Earlier this year, with support from the Toshiba International Foundation, I produced a series of conversations thinking through how technology interacts with and shapes our world. It was a meaningful process, resulting in a collection of fruitful dialogues, which can be accessed here. While that project has finished, my hope is to continue to share some occasional conversations around broader themes.
In this episode, I converse again with my friend and colleague, PC, an Australian scholar who I have spoken with previously (here and here), and also has a Substack, ‘living together, somehow’. We commence with the following quote from China Miéville’s 2015 article, ‘On Social Sadism’:
There’s an arrogance to despair. Everyone thinks their own epoch is unique, and the sense that it’s uniquely awful is no less solipsistic or ahistorical than the belief that it’s the culmination of Weltgeist. But history is not endless recursion: some times are worse, in certain ways, than others.
Is now one of those times that is indeed worse? Starting with this question, our conversation turns in circles, exploring how to understand the current moment in reference to institutional entropy, questioning whether polycrisis and other conceptual frames might help us comprehend the changes we are experiencing, and considering parallels and thinkers from fin de siècle Europe. As a prompt for examining points of overlap, we engage with Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, which evocatively captured the end of an era, the disappearance of a lifeworld. Zweig’s description of the time before the Great War feels like it could equally be applied to the post-Cold War period:
There was progress everywhere. Who dared, won. Whoever bought a house, a rare book, a picture saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed. There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world – for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum?
As we engage with Zweig, Musil, along with other related thinkers and experiences, we grapple with these questions that PC posed in a recent post:
How do we live together, somehow, in and through a period of disintegration? And what can we learn from other people who have survived disintegration, in very different milieus, very different cultures?
While no easy answers are offered, the wager is that there is value in the process of thinking through such dilemmas together.
This conversation has been cross-posted on the ‘Imperfect world’ podcast feed.
