Just Getting Started
We tell ourselves that we live inside late modernity. What if we're wrong?
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Tomorrow is the summer solstice; 2021 will be half over.
At these landmark moments in the year, I always feel compelled to take stock. And this week that intersected with broader reflections: on where we’re at inside modernity, and where we’re heading.
My feeling? We’re only just getting started.
I’ve been thinking about time recently. Not in any metaphysical sense. I mean personal time. How to use it, where it goes, how to orient yourself inside it.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been thinking – that is, I never really stop thinking – about this newsletter.
Then I came across this tweet:
Walt Disney thought he was too late to get into animation. In 1923.
Two small words: too late. But we’ve all felt their power at some point in our lives. Back in the mid-2010s, I often thought about starting a newsletter. But email is 25 years old. There are so many newsletters. I’m too late.
These days, I’ve stopped believing in that kind of too late (you should too). And reading about Walt this week, it struck me that there is a link between my thinking – my suspicion – when it comes to the idea of late, and the project that is NWSH.
We inhabitants of the 21st-century have a special relationship with lateness. It forms a part of how we think about ourselves and our shared future. We talk about ourselves as living inside late capitalism, and late modernity. And those phrases are rarely questioned.
But what if, like Walt, we’re wrong?
The word late seems simple, and sometimes – ‘you’re late for this meeting’ – it is. But to call ourselves late in this context is far more complex. First, it implies that we have knowledge of both the start and end state of a process that is playing out in time. And second, it’s a judgement that we’re much closer to the end than the start.
Often, though, those kinds of judgements are flawed. That’s because when it comes to most processes – the small, every day stories playing out in our own lives, or the sweeping forces that shape the world we live in – we’re terrible judges of what the end state will be, or when we’ll get there. Typically, our picture of that end state is crushingly unimaginative. It amounts to whatever we see around us now, plus a little more in the same vein. But the world, as we’ve had cause to notice recently, doesn’t work like that.
Walt thankfully realised he was wrong about being too late to make a difference in animation. What if we’re wrong when it comes to late modernity? What if, in truth, this journey we’re on is only just getting started?
The pandemic has been good for these kinds of thoughts. It opened up a space, unique in our lifetimes, that made it easier to believe that the version of modernity we live inside now isn’t finished, or anything close. It made it possible to ask in a new way: what comes next?
We think we understand the internet. But what if this version is just the first, primitive internet, significant mainly because it laid the foundations for the next iteration?
We think we know money. But what if fiat was just a blip before the arrival, and long rise to dominance, of entirely new forms of currency?
We rightly celebrate the advances we’ve made in medicine. But what if all that has been only a prologue to the revolution set to play out via genetic technologies?
You get the idea. We moderns tend to think we’re late in the game. But plenty of evidence points to the likelihood that we’re only just getting started.
It’s an exciting thought. It’s also a scary one, because it puts agency back in our hands. If you’re too late, the next step is to do nothing. If you’re early in a process, you still have the chance to influence it. There’s work to do.
Which brings us to this newsletter. New World Same Humans is founded in the belief that in the 2020s, we can come together to build a radically different, and better, future for all. The implication is that we’re likely to be early in modernity; that we still have time and space enough to change where we’re heading. Or, at least, that we should act as though we know that to be true. The alternative is to believe that we can’t make a difference; that we’re stuck with what we have now.
In its own small way, NWSH is about a refusal to believe that, and to countenance the inaction that would result. One of its fundamental themes, it seems to me, is early modernity, not late.
It means a lot that you’ve chosen to join the journey. And as the year reaches its halfway mark, I’m mindful of the many things that I want us to do together before the year is out.
So many plans; so little time! But that’s okay. Our community is just getting started, too. There’s much more to come.
Spread the word
Thanks for reading this week.
There are some special New World Same Humans projects in the lab that I can’t wait to share with you.
In the meantime, if this week’s instalment resonated with you, why not consider spreading the word? You could forward the email to someone who’d also enjoy it. Or share across one of your social networks. Remember: the larger and more diverse the NWSH community becomes, the better for all of us.
I’ll be back on Wednesday with New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,
David.