The confused contemporary
In process
Rather that penning a new note, below is a cut from the book draft in progress, speaking to the confusing and conflictual conditions of the contemporary.
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Where are we? What is that? Where has our dream brought us?
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1924)
A quarter of the way through the first century of a new millennium, a quarter of the way through the year: the headlines that appeared in the month of April 2025 powerfully captured the confusion and vertigo of the contemporary, with shocks coming in equal measure from extremes in stupidity and intelligence.
The headline grabbing news for the month came from the dramatic announcements of 2 April 2025, declared as ‘Liberation Day’ by US President Donald Trump, who held a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden to announce high tariffs on most countries. Economist James Surowiecki described the formula for determining the so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ as ‘extraordinary nonsense’, with the calculations appearing to match what is suggested by prompting major AI chatbots: ‘Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s’. Speaking to Bloomberg as the US stock market plummeted, one wealth advisor carefully determined that the approach taken, ‘lacks a level of sophistication.’ In the days that followed, as analysts tried to make sense of the non-sensical, one point of comparison offered was the recent history of the United Kingdom, reflected in the experience of Brexit as ‘a startling act of economic self-harm’, and its experience in September 2022 when a poorly judged budget statement by the then new prime minister, Liz Truss, quickly triggered financial stress with equities and bonds falling together as bond yields rapidly rose. This was dubbed the ‘moron premium’, to describe conditions in which ‘bond markets place a penalty on erratic regimes’, a situation that now seemed to apply to the US Treasury market, meant to be the bedrock of the global financial system.
A day after Trump liberated many people of their illusions and financial wealth, on 3 April 2025, a team of researchers published ‘AI 2027’, predicting that, ‘the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.’ The authors forecast that within a few years that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will develop superhuman skills, becoming able to recursively self improve, and from there, ‘it’s a short hop to artificial superintelligence… at which point all bets are off.’ A few weeks later, on encountering the latest model of ChatGPT released by OpenAI, the economist Tyler Cowen wrote, ‘Benchmarks, benchmarks, blah blah blah. Maybe AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] is like porn – I know it when I see it. And I’ve seen it.’ Geoffrey Hinton, whose work played an important development in current AI models, has been surprised with the pace of these advancements, proposing that we have collectively reached a ‘kind of bifurcation point in history’ in which there will be a need to reckon with the dangers of creating such powerful and potentially uncontrollable technology.
At the same time as Hinton offers such warnings, however, at the other extreme ‘AI slop’ and ‘AI brainrot’ threaten to overwhelm and drown the internet in AI-produced garbage, with Jacob Silverman writing in the Financial Times that, ‘ the last bits of fellowship and ingenuity on the web are being swept away by a tide of so-called artificial intelligence’. Regardless of the current and future capacities of AI tools, it is already clearly too powerful and advancing too fast for the way societies are structured. With these developments, the future now rushes towards and intrudes upon the present, as the advent of technologies that far outstrip human capacity and control appear as a real and immediate possibility, with radical consequences for the collective human endeavour.
On the same day that Trump announced his tariffs, climate scientist James Hansen published a memo with his colleagues entitled, ‘Global Warming Acceleration: Impact on Sea Ice’, which concluded with the implications of their findings: ‘High climate sensitivity … changes everything. Most important: it makes it much more difficult to avoid passing the “point-of-no-return” – shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and, in turn, sea level rise of several meters.’ This continues and deepens arguments Hansen has been making that the approach taken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) understates the speed and scale of global warming. A few weeks later on 22 April 2025, the annual ‘Earth Day’ passed with limited fanfare, although The White House did announce that, ‘On Earth Day, We Finally Have a President Who Follows Science’.
To mark the day, The New York Times published a pair of articles. One was entitled, ‘What’s the Best Thing I Can Do for the Planet?’, which commenced by explaining that, ‘it’s important to understand that climate change is a symptom of a larger issue: ecological overshoot, or the fact that humans are consuming resources faster than they can regenerate and producing more waste and pollution than nature can absorb’, leading to the sound conclusion that, ‘one of the most effective ways [is] to avoid consumption in the first place’. Another article appeared in Wirecutter, the product recommendation service of the newspaper: ‘10 Earth Day Deals on Products Wirecutter Loves’, with their sustainability editor Katie Okamoto espousing the benefits of buying refurbished goods: ‘You save money – often a lot of money – and you skip over that environmentally intensive manufacturing phase. It’s a win-win.’ The stubborn refusal to even vaguely align the findings of climate science with societal practices reflects a deep, widespread unwillingness to accept almost any limits on consumption. ‘Quite frankly bonkers’ is how Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London, described the heatwave in Central Asia the previous month of March 2025, which saw temperatures up to 10C above pre-industrial levels, but this description could be equally be applied to any attempt to speak of ‘win-win’ in the current climate context. A more honest reflection was offered by climate reporter David Wallace-Wells judging, ‘the world seems to be surrendering to climate change’.
Pausing, stepping back, and judging the macro trends captured in these specific news stories taken from this one month of April 2025, what becomes evident? The dysregulation of the climate and societies mirror and amplify each other, the planet and people moving further and further out of balance. The world appears simultaneously threatened by too much stupidity, too much intelligence, too much content, too much consumption, too much conflict, all at the same time, while so many still suffer from not enough sustenance, security, substance. In 1937 Robert Musil judged that, ‘the conditions of life are today: so unintelligible, so difficult, so confused’, a description that can be directly applied to the contemporary. Recognising and reckoning with these contradictory, confused forces, pushing and pulling, running forwards and cycling backwards, this is a time of disorientated extremes and extreme disorientation.
The challenge becomes how to think and talk about changes as they are unfolding and indeterminate, even if clarity is wanted it might simply not be possible because the conditions themselves are unclear. Rather trying to ignore the uncertainty, to deny the confusion, another response is to face it for what it is. These are strange, unprecedented times, and should be understood as such.
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Trying to reckon with these conditions is what the book attempts to do… More on that to come, as it comes.