Horizontal epistemology is the norm in the age of big data. It’s not enough to perform one experiment but to have uniform standards for a family of experiments.
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Tangle time
Why stick to linear arguments thick with text? Can we make sense of the world by skipping from word to song to figure? Why not connect the new when the old world is collapsing of its own contradictions?
Every era of quickening change has its existential worries, when solid ground becomes quicksand. Here I use ‘demons’ to probe the shifting ground of knowledge.
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When the Exception Becomes the Rule
What’s truly exceptional about our predicament is how the state of exception has escaped the confines of the detention centre and occupied Main Street. For the first time in human history, the entire world is in a universal state of exception for exactly the same reason.
If nations were programming languages, what language would they be?
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Conserving Citizenship
We need an account of the redistribution – and decentralization – of power that’s commensurate with a multi-scale idea of citizenship, one that adapts to the hyper local as well as it does to the planetary.
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Participatory Citizenship
The COVID crisis is a layer on top of a turn towards authoritarianism coming out of the 2008 economic crisis. At the same time, new opportunities for national and global solidarity are emerging. What might those solidarities look like?
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Skillful Citizenship
In Buddhism, skillful means train adepts to act and respond creatively in a context. Replacing the religious concerns of Buddhism with the secular concerns of collective existence – can we be trained to be skillful in how we approach public problems?
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Public Problem Solving
Crisis needs community, or as the old saying goes: we hang together or we’ll surely hang separately. Whether it’s a viral epidemic or climate change, the quality of our response to a societal crisis depends on the strength and depth of our communities: their capacity for compassion, for adaptive leadership and the resources they bring to the problem.
A couple of days ago, the UN released a report saying the COVID19 crisis is the worst crisis the world has faced since World War II. Now more people will be willing to listen to alternatives to the entire system, not just one piece of it.