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Tom Barson's avatar

Thanks for this piece. I've been mulling it (while repainting my office) for two days. So far, two takeaways. have coalesced.

The first (and obvious) one concerns the 'hyperobject' metaphor, and the eerie solidity it gives to our ever-present polycrisis. It can seemingly worm its way (uninvited) into every headline. For example, in opinion piece in today's NYT, Columbia historian Matthew Connelly wonders why the academic community didn't rally around Columbia as it has around Harvard. My first reaction was that the piece might well have been titled "On Haplessness." Connelly's complaint might be just, but -- from my considerable distance -- it doesn't change that when the hyperobject asteroid hit, Columbia resembled nothing so much as a dinosaur.

But my second thought relates the TED setting of your reflections, which tempts me to just the sort of cultural criticism that I usually denounce. You refer in this piece, as you have even more pointedly before, of our culture's lack of seriousness, its allergy to the biggest questions, its blindness to the possibility of "ends that transcend the world." But doesn't TED's very productization of ideas-as-entertainment reinforce this? This year's TED may have focused on "What are humans for?" -- seemingly a big question, but one with a sell-by date, a hook that TED's annual format must ineluctably replace with another. Transcendence might reach this year's top ten, but it remains hard to imagine how a culture based on evanescence could ground itself in eternity

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Sam Mace's avatar

I was at a game day with a researcher working in AI and he was oddly even more apocalyptic about it than me. He felt we were heading into dangerous territory which would end up with the majority of us losing our jobs. But he then offered the tokenistic, 'well, we'll have basic income and it'll be fine'. It struck me that he had not even thought about the idea that work is a good thing. That work is valuable as a practice as it is part of our essence. The crisis we are heading into is not simply potentially a financial one but one of the human soul.

I do think this omnicrisis we are emerging into is too big for any one person to fully grasp the sides of. There is also the notion that we simply keep on living doing our routines until they are infringed upon. I do at times wonder if we are too far gone, that values which used to hold meaning are now little more than a simulacra unable to hold anything in place.

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