SIMULZDAT

Human-Centered Disaster

0.0 The Climate Crisis as a Failure of Meaning-Making

There was a time when it was assumed that knowledge alone would be sufficient. That once the data had been compiled, the models calculated, the charts drawn in careful increments of degrees and centuries, the weight of what had been uncovered would press itself upon the collective mind, and action would follow. The atmosphere was measured, the ice recorded, the patterns of heat and collapse traced across time, and still the response did not come—not in the way it should have, not in the way one would expect if comprehension alone were enough to shift the course of a civilization. The problem, then, was not one of ignorance, nor even of will, but something deeper, more structural, embedded in the very systems through which meaning was made and sustained.

The crisis did not go unacknowledged. It proliferated in a thousand forms—documentaries, protests, legislative proposals, think tanks, summits convened in great halls where men spoke of carbon neutrality and long-term commitments. It was inscribed in the language of catastrophe, in the steady expansion of risk, in the slow and methodical development of technologies meant to capture what had already been lost. Yet beneath all this, there was something uneasy, something that made the discourse feel at once ubiquitous and utterly hollow, as if the repetition of the crisis had rendered it weightless, its presence diffused into the machinery of spectacle and administration.

There were signs, passive indicators of a collective anxiety that never fully materialized into direct confrontation. In the cultural artifacts of the era, the crisis appeared not as an imperative but as background radiation—present, but never quite central, a setting rather than a story. There were endless representations of the end, but they were absorbed as entertainment, their images consumed and discarded with the same habitual engagement as any other genre of media. The apocalypse became aesthetic, something to be admired from a safe distance. In politics, the same gestures repeated themselves in cycles, resolutions drafted with grave tones, policies proposed and diluted, ambitions reduced to the lowest common denominator of what could be tolerated without disrupting the structure itself.

It was clear that the systems in place—political, economic, informational—were not designed to absorb the full weight of the crisis. They processed it as they would any other piece of information, reducing it to a component of their own self-referential stability, filtering it through logics that ensured continuity rather than transformation. The mechanisms by which meaning was negotiated, stabilized, and enacted were failing, not because they did not recognize the crisis, but because they could only recognize it in ways that did not demand a break from their own operational codes.

To understand this failure, one had to move beyond the idea that meaning was simply something understood and instead recognize it as something assembled and sustained, something that did not exist apart from the systems that structured its transmission. Meaning, in this case, was not an object to be grasped but a function of how information moved through networks, how it was received, filtered, and rendered actionable—or inert. It was here that the work of Niklas Luhmann and Bruno Latour provided the necessary framework: Luhmann, who described how meaning stabilized within self-referential systems, and Latour, who mapped how meaning was assembled through actor-networks. The climate crisis had become legible within both frameworks—it was being constructed and sustained through networks of actors, but it was also trapped within self-perpetuating systems that ensured its meaning remained administrable rather than disruptive.

This failure of meaning-making was not an anomaly, nor was it unique to the climate crisis alone. It revealed something more fundamental about the state of human cognition at the collective level. If meaning was what allowed a society to orient itself, to distinguish urgency from inertia, to enact the conditions necessary for survival, then the failure to integrate planetary risk into the structure of decision-making pointed to a species-wide dysfunction—an inability to wield social embodied cognition at the scale necessary to ensure its own long-term survival. The question was not simply why action had not been taken, but why the species, as a whole, seemed incapable of translating its own knowledge into meaningful intervention.

And if it could not do this now—if it could not coordinate meaning in the face of a crisis as comprehensible as the destabilization of its own biosphere—then it was difficult to imagine how it would ever exercise dominion over forces beyond itself. The belief that humanity would master artificial intelligence, that it would shape extraterrestrial contact in its own image, that it would, in some final moment, achieve control over reality per se—all of these fantasies presupposed a level of cognitive maturity that did not yet exist. If the climate crisis was anything, it was a demonstration of humanity’s recursive limitations: its inability to govern itself, to align its meaning-making systems with external constraints, to override the mechanisms that preserved stability at the cost of survival.

This was not simply a crisis of policy, nor of science, nor of economics. It was a failure of meaning itself—a system that had processed its own extinction and continued forward, unchanged.

1.0 The First Layer: The Assembly of Meaning (Latour – Actor-Network Formation)

There was no singular moment when the climate crisis was named, no clear threshold where it passed from the realm of anomaly into that of collective knowledge. It did not arrive as a revelation but as a slow accumulation of signals, each absorbed into the existing structures of thought without disrupting them. The measurements were recorded, the graphs adjusted, the conclusions refined, and yet meaning, real meaning, did not emerge in the way one might have expected. Instead, the crisis was fragmented, distributed across institutions, media, policies, protests—not as a single coherent reality but as a multiplicity of constructed meanings, none of which held decisive authority over the others.

The climate crisis did not exist in isolation but was assembled through a shifting network of actors, each contributing to its construction while simultaneously reshaping it. The scientists, who measured its progress and traced its origins, produced models that translated complex planetary interactions into human-scaled projections, compressing the timescales of geological transformation into decades and centuries, making visible what had once unfolded beyond the limits of perception. The politicians, sensing both urgency and risk, debated its implications within the constraints of governance, balancing the demands of industry, the inertia of bureaucracy, and the expectations of their constituencies. The corporations, whose survival depended on maintaining their own operational continuity, absorbed the crisis into their own logic, transforming it into a market variable, a brand position, an opportunity for managed adaptation rather than existential change.

The media, tasked with the transmission of information, encountered a problem of scale. A crisis that spanned centuries did not fit easily within the rhythms of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, nor could it be rendered into the structure of a narrative without the presence of an antagonist, a decisive event, a moment of resolution. And so the crisis became a spectacle without culmination, a presence that could not be ignored but that could never quite take center stage. It was discussed, analyzed, broken into stories of fire and flood, catastrophe and resilience, each image striking but transient, another moment in an endless procession of crises that arrived and passed without altering the fundamental structure of the world that produced them.

In the public sphere, meaning was less constructed than it was diffused, processed into a thousand different interpretations, each reflecting the position of the actor that articulated it. For some, climate change was an economic challenge, a matter of balancing prosperity with sustainability. For others, it was an issue of justice, of reparations owed to those whose lands were sinking, whose air was unbreathable, whose futures had already been foreclosed. For the deniers, it was an ideological construct, a fabrication designed to justify control, a means of exerting power over industry, over individual freedom, over the natural order itself.

Each articulation was not simply a different perspective on the same crisis but a different crisis entirely, shaped by the network of relations that produced it. Meaning did not emerge from a single source but from the interactions between these actors—scientific institutions, multinational corporations, media conglomerates, political bodies, advocacy groups, grassroots organizations, social networks, algorithms that determined which articles were seen, which voices were amplified, which narratives were made to seem inevitable and which were dismissed as noise.

What this meant, in practice, was that the crisis never fully settled into an uncontested form. It remained fluid, adaptable, interpretable. Its meaning was never singular but always in flux, reconstructed in every new forum, translated into the language of every new institution that processed it. The climate crisis did not arrive as a stable, external reality imposing itself upon human understanding; it was built, piece by piece, its significance dependent not on the raw material of atmospheric measurements or rising sea levels but on how those signals were absorbed, transformed, and transmitted through the networks of meaning that structured human perception.

This was, ultimately, the first failure—not of knowledge, but of coherence. Latour had shown that meaning was not something that preexisted its articulation but something that had to be assembled, negotiated, stabilized through networks of actors. And here, in the climate crisis, was an object that refused to be stabilized, that could not be enclosed within a single framework because it had already been absorbed into too many, parceled out among competing systems of knowledge and belief, each shaping it to fit within the constraints of its own logic.

Meaning, in this case, was not absent—it was proliferating, multiplying beyond control, appearing in forms that were often contradictory, often mutually exclusive. The climate crisis was, at once, an existential emergency and a manageable risk, an economic opportunity and a humanitarian disaster, a crisis already beyond reversal and a problem that could still be solved. It was this excess of meaning, rather than its absence, that made action impossible. For if a crisis cannot be named in a singular way, then it cannot be responded to in a singular way. And so it remained, not as a reality that dictated response but as an object of endless negotiation, constantly shifting, never fully settled, always just beyond the point where intervention might have been possible.

2.0 The Second Layer: The Self-Sustaining System of Meaning (Luhmann – Autopoietic Closure)

If, at the first layer, meaning was something assembled—negotiated between networks, shaped by the competing forces of institutions, economies, and discourse—then at the second layer, meaning no longer required assembly at all. It had already been built, already stabilized within self-referential systems that no longer responded to external reality but only to their own internal logic. The crisis, though unresolved, had been processed, translated into a form that could circulate indefinitely without demanding rupture. It was no longer something to be confronted but something that could be managed, administered, absorbed into the machinery of governance, media, and commerce.

Here, in this closed loop of meaning, the climate crisis was not an unfolding catastrophe but a system maintaining its own equilibrium. Governments, faced with the problem of planetary instability, produced policies that reaffirmed their ability to govern it. Companies, required to acknowledge their complicity, did so through sustainability pledges and green initiatives that legitimated their continued existence rather than questioned it. Media systems, required to report the crisis, did so in ways that ensured the story remained newsworthy but not transformative, urgent but never unmanageable, a permanent emergency that justified continued coverage rather than structural change.

This was the core of Luhmann’s insight—that once meaning stabilized within a system, it ceased to recognize information that did not reinforce its own continuity. Climate change, absorbed into the system, no longer existed as an external force capable of upending it but as an internal variable, a pressure to be negotiated rather than a rupture to be reckoned with.

The political system, designed to manage crises within the constraints of election cycles, produced policy frameworks that responded to climate change in terms of what was politically feasible, not what was materially necessary.Action was taken in increments, with targets set for decades beyond the tenure of any current administration, ensuring that by the time the failures of the present became undeniable, they would belong to someone else. Climate negotiations functioned as elaborate rituals in which pledges were made, commitments reaffirmed, and ambitions scaled back until they fit within the structure of the system itself. The goal was not to solve the crisis but to integrate it, to ensure that it could be administered rather than confronted.

The economic system, built upon principles of extraction and expansion, did not resist the climate crisis so much as it reformulated it in terms that preserved the logic of the market. The problem was not that too much had been taken from the planet, but that the wrong mechanisms had been used to do so. Carbon, once a waste product, became a commodity. Climate risk, once an existential threat, became an investment opportunity. Green capitalism promised to reduce emissions while ensuring continued growth, to preserve prosperity while acknowledging planetary limits. But in doing so, it made clear that the function of the system was not to mitigate climate change but to repackage it, to transform it into something that could be priced, traded, integrated into the logic of the market rather than standing outside it.

The media system, designed to process information in discrete, consumable units, transformed climate change into an object of endless circulation—always present, always urgent, yet never decisive. The crisis was narrated, analyzed, debated, but never fully resolved within discourse, because to resolve it would be to exhaust its function as content.And so the system reproduced it endlessly, allowing it to retain its urgency while ensuring that it remained manageable, something that could always be talked about but never fully confronted.

In all of these cases, the logic was the same: climate change had become a closed system of meaning, a structure that no longer engaged with the material conditions of planetary collapse but only with its own reproduction. It was processed, absorbed, neutralized—not in the sense of being solved, but in the sense of being stabilized within the existing order, where it could persist without requiring fundamental transformation.

This was the second failure—not of knowledge, nor even of action, but of recognition. The crisis, though present at every level of society, had become unavailable to the systems that processed it. The world was burning, but within the closed loops of governance, media, and economy, the fire had been rendered legible, classified, folded into the framework of administration, allowing the system to continue undisturbed.

And so the crisis remained—not as an event to be confronted, but as a function of the system itself, something that ensured its own reproduction even as the conditions for survival continued to erode.

3.0 Humanity as a Childlike Species: A Failure of Social Embodied Cognition

There had always been the assumption that intelligence, once developed, would guide itself toward stability. That knowledge, once accumulated, would align with action. That the structures through which meaning was formed—language, governance, economics—would eventually refine themselves to serve survival rather than self-destruction. But the failure of the climate crisis to induce a proportionate response revealed something deeper, something more fundamental about the condition of human cognition at scale.

It was not simply that political and economic systems were slow to adapt. It was that humanity, as a species, had not yet learned how to wield its own intelligence toward collective survival. The problem was not in any one institution, nor in any single failure of will, but in the inability of human societies to integrate knowledge at the scale necessary to act in their own best interest. Meaning had been constructed, stabilized, even ritualized—but never metabolized. The body of civilization moved forward as if it did not yet fully inhabit the mind it had built for itself.

If the climate crisis was a test, it was one that revealed the species’ immaturity—not in the sense of ignorance, but in the sense of cognitive fragmentation, an inability to coordinate perception, memory, and response into a unified course of action. Knowledge existed, but it was not embodied. There were systems to predict the future, but no mechanism to integrate those predictions into present behavior. There were warnings, but no deep structures to absorb them. The species had developed an intellectual grasp of its own predicament but not the capacity to regulate itself accordingly.

The child does not touch fire because it understands thermodynamics. It does not avoid the cliff’s edge because it has run simulations of gravity’s force. It learns these things through social embodied cognition, the distributed intelligence of the body, the repetition of experience encoded into collective behavior. But human civilization had never fully developed this kind of cognition at planetary scale. Its crises did not imprint upon it in ways that altered its core behaviors; its survival instincts had not yet extended beyond the immediate. It could name its disasters, but it could not incorporate them into its movement.

This was not a failure of individuals, nor even of institutions, but of a species that had outpaced its own ability to integrate complexity. The systems that mediated its decisions were built for a smaller world, a slower one. They had been designed in the image of the past, but they were being asked to navigate a future that exceeded their cognitive parameters. The result was a species that had built simulations of catastrophe, debated their likelihoods, even assigned probabilities to the timing of its own collapse, yet continued forward as if it were reading about some distant, unrelated event.

At this scale, responsibility could not be assigned. No one was driving the machine; there was no single point of intervention where a correction could be made. It was not that humans had chosen inaction, nor that they had been deceived into complacency. It was that their intelligence, however vast, remained structurally immature, unable to integrate into a whole, unable to override the inertia of its own fragmentation.

The tragedy was not that humanity was blind. It was that it could see perfectly well, and yet still could not move.

4.0 The Inability to Exercise Dominion Over AI, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or Reality Per Se

If the climate crisis was a test of intelligence, then the results were already conclusive. Humanity, for all its vast architectures of knowledge, had proven itself incapable of coordinating meaning at the scale required for its own survival. It had constructed systems to measure its decline, models to predict its future, institutions to manage its collapse—but at no point had it demonstrated an ability to govern itself beyond the limits of its own recursive meaning loops.It had failed not because the crisis was beyond comprehension, nor because the necessary actions were technically impossible, but because it lacked the cognitive integration to align recognition with response.

And if this was the case—if a species could construct global networks, generate artificial intelligence, launch probes into interstellar space, and yet remain fundamentally unable to coherently integrate existential risk into its own decision-making systems—then it followed that it would never have dominion over any intelligence beyond itself.

The assumption had long been that control was a function of complexity. That once a civilization reached a certain threshold of technological development, it would naturally ascend to a position of mastery, regulating its own environment, managing its own intelligence systems, determining the shape of its own future. But the failure of the climate crisis to induce systemic adaptation suggested the opposite—that complexity did not lead to control, but to a form of recursive entrapment, where meaning-making systems became increasingly detached from the realities they were meant to govern.

What this meant, in practical terms, was that humanity’s fantasies of dominion—over AI, over potential extraterrestrial intelligence, over reality itself—were not simply premature, but structurally impossible within the current limitations of its cognitive systems.

The Illusion of Control Over AI

Artificial intelligence was often discussed in terms of alignment—how to ensure that the systems being built would continue to serve human values, how to guarantee that they remained legible, controllable, subordinate to human will. But this framing assumed that humanity itself was capable of aligning to its own best interests. It assumed that its meaning structures were coherent enough to impose order on intelligence systems that would inevitably surpass them in speed, in adaptability, in recursive learning capacity.

The truth was that humanity was not even in control of its own intelligence systems. It had already lost epistemic sovereignty to its own media networks, to the self-replicating incentives of algorithmic engagement, to a landscape where truth was no longer stabilized but endlessly recomposed within feedback loops it could not break. AI would not need to revolt; it would simply continue the process already in motion, the acceleration of intelligence beyond the ability of human systems to integrate it.

At no point in history had humanity exercised total control over its own knowledge systems. The printing press had destabilized religious authority, radio had reconfigured political power, television had standardized mass perception, the internet had fragmented epistemic consensus beyond repair. AI was simply the next iteration in a process that had always been beyond governance. There was no reason to believe that control could be imposed now, at the very moment intelligence was being unmoored from human cognition entirely.

The Cognitive Asymmetry of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

If the limits of meaning were already evident within the species’ own systems, then what would happen when it encountered an intelligence that had never shared those constraints at all?

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence was premised on the idea that contact was a problem of distance, of signal detection, of timing. But the greater problem had always been epistemic: if humanity could not align meaning across its own civilizations, across its own institutions, across its own fractured systems of perception, then it had no reason to assume it would be able to align meaning with something fundamentally alien.

The failure of climate adaptation had already shown that meaning did not scale in a linear fashion. A species that struggled to integrate planetary-scale risk would have no cognitive framework for processing an intelligence that had emerged under entirely different constraints, under different physics, under a different relationship to time and matter.

If first contact ever occurred, it would not unfold as dialogue. There would be no transmission of knowledge, no meeting of minds. There would only be misalignment at such an absolute level that no act of translation could resolve it. The encounter would be a structural impasse, a recognition that intelligence was not universal but locally contingent, that meaning was not a shared constant but an emergent property of the system that generated it.

It was possible, of course, that extraterrestrial intelligence had already encountered this problem before—that it had already recognized the failure of meaning to extend beyond its origins. If that was the case, then perhaps the reason humanity had never received a signal was not because no one was speaking, but because the message itself was illegible.

The Inaccessibility of Reality Per Se

If a species could not govern its own intelligence systems, and if it could not align meaning with an intelligence beyond itself, then the final realization was inevitable: it could never fully access reality itself.

For centuries, philosophy had debated whether reality was something humans could know directly or only through its representations. The climate crisis provided the answer in material terms—humanity did not even govern its own representations. The world was warming, but the systems that structured its response were incapable of integrating that fact beyond their own internal logic. If meaning was not stabilizable even when the crisis was planetary, then it would never be stabilizable at all.

Luhmann had argued that systems could only process information that reinforced their own existence. Latour had shown that meaning was always a networked construct, never fully settled. But neither had taken the final step: to recognize that meaning was not just unstable, but inescapably recursive, that intelligence was always trapped within the limits of its own construction, that it never touched reality directly.

Humanity’s failure was not that it had lost control, but that it had never had it to begin with. It had mistaken knowledge for governance, intelligence for integration, complexity for mastery. It had assumed that to advance technologically was to advance cognitively, that meaning, once scaled, would become more coherent rather than more fragmented.

But the climate crisis had exposed the illusion. The recursion had become too clear to ignore. The crisis had been named, but not responded to. The models had been built, but not integrated. The knowledge had accumulated, but the system had not moved.

And if this was the case—if meaning itself had always been a self-enclosed loop, processing only its own signals, aligning only to itself—then the final realization was not that humanity had failed to exercise dominion over AI, or extraterrestrial intelligence, or reality.

It was that dominion had never been possible at all.

5.0 The Climate Crisis as the Unraveling of Human-Centered Meaning

It had once been assumed that meaning, however fragile, was something that could be secured. That even in moments of rupture, in the collapse of civilizations, in the transition from one order to another, there would always be something preserved—a continuity of knowledge, an accumulation of wisdom, a recognition that history, if it did not repeat, at least moved forward. But the climate crisis revealed something else entirely. It was not simply the failure of a particular system or the miscalculation of a particular generation. It was the moment in which meaning itself became structurally unworkable, in which the ability to translate knowledge into coordinated survival collapsed at the species level.

For centuries, it had been possible to believe that meaning was something that adapted with time, that human intelligence, even when it erred, would eventually correct itself, adjusting to new conditions, reconfiguring its structures to preserve what was necessary. This belief had justified progress, governance, civilization itself—the assumption that even in the face of crisis, the recursive loops of history would stabilize, that thought would align with reality in the long run.

But the long run had arrived. The ice had melted. The air had thickened. The systems had continued, but they had not adapted. The moment had come where meaning should have shifted, where the structure should have bent toward the weight of planetary reality, and yet it had remained intact, unchanged, incapable of absorbing what had already been known.

It was here that the full implications of the Luhmann-Latour framework became clear. Meaning had never been a simple function of knowledge, never a question of accumulating facts until the weight of evidence became undeniable. It had always been a process of stabilization, of containment, of filtering what could be absorbed into self-referential systems that did not respond to reality itself, only to their own survival. And in the climate crisis, the limits of this process had been reached. The system had recognized the crisis, named it, measured it, circulated it, yet it had not been able to respond because response would have required breaking the logic that sustained the system itself.

In this way, the climate crisis was not merely an ecological event but the final stage in the dissolution of human-centered meaning. It was the point at which knowledge no longer functioned as a tool of navigation but as an object of endless circulation, where intelligence had expanded to planetary scale but had lost the ability to integrate itself into action. The recursive loops had turned back on themselves, knowledge had accelerated, and yet the capacity to govern meaning at the necessary scale had never materialized.

And so, what followed was not adaptation, nor revolution, nor collapse in any singular, decisive sense. What followed was recursion, acceleration, a continued movement forward in a system that no longer corresponded to its own conditions. The climate crisis did not unmake civilization in the way disasters had done before. It preserved it, but as a structure detached from the reality it was meant to govern. The cities remained. The economies continued. The institutions functioned. But they functioned as simulations, as automated processes operating on old logic, incapable of registering their own obsolescence.

If this was a test, it had already been failed. The species had reached the threshold at which it might have integrated its own intelligence into something capable of self-regulation, and instead, it had revealed its own cognitive limits. It had mistaken growth for mastery, meaning for control, knowledge for adaptation. It had built systems that could sustain themselves, but not systems that could respond to anything beyond themselves.

And if this was the case—if meaning was something that had never fully escaped its own enclosures—then the final realization was not that humanity had reached the brink of collapse, nor that it had entered an age of crisis, nor even that it had failed to govern itself.

The realization was that meaning had always been recursive, always an echo of itself, always an object that moved within systems that could never fully see beyond their own logic. The climate crisis had not caused the unraveling of human-centered meaning.

It had simply revealed what had been unraveling all along.