What's next?

Editor's Note

Hello from London!

In our ongoing discussions on normalcy, where do you lie? Do you believe that the Covid period was a portal from one world to the next, as Arundhati Roy described it? Or do you see an evolving layer cake of complexity built up at speed? As we shift through the economic hangover of inflationary pressure and high-interest rates, how do we prepare for a new era appearing through the hazy smoke? Can you even speculate?

In this outstanding piece, entitled "What's next?" Mitch Therieau summarises:

Of course the pandemic hardly created the fantasy of a universal future; it only intensified it, invested it with a particularly urgent charge of desperation. If the past two years have produced any genuinely new development in the history of the future, it is perhaps a widespread, if faintly felt, consciousness of stagnation; a growing conviction that a sweeping Next Thing is not forthcoming. 

This is what the aspiring goblins and cluttermongers have grasped, however inchoately. They have given a concrete, if degraded, form to a general exhaustion with the theological conception of the Next Thing: the future as a divine dispensation handed down to us from above. Maybe, then, if we squint hard enough at the glittering dump of post-trend, we can make out the faint outline of a more useful way of thinking about the Next Thing: not as a program delivered to us by tech overlords, but as a result of practical human activity, as a series of projects that may or may not converge — that is, as a matter of DIY.

It's a brilliant piece. Read it this weekend.

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

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Near

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End Note

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