Civilisation After Progress
Abundance without Ease
This is not my next formal book, at least not in the ordinary sense.
Civilisation After Progress arrived almost all at once, after months of essays had already done their slower work underground. I did not so much write it forward as watch a field of thought suddenly become continuous enough to hold as a single object. For that reason, I think of it less as a sequel than as a compression: a short companion volume, the first complete crystallisation of a world I had already been naming in fragments.
What is new here is not every individual argument. Much of the material has appeared elsewhere in partial form. What is new is the convergence: the sense that progress no longer automatically converts into dignity, legitimacy, or a future most people can remain inside, and that the machine age sharpens this crisis rather than resolving it.
So this book should not be read as a final settlement. It is something slightly stranger and, I think, more honest: a jump-book. A companion object. A proof that the terrain is real.
