It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the…
Tag: the future ain’t what it used to be
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Two: No More Secondhand Futures
In a post here two weeks ago I discussed the disastrous failure of imagination on the part of the industrial world’s governing classes. Since then—well, let’s just say that for connoisseurs of elite cluelessness, it’s a target-rich environment out there. We’ll choose one such target more or less at random. Last week’s news was briefly…
The Unmanageable Future
Explorers into unknown territory face plenty of risks. One that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves is the possibility that they know less about the country ahead than they think. Inaccurate maps, jumbled records, travelers’ tales that got garbled in transmission or were made up in the first place: all these and more have…
Tomorrowland Has Fallen!
Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are…
On Domed Cities and Doomed Dreams
Recently I’ve been reading the writings of the American philosopher William James. You won’t see much discussion of his work among philosophers nowadays, and that’s not just because he happened to be white and male. He had the bad luck to reach maturity as Western philosophy was in its death throes, and he added to…
The Next European War
The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society. It’s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we’ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we’re constantly breaking new ground and going where no…
The Negative-Sum Economy
There are tides and seasons in the comments I field for posts here on my blog, certain questions that get asked at regular intervals, certain saliva-flecked tirades I can count on getting whenever certain things appear in my writings or happen in the world. One of the more frequent of the questions is how to…
The Future is a Landscape
I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”…
What We Can Still Accomplish
One of the unexpected benefits of posting my reflections on the future of industrial society in public is that quite often I get advance warning of events on the horizon that others haven’t anticipated yet. Sometimes, I’m glad to say, it’s because someone in my commentariat happens to have noticed an obscure news story or…