There is a tendency to see climate change as a malfunction of technology—a problem of carbon, policy, or engineering. We are told it is the price of industrial success, an unfortunate side effect of progress that clever inventions will one day fix. But the crisis did not begin in the factory. It started in the imagination. It is first and foremost a cultural byproduct—the physical consequence of two ideas so profoundly rooted in the modern mind that we rarely notice them anymore. The first is the cult of speed: the conviction that acceleration itself is a
form of improvement. The second is the separation of humanity from nature: the belief that the world exists as raw material for our ambitions. Together, these convictions became the twin engines of modernity, producing the psychological climate that made the physical one fevered. The cult of speed gave us an economy defined by expansion; the separation from nature made relentless extraction feel moral, even inevitable. Once progress was defined by velocity and domination, the rest followed automatically—factories, fossil fuels, and the conviction that limits were errors to be solved rather than conditions to live within. Climate change is the tangible proof that culture has become a force of nature, and that ideas alone can alter the Earth’s temperature.
The obsession with speed is merely the modern disguise of an ancient impulse: the will to overstep every boundary once thought to define the human place in the cosmos. The ancients understood this hunger well, but they also feared it. For them, excess was not progress; it was hubris—an act of violence against the gods, a trespass into sacred order. When Icarus soared too close to the sun, when Xerxes cut a canal through Mount Athos to command the sea, when Phaethon seized his father’s chariot of the sun, or when the builders of Babel raised their tower to touch the heavens, the result was always the same: the sky struck back. To overreach was to invite the wrath of the gods. Their myths warned that brilliance unrestrained would one day consume those who rushed too far, too fast.
The modern age did not invent this rupture; it perfected it. Long before, the monotheistic divide between Creator and creation had already set humanity apart from the world it inhabited. The sacred became transcendent, nature merely its backdrop. In the seventeenth century, Descartes gave this spiritual separation a mechanical form. The Earth ceased to be a living presence and became a system to be mastered. He spoke of making humanity “masters and possessors of nature,” and the phrase became a prophecy. What had once been reverence turned into control—a logic that made exploitation appear as progress. By the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, morality itself had undergone a shift: the defier of limits became our hero, and speed became our measure of worth. What the ancients called hubris, we renamed ambition. Acceleration, once a path to ruin, had become a point of pride.
It would be wrong, however, to see this impulse to overreach as universal—as something intrinsic to the human condition. It is a peculiarly Western inheritance. Many other cultures never broke that bond. In Indigenous cosmologies, from the Americas to Oceania, humans remain part of a living continuum, bound by reciprocity rather than mastery. In Daoist thought, harmony lies in wu wei—effortless alignment with the natural flow, not conquest of it. Buddhist and animist traditions alike imagine balance, not ascent, as the mark of Wisdom.
The West turned the tower of Babel into its emblem; others traced the circle. In the Western imagination, progress meant ascent—a climb towards mastery. Elsewhere, the circle governed: progress meant balance—what you take must be given back. In the Andean ayni, reciprocity is the law of life; in Japanese satoyama, forests and villages sustain each other through careful exchange. Even the blood offerings of the Maya served as a way to return energy to the cosmos, thereby repaying the debt of existence. Like Icarus, the West dreamed of the sky; others listened to the ground. Climate change, then, is not the outcome of humanity as a whole, but of one civilisation’s imagination—a local myth that, through conquest and colonisation, ended up becoming global.
The early twentieth century made this cultural shift explicit. In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto announced a new religion of speed. “A roaring motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,” he wrote—a line that captured the spirit of a civilisation ready to trade grace for momentum. The static ideal of beauty that had guided centuries of art gave way to the thrill of propulsion, noise and light. When the first trains began to move, witnesses screamed and ducked in terror, convinced their bodies could not survive such velocity. Yet what had seemed unbearable soon became ordinary. The train, the car, and soon the aeroplane turned motion itself into spectacle, landscapes unrolling like film before their windows. For the first time, humanity could watch the world slip away and call it progress. The world no longer sought harmony with nature, but ecstasy in acceleration. A few thinkers tried to resist the intoxication. Paul Virilio warned that every technology invents its own catastrophe—the shipwreck born with the ship, the crash with the plane.
Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” looked back in horror, blown helplessly into the future by the storm of progress. More recently, Byung-Chul Han has described the latest stage of acceleration as psychological, in which speed has migrated inward. In The Burnout Society (2010), he portrays a civilisation that drives itself beyond exhaustion—a world that has replaced reflection with performance and attention with fatigue. In barely a century, what began as an artistic provocation has evolved into a planetary operating system. The cult of speed—coupled with the conviction that the world is a resource rather than an ecosystem we belong to—endures because it disguises itself as hope. To slow down feels heretical, almost immoral, as if stillness itself were a crime against progress. The few who call openly for degrowth as the only viable response to climate change are treated as lunatics.
Art, too, absorbed the virus of velocity. For centuries, its task had been to glorify power, embellish the spaces of worship and dwelling, reveal beauty, and grant permanence to what time erodes. Modernity changed that mission. Innovation became its highest virtue, and novelty its moral law. The obsession with the new is the cultural echo of the cult of speed—not merely moving faster, but erasing whatever came before. Each artistic revolution demanded another, until creativity itself became industrialised: new products, new collections, new launches, feeding extraction, waste and carbon. Nowhere does this ideology of perpetual novelty take such tangible form as in fashion—the art that made acceleration wearable. What began as an aesthetic rhythm became an economic engine, one that turns imagination directly into emissions. The global fashion industry now accounts for an estimated 4–8% of total greenhouse gases—more than aviation and shipping combined[1]. Its supply chains consume 93 billion cubic metres of water each year[2] and generate 92 million tonnes of textile waste[3] , much of it burned or buried within months of production. The pursuit of the “new”—of seasonal reinvention and planned obsolescence—transforms aesthetics into emissions. Fast fashion is only the most visible symptom of a deeper cultural mechanism: a belief that change itself is a virtue, regardless of direction.
Even luxury, which markets itself as permanence, depends on velocity—on flights, freight, and the destruction of excess production. Behind every gesture of elegance flickers the same fire.
Culture is not only the philosophical root of climate change; it is one of its driving forces. We are now measuring the heat generated by our ideas. The cloud has weight, the internet has a temperature. Every click, stream and upload adds to the planet’s fever. What once existed only in the realm of imagination, now demands electricity, cooling and land.
Our myths, entertainment and communications no longer just reflect reality, they alter it thermodynamically. The internet—the nervous system of contemporary culture—has grown into an insatiable digital furnace. It now consumes around 7% of the world’s electricity, a share that could double by 2030[4]. Data centres alone account for 415 terawatt-hours annually, roughly[5] equivalent to the total energy use of the United Kingdom.[6]
From space, these infrastructures appear as glowing cities. In Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London and Paris, energy demand from data centres is growing so fast that governments are considering consumption caps. The map of culture has become a map of heat. Every minute, humans stream more than 1,000,000 hours of video on Netflix, YouTube and TikTok combined[7]. The carbon footprint of a single hour of HD video is roughly 55 grams of CO₂ in Europe, and up to 100 grams in the United States[8]—multiplied by billions of users, it equals the annual emissions of an industrialised nation. Paradoxically, the more “virtual” our culture becomes, the more physical its costs: air conditioning for server halls, rare-earth metals for devices, and cooling systems for our collective distraction. In other words, culture no longer merely interprets the world—it radiates heat, actively fuelling its fever.
Having exhausted the natural world, we have begun to reproduce it. The age of extraction has given way to the age of simulation—a second nature built from data, pixels and polymers. We no longer cultivate landscapes; we render them. We scroll through digital sunsets while the real ones fade. Technology, once the instrument of separation, now masquerades as reconciliation—a means to preserve what it helped to destroy. Every field has its mirage. AI paints coral reefs and rainforests that no longer exist, offering beauty in place of loss. Designers grow lab-made silk and mushroom leather, while fashion houses release digital-only couture—garments that never touch a body, yet demand colossal energy to exist. Architects no longer study the sun; they simulate it, modelling light and wind as variables in software. Musicians compose with extinct birdsong, preserved as data but emptied of life. Even our environmental conscience has become computational; its activism is powered by the very servers it warns against. This is how contemporary culture, in its attempt to heal its wounds, deepens the old Cartesian divide. The more precisely we recreate the world, the further we drift from it—until, with artificial intelligence, even imitation no longer requires us.
A few words typed into a search bar: “write a symphony,” “design a chair,” “draft a constitution.” In less than a second, answers appear—sketches, sounds, laws. What once took lifetimes now happens before thought can form. Artificial intelligence marks the point in history where acceleration escapes human control. For centuries, we built machines to extend the body—the wheel, the train, the jet. With AI, we have built a machine to expand the mind, and in doing so, we have given speed a new dimension: thought itself now moves faster than reflection. Artificial intelligence is not just another engine of progress; it is the ultimate driver of acceleration and climate change—and probably the last one. Training a single large AI model can release around 552 metric tonnes of CO₂—roughly[9] the emissions of five cars over their entire lifetime. The sector’s hunger for computation is extraordinary: global data centres already consume 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity every year, and this figure could rise to 945 TWh by 2030[10], equivalent to Japan’s total national consumption. In the United States alone, data centres now account for 4.4% of electricity use[11], projected to reach up to 12% within five years. Each AI query consumes up to 10 times more energy than a traditional web search.[12]
But the real danger is not the electricity—it is the momentum. Artificial intelligence collapses the distance between intention and execution. What once required time—to imagine, to deliberate, to create—now unfolds in seconds. We have entered an economy of instantaneous creation: code writes code, art generates art, and decision replaces understanding. Civilisation becomes a feedback loop of its own acceleration—self-optimising, self-propelling, self-consuming. And as if this were not fast enough, quantum computing is already redefining the horizon. In China, the photonic processor Jiuzhang recently solved a problem in four minutes that would take even the most powerful classical supercomputer 2.6 billion years to complete[13]. But every leap in velocity deepens the planet’s fever. Quantum machines demand near-absolute-zero cooling and colossal energy inputs, amplifying the same thermodynamic spiral that drives the climate crisis. On the horizon, a new convergence looms: AI meets quantum computing. Thought fuses with the very fabric of reality. We are approaching the speed of God, but like Icarus, we have no plan for the fall.
If the root cause of climate change is cultural, as we have observed, then the solution must also be cultural in nature. It is undeniable that a cultural shift is underway. The logic of permanent acceleration is beginning to tire even those who have profited most from it. A new generation has emerged that views limits not as failure, but as an ethical principle. In laboratories, in cities, in digital subcultures, fragments of a post-acceleration culture are appearing—one that measures progress not by speed, but by coherence, by how gently we can live on a burning planet. If the old dream was to master the Earth, the new one—the only one left—should be to synchronise with it.
Signs of this turn are multiplying. In science, the rhetoric of domination is slowly giving way to one of restoration: regenerative agriculture, biomimicry, and circular design attempt not to conquer nature, but to learn from it. In architecture, the monuments of glass and steel yield to adaptive reuse and low-carbon vernaculars. In cities, the cult of mobility meets its counter-movement in the “15-minute neighbourhood,” where proximity replaces sprawl as the measure of freedom. Even in technology, a growing minority of developers speak of “digital sobriety”—the idea that innovation might consist not in doing more, but in doing less, more wisely.
After decades of worshipping novelty with hysteria, even the fashion industry is discovering a different kind of elegance: one rooted in permanence, repair and repetition. Archives are being reopened, fabrics are being recycled, and timeless design is replacing seasonal spectacle. The aesthetics of accumulation are slowly giving way to the aesthetics of duration. Permanence itself, as proven by the staggering success of vintage clothes among Gen Z—a generation that buys pre-owned garments more than any before it, turning resale into a projected $350-billion market by 2028[14]—is becoming aspirational again. In this reversal, will fashion—the most accelerated of arts—paradoxically become one of the first to slow down and disavow the cult of speed? Perhaps. Yet outside the ateliers of conscious luxury, the reality remains less poetic. On a Saturday afternoon in Le Marais, queues still snake around a new Shein pop-up, where clothes cost less than a coffee and change faster than the weather.
For now, the slow revolution remains a privilege, while the rest keep dancing to the tune of the pied pipers of fast fashion—lured by the promise of endless novelty at impossible speed. But if a global slowdown were ever possible, with the advent of AI, it no longer is. The genie is out of the bottle, and it has learned to code. Artificial intelligence will not pause; data will not cool; culture will not forget how to accelerate. Even its apparent triumphs bear the same signature. Machine learning maps methane leaks invisible to the human eye, tracks deforestation tree by tree from space, and discovers new materials that absorb carbon instead of emitting it. Algorithms forecast floods and droughts before they strike, modelling the future with divine precision. According to the International Energy Agency, AI could theoretically reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 1.4 billion tonnes by 2035[15]—roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of Japan. Yet these projected victories, however dazzling, belong to the same logic that caused the crisis: the dream that mastery will redeem us. The smarter our tools become, the deeper our dependency grows. Because climate change is not a technical failure but a metaphysical one—the inability to live within limits—AI does not cure that condition; it intensifies it, offering the hubris of all hubris: the illusion of infinite control at the very moment when we most need humility. It can optimise, predict and accelerate, but never teach restraint. Each new efficiency breeds new appetite. History suggests that we will not use what we save to slow down; we will use it to do more, faster.
If salvation exists, it will not come from invention, but from renunciation—from a culture that remembers how to stop. The crisis began in the imagination; only there can it end. Considering our nature and our record, however, the necessary cultural shift will most likely come only after the crash—through the crash. Acceleration has proved a highly addictive drug for the human mind; we will not renounce it willingly. Until the sky strikes back.
In J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), cities sink beneath tropical waters. At the same time, the survivors, stripped of their former world, drift toward a primitive calm—a fusion of the individual and their environment, the collapse of the boundary we once drew between ourselves and the Earth. Having spent centuries defining nature as something outside us, we may come to rediscover it only when it reclaims us. A species dissolving back into its overheated climate, learning—at last, and by force—to breathe at the planet’s pace.
