Stand at the right vantage point in late 2025, and you can watch multiple worlds ending simultaneously. Not with theatrical finality, but through the slow dissolution of systems we once took for granted. The post-war international order buckles under its own contradictions. Economic orthodoxies that governed for four decades collapse into policy chaos. Democratic institutions lose legitimacy even as elections multiply. The very notion of shared truth fragments into competing realities. And beneath it all, artificial intelligence advances toward capabilities that will fundamentally reorder what it means to work, to create, to be human.

At NEXT25 in Hamburg, this pattern of cascading endings formed the conference’s throughline. As discussed here:

The common thread, however, is the sense of an epochal break, a turning point in time. 1968, that iconic year, symbolised a fresh beginning, the escalation of protests against the old and demands for something new. 2025 is reminiscent of a right-wing 1968, albeit with a very different style and objectives. But it’s not conservative in any sense of the word.

The signs have been accumulating since at least 2016. As we observe, “it’s time to face a new reality and abandon some of our favourite illusions about politics, technology, and the economy.“

The question is no longer whether these systems are ending, but what comes after. And more unsettlingly: Are we witnessing not merely the end of particular arrangements, but the end of modernity itself?

The geopolitical rupture

Something shifted fundamentally when Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined BRICS in January 2024, alongside Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran. This wasn’t diplomatic theatre. Major powers were openly constructing alternative institutional frameworks, declaring in effect that the American unipolar moment had definitively ended.

The collapse of the liberal order

The architecture that Francis Fukuyama prematurely called “the end of history“ is collapsing not from external shock but internal incoherence. A Chatham House analysis notes:

The ‘liberal international order’ that has been predominant, if often controversial, since 1945 is being challenged as never before. This reflects factors both long-standing and recent: the rise of China; the frustrations and ambitions of countries – including many in the Global South – that associate the US-led liberal international order with deep hypocrisy; inequality within liberal democracies that has given rise to populism; Russian revanchism; and perhaps above all, the US’s more nationalist outlook and disruptive foreign policy since Donald Trump took office for the second time in early 2025.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was notable as perhaps the first time that NATO and its allies failed to achieve their goals, potentially symbolising the end of the unipolar moment. This wasn’t merely a military setback. It demonstrated that Western military and economic power, however formidable, could no longer simply dictate outcomes. NEXT22 explored how the invasion marked a historical threshold – when Russia invaded Ukraine, things would never be the same again, ushering in ”the after times“ where history resumed its cyclical patterns and the taken-for-granted stability of the post-Cold War era dissolved.

Multipolar disorder

What emerges is not a return to familiar patterns – neither 19th-century balance of power nor Cold War bipolarity – but something unprecedented. Multiple centres of power with overlapping spheres, competing governance models, fluid alliances. The Munich Security Conference warns that increasing great-power tensions have already made it more difficult to agree on and fund peacekeeping operations, while the world is experiencing a record number of armed conflicts.

The Global South’s assertion of agency proves particularly consequential. These countries aren’t choosing sides; they’re choosing themselves, picking and choosing alliances based on interest rather than ideology. The West’s claim to universal legitimacy – always contested, now openly dismissed – cannot survive this realignment.

What dies here is not American power per se, but the presumption that any single power can or should organise the world. This marks the end of modernity’s geopolitical assumptions – that Western values and institutions would eventually become universal, that history moved in a single direction. The end of modernity manifests in the multipolar disorder replacing American hegemony.

The economic transformation

The end of neoliberalism announces itself in concrete, measurable ways. At the end of World War II, fewer than five border walls existed globally, and even by the Cold War’s close, there were fewer than a dozen. Their sudden proliferation tells a story: the world is closing, not opening. Trade restrictions increased fivefold from 524 in 2015 to 3,000 in 2023.

The pandemic accelerated recognition of this transformation. In January 2021, we observed: “In the aftermath of the pandemic, we should never see capitalism in the same way again.” What 2020 revealed – that markets are “social phenomena, necessarily underpinned – and underwritten – by an infrastructure provided by the collective” – had always been true, but the crisis made denial impossible.

Since 2020, major publications from the New York Times to Foreign Policy have questioned whether neoliberalism has ended. The debate is settled – what remains is figuring out what comes next. Despite America’s growing political polarisation, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that the globalisation of yesteryear should be put out of its misery.

The geometry of trade

Yet this isn’t a simple reversal. Global trade as a percentage of GDP remains roughly stable, oscillating between 55% and 60%. What’s changing is the geometry – trade becoming more regional, more explicitly political, more weaponised. Academic research shows that:

Globalization 1.0 assumes that the United States-led neoliberal project would develop seamless connections between trading nations. I suggest that globalization 2.0 eschews the building of this modality of connection as discourses about risks shift to discourses of transnational threats.

The policy alternatives emerging prove troubling. Industrial policy risks subsidy wars between nations desperate to dominate future industries. Economic nationalism threatens the efficiency gains of integrated supply chains. Protectionism could trigger recession just as demographic decline reduces growth potential. We face, paradoxically, both the end of artificial scarcity – housing, energy, infrastructure could all be abundant given political will – and the continuation of shortages driven by policy failure.

The collapse of neoliberalism without a coherent successor framework suggests something deeper than mere policy transition. It points toward the end of modernity’s economic logic itself – the assumption that market mechanisms combined with state intervention could deliver perpetual growth and prosperity. The end of modernity’s economic order leaves us without roadmap or replacement.

The energy crisis: systems under strain

Last year’s NEXT conference examined “New Energy – Recharging our Systems” with particular focus on the rapid development and transformation of our energy needs and energy systems. The timing proved prescient. We face not merely an energy transition but an energy paradox: simultaneous crisis of supply, demand, infrastructure, and purpose.

The immediate crisis manifests as the artificial scarcity of energy. Despite technological capacity for abundance, expensive energy contributes directly to working-class anger, driving populist movements.

Systemic infrastructure mismatch

But the deeper issue is systemic. The energy infrastructure built for the 20th century – centralised, fossil-fuel-based, designed for predictable demand – confronts 21st-century realities: renewable intermittency, distributed generation, electrification of everything, and AI’s voracious energy appetite. The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity demand from data centres will more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, slightly more than Japan’s entire electricity consumption today. We’re building an AI economy on an energy system designed for an industrial one.

Understanding this requires systems thinking. As we’ve long argued, we live in a world of complex, interdependent systems, and any thinking that fails to include that runs the risk of summoning the law of unintended consequences. Energy systems don’t exist in isolation – they intersect with political systems, economic systems, infrastructure systems, all interconnected in ways that make simple solutions impossible.

The geopolitical dimension compounds the technical challenge. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t just cause an energy shock – it revealed the strategic vulnerability of energy dependence. As Jessica Berlin warned at NEXT22, the invasion marked a moment requiring us to rethink how we live to minimise the crisis.

Europe’s rushed pivot away from Russian gas exposed infrastructure deficits, regulatory bottlenecks, and the fragility of energy systems lacking adequate storage capacity and alternative supply routes. The result: inflation fueling political instability, which, in turn, undermines the political consensus needed for the energy transition.

From scarcity to abundance

In times of dissonance and endless disruption, we badly need new energy to recharge our systems.

This was NEXT24’s opening statement. But “new energy” means more than renewable sources. It means reimagining the entire energy paradigm – from centralised to distributed, from extraction to circulation, from scarcity logic to abundance logic. The technology exists. Solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity in most markets. Battery storage costs have plummeted.

NEXT25 explored how electric vehicles are becoming “batteries on wheels” – active participants in the energy system through vehicle-to-grid technology, turning cars into distributed storage assets that can help balance supply and demand. The barrier is political: regulatory inertia, incumbent resistance, and the same bureaucratic dysfunction strangling housing and infrastructure development.

The energy question thus crystallises the broader crisis: we possess technical solutions to material problems but lack political capacity to implement them. This gap – between what’s technically possible and what’s politically achievable – defines the end of modernity in its most tangible form. The modern project promised that reason and organisation could overcome material constraints.

When we can no longer translate knowledge into action, modernity’s core promise fails. This energy paradox exemplifies the end of modernity in concrete terms: we possess solutions but cannot implement them. Until we close this gap, energy remains a driver of instability rather than a foundation of prosperity.

The populist surge

In 2024, voters worldwide expressed dissatisfaction through the ballot box, with a median of 64% of adults across 34 countries saying their national economy was in bad shape. The incumbent bloodbath that followed wasn’t random. It reflected structural dissatisfaction with political classes across ideological lines.

The far-right gained ground across Europe and beyond. In Austria, the FPÖ emerged as the leading party in 2024 elections with 28.9% of the vote; in Italy, the Fratelli d’Italia coalition came to power with 25.99% in 2022. These weren’t protest votes. They represented genuine political realignments, often with right-wing parties increasing their vote share in successive elections.

The roots of discontent

Pew Research documents this shift:

Frustrations with the political class have created opportunities for right-wing populists and other challengers to traditional parties and the political status quo. Several elections this year [2024] in Europe highlighted this trend: Right-wing populist parties, many of which campaigned on sharply anti-immigration platforms, gained ground in this year’s European parliamentary elections.

The causes remain contested: economic dislocation versus cultural backlash, globalisation versus immigration, inequality versus identity. But a UN report links the global rise of right-wing populism directly to the decline in social protections. More specifically, researchers identify housing market stress as a key driver:

“It is the radical right – and not the mainstream left – that attracts voters who face increasing economic risks in the housing market.”

This reveals something important: the welfare state’s crisis isn’t just fiscal or ideological. It’s functional. When basic needs like housing become speculative assets, when infrastructure crumbles, when energy becomes unaffordable, politics radicalises. The right-wing populists aren’t manufacturing grievances; they’re exploiting real failures of governance.

Yet their proposed solutions often worsen underlying problems. Immigration restrictions don’t build houses. Nationalism doesn’t repair infrastructure. Distrust of institutions doesn’t improve state capacity. We face a perverse cycle: governance failure drives populism, which further degrades governance capacity, which drives more populism.

This dynamic reveals the end of modernity’s political settlement – the social contract between citizens and states that promised security, prosperity, and progress in exchange for democratic participation and social cohesion has broken down without a viable alternative emerging.

The epistemic crisis

Perhaps the most destabilising ending is epistemic. We’ve moved beyond post-truth to something stranger: the multiplication of truth-regimes, each with its own apparatuses of validation, its own authorities, its own standards of evidence.

Michel Foucault described how every society has a “regime of truth” – the rules for distinguishing true from false, the institutions that produce and validate truth, the political economy governing its circulation. According to Foucault:

In societies like ours the ‘political economy’ of truth is characterised by five historically important traits: ‘truth’ is centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it; it is subject to a constant economic and political incitation; it is the object, under diverse forms, of an immense diffusion and consumption; it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses; lastly, it is the stake of a whole political debate and social confrontation.

The internet didn’t destroy this regime so much as pluralise it. As we observed in 2019 about Parallelwelten (parallel worlds), truth has lost its singularity in favour of a multitude of parallel worlds, each maintaining its own truths. Multiple regimes now compete, each fighting for supremacy with all available means – discursive, economic, political, cultural.

We’ve explored since at least 2019 how Big Tech platforms create the rules others must follow, with little democratic oversight – the digital sphere increasingly defines, controls and governs the analogue world without real democratic checks and balances. What matters increasingly isn’t whether something is true or false, but whether it serves one’s group, advances one’s cause, fits one’s worldview.

The Jankowicz case

The case of Nina Jankowicz illustrates the dynamic. In 2022, she was appointed to lead the Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security. As she recalled:

Within hours of the board’s public launch, partisan media, influencers, and members of Congress were calling it a “Ministry of Truth” and claiming that I would be censoring Americans’ speech. They did this entirely without evidence; as demonstrated by the board’s founding documents and my five-hour sworn deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, the board had nothing to do with censorship. Its mission was to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment.

Our take:

The Ministry of Truth is, of course, a fictional department in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose mission is to rewrite history. The board that was attacked in this way was dissolved shortly thereafter. Disinformation had won the battle; truth had lost.

When everything can be called fake news, nothing can be. Experts dismissed as elites lose their authority entirely. Partisan media breeds universal mistrust. This isn’t Orwellian manipulation of truth; it’s something more corrosive – the exhaustion of truth as a political category.

The consequences cascade. Without shared epistemic foundations, democratic deliberation becomes impossible. Conspiracy theories proliferate in the absence of trusted arbiters. Common facts vanish, and society fragments into incompatible realities.

This may be the most fundamental ending of all – not of truth itself, but of the social mechanisms by which we once agreed on what counted as true. The end of modernity might ultimately be defined not by technological change or economic transformation, but by the collapse of shared reality itself.

The technological transformation

David Mattin’s NEXT25 keynote posed the question directly: What’s left for humans when AI can do most of our work? The question isn’t hypothetical. AI performance shows the scariest exponential curve happening right now, though it’s still slow enough that we don’t feel it day to day – a boiling frog situation, with AGI no longer sci-fi but possibly close to reality.

David explained:

We are shifting out of one economic system, one civilisational system, to another. We are amid a convergence of new technologies, that are all coming together to push us out of our current systems into something profoundly new.

The timing proves consequential. In advanced economies, the human population is about to peak and fall into steep decline just as AI and humanoid robots come online – as Kevin Kelly wrote in “The Handoff to Bots”, we’re about to hand over the reins of our civilisations to the robots we’ve built.

When AI handles knowledge work, corporate structures might hollow out, replaced by independent operators working with AI tools. We might see AI-to-AI transactions in virtual economies, heading toward what Mattin calls a social and economic singularity – AI replacing human economic inputs, transforming scarcity into abundance. As he notes:

Our role in the economy was to change scarcity into abundance. We turned that into the purpose, the meaning of us. Religion faded away, and we turned our jobs into our meaning. When machines can do that, what is our meaning then?

This anxiety pervades contemporary discourse about AI, manifesting as either utopian fantasies or apocalyptic fears. This represents the end of modernity as we’ve understood it – work-based identity giving way to an undefined future, the substitution of economic purpose for religious purpose now collapsing under automation’s advance.

What humans will matter for

Yet Mattin offered a different frame: humans will matter for precisely what machines cannot replicate – a theme we’ve addressed since at least 2018. As he put it:

You are a human being. A machine can never be a human being. If we accept that, we’ll stop being confused about some of the things we’re deeply confused about right now. Our apex need is to be seen by another human being, to share experience and communication. Everything you deliver of value into the economy will come from the part of you that can stand in front of another human and share what it means to be human.

The thing that will become scarce is understanding other humans’ feelings. Caring, counselling, genuine creativity – not AI-generated content, but outputs emerging from human-AI collaboration that transcend what either could achieve alone. This suggests that the end of work as we’ve known it could enable a beginning – not of leisure, but of different forms of labour centred on meaning-making, connection, care.

Whether this happens depends on political choices about how abundance gets distributed, whether humans are valued beyond their economic productivity, whether we can look up from screens and actually see each other. David concluded:

We need to come together as a collective to establish rules and norms for technology, ensuring it remains under control and benefits us. We need to share the abundance the machines create, rather than it falling into fewer hands. And we have to decide that humans matter.

Modernity’s end?

Which returns us to the fundamental question: Are these discrete endings of particular systems, or something more profound – the end of modernity itself? We’ve been investigating this question since 2018 (or possibly earlier), examining whether we live in postmodernity, liquid modernity, or what David Mattin termed “augmented modernity”.

Foreign Policy observes:

The details varied from country to country and across different political and social milieus, but in the modern era, there was a fundamental story, a ‘grand narrative,’ in the words of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, that seemed plausible to most people in the Western political mainstream. It was a story about increasing prosperity linked to economic growth, about technological and scientific progress, about the universality of human rights and the indispensable advantages of a specific liberal-democratic model of society. This narrative of development — world history as a bildungsroman— no longer comforts us as it once did.

The collapse of temporal certainty

Economic growth proves ecologically catastrophic. Scientific progress generates technological unemployment and existential risk. Universal values fragment into competing particularisms. Liberal democracy loses appeal even in liberal democracies. The global financial crisis undermined trust in financial institutions. The Covid pandemic collapsed confidence in scientific expertise and traditional media.

Whether we call this postmodernity or late modernity matters less than recognising the condition: multiple visions now compete with no single model commanding hegemonic legitimacy. Chinese state capitalism, Islamic political theology, Silicon Valley techno-libertarianism, European social democracy – each offers partial answers without universal persuasiveness.

The modern assumption that one civilisational form would eventually prevail has died. At NEXT22, David Mattin argued that “modernity is done” – that the new tension is between those who think we can transcend human nature and those who think society will collapse.

Modernity’s temporal foundation

Perhaps modernity’s core feature was a particular relationship to time – progress as master narrative, history as development, change as improvement. The Industrial Revolution installed clock-time as the dominant temporal regime: linear, measurable, synchronised across distances. Time was structured around work and productivity, with the factory whistle and the train timetable organising collective life around the mechanical rhythms of industrial capitalism.

What ends is not change itself but the presumption that change represents progress, that time moves forward toward improvement. We now live in what sociologist Manuel Castells calls ”timeless time” – where global communication networks compress time to the point where it almost disappears, where everything happens simultaneously in a perpetual present that erodes both past and future. The linearity of industrial time collapses into what François Hartog describes as “presentism” – the tyranny of the moment, the treadmill of an infinite now.

We’re left with transformation without telos, constant disruption without clear direction, the exhausting work of adaptation without the faith that we’re adapting toward something better. When time loses its narrative structure, when the sequence of past-present-future dissolves into simultaneity, modernity’s temporal foundation crumbles.

Antonio Gramsci wrote that ”the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We inhabit such an interregnum, stuck between a post-war order that no longer functions and successor systems not yet formed.

This might actually be what postmodernity means – not a new epoch succeeding modernity, but the condition of existing after the modern certainties have dissolved, before new certainties (if such are possible) crystallise. The interregnum extends indefinitely. The morbid symptoms become permanent features. We learn to navigate turbulence without expecting it to resolve into stability.

Navigating the interregnum

The proper question isn’t how to end the interregnum – that presumes a resolution that may never arrive – but how to live within it, build within it, maintain possibility within it. The end of modernity means learning to navigate ceaseless change without the compass of progress, to construct without knowing the final form.

David Mattin explored at NEXT22 how we face system shifts – true disruption – in which the systems around and within our businesses change rapidly and unpredictably. These are systemic changes: the new reality of work, supply chains and the return of scarcity, the shift to digital infrastructure, crises of truth and trust, and the new need for care. Understanding these interconnected transformations requires embracing systems thinking rather than seeking simple solutions to complex problems.

The crisis of institutions

The mistrust of institutions has real foundations. States have failed to deliver basic functions: housing, infrastructure, security. Expert classes have presided over disasters while insulating themselves from consequences. Democratic institutions have proven vulnerable to oligarchic capture. As we observe:

The mistrust of the deep state has a true core, even if the term itself has been discredited as a right-wing battle cry. Ironically, however, it is now the digital oligopolies that want to seize power and replace liberal democracy with an authoritarian technocracy.

Yet the alternative – Silicon Valley oligarchs replacing democratic institutions with technocratic authoritarianism – proves worse. We’ve been documenting since 2017 how Big Tech companies have streamed innovation into their own control rather than genuinely facilitating the lives we want to live.

By January 2025, the process culminated in what can only be described as Big Tech taking control of politics itself – a tech oligarchy with unprecedented concentration of economic, political, technological, and media power. Faith in technology substituting for faith in democratic process leads to intensified oligarchy, not liberation. Technology requires intelligent frameworks to flourish as force for good rather than domination.

Yet as Indy Johar states, the deeper challenge is recognising that “we are living through the exhaustion of democracy as we have known it”. Our institutions, designed for the 19th century, have become “architectures of lag: structurally incapable of reasoning, deciding, or acting at the temporal velocity and systemic interdependence of the 21st”. The task isn’t preserving these forms but refounding democracy as “an evolving architecture for perceiving, deciding, and acting together within complexity”.

Escaping false binaries

Building these new democratic architectures and intelligent technology frameworks requires moving beyond old dichotomies. What might this involve? States defending freedom and security through the rule of law and regulations that prevent monopoly. Welfare systems covering existential risks without creating dependency. Infrastructure investment combining public direction with private execution. Democratic institutions redesigned for complexity rather than simplicity, resilience rather than optimisation.

This requires escaping what Andreas Reckwitz identified as liberalism’s crisis:

The welfare state that emerged in response to the social question created a culture of dependency, while neoliberal market radicalism (in response to excessive state regulation) increased social inequality and weakened the public infrastructure. This is the Gordian knot of illusion and confusion that we have to cut.

Neither pure state nor pure market offers solutions. We need to cut this Gordian knot, but we can’t cut it cleanly — we must untangle it thread by thread, experimentally, locally, provisionally. Indy Johar argues that this requires “the courage to admit that democracy, in its current form, is broken” – not to abandon it, but to reforge it as “a living capability of society” rather than a static system preserved through nostalgia.

The work ahead isn’t systematic transformation according to blueprint. It’s more modest and more difficult: maintaining possibility within chaos, building alternatives within the shell of failing systems, preserving what deserves preservation while allowing necessary endings to occur.

What comes after

The endings we face are irreversible. The post-war liberal international order won’t be restored. Neoliberal globalisation won’t return. Expert authority won’t regain automatic deference. AI won’t stop advancing. Energy systems won’t revert to 20th-century models. These aren’t problems to solve but realities to navigate.

We’ve been articulating this truth since the pandemic years. In October 2021, we observed: “It seems unlikely we’ll ‘snap back’ to our pre-pandemic lives.” By early 2022, this had hardened into certainty: “Forcing a return to the old normal is not a viable adaptation to the new pressures” facing society. The lesson of 2020 was stark: “You can’t assume that things will always continue much as before.”

New patterns emerging

Yet endings contain beginnings. What’s ending might be illusions that needed to end – the illusion of permanent American hegemony, of endless growth without ecological cost, of technological progress as salvation, of expertise without accountability, of democracy on autopilot, of cheap energy without consequence.

Even within the interregnum, new patterns of meaning-making emerge. Alex Danco argues that “Prediction” is succeeding postmodernism as a cultural movement – not forecasting the future but participating in shaping it through timing, information contribution, and being “predictive of the game, rather than predicted by the game”.

Where postmodernism offered personalised consumption wrapped in unthreatening simulacra, the prediction aesthetic embraces friction and timing as meaning itself. Where modernity promised progress and postmodernity offered innovation (with your capital at risk…), prediction reframes purpose around contributing information to create order in the universe.

This manifests everywhere: the explosion of prediction markets and speculation; the shift from “innovation” to “adoption” as the governing metaphor; the recognition that when you engage matters as much as how; the understanding that contributing information that AI doesn’t yet know becomes a form of value creation. Whether this represents genuine cultural transformation or merely late capitalism’s most sophisticated form remains contested. But it suggests that even permanent liminality generates new modes of participation and meaning.

Toward humbler futures

What might come after could be humbler and more sustainable: multipolar governance accepting that no single civilisation will dominate; economic systems valuing resilience over pure efficiency; technological development directed toward human flourishing rather than displacement; democratic experimentation with new forms beyond exhausted institutions; energy systems designed for distributed abundance rather than centralised control; epistemic pluralism without epistemic chaos. And perhaps, as Danco suggests, new forms of purpose emerging from our ability to contribute information and participate in collective sense-making, even as AI handles much of material production.

This requires choices:

• about how AI-generated abundance gets distributed;
• whether we establish rules and norms for technology before it establishes rules and norms for us;
• whether we decide humans matter beyond economic productivity;
• whether we can share experience and communicate across the fragments into which society has shattered;
• whether we can build energy systems adequate to the challenges ahead.

The age of multiple endings is also, potentially, the age of multiple beginnings. Not one grand narrative replacing another, but many experiments, many attempts to build livable futures within the ruins of failed systems. Whether these coalesce into new cultural movements like Danco’s “Prediction”, or remain fragmented adaptations, or prove merely the final forms of dying systems rendered perfect at their moment of obsolescence – this remains uncertain.

Choices ahead

The task isn’t to restore what was – that path is closed – but to discover what might be possible after the illusions end, after the certainties dissolve, in an interregnum that may prove permanent.

We stand at a threshold. The old forms are dying. What is new cannot yet be born. Morbid symptoms multiply. This is where we are, and perhaps where we’ll remain – permanently liminal, constantly adapting, forever between orders. The question is whether we can make such a condition livable, even generative, or whether the permanent crisis proves ultimately unsustainable.

That remains to be seen. The experiment is underway. We are the experiment.

Picture by geralt/ Pixabay