, the metacrisis is also highly related to the “singularity,” which in the context of AI-driven techno-hell, means via TechTarget:
In technology, the singularity describes a hypothetical future where technology growth is out of control and irreversible. These intelligent and powerful technologies will radically and unpredictably transform our reality…
When singularity is used to describe the future, the focus is on a level of extreme unknown and irreversibility. The term is used describe the hypothetical point at which technology — in particular artificial intelligence (AI) powered by machine learning algorithms — reaches a superhuman level of intelligence and capability.
One potential manifestation of the metacrisis facilitated by AI, among many factors, in this vein is the advent of genetic sequencing technology, which will possibly become widely available and increasingly cheap to acquire for individual actors with malevolent intent and will enable the modification and dissemination of novel pathogens, be they viral, bacterial, etc, for which the human population has no prior immunity. Think gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in a dingy communist lab, which unleashed COVID-19 on the world, at currently unimaginable scales by actors exercising even less caution than Anthony Fauci and his CCP colleagues.
The problem is that many such manifestations, including the one above, are very real and very imminent while others, like “climate change” framed as excessive carbon in the atmosphere (nonsense: carbon is essential for life on Earth) are entirely manufactured for the sake of social engineering programs. So we have a bit of a “boy-who-cried-wolf” messaging dilemma.
