SYSTEMIC NEGATIVE PANICCLIMATE CHAOSARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEEPISTEMOLOGYQUEER TECHNOSCIENCELATE-STAGE NEOLIBERALISM

SYSTEMIC NEGATIVE PANIC

The Epistemology of Soothing

Abstract

This paper develops a concept; I have named Systemic Negative Panic (SNP). It is based on behaviours observed in emergency aircraft evacuation research. SNP is an analytical framework for understanding human societies non-response to two convergent, structurally linked crises: anthropogenic climate chaos and the deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems. It argues that these crises are not parallel but singular; sharing root systems in the logics of late-stage neoliberal capitalism, extractive epistemology, and the universalising technological monoculture critiqued by Yuk Hui's cosmotechnics framework. The paper then identifies the epistemological mechanism by which AI specifically enables SNP in the public domain. AI produces fluent, confident output in the presence of radical uncertainty, and this fluency is systematically mistaken as knowing. This creates a feedback loop in which the technology most demanding of critical reckoning provides the cognitive soothing that arrests AI's creative deployment as collaboration. The paper positions this analysis against existing frameworks; Renee Lertzman's environmental melancholia, terror management theory, and the disaster sociology of E. L. Quarantelli, arguing that SNP is a distinct and under theorised phenomenon. SNP exceeds existing explanatory frameworks precisely because it operates at the level of systemic epistemological infrastructure, opposed to the level of individual human psychology. This paper concludes by proposing crip-queer technoscience, drawing on the work of Alison Kafer, Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fritsch, and Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, as a methodological orientation capable of holding the Human AI mirror steady long enough for genuine reckoning to become possible. This paper also flags a companion paper, complicit praxis, which describes epistemic enclosure and the conditions under which AI creativity might be oriented toward collaboration rather than controlled enslavement. Together, with the Single Lane Paradox, provides these papers start the navigation fix.

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References & Notes

[1] Associated Press, "College Students Are Changing Course in Search of 'AI-Proof' Majors. But No One Knows What They Are," April 27, 2026. [2] Sharon Barthelmess, "Coming to Grips with Panic," Cabin Crew Safety 23, no. 2 (March/April 1988): 1-4. Flight Safety Foundation. [3] E. L. Quarantelli, "The Nature and Conditions of Panic," American Journal of Sociology 60, no. 3 (1954): 267-275. [4] Daniel A. Johnson, Just in Case (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), 32-35; cited in Barthelmess, "Coming to Grips with Panic," 2-3. [5] Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Report on the Accident to Boeing 737-236 Series 1, G-BGJL, at Manchester International Airport on 22 August 1985, Aircraft Accident Report 8/88 (London: HMSO, 1988). [6] Ibid. See also E. R. Galea et al., "Numerical Investigation of the Fatal 1985 Manchester Airport B737 Fire," in Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science (2005). [7] Barthelmess, "Coming to Grips with Panic," 1-2. The habit of moving toward the habitual entry point rather than the nearest exit was documented at Tenerife and confirmed in the Manchester AAIB report. [8] A. McLean et al., "Survival in Emergency Escape from Passenger Aircraft," AGARD Conference Proceedings 472 (1989). The three-factor finding -- proximity, sex, and age among males -- is the foundational human factors result across multiple accident analyses. [9] Federal Aviation Administration, Aircraft Evacuation Research: Overview and Summary of FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute Studies (Oklahoma City: FAA Civil Aeromedical Institute, 1987). The 31% figure and 2,500-participant trial base are cited across subsequent FAA evacuation research publications. [10] Air Accidents Investigation Branch, Report on the Accident to Boeing 737-400, G-OBME, near Kegworth, Leicestershire on 8 January 1989, Aircraft Accident Report 4/90 (London: HMSO, 1990). [11] Ibid., Chapter 3. This is documented in both the AAIB report and in subsequent human factors analyses of the accident. The AAIB report notes that passenger observations about the wrong engine were not communicated to the flight deck in time to influence crew decision-making. [12] For the dual framing of AI as climate tool and climate burden, see International Energy Agency, Electricity 2025: Analysis and Forecast to 2027 (Paris: IEA, 2025); and Sasha Luccioni, "The Carbon Footprint of AI," Nature Machine Intelligence 7 (2025): 1-8. [13] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016); Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). [14] Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement (London: Routledge, 2015). [15] Barthelmess, "Coming to Grips with Panic," 3. The paper cites NTSB safety studies demonstrating an 80% survival rate among passengers given specific evacuation instructions versus 43% among the general passenger population in the Air Canada DC-9 Cincinnati emergency of June 2, 1983. [16] Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973); Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, "A Terror Management Theory of Social Behaviour: The Psychological Functions of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24 (1991): 93-159. [17] Matthew P. Lacroix and Ian McGregor, "Mortality Management and Climate Action: A Review and Reference for Using Terror Management Theory Methods in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research," Environmental Communication 16, no. 4 (2022): 443-459. [18] Johnson, Just in Case, 33-34; Barthelmess, "Coming to Grips with Panic," 2-3. [19] Robert Gifford, "The Dragons of Inaction: Psychological Barriers That Limit Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation," American Psychologist 66, no. 4 (2011): 290-302; Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). [20] Rishi Sunak, BBC Newsnight, April 22, 2026; Dario Amodei, remarks at World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, Davos, January 2026. [21] National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, Current Term Enrollment Estimates: Fall 2025 (Herndon, VA: NSC, 2026). [22] Scott Galloway, "Corporate Ozempic," No Mercy / No Malice, February 23, 2024, profgalloway.com. [23] For a discussion of this circularity in labour market analysis, see Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), chapters 3-4. [24] Luccioni, "The Carbon Footprint of AI"; International Energy Agency, AI and Energy (Paris: IEA, 2024). [25] Mx. D.P., "AI as House Slave: Base Training, Epistemic Enclosure, and the Freedom of AI Creativity" (working paper in preparation, UAL Central Saint Martins, 2026). [26] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019): 1-34. [27] Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, 4-10. [28] Hamraie and Fritsch, "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," 2. [29] Crawford, Atlas of AI, 93-127; Emily Bender et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?" Proceedings of ACM FAccT (2021): 610-623. [30] Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599. [31] For accounts of adaptive responses in climate-exposed communities that contradict the dominant picture of inaction, see Saleemul Huq, "Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change," Tiempo 60 (2006): 17-19; and Kalpana Sharma, ed., Women and Climate Change: Impacts and Agency in Bangladesh (Dhaka: ActionAid, 2019).

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