Here we develop the concept of metacrisology – a way of thinking shaped by crisis that examines the nature of crisis itself – by engaging with philosophers in the context of climate change, technological acceleration and symbolic misery. Beginning with a traumatic childhood experience of cosmic finitude, we reconceive crisis not merely as a path toward inevitable disaster but, in Kostas Axelos’s Heraclitean sense, as an improbable imperative that challenges passive acceptance. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s interpretation of krisis as a decisive moment, we argue that the metacrisis is fundamentally a crisis of time deprived of care. Yet against survivalist resignation, we advocate a pedagogy of the unexpected (anelpiston) that cultivates openness to the unprecedented as such. For this we search for a new experimental language to explain the situation. Byung-chul Han’s critique of Heidegger and his revival of the sublime also informs our discussion of beauty as a temporal suspension that resists the rush of technical time. We critique the fetishisation of wounds, whether symbolic or ecological, that forecloses futures and instead argue for a destructive aesthetics that can generate the untimely catastrophe from which, in Deleuze’s sense, a people-to-come might emerge.

Digital technologies induce organised immaturity by generating toxic sociotechnical conditions that lead us to delegate autonomous, individual, and responsible thoughts and actions to external technological systems. Aiming to move beyond a diagnostic critical reading of the toxicity of digitalisation, we bring Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological analysis of technology into dialogue with the ethics of care to speculatively explore how the socially engaged arts—a type of artistic practice emphasising audience co-production and processual collective responses to social challenges—play a care-giving role that helps counter technology-induced organised immaturity. We outline and illustrate two modes by which the socially engaged arts play this role: 1) disorganising immaturity through artivism, most notably anti-surveillance art, that imparts savoir vivre, that is, shared knowledge and meaning to counter the toxic side of technologies while enabling the imagination of alternative worlds in which humans coexist harmoniously with digital technologies, and 2) organising maturity through arts-based hacking that imparts savoir faire, that is, hands-on knowledge for experimental creation and practical enactment of better technological worlds.