In the course of my research, I will occasionally indulge in a session of academic archaeology and follow a trail of references back in time to see if I can find the source of some particular concept or idea. I would like to think that acquiring this ki…
The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go From Here?
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB.
The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB.
Goliath's curse: the history and future of societal collapse
A vast and unprecedented survey of societal collapse -- stretching from the Bronze Age to the age of silicon -- that digs through the ruins of fallen societies to understand the root causes of their downfall and the most dire consequences for our future. Stepping back to look at our precariously interdependent global society of today -- with the threat of nuclear war ever present and the world heating up faster than it did before the Great Permian Extinction, which wiped away 80-90 percent of life on Earth -- one couldn't be blamed for asking : Will we make it? Addressing this question with the seriousness it demands, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy that stretches across five millennia, and more than 440 societal lifespans, from the first Egyptian dynasty to the modern-day United Kingdom, using the latest discoveries from archaeology and anthropology to reveal profound and often counterintuitive insights into why exactly societies fail. While books like Jared Diamond's Collapse zoom in on only a few case studies, Kemp's embrace of a 'deep systems' approach, availing himself of the largest dataset possible, allows him to discover the broader trends, and deeper causes, of collapse that pose future risks -- without abandoning the gripping historical narratives that bring these pages alive. Goliath's Curse is a stark reminder that there are both bright and dark sides to societal collapse -- that it is not necessarily a reversion to chaos or a dark age -- and that making a more resilient world may well mean making a more just one
Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method
The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.
Pace Layers 02025 Annual Journal
Long Now’s annual print journal explores the ancient past and distant future of the present moment through essays, interviews, fiction, poetry, and visual art. The journal takes its name and shape from Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand’s pace layers framework — a tool for thinking about how civilizations work. [Learn more about Pace Layers](https://longnow.org/pacelayers/)
rohit on Twitter / X
One of the most fun papers I've read in recent times. Excellent. Reminiscent of the good old days of science papers. pic.twitter.com/4a7qRTloSG— rohit (@krishnanrohit) December 30, 2024
Do Artifacts Have Politics?
Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136
Full Text Of The Grim Meathook Future Thing
I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.
Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry
Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.
Legends of the Ancient Web
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
Do Artifacts Have Politics? on JSTOR
Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? (Winter, 1980), pp. 121-136
Quick and only partially coherent review of 2024
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland