Industrial visionaries tend to have chaotic and disruptive personalities. Their goals don’t neatly fit the social ladder. But societies that make room for them reap immense rewards.
Humans are irreversibly reshaping Earth, and neither degrowth nor green energy tweaks will stop it. In the long run, we will have to use our power to create a thriving garden planet.
In the early 1990s, the UN intervened in Cambodia in a show of liberal democratic state-building. Its failures foreshadowed the hubris which would follow the liberal world order from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan.
Mike Solana joins Wolf Tivy to discuss how San Francisco’s governance works, how it has gone wrong, and what he thinks it would take to fix it.
Sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H Bratton discusses how our ongoing technologically-driven terraforming will remake the world order, and how technology reveals and creates human destiny as much as enabling it.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss accumulative versus developmental orientations to industry, and the necessity of a class with interests beyond individual finance.
The biggest threat to America’s world order is not China, but the country’s own deepening dysfunction. Its grand strategy must go beyond containment and transform the basis of U.S. power.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss Charlie Smith’s recent piece on posthumanism and its implications. Other topics include the ways in which a complex society impacts our agency, why the idea of discourse is a mind virus, and thinking of humanity as a hypothesis for life.
As neoliberal reforms broke the back of American labor, they also created a growing class of small business owners. Now, that class has come back to haunt both big business and the establishment which created them.
America’s China hawks paint the country as an economic, geopolitical, and military danger. In reality, China is less a threat to America itself than it is to the legitimacy of U.S. ruling ideology.
Wired magazine founder and technologist Kevin Kelly discusses why technology has agency, why he believes in God but not destiny, and how to be an anti-utopian optimist.
Observers regularly predict the U.S. dollar’s collapse as the global reserve currency. In reality, history shows that currency dominance is one of the most enduring forms of hegemony.
Wolf Tivy and Galen Wolfe-Pauly discuss what’s wrong with social media and computing as we know it, as well as a new paradigm for humane computing.
Humanism believed that we could conquer the world. In reality, modernity has escaped our control. Only a posthumanist framework can see us through.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the concept of progress and whether it still has a role in the American consciousness.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis joins the salon to discuss his new book on COVID-19, extreme crisis, and what we can learn about the relationship between pandemics and human nature.
New Optimists such as Steven Pinker emphasize the triumphs of modern civilization. But modernity has also created a grim left tail of potential catastrophes. We have only averted them by luck.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss the role of billionaires in society, how to think about personal wealth, and the inherent tensions between capital and state.