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Willy De Backer BE

@art4theark.bsky.social

Former EU journalist exploring interconnected crises reshaping our world. Digging into social-ecological security, planetary health, & justice within web of life. Deep-time optimist, envisioning posthuman futures beyond civilisation's current trajectory.

557 Posts681 Follower1111 Folgt
Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 4d ago

My new LinkedIn post on re-reading de Saussure, Barthes & Derrida to make sense of the AI empire: "Artificial intelligence is a quieter colonisation than the old kind, and harder to see." #DigitalColonialism #DigitalSovereignty www.linkedin.com/pulse/quiet-...

The quiet empire: AI, language and power

This week I read "Empire of Signs", an essay by Alex McPhee-Browne in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which argues that a handful of French thinkers described the large language model (LLM) decades b...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 4w ago

I wrote about the #NATO summit in Ankara and the money our 'security alliance' will spend on preventing a collapse of #AMOC - 'climate adaptation has no lobbyists in uniform'. #ClimateSecurity #NATO #Overshoot www.linkedin.com/pulse/runnin...

Running amok in Ankara

On 6 July 2026, New Scientist reported that the collapse of the Atlantic circulation regulating Europe's climate may already be unavoidable. Researchers estimate a 10 to 23 per cent probability that t...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · last mo.

"Football unites the world" (#FIFA), but only after 'America First' - anyone has any worries about the decisions of the referee in the upcoming match? - the Belgian team should just go home, leave this hypocrisy and have the King hand them the World Cup statue in Brussels

Jacques Gallagher@1olddemocrat.bsky.social · last mo.

Another abuse of power from corrupt president Trump. He hasn't been to any matches and doesn't know anything about soccer. Maybe it was a reward to FIFA for giving him a tin-pot peace prize. www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · last mo.

Europe's heat shock: trees or air conditioning? Forget the tribal fight! "Every civilisation that faced the end of its dominant urban form eventually had to reorganise around smaller settlements." #PoliticsOfLimits #PhoenixEurope #PostGrowth #UrbanFutures www.linkedin.com/pulse/end-mo...

The end of the modern urban age

From satellite image to civilisational reckoning The European Environment Agency (EEA) recently posted a satellite image of Brussels (See links to sources in the comments). It showed land surface temp...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · last mo.

"Civilisation can collapse without humanity disappearing. Humanity can persist, embedded differently, without this particular civilisational form persisting at all. #EcologicalOvershoot #SymbioticWellbeing #Omgroei #Collapse www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-c...

What if civilisational collapse is the biophysically normal?

Around 2007, I had the privilege of working as the European Director of the Global Footprint Network, the organisation founded by Bill's student, Mathis Wackernagel, based on the very methodology Will...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · last mo.

The UK ship is ready to board a new captain, but the 'growth' emperor still defines the course - my take on Andy # Burnham's policy speech #Manchesterism #Growth #FinancialMarkets #Populism www.linkedin.com/pulse/burnha...

Burnham's Manchesterism or the emperor's new clothes

Though I warned about it in my May post, the UK seems to have chosen its next captain. Six prime ministers in a decade, but the ship still taking on water in the same places, and now Andy Burnham wait...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · last mo.

My take on the #G7's show in Evian and Versailles: "A civilisation does not announce its own ending. It throws a decadent dinner in palaces of gold, with the new ‘Sun King’ shining in all his mirrors." #AI #AIGovernance #DigitalSovereignty www.linkedin.com/pulse/%C3%A9...

Évian, Versailles: the ultimate Faustian bargain

Évian-les-Bains, 17 June 2026. The heads of state of the world's seven wealthiest economies sit down to a working lunch with the high priests of artificial intelligence on the shores of Lake Geneva.

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My latest essay in the series #ReadingForTheWorldToCome: how a forgotten Norwegian trilogy should be re-read despite its dark history. #Literature #Norway #Entanglement #SymbioticWellbeing www.linkedin.com/pulse/1930s-...

A 1930s Norwegian novel, the 21st century needs to re-read

Sometime in the early 1970s, I watched a two-part German film by Paul May: Und ewig singen die Wälder (1959) and Das Erbe von Björndal (1960), known in Dutch as En eeuwig zingen de bossen. The cast wa...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My critical evaluation of Mazzucato's 'Common Good Econmy' and Piketty's et al 'Global Justice Report': "two of the most rigorous progressive economists of our time are writing for a world we no longer live in and leave the global authoritarian turn unanswered" www.linkedin.com/pulse/two-pr...

Two progressive economists write for a world we no longer live in

Two important economic studies landed on the same day, 4 June 2026. French economist Thomas Piketty and 44 co-authors published the Global Justice Report.

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 2mo ago

@annapuzio.bsky.social Dieses Interview zu Magnifica Humanitas kommt zu ähnlichen Schlüssen wie mein LinkedIn-Beitrag vom Sonntag: die Umdeutung von "more than human", der Widerspruch zu Anthropic, der intakt bleibende Anthropozentrismus. www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-h...

From humility to grandeur: comparing Magnifica Humanitas and Laudato Si'

In May 2015, Pope Francis opened Laudato Si' with a canticle. "Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth.

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Anna Puzio@annapuzio.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Heute in der FAZ @faznet.bsky.social ein Interview von mir zum (humanistischen) #Menschenbild der Enzyklika, zum Anthropozentrismus und zu denjenigen, die in der Enzyklika zu kurz kommen. (1/2) tinyurl.com/ycmevbs4

Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My eco-centric reading of the new encyclical compared to Pope Francis's Laudato Si': "The climate pope may have been silenced in this encyclical but the biophysical alarms will continue to go off." #AI @ecodenker.bsky.social www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-h... @timhowles.bsky.social

From humility to grandeur: comparing Magnifica Humanitas and Laudato Si'

In May 2015, Pope Francis opened Laudato Si' with a canticle. "Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth.

linkedin.com

Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"The right question is what Europe should be for in a world of predatory empires, a thinning material base, and political institutions reaching the end of their usefulness." #EuropeanUnion #PhoenixEurope #PostGrowth #Ventotene #CareEU www.linkedin.com/pulse/future...

Future of Europe? From Power EU to Care EU

In their April 2026 issue, the editors of Esprit, the long-standing French review of ideas, posed a question to Enrico Letta and Marine Tondelier. Letta is the former Italian prime minister and author...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Watching Kubrick's '2001' in the shadow of Artemis II - "What I once saw as a hymn to progress is, in fact, a dark, dystopian vision of the rise and self-destruction of a particular kind of human civilisation." #Kubrick #2001ASpaceOdyssey #Artemis #AI #BrunoLatour www.linkedin.com/pulse/kubric...

Kubrick’s ‘2001’: the dark vision we mistook for a celebration of progress

It was the spring of 1970. I was seventeen, sitting with my high school classmates in a darkened cinema in Turnhout, the Richard Strauss opening of his ‘Zarathustra’ rising as the sun came up over the...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 4mo ago

In the Age of Limits, a new political cleavage is emerging, going beyond the left-right dimension - read my new LinkedIn post on 'bounded vs unbounded' politics #PoliticalScience #Limits #Progress #Authoritarianism www.linkedin.com/pulse/politi...

The politics of limits: toward a new cleavage axis

Why do voters who want stronger social protection, fairer markets, and a liveable planet keep electing governments that deliver the opposite? Why does authoritarian populism win despite its failures? ...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The contrarian views on #Artemis by a space child who was 16 in 1969 - "This is the last convulsion of an extractivist civilisation that has never accepted limits, now preparing its own evacuation while the planet burns." #Limits #HumanExceptionalism www.linkedin.com/pulse/artemi...

The Artemis retrotopia: when 1969 becomes the future

"Here am I floating 'round my tin can, far above the moon. Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"The wars being fought today ... are the last convulsions of a political structure designed for a world of expanding material throughput that no longer exists." www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-c... #NationState #Geopolitics #EcologicalOvershoot

The last convulsions of the failing nation-state

Why is the world suddenly confronted with so many new wars and warmongers? Russia invades Ukraine to restore imperial territory. Israel destroys Gaza in the name of national security.

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 5mo ago

My new article on the real reason behind the #Iran war: "every major actor is chasing control over resources that planetary boundaries have already rendered insufficient for sustaining civilisation as we know it." www.linkedin.com/pulse/iran-w... #Geopolitics #EcologicalOvershoot #StraitOfHormuz

The Iran war: symptom of a dying energy disorder

What Operation Epic Fury reveals about a civilisation at war with the planet it depends on While mainstream media replays Trump’s “the war is nearly complete” hallucination, a new essay by Danish infl...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 5mo ago

"Europe does not need a social pillar mounted on top of a growth engine. It needs a social-ecological architecture that treats stable climate, healthy soils, secure material flows, & functioning ecosystems as the foundation of citizen well-being ..." www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond...

Beyond sovereignty: Europe needs a social-ecological foundation

László Andor and Robin Hugenot-Noël make an important case in the Social Europe journal: European sovereignty without a social foundation is a hollow construction (Links at the end of this article). T...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Read my analysis of the #Munich Security Conference - "The most consequential dimension of global security, the collision between a growth-dependent civilisation & the physical limits of the planet it inhibits, remains a political taboo" www.linkedin.com/pulse/munich... @camlinger.bsky.social

Munich 1938-2026: what lies under the rubble of geopolitical destruction?

Munich has a history of hosting conversations that mistake symptoms for causes. In September 1938, European leaders gathered in the city to address what they understood as a political crisis: Hitler’s...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 6mo ago

"To understand why populists are winning, we need to recognise the new political divide - not left-right but bounded-unbounded." My thoughts on the success of populists, the crisis of modernity & the need for limits #Populism #Authoritarianism #Limits www.linkedin.com/pulse/hunger...

The hunger for limits that populist authoritarians exploit

A new study in Comparative Political Studies arrives at a conclusion that will surprise few readers of my Linkedin posts: populist orientation - which refers to a preference for anti-elite, people-cen...

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Willy De Backer BE@art4theark.bsky.social · 6mo ago

My LinkedIn post on the EU-India and Mercosur trade deals: we need " a radical rethinking of what trade is for and how much the planet can sustain." #EUIndia #EUMercosur #TradePolicy www.linkedin.com/pulse/global...

Global trade deals in times of ecological overshoot

When Ursula von der Leyen called the EU-India Free Trade Agreement "the mother of all deals," she was speaking the language of limitless growth: €200 billion in projected trade by 2030, tariffs slashe...

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