futures
The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience | NOEMA
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Narratives of inevitability have the effect of foreclosing thought and deliberation. If outcomes are inevitable, then there’s nothing to do but assimilate to this pre-determined future, to go along for the ride prepared for us whatever the consequences. As Lauren Collee has recently put it, “Techno-determinist futures … are used to habituate us to... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability
That is to say, our social groups, tools, situations, and, more broadly, environment have always served as a cognitive extension, networking our individual minds, allowing them to spill into each other and share processing tasks as a group. It’s as though our brains are aware of their own biohardware limitations. They naturally seek to form rings... See more
But long before the internet, philosophers and religious leaders theorized a global connectivity, or collective consciousness. In 1922, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “Noosphere”, or the “thinking layer” of the earth, networking all human thought. In the internet era, his predictions have become surprisingly accurate, now starting to... See more
Our crises are material and profoundly collective, and so, ultimately, we will be able to bear unbearable realities only if we also work to change them. That means we must take action (Action! Action!) to make the world different from the way it is now. We must attempt, with great urgency, to imagine a world that does not require Shadow Lands, that
... See more“More than two millennia after the Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer... See more
Creative Disruption In The Order Of The World | NOEMA
There are many aspects of life that pull us in opposing directions. We need to be pessimistic enough to prepare for bad outcomes but optimistic enough to undertake new projects. We need to see people both as enmeshed in systems that push them around and as free agents shaping their own lives. It’s vital to be skeptical and ask questions, but also
... See moreJoshua Rothman • Why Are We Tormented by the Future?
We don’t create fantasy worlds to escape reality. We create them so we can better see, understand, and reshape reality.
Being alive right now means rethinking boundaries, pushing on the walls of your imagination. It means feeling around in this world for another one.