Do you worry that the message of Apologize To The Future might be a little too dark for some people to stomach?

I just worry about it being authentic and genuine. In my previous work, I had to tackle many of the same problems, but there was a lot of black humor, and that feeling of putting people on a bit. I felt that I wanted to dispense with all of that in a very direct way with this album. I just don’t feel that there is time for sarcasm. I feel that humanity is stuck in denial and we need to get past that because we’ve got a long way to go, to get to where we need to be—as long as we remain interested in narcissism and self- ishness, then we can’t really prioritize the future meaningfully. We need to have a lot more empathy for our offspring, because, essentially, what’s happening is that we have run up a huge bill in a restaurant and now we’re going to abscond without paying it. We’re going to be smugly dead, while our offspring—not mine, because I don’t have any—but many people’s offspring will be really struggling, and more or less picking through the rubble. We need to begin to feel ugliness of what we have done, and most people are not ready for that. This album is a tentative step in that direction.

I expected you to be more of a nihilist but you seem to have a really urgent love for humanity...

I’m actually a fan of civilization for all of its faults. I actually agree with what Winston Churchill said about democracy. I’m probably paraphrasing, but he said something like democracy is a terrible form of government; it’s just better than all the other ones. It’s similar to civilization, which could be said to be directly responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in. But think of what the alternative to civilization would look like? I can’t tell you how terrible the arguments I have had with my primitivism friends about that have been. I’m a technologist. I’m not willing to return to that point of cowering in caves from what humanity has done. I don’t have answers, either, other than this simple one that I proposed for these last 40 years—asking people politely to not procreate, which, as we all know, hasn’t been much of a success. I’m not proposing anything other than that. I mean, you can re- cycle bottles to make you feel better, but I wouldn’t count on that preventing the climate catastrophe.

Without wishing to seem trite, surely if no one procreates there will be no one to actually apologize to in the future?

How about we cross that bridge when we get anywhere near it. We’re so far from it that it’s just totally irrelevant—population is still going up year-on-year. The fact is that we can’t have another billion and a half people on the planet and also expect to lift the entire world’s population to up to a First World standard of living. It’s just not going to work that way, so we have to reduce the population a lot, or people have to make do with less. And they’re both very difficult to achieve because we need people now, not their children, to give up their hard won gains and standard of living.

I read it was the death of your mother that gave you a sense of urgency in making this record. Is that correct?

Sure. It’s definitely a factor. I mean, there’s just nothing like the cold water splashing on your face forever of a very close family member dying. But I think that was just the trigger. It had been building for a long time. I definitely kind of went off the road in terms of being in the public eye with electronic music, or whatever. After Man of The Future, people did not hear much from me in that world for more than a decade, but during that time, I wasn’t idle. I was very busy. I did lots of things during that time—just for starters, I helped develop the world’s first colour 3-D printer and I developed my own DJ software. But while that was occurring, I was also researching and developing a deeper understanding of climate change and species extinction. I mean, I was talking about that stuff in the 90s—mass extinctions and the sea level rising, and so forth—and it was considered far-fetched, but today all that stuff is front-page news. Those predictions proved to be quite reliably valid. I take no pride in that. It’s not something that I wanted. I would have preferred to be proven wrong.

Why do you think people are more concerned about climate catastrophe than the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, which seems to me to be a more real possibility than it was in the 90s?

That’s complicated. It’s hard to say. I would guess that it’s now just one of several threats—environmental threats are just as serious, and we’re less able to control them. In theory, nuclear war is controllable, people could put a stop to it, and it kind of felt like we were putting a stop to it until the crazy Republicans decided to start tearing up treaties. But climate chaos is in a different category. It’s like ordering a package on Amazon, right? You know, there’s a point in which you can’t really take it back. That’s the category that we’re in now; we’re in the stage where we actually can’t prevent it. I think people underestimate the seriousness of the situation—that, in fact, it is possible for human civilization to end. We have this idea that somehow we’re invulnerable and that we’re beyond the kind of limits of biology, but nothing could be further from the truth. We’re not going anywhere, there’s nowhere to escape to, and no one is coming to rescue us. We are actually alone on earth facing a fundamentally hostile universe that’s completely indifferent to our faith. If we don’t start to value the future, then the future simply doesn’t include us.