The 21st century is likely to be the most eventful century in human history. This coming decade will set many of its long-term trends and determine whether we thrive as a planet or collapse into ruin. Either way, a new world is about to be born.
We spend days, months, even years looking for answers. People who find the answer are celebrated as geniuses, prophets and inventors. The world beats a path to their mousetrap. In contrast, we don’t spend much effort looking for questions.
There’s just one continuum from the neural to the social. That’s just for starters: give it time and the continuum will go all the way from cells to continents. Cosiety zindabad!
We take worlds for granted. Science reduces them; literature shrinks them and philosophy ignores them. And yet, without the world we would be nothing. The weltist returns to the world from the universe. They are more worm than eagle.
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.
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.
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.
