The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

Just consider that right now, this moment, there are a million people out there, working eagerly on something that the rest of us don’t yet quite understand—knowing, knowing that “this will change everything”. If even one percent of them are not mistaken, we will literally have thousands of discoveries, inventions and insights that, each one by itself, changes society in profound and unexpected ways. Even if some of the things I have mentioned turn out to be exaggerated or based on misconceptions, the totality will certainly be something dramatically new and different as the world-system evolves over the coming decades. What I have not ventured to discuss is that every one of these mentioned phenomena interact with the others at an accelerating pace. We live in a time of “peer-to-peer digitalized nano-bio-tech employed by means of virtual 3D to solve energy problems to address climate change”—and so forth. All of this is happening simultaneously, day by day, in one great web of interacting, evolving nodes. Do the math—an increasing number of accelerating revolutions and crises, all cross-pollinating at an accelerating pace (the solution to the equation is “boom!”—we just don’t know if it’s fireworks or atom bombs). When a multiplicity of things explode all at once, in a multidimensional crisis-revolution, our linear models of the world rarely work out—they cannot take on so many different variables (and variables with qualitatively different properties) and their mutual in...