The human world of the early 21st century is dominated by science, cities, and high technology. However, both our modern way of life and our way of thinking about the world sprang up only within the past several centuries. Compared to our hunter-gatherer forebears, we might as well be from another planet.

Most people who live in industrialized nations now believe that humans are superior to the rest of nature. It is assumed that by using science and reason, along with giant helpings of technology, we can banish scarcity and ignorance. Modernity is thought to be the implicit goal of billions of years of biological evolution.

However, in the last few years a critical discourse about modernity has emerged in books, blogs, and academic literature. For these authors, modernity is the cause of the current polycrisis and the impending Great Unraveling. Modernity is likely to comprise a brief and intensely destructive moment in Earth history, because the way we live is unsustainable not just in its details, but in its inherent design.