Guest post by the author of Octopusyarn.

Global problems from climate change to arms races need global, or better yet, planetary solutions. Religion may be able to defeat Moloch, where all international treaties have failed before. If it is to address the crises outlined in the previous part, Metamodern religion needs to enable Cosmo-local coordination. 

However, attempting to enforce a monolithic religion on a planetary level would likely lead to dystopian outcomes. Different cultures and ways of life need to be preserved, potentially even traditional religions like Christianity, with a few tweaks. The weaving of the social fabric happens on a local level. Cosmo-local coordination seems like the way forward: A minimal planetary layer that allows for a variety of local cultures.

The middle section of the tree contains both principles for global coherence and ways that they can manifest in a plurality of contexts.

Omni-consideration

At the core of a shared moral framework should be something like Omni-consideration, a term used by Daniel Schmachtenberger. 

What is the most fundamental lived reality of conscious experience? Suffering is bad, pleasure is good. This seems like an experiential axiom, whether we have a formalised theory of consciousness or not (Mike Johnson, the grey eminence of qualia structuralism, suspects valence might be the “Rosetta Stone” of consciousness). If this can’t be our shared basis for coordination, nothing can. 

Omni-consideration derives directly from this axiom of emotional valence: We should attempt to maximise pleasure and minimise suffering (over the long run). The concept of Human Rights is a subset of this way of thinking, but Omni-consideration goes much further: it implies care not only for all humans but all conscious beings (and the environment as a result). 

Omni-consideration implies the practice of considering the impacts of one’s actions and decisions on all stakeholders, including but not limited to oneself, other people, other species, future generations, and the environment. It also prohibits externalising harm somewhere else for the benefit of a narrowly defined group or outcome. To truly live this, decision-making would need to take into account the interconnectedness of living systems and n-th-order consequences. As elaborated by complexity science with its understanding of non-linear dynamics, we need profound humility when judging what effects any action may have. In terms of moral reasoning, this humility implies a parallax between utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology. 

Planetary governance

We won’t get around sharing the same planet. Actions with a global effect (e.g. environmental damage) concern all of us. 

Planetary governance is the most important piece for solving the external Meta Crisis, and might only become possible through the spread of Metamodern Religion. Specifically, through the principle of Omni-consideration being taken seriously, supported by the structure of feeling within Integrative pluralism.

There are straightforward implications of Omni-consideration, such as a principle of non-violence and a notion of fundamental rights. In addition, More indirectly, it implies mitigating existential risks of all kinds – from rogue AGI to climate change. Uses of technology that endanger large swaths of the population or even the possibility of life on the planet altogether need to be strictly controlled. We need to learn how to live within planetary boundaries.

While a likely starting point is a social contract, eventually, there would need to be a planetary governance process (potentially combined with a monopoly of violence) around these issues in order to effectively enforce such rules. We already have bodies like the UN that try to guarantee and promote global peace and human rights with mixed results today. The current failure modes of the UN (e.g. stalemate in its security council, fossilised power relations from past wars, institutional bloat, etc.) would need to be addressed. 

As you surely notice, we’re entering geopolitical LaLa Land. 

How could we ever get everybody to agree on shared rules? Even less plausibly, how could we exit the arms races we are currently engaged in and get the powers that be to hand over their toys? How could a global monopoly of violence possibly not degenerate into a totalitarian one-world government because of unchecked power? Good questions, no easy answers. However, it seems inevitable that we will need some form of planetary governance because of the global nature of these issues. That fact that the largest collective bodies currently are nation states arguably exacerbates these issues through the competitive dynamics between countries. 

What does this have to do with religion? 

The only cases where coordination failures have been solved are to be found in religions. An example is Shabbat in Judaism, the day when it is prohibited to do any work at all. This rule is enforced to this day with strong social norms and deterrence by a large punishment. Religious law has successfully bound an arms race (on time spent working in this case) within Judaism (as Schmachtenberger explains), resulting in more social coherence.  In addition, Planetary governance is necessary as a political scaffolding that allows for the sefirot below to function. For example, universal freedom of movement between the different cultures and states is needed for Atomic communities to function.

Before any kind of planetary governance will become possible, there will need to be significant shifts in culture. Jeremy Johnson describes going planetary as moving beyond anthropocentrism and starting to relate to the Earth as a living system (see the Gaia hypothesis). It also entails a structure of feeling that makes global interconnectedness palpable on an everyday emotional level. As it turns out, a new aesthetic sensibility is not just required as a precedent for enabling planetary governance, but the keystone of the entire structure of Metamodern Religion. 

Integrative pluralism

At the very heart of this proposed structure for Metamodern Religion is Integrative Pluralism: the recognition that there are always multiple valid ways of understanding a situation and that by bringing these perspectives together, a more holistic and complete understanding can be achieved. Moving through Wilber’s quadrants, we can see the same issue from completely different points of view, subjectively, culturally, scientifically, and systematically. There is a fractal pattern opening up by zooming into each quadrant and applying the framework again, as demonstrated by Hanzi’s exploration of ethics.

“The task is to see reality as it is, the method is to look through millions of eyes”
—Nietzsche

We could therefore expect that the core task of Metamodern Religion will be to weave together these different perspectives, such as culture, science, and spirituality, with the human experience of our times. It should accommodate the integration and coherence between the different ontological categories and vantage points within them. Like a prism, Integrative pluralism crystallises all of the abstract sefirot above and emanates specific manifestations of them in the more concrete spheres below. 

The Glass Bead Game of harmonisation

This integration happens primarily through art. While it may seem daunting, this would not be the first time humans engage in sweeping religious integration: We can think of the great religious art of the past, from the Bible to Dante’s Divine Comedy, from the great Gothic cathedrals to Michelangelo’s frescoes as predecessors.

Before Metamodern Religion can emerge, we need an artistic renaissance. Entirely new art forms and practices are what will produce the symbols, myths, and collective experiences at the core of a new Cosmo-local religion. This process of harmonisation and integration reminds of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a fictional play that synthesises all arts and sciences. 

We need our own Glass Bead Games. Whether it’s interactive media, AI-powered experiences, VR/AR, or blockchain (or all of them), I expect technology to play a vital role too. I’d also expect the art to be much more participative and created by collectives rather than individual artists. 

The work of Olafur Eliasson is a prime example of art centred around multiperspectivalism, creating an aesthetic that works across cultural backgrounds and levels of development. Yayoi Kusama’s art re-enchants modernity with bright colours and opens up the sublime dimensions of the mundane. Early examples that lean into co-creation include experiences like Nora Bateson’s warm data lab, David Chapman’s hyperlinked books (e.g. Vividness) written in public, or genre-breaking experiments like Meaningwave or In Shadow. Laurence Currie-Clark has brought a version of the Glass Bead Game to life as a collective inquiry practice and is now expanding it into an experimental social media platform. Plantoids are an example of how the use of technology in art can engender co-creative spaces and ecological thinking.

The texture of numinous excess

This integration of different strands of a culture at any time is what generates the binding energy of religion. Layman Pascal describes it as the core of religion as a process: the “surplus coherence” achieved by this integration generates the “numinous excess”, the religious feeling of awe and wonder. Tiferet, the sefira at the very heart of the tree, where I placed “Integrative Pluralism”, is often titled “Beauty”. We will know our Glass Bead Games are working if they produce this sense of numinous excess in participants from diverse backgrounds. The task here is nothing short of building the cathedrals of our age. We need a return to beauty while still folding in the critical deconstruction that has been prevalent in contemporary art. 

The feeling structure of metamodern art is still in the process of unfolding. Some potential elements are the following: 

• Metaxis. Holding sincerity and irony in superposition results in an in-between quality: neither entirely serious nor ironic, but both at once. From leaning into the apparent contradiction, a new kind of beauty emerges, like a moiré pattern. Irony adds dimensionality to the sincerity, while sincerity adds depth to the irony. Contemporary metamodern art is diffusing this sensibility to wider and wider audiences. 
• Planetary Communitas: Communitas is the interpersonal connection our ancestors may have felt in their religious rituals. A blending between individuals into a felt sense of group-consciousness. We want a similar sensibility but with a wider circle of concern, including all of humanity, to other species, and to the planet itself. Not just understanding the interconnection of the ecosystem intellectually but viscerally feeling ourselves as part of its wholeness. 
• Aperspectival hyper-textuality: I expect art forms enabled by technological capabilities (VR/AR/AI) that will be more interactive and informationally dense. This may induce a new sense of time created by the hyper-textuality of technological augmentation: Moving from linear time to what Gebser calls “aperspectival”, where the spectator/participant can zoom in or out, co-creating the art as different vantage points are activated. This may be a way to perceive Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. 

The jargon above is pointing at different potentially relevant elements and not to be mistaken for a complete description. 

Atomic communitarianism 

What do traditional religions and countercultures from hippies to reactionaries all have in common? They share the mistaken assumption of universalism: that their specific solution to social organisation is the best possible way of organising society everywhere, at all times. It seems obvious that there are certain trade-offs in cultural space and that for different people and circumstances, different solutions will better support their thriving: 

• Different social norms may be required for different circumstances (e.g. variations on family structures vs. more tribal arrangements, monogamy vs. polyamory, more or less fluid roles in society, diet, etc.).
• Different political and economical frameworks, and different relations to technology: from liquid democracy to a constitutional monarchy of philosopher kings, from neo-Luddism to fully-automated luxury communism.
• Different variations of the overarching narratives, different shared rituals, and different archetypal myths, all coloured by the idiosyncrasies of place and culture. 

There is no universal answer for social organisation. Is it possible to rejoice in our differences instead of incessantly trying to convince each other that our way of life is “right”? A healthy social pluralism seems possible as long as we can agree on some minimal common ground to avoid diverging into factions so different they can’t communicate any longer. The principles of Omni-consideration and (minimal) Planetary governance are plausible directions. As long as anybody can freely move between communities, multiple solutions can be explored in parallel. 

In order for communities to function within Metamodern Religion, there will likely be some commonalities, including: 

• A new localism and connection to the ecosphere, communities caring for their bioregions. 
• A developmental approach, helping its members grow in different dimensions, supported by an ecology of practice. 

The general idea of this sefira is described in Scott Alexander’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. There is also an alignment on this point in the Game-B community, where so-called “Proto-Bs” could propose local solutions radically different in social architecture towards the same global aims of a thriving, non-violent, and sustainable culture. 

Cosmopolitan Shamanism

This is all quite complex. How could such a convoluted structure possibly scale to a global religion? 

The answer is that not everybody has to fully understand every part of it, participating is enough. I can type these words without knowing how my laptop works. It is much easier to function within a given system than work on the systemic level itself. Only a small part of the population will be called to do the latter and both help midwife Metamodern Religion and then improve and maintain it. These “shamanoid” personalities (as Bard calls them) would need to understand the functioning of the structure as a whole and likely undergo significant training to take up their role as stewards or “priests” of Metamodern Religion. I call them “Cosmopolitan Shamans” since they are needed across the different Atomic Communities all over the world, and at least some of them would also travel between them. 

Cosmopolitan Shamans have a number of critical functions across the structure of Metamodern Religion, both between and within Atomic communities: 

Between communities: 

• Maintain and update the Structure of Metamodern Religion as situations change, e.g. its overarching narratives and shared standards.
• Interconnect the different atomic communities to ensure alignment with the overall structure and transfer knowledge between them. 

Within communities:

• Develop art, culture, and practices within atomic communities.
• Steward the different atomic communities, ensuring sustainable bioregions, a healthy social commons, and the continued development of its members. 

Likely, different specialised roles would emerge to fulfil these different functions, i.e. staying in place to steward a specific community or travelling between them to facilitate knowledge exchange. Shamans may also be called to work on philosophical frameworks, narratives, or practices respectively, or to create art. There would need to be a globally connected network of Cosmopolitan Shamans that allows for their recruitment and training, as well as an exchange of knowledge and experience. The mycelium of Metamodern Religion. 

Since there is a significant degree of responsibility and power in this function, the membrane of who may take up the training needs to be clearly defined: Likely, self-selection, peer-verification, and mutual training would all be involved. Before being able to take up a specific role, aspiring shamans should demonstrate an understanding of core narratives and the underlying philosophy. They would also need to master a wide range of practices and show a strong ethical commitment. 

The shamanic network would need to be able to work with whatever power structure is at play (from technologists to political leaders) while maintaining independence from it. We can imagine a number of techniques from camouflage to an internal “immune system” for this shamanic network to maintain its independence. The network would also need to avoid institutional inertia and maintain its fluidity. While it may share elements with religious secret societies of the past, from the Freemasons to tantric Kaula, there will also be key differences: Since Cosmopolitan Shamans need to both be able to recognize each other and be recognized by all members of their communities, a paradigm of “self-secrecy” or “open conspiracy” seems more likely.

— 

Next: Bringing it home, into your life

From setting the context in the first part, to the philosophical musings in the second part, you’ve followed me through meandering and dense speculations of how a new religion could facilitate global coordination while remaining pluralist. The final part of the series will bring all of this home. Home into our own lives. We’ll look into how ecologies of practice can connect to these larger structures and lead to personal meaning and fulfilment. Metamodern Spirituality is doing the same work of integration and harmonisation that religion does culturally on a personal level. As above, so below. Stay tuned.

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The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain pseudonymous. 

On his blog, he expresses his long-standing interest in philosophy, psychology, and psycho-technologies. As a technologist, serious meditator, and denizen of the liminal web, he likes writing at the intersections of different fields.

Guest post by the author of Octopusyarn.

In the previous part of this series, I have presented a broad definition of religion as the social fabric that orients culture through integration. I also made the case that in order to solve the Metacrisis and the Meaning Crisis, we will need to replace our deficient Western religion (a blend of consumerism, scientism, and humanism) with the emerging Metamodern Religion.   

This part focuses on the first of three sections of the tree, describing the philosophical framework for Metamodern Religion: bringing together science and post-structuralist insights while remaining flexible enough to hold multiple cultural interpretations, including traditional and indigenous ones.

• The Ineffable, at the crown of the tree, at once enables and relativises the 2 following sefirot. 
• A Post-Metaphysical God serves as a placeholder for the best possible integration of ultimate value and scientific understanding at any given time. 
• Self-aware Narrativity allows this God to become antifragile through continuous deconstruction and hopefully prevents dogmatism and fundamentalism. 
• Meta-rationality is the intellectual stance that can overcome relativist nihilism. It at once affirms rationality while acknowledging its limits, and aims to navigate between different modes of thinking. 

(?X?)

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.“

Akin to the original kabbalistic scheme, we start with the ineffable i.e. REALITY beyond description. It seems like this fountain of mystery is shared by most of the world’s traditional religions. Just like the Tao can’t be named, God in the Abrahamic traditions cannot be pictured. Similarly in Hinduism: Brahman, the ultimate reality that underlies all of existence, is said to be beyond all name, form, or attributes – “neti neti” – not this, nor that. Also the (Mahayana) Buddhist concept of emptiness, Shunyata, points at an ultimate reality that lies behind the appearance of things, which don’t have inherent existence but arise dependent on one another. 

As perennialism asserts, this sort of non-dual mysticism seems shared by major religions. Any of the theistic traditions could insert their favourite term for God here as long as they concede that ultimate reality (God) can’t really be described and their name is as good as any other. Even though we may never hope to describe reality in its totality, we should not give into the temptation to cover up anything vaguely spiritual or complex with the veil of ineffability. We can become more precise in describing different states, stages, and aspects of reality, as argued by Layman. 

A key consequence of placing ineffable mystery at the crown sefira is that it allows for ingress of novelty into the system: as major breakthroughs are achieved, whether scientific, cultural, or spiritual, they come in from the top and percolate down to update the system appropriately. Just like in the original kabbalistic tree of life, the entire model below emanates from this point. The ineffable couples the system with reality, making sure the map never ceases to represent the territory accurately, and acting as a reminder not to mistake the former for the latter.  

Post-metaphysical God

What would religion be without a concept of God? Even though it’s arguable the term may carry too much historical baggage, it seems like an equivalent pointer of ultimate value is critical for the overall function of the system. Also for reasons of backwards-compatibility and inclusivity, it makes sense to call a spade a spade – and a God a God. 

However, it should be clear that we are not talking about an all-powerful personal God with agency, intentions, etc. The type of post-metaphysical God envisioned should be fully compatible with a rationalist/scientific worldview. Functionally, it provides a focal point for shared values as well as a container for the most parsimonious ontologies and cosmogony.

The values imbued should be maximally inclusive and universal. A plausible example are the “4L”, as described by Gregg Henriques:

• Life – the living ecosystem and its continued increase in complexity
• Love – the relational force between all of the parts; right relationship
• Light – consciousness and the value of internal experience 
• Logos – the patterning or order of the Cosmos, the ground of intelligibility 

It bears repeating that any post-metaphysical conception of God always grows from the unspeakable mystery (and can be shredded back into it). Any Metamodern God is always a God of the “in-between” – Deus Metaxy. God emerges from an ever-evolving, interconnected net of relations. In some instances, “God” as a concept may also be used to ground any axioms used, for example, fundamental physical forces or fields, time-space (or the place before/beyond it), or even consciousness. 

The post-metaphysical trinity   

In many religious systems of the past (e.g. Christianity or Hinduism) as well as more recent attempts from Wilber’s Religion of Tomorrow (which was influenced by Whitehead) and Bard’s Syntheism, God is split up in at least a triad of different aspects. It seems critical for a post-metaphysical God to be multi-dimensional to accommodate a spectrum of values and to ground different axioms. 

Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics is made for mapping abstract triples, so using its triplicate modular isomorphism to classify different ideas of holy trinities seems opportune. The table below includes the core values above, scientific axioms, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist concepts, as well as relevant post-metaphysical conceptions of God by Bard and Wilber.

The examples above (and even the triplicate structure itself) are merely placeholders. A metamodern theology could be imagined as the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the post-metaphysical God. In order to truly reflect the best scaffolding possible at any time, this would require an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue of scientists, mystics, and philosophers.

Grand narratives return in a mycelial form  

In addition to the God concept, we also need compelling and accurate stories about topics generally addressed naively by religions or unintelligibly by philosophers: 

• The origin and teleology of the Cosmos, and our role in it as a species. 
• The nature of the sacred, the good life, and their ethical implications. 
• Kant’s 4 questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? What is man?” 

Importantly, we’re not looking for a single theory of everything, but a mycelial structure of coherent yet branching stories. We’d expect Bard’s categories of logical, mythical, and pathic narrative (as described in this short piece) to be present in many permutations: These stories need to resonate in different cultural environments and potentially even tie into previous religious traditions. We want stories so good that they’ll be declared as a lost Gospel or a new buddhist Terma by traditional religions.  

Traditionally religious speculations have already been coming back as hypotheses wrapped in “science-y” language for the past decades already (see the demarcation problem). The simulation hypothesis is just tech bro gnosticism. The Omega point and the singularity are Silicon Valley eschatology. Cosmological inflation, complexification, quantum entanglement, many worlds. Many words. And all of them have religious implications and offer competing grand narratives, whether their pundits admit it or not. Many of them tie in with great religious traditions and philosophers alike (Hegel, Whitehead, Bergson, de Chardin). A re-integration therefore does not seem out of reach, and we will continue to see more convincing attempts. The prototypical example is Wilber’s Integralism, and more recently, Metamodernism. Interesting attempts that focus even more on the narrative aspects continue to show up, e.g. Dempsy’s “Emergentism” or Azarian’s “The Romance of Reality”. 

While the vanguard of science is still undecided on major questions (e.g. interpretations of quantum mechanics or the nature of consciousness) and different narrative strands will end up with quite different interpretations, some common elements seem clear. First and foremost, a development through time with distinct phase changes of emergence with increasing complexity seems like a common denominator.

Gregg Henriques’ Tree of Knowledge system pictured above is a recent version of this general pattern. Humanity is at the cusp of this development toward higher complexity. We are the universe waking up to itself, or something like that.

Self-aware narrativity

Now that we’ve created God, it’s time to kill her again. We do that by realising that all concepts and stories are ultimately constructed and empty of inherent meaning, grounded in the principle of the ineffability of reality. The sefira of self-aware narrativity balances the creation of a post-metaphysical God with its deconstruction. However, this negation of Ultimate Truth does not mean that we are forever condemned to a relativistic nihilism of ever-fragmenting, incompatible narratives. Ihab Hassan intuits a via negativa opening up through the void of deconstruction. We will get back to “truth”, “trust”, and “spirit” through nihilism – “For only through nihilism is nihilism overcome.” (read Brendan Graham Dempsey’s analysis of Hassan’s essay here). 

Recognizing that all language games are constructed and result in different topologies of meaning and power protects against the pitfalls of dogmatism and universalism. However, just because we can never articulate the Ultimate Truth doesn’t mean we need to remain silent. We can move ever closer to the shifting of reality with more refined, coherent, and parsimonious narratives. Once we accept that, the task becomes affirming our shared humanity in the best story we can come up with at the time.

An anti-fragile God and made-up prophets

Being self-aware of its constructedness, a metamodern God needs to be able to sustain critique. Daniel Görtz describes this concept of a headless God as follows: “It is a God whose altar can be pissed upon, (who) is insulted again and again, yet remains sacred, and is resurrected. (…)” A metamodern God is “always on his way to the guillotine.” 

This dynamic creates antifragility: Whatever belief structures are left standing after repeated ferocious critique can be believed in with much more conviction. Critique also acts as a pruning function to get rid of structures no longer needed. There should be no hesitation in tearing down any narratives that are disproven by our scientific advances in order to reconstruct ones that better reflect reality. 

If we can acknowledge that our God is ultimately fictional, we can also extend that principle to our prophets. We don’t need historically accurate or even living mouthpieces of God, fictional prophets will do just as well. Arguably, made-up prophets are even better: It absolves any popularisers of Metamodern Religion from the need to live up to people’s expectations. Any human will invariably disappoint when perfection is projected on her. On the other hand, a fictional character can effortlessly fill the most heroic shoes. With fictional prophets, we neither have to wait for our saviour nor be devastated about the inevitable fall from grace of our priesthood. 

By shifting the focal point of imitation to fictional characters, we are also protecting against  gurus who soak up projections to become psychopaths drunk on power. It also invites others into co-creation: Since there is no need for historic accuracy or priestly authority, anyone can add to the mythos of our made-up prophets. The invitation even extends to putting on the mask of the prophet themselves, without ever identifying with it. In this way, the prophet stops being a person and becomes a mode of being.   

The great Hanzi Freinacht is a prime example: The persona of the Nietzschean philosopher with captivating jawbones and imposing beard allows the authors to enter a prophetic mode they might otherwise be too modest for, without taking themselves too seriously. 

Stealing the Culture

This ain’t no fun as a single-player game; Metamodern Religion only comes to life with a collective of believers. We need to “steal the culture”, as Vervaeke says. Metamodern Religion has structural advantages in the memetic landscape and could convert increasing numbers from both the “spiritual but not religious” crowd as well as traditional religions.    

The dialectic between the creation of a Post-metaphysical God and the deconstruction of Self-aware narrativity could produce ever more compelling narratives. As time progresses, the petrified dogmas of traditional religions will appear more and more inconsistent. All the while, the population on average develops further and Metamodern Religion will exert an inexorable pull on adherents of traditional religions. 

At the same time, more scientific minded people would notice that the stories are in agreement with their worldview but provide much more personal and collective meaningfulness, so they too would be tempted to join in. Filling the God-shaped hole in their hearts in a way that doesn’t compromise on rationality could seem like a no-brainer.  

Metamodern religion will only feel intersubjectively real once a critical mass of “believers” subscribe to it. Just because we know that it’s just a story we made up doesn’t make it feel any less real. To the contrary, many metamodernists will only believe a story because they know they made it up. There is a certain bootstrapping principle at play here that reminds the concept of Hyperstition. Like a collective placebo effect, we might be surprised how real our headless God will feel once enough of us have agreed on a version we could believe in. 

Meta-rationality: Crossing the abyss

Camus juxtaposed the seemingly inherent need for meaning with the “unreasonable silence of nature”, a condition he titled the Absurd. If all truth is socially constructed, and it’s all really just power games deep down, why do anything at all? This feeling of absurdity, and the relativistic nihilism implied by the postmodern metameme is the abyss we need to cross. 

Meta-rationality, as described by David Chapman, is the stance that can overcome this nihilistic attitude without losing any insights of the postmodern critique. It affirms that rational systems and truth seeking makes sense to a certain extent and in certain contexts. By distinguishing between different methods of rationality and explaining their applicability and limitations, we can have our cake and eat it too. Yes, there are real patterns out there. We can reason about them, and we can be closer or further away to describing them accurately. And no, most of reality can’t be formalised well enough to apply strictly rational methods to. A lot of things we care about are socially constructed and too nebulous and interactive to capture in formal systems. Sometimes we can still reason about them, but only with fuzzy logic, or as Layman Pascal suggests, using the operators “somewhat”, “kind of”, and “almost”. 

In the context of Metamodern Religion, Meta-rationality allows us to distinguish between areas where we can formally strive for a better solution (e.g. the degree to which narratives map onto scientific theory, the game theory involved in global governance, or the empirical effectiveness of psycho-technologies), and areas where multiple solutions are called for.  This meta-rational understanding allows us to hold both relativism/narrativity and the aspiration towards truth in parallax. What David Chapman calls the “complete stance” or the “fluid mode” is also in line with the Metamodern principle of sincere irony: We are ironic because we know it’s all just language games on some level and sincere because we also know that there are better or worse games we could play, and because there is profound value at stake. 

So we indeed each need to shape our personal meanings (as we’ll see in the final sefira), but those should connect to a larger narrative that affords social cohesion around shared values (getting us out of the Meaning Crisis). This collective narrative should also *almost* map to real patterns in “objective” reality.

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The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain pseudonymous. 

On his blog, he expresses his long-standing interest in philosophy, psychology, and psycho-technologies. As a technologist, serious meditator, and denizen of the liminal web, he likes writing at the intersections of different fields.

This article was first published as an independent chapter in the book Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and emergence in metamodernity, from 2021, an anthology edited by  Jonathan Rowson and Layman Pascal. The following text has been slightly edited to fit the format of an online article.

Illustration: Vanitas of Metamodern exhibition by François Réau, Corine Borgnet and Ekaterina Panikanova, Antwerp Art Weekend 2021.

Before we begin, it is important to mention that “Metamodern sociology” can mean two quite different things, viewed from opposite but mirroring positions:

• First meaning: The descriptive sociology of metamodern society – its emergence, social logic, structures, causes, consequences, dynamics, central processes, culture and lived experience. This line of inquiry expands into sociological descriptions of “metamodernity” as a certain societal condition, and into “metamodernism” as a social, political, cultural and academic movement. In other words: This is sociology applied to metamodernism; sociology in any qualitative or quantitative form with metamodernity and/or metamodernism as its object of study, “the sociology of metamodernism”, if you like. As such, it can be categorized alongside other “hyphen sociologies” like the sociology of poverty, the sociology of religion, the sociology of death – and so forth.
• Second meaning: The discipline of sociology itself, as understood, practiced and developed from sensibilities pertaining to the culture and philosophy of metamodernism. This guides us towards the question: What does society look like from a metamodern lens? How does a metamodern sensibility (in terms of ethics, ontology, spirituality, aesthetics, epistemology and political goals) shape the discipline of sociology, if, indeed, such a disciplinary delineation is still deemed appropriate to the metamodern observer? Such questions can be answered only through developments of sociology proper, i.e. the proposition and argumentation for novel theory, meta-theory, methods, methodology, and the topics and rationales for research questions within sociology.

The two meanings are, unsurprisingly, intertwined. Hence, they should also be discussed together, reflecting upon each other. Yet, they must be clearly distinguished as separate issues, and only then be carefully braided as two streams.

In the following, the focus will primarily be upon the latter of the two – sociology as viewed from a metamodern understanding – but it ends with briefly revisiting the topic of how metamodern society can be studied, a few suggestions primarily for aspiring scholars of this uncharted field.

Against periodization

A guiding light in both angles of approach, however, is that there is indeed something that can meaningfully be called metamodern (a descriptive), metamodernity (a state of affairs in society, a certain configuration) and metamodernism (a certain sensibility, movement or project). This is and remains the working hypothesis of metamodern sociology.

At the heart of it all is a simple developmental model: the idea that societal development occurs through a number of profound, qualitative shifts: from modern society, to a postmodern deconstructive critique of the latter, to a metamodern synthesis of these two, the later taking deliberate steps to reshape modern society and its prevailing social logic, drawing upon, but not limiting itself to, the postmodern critique. After the postmodern deconstruction, follows the metamodern reconstruction. Or, rather, reconstruction is the endpoint of deconstruction; the former follows from the latter.

That is, ultimately, what metamodernism is about; it takes modern society itself as its object, picks it apart with a postmodern sensibility, and then begins to put the parts together in new ways, into new relations, human and posthuman (including other fundamental categories such as technology, the biosphere and non-human animals). Modernity flows from the dynamics of pre-modern society (traditional, or what I have termed postfaustian, which in turn builds upon earlier stages[i]); postmodernism can only emerge from the backdrop of modern society; metamodernity (or: metamodern society) emerges as people can conceptually and socially step outside of the “modern world” and view it as an object that can be reshaped from the inside-out, in synthesis with the multiple anti-theses produced by postmodern critique.

A few words about this progression, from the modern, to the postmodern, to the metamodern, would be in order. There is, in my mind, a widespread misunderstanding of how this is to be approached – the fallacy of periodization, a description of historical epochs that are taken to have certain properties: a modern period, a postmodern period, and a metamodern period.

Adorno famously wrote that “Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category”.[ii] This comment incisively captures the crux of the matter: Viewed from a sociological vantage point, there is little meaning in historical periods and years. Historiography, in the words of Wilhelm Windelband, is ideally an entirely ideographic enterprise, i.e. it describes chains of events qua events, and it focuses on the particularity of facts and emergences located specifically within space, time and sequence. Sociology is located within the social sciences, and as such it always strives towards at least some generalizability, i.e. it is ultimately what Windelband would have called a nomothetic endeavor, a study of regularities of the social universe. Periodization can never be truly ideographic nor nomothetic. Obviously, modernity did not “occur” during certain year, nor did it end and postmodernity begin at another year. As the 19^th century classical sociologists struggled to grasp it, modernity is a certain pattern of widely interconnected phenomena, certain abstracted qualities that seem to describe deep-rooted properties of a society in its entirety; the explanatory relations between said properties.

Much confusion has come from this fallacy, and, as a result, the exploration of the modern, postmodern and metamodern quickly reaches an analytical impasse in many, or even most, of its students. Vermeulen and van der Akker have suggested that metamodernism is a period shaped by certain events, but they cannot provide any full description or explanation for as to which pattern connects these events.[iii] Correspondingly, contemporary sociologists have been reluctant to describe the present period as “postmodern” and have suggested terms such as “late modern” (Giddens)[iv], “liquid modernity” (Bauman), “second modernity” (Beck) and so on – perhaps, a wise caution. In my view, these sociologists notice the fact that, yes, there are indeed new trends and social logics cropping up in society, but that the prevailing social logic is fundamentally still guided by what may be described as modernity.

The simple reason for this confusion, I believe, is that the question is incorrectly posed. The answer to the question of “when is modernity/postmodernity/metamodernity?” always depends upon the more fundamental question of what each of these is. The answer to that question, in turn, depends less upon certain historical events, and more upon how these three categories are defined; firstly, as different sequences of unfolding logics or dialectics, the latter following from the dynamics of the former; secondly, as different aspects or dimensions of each (I will describe six such different aspects shortly).

The idea of “the metamodern” is thus a heuristic tool; it does not presuppose exactly what “metamodern” is or means, but it stipulates that such a phenomenon can be explored and that the concept’s predictive value can increase as the descriptive, deductive, analytical and interpretive concepts are developed and refined.

In accordance with metamodern sensibilities, the concept of metamodernism can itself be viewed as being held with “sincere irony” – a synthesis between the sincere belief in progress (of developmental psychology, stage models of perspectives upon the world, dialectical dynamics that seem to stabilize around certain equilibria), and the ironic distance to any such models and sense of direction, an admission that our models and paradigms are always limited and, ultimately, partly mistaken. But even “the synthesis” can be taken as too literal, too monolithic and uncritically held as a belief. Hence, the metamodern sociologist’s belief in metamodernism is rather a proto-synthesis; a proposed, ironically held heuristic of descriptive and prescriptive models of society and reality.

Metamodernism in six dimensions

With this pragmatically self-depreciating view in mind, the complex we call metamodern-metamodernity-metamodernism can be viewed in six distinct but deeply interrelated ways:

• as a cultural phase that comes after and redeems the cynicism and irony of postmodernism with a “new sincerity” which coexists peacefully with postmodern irony (such as in the work of Vermeulen and van der Akker, comparable to the work of cultural theorists on post-postmodernism, digimidernism, transmodernism, performativism, postconstructivism, enactivism – describing trends within culture at large, pop culture, visual arts, theatre, architecture, literature, music, film and so forth);
• as a developmental stage of society and its institutions, one that emerges and stabilizes after modern society (such as my own work, comparable to Ken Wilber’s integral theory, Jürgen Habermas’s and Günther Dux’s developmental sociologies, ideas about new Kondratiev waves of economic life, like Paul Mason’s “postcapitalism”, economic stage theories like Klaus Schwab’s “fourth industrial revolution”, Manuel Castell’s “network society” and, more indirectly, the holistic sociologies of Roy Bhaskar and Edgar Morin);
• as a meta-meme, i.e. a deep-lying pattern-of-patterns within the realm of meaning-making and symbols, with its own social, economic and technological dynamics, that are likely to emerge together in a coherent, non-arbitrary manner in historical sequence, where the different parts resonate with one another and mutually reinforce each other, particularly around the emergence of a digitized internet society (this is explored in my own upcoming work, The 6 Hidden Patterns of History and it has a precedent in e.g. the work of Jean Gebser);
• as a relatively late and rare stage of personal development – cognitive, emotional, existential and relational (as studied in adult development psychology, where later stages of a more self-transforming mind are studied in different ways by such theorists and researchers as Robert Kegan, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Michael L. Commons, Michael Basseches, Kurt Fischer, Theo Dawson, Terri O’Fallon, Clare Graves, Gerald Young and others, myself included with my work on the “effective value meme” of a person);
• as a certain paradigm, with its own philosophy with accompanying theologies (which includes a family of ideas concerning ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics – such as Karen Barad’s agential realism and onto-epistemology, Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism, perspective-participatory views of reality and “entanglement”, belief in potential rather than actuality as the ground of reality, developmental views of emergence, chaos, complexity and cybernetics, multi-perspectivalism, the revisiting of process philosophy in Whitehead and Peirce, critiques of anthropocentrism and humanism, holistic views that put spirituality and studies 1^st person phenomenological or experiential perspectives at the center, developmental semiotics and cyber-semiotics, syntheistic theologies, transdisciplinary studies and meta-theories which map out non-arbitrary relations between different injunctions into reality, fractal perspectives of reality and phenomenological experience in which for instance the relation between natural and social sciences are viewed as contained within one another in fractal patterns, relationality as an ontological basis, deconstructive critiques of the naïve experience of the self as a discrete object, transpersonal perspectives that try to go beyond ideas of “the individual” and “the collective”, critiques of linear statistical inference in favor of the study of emergent patterns, a holistic view of information theory, and an embrace of both-and thinking and self-critical embrace of paradox and the brokenness of reality’s self-organization; these abstractly interrelated strands represent different versions of neo-Hegelianism and post-Kantianism, tending towards “non-dual” spirituality and a distancing from Cartesian dualism in its various forms). Obviously, the interconnecting links between all of these philosophical projects are far from evident; rather, I hold, there is a profound structure to the metamodern mind, the contours of which can thus far only be vaguely sketched, and much work remains to be done in terms of formulating the key principles underlying the metamodern philosophy proper, as well as within the sociology of knowledge concerning from which social contexts such ideas emerge;
• as a certain movement or project, emerging primarily in relatively “progressive” countries and segments of “developed” societies, largely from postmodern strata of the population (animated by sentiments of oscillation, superposition (in the quantum sense), or both-and thinking, where you hold two polarities in mind at the same time: such as sincere irony, informed naiveté, magical realism, relative utopia, the crossroads of fact and fiction. This movement – with its intermeshed strands of cultural, aesthetic, political, psychotherapeutic and organizational efforts – is driven by ideals of creating open participatory processes, collective intelligence, inner work and “embodiment”, co-development, and an experimental view of rituals as well as attempts to “re-construct” everyday life and social reality, as well as attempts to bridge and synthesize perspectives of the Left and Right and the different sides of the culture wars, e.g. between traditionalists and progressives. Metamodernists tend to emphasize inner development as a political and sociological issue, deliberation, process and perspective taking as political tools, and focus on the intersection of inner depth and outwards complexity. The demographics of this movement is primarily drawn from what I have termed the Quadruple-H population (Hipsters, Hackers, Hippies and Hermetics – more on these below)).

As the reader may have noticed, periodization is not one of these six categories. Metamodernism is not a period, not an epoch. It is what Sean-Ebjörn Hargens has termed a “multiple ontological object”[v]; it is many realities at once, and no single aspect or angle-of-attack captures it fully or even very meaningfully and usefully. Metamodernism is thus both a cultural phase, and a developmental stage of society, and an abstracted meta-meme, and a stage of personal development (with different complexly intertwined sub-categories thereof), and a philosophical paradigm, and a movement with a certain project for culture and society.

I would like to be direct here: Until scholars, students and other agents of metamodernism learn to distinguish between these six meanings of “metamodern”, there can be very little progress made – analytical or political – towards metamodern understanding and goals in society. Attempts at periodization will remain arbitrary, bordering on nonsensical, unless one specifies which aspect of the metamodern one studies.

Clearing the analytical fog

Let us consider a few examples of analytical difficulties of this complex, multidimensional landscape:

• There can be metamodern elements in singular works of arts and culture long before today’s wave of metamodern arts (Salvador Dalí, for instance, is generally termed to be a “modernist” in art history text books, but a quick analysis of his paintings reveals a strong postmodern current with significant metamodern elements);
• there can be minorities of people with metamodern personalities and values in a society that is dominated by modern values and institutions but in which there are also large minorities with pre-modern and postmodern values and corresponding stages of personal development;
• there can be philosophers who work from an underlying metamodern paradigm but fail to see and name that same paradigm (or choose not to, for various reasons);
• there can be metamodernist movements manned and driven by people who do not embody corresponding stages of personal development;
• there can be agents who tap into the social logics pertaining to the metamodern meta-meme, but who do not themselves think and act in accordance with metamodern cultural sensibilities;
• there can be leaders who enact the cultural logic of the metamodern phase in their communication and agency, but who are themselves by no means metamodernists and do not lead metamodern movements (Seth Abramson has made this case for Donald Trump);
• there can be artists who partake in exploring metamodernism as a movement and cultural phase, but whose work is largely devoid of metamodern elements;
• there can be entire societies affected by the social logic of the metamodern meta-meme, but the institutions of which are still modern or even pre-modern…

… and so forth. Hopefully, then, the analytical fog can clear.

Different methods and analytical tools are required to study, understand and enact each of these six dimensions. Metamodern sociology must be one that non-arbitrarily traverses this landscape of six dimensions, selecting and coordinating appropriate theories and methods to understand the different dimensions and their interrelations. For instance, an understanding of the metamodern stage of personal development cannot be understood through further developments of cultural theory; it requires a solid foundation in developmental psychology and adult development. Likewise, developmental psychology alone cannot guide the understanding of how metamodern institutions can be created in society for it to self-organize at a transnational, global level, tackling wicked issues such as climate change and technological disruption. All six paths must be mastered, not by one single person (that is all but impossible), but by the community of students of metamodernism. These students must, in turn, be capable of communicating across these six dimensions and be able to grant recognition and fair, critical appraisal of one another’s work from different angles.

As for periodization, this can only become meaningful retrospectively, once the dimensions of study are specified. If one argues, for instance, that we live today in a cultural phase of metamodernism, and finds examples thereof in arts and popular culture – which are distinct from postmodern sensibilities of critique, irony and deconstruction – then one misses the obvious fact that we do not today live in a society organized around metamodern institutions, i.e. institutions created against the backdrop of a metamodern philosophical paradigm and governed by populations at metamodern stages of personal development. In other words: This one-dimensional analysis misconstrues a late modern society, with postmodern elements, as being “metamodern” and thus cuts the impetus for a truly metamodern movement short.

Likewise, naturally, modernity can be periodized either as a 20^th century phenomenon, as stretching back to the beginnings of industrialism, as rooted in the Enlightenment, as emerging during the Scientific Revolution of the 1600s, as appearing in the arts and culture of the Renaissance when perspective entered into painting and the modern Western musical scale was completed in the 1400s, to precocious late medieval thinkers of science and progress like Roger Bacon – or even to forms of proto-modernity in antiquity and the state formation of Qin China. Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

The same can be said about postmodernism, the earliest signs of which harken back to the Enlightenment (with Rousseau), clear forms begin to emerge during the 19^th century, dominant forms take hold in what is conventionally called “modern” art in the first half of the 20^th century, and clearly formulated philosophies of postmodernism (often tied to poststructuralism) which stretch back to at least the 1960s – and then becoming a dominant social logic or phase in the 1990s’ popular culture.

I would like to stop for one more caveat. A distinction should be made between students of metamodernism who stop at the descriptive stage of inquiry, and those (like myself) who combine a descriptive and prescriptive approach. I believe that, if one sees and understands metamodernism in this richer and more multi-dimensional sense, one cannot remain entirely neutral to the developmental path of society; one is morally compelled to act to bring about a metamodern society, reorganizing the limits to the systemic dynamics and life-worlds of modernity. Just as medieval society appears crude, irrational and immoral to the modern mind, so does modern society appear needlessly grim and “un-enlightened” to the metamodern observer. Hence, I should like to underscore that the metamodern sociology of which I propose an outline in this article can and will have a prescriptive and normative element: with sincere irony, with informed naivety, with pragmatic romanticism, it is a moral imperative for metamodern sociology to study society in ways that can offer self-critically held proto-syntheses; visions and plans for a qualitatively different and ethically desirable future society.

It should further be underscored that this moral impetus does not come from a posited “direction of history”, from the idea that metamodernism is a later or future period or epoch; if “progress” is tied to time and arbitrarily delineated epochs rather than to analytical distinctions and categories, one is promptly returned to the teleological fallacy, i.e. in believing that time itself progresses history along a certain pregiven axis of linear development. The moral impetus emerges, instead, from the ethics and sensibilities of the metamodern mind and from an understanding of the advantages, in terms of human and non-human animal thriving and reduced quantities of suffering, conferred by the emergence of metamodern society and its societal properties. Metamodern psychology emerges from modern psychology, transcending and including it; the same is true of a metamodern philosophy and ethics; and the same is true of a metamodern society. Metamodern society is not a utopian vision[vi]; it is simply another social logic that flows developmentally from modernity, taken to its own endpoint, which is postmodernism, taken to its own endpoint, which is metamodernism.

Sociology in an evolutionary context

Let us now revisit sociology as an academic discipline evolving in rhythm with society, so that it may be considered from a distinctly metamodern perspective. In this view, there is modern sociology (but not quite a pre-modern one; it begins there), a postmodern sociology, and then the potential for a revamped form of the discipline – a metamodern sociology.

Since its programmatic formulation in the 19^th century, despite eager and repeated efforts from the onset, sociology has never fully managed to establish itself as a “science” in the sense that its basic theories and tenets can be agreed upon by all practitioners and be taught in textbooks. The textbooks of sociology to this day still all present an array of different and partly competing, partly overlapping, perspectives, methodologies and models. Whereas the natural sciences also depend upon the society of the people who ask the questions and perform the research, they allow for a certain distance to the shared and experienced life-worlds of everyday life. Inquires of social science, in contrast, have a considerably closer tie to the issues and questions pertaining to a certain society in a certain time – to everyday life. Mechanisms for alleviating poverty are only studied in a society in which people feel that this is a realistic and meaningful endeavor; ethnographic studies of honor killings can only crop up in a society in which a significant group views such practices as alien, harmful and immoral; questions of the nature of the relation between states, markets and civil society can only emerge in a context where these categories are viewed as defined objects in the first place – and so forth.

Hence, sociology has largely reflected and partaken in the dominant strands of thought and understanding of society at large – from a distinctly modern sociology, geminating in the 18^th century with Montesquieu and Tocqueville, originating in the middle 19^th century with Comte, peaking with its programmatic formulation in the “classics” (Marx, Spencer, Weber, Durkheim, Tönnies, Dubois, Martineau – with premonitions of later developments in rogue thinkers like Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel), maturing, aging and decaying in the mid-20^th century with Talcott Parson’s structural functionalism, and surviving to this day in the form of conventional, quantitative studies of social phenomena – to a distinctly postmodern turn, beginning in the 1960s with social constructionism, “French theory” and poststructuralism, taking over the bastions of conventional academia within social science and humanities in the 1980s and 1990s with various strands of critical theory, discourse analysis, the linguistic turn, radical constructivism (rather than “constructionism”), feminist scholarship, queer theory, postcolonialism and intersectionality.

Between these two bodies of intellectual and social pursuit – modern and postmodern sociology – one can place certain figures and strands that served as portals between the two realms of thought and research; ideas that were proto-postmodern and in that sense “before their time”: Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, Levi-Strauss’ structuralist anthropology (harkening back to Saussure’s linguistic structuralism of the 1920s, and later radicalized into full-fledged postmodern poststructuralism in the hands of Foucault and other French theorists), the symbolic interactionism that grew from Goffman’s situationist sociology of everyday life and its rituals, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (the study of how people in practice implicate a larger social order underlying each everyday interaction) – and, of course, the Frankfurt School and other strands of humanist socialism and psychoanalysis. All of these started bonfires in the project of modern sociology, particularly against the backdrop of the socialist and humanist campus radicalism of 1968 and the 1970s; fires that spread and eventually reached the heart of the discipline, reshaping it in its entirety.

Modern sociology is driven, in some way or form, by a will to understand society “as an object” by means of the scientific method, and thus ultimately to reshape it in accordance with a “rational” will of the observer. This holds true whether it is Marx’s view of stages of economic and societal development, Durkheim’s (pre-)statistical study of “social facts” (such as the suicide rates that reproduce themselves with frightening regularity in different segments of a given society from year to year), or Weber’s attempt to use a qualitative analysis of ideas, values and religion as driving forces and his study of the emergence of a distinctly “modern” state bureaucracy, market and civil society.

All of these observers try to somehow understand what modern society is by using, in some sense, “scientific” approaches. When Comte coined the term “sociology” in 1838 (although it has recently been shown that this was not a first), he imagined it as an entirely positivist science, one that would study society as a natural object like any other, and eventually serve to bring full rationality to all human relations, including the organization of the other (natural) sciences. He thus imagined a developmental model of society in which a scientific modern society was the final stage, and here sociology would take its place as the governing principle, establishing itself as “the queen of the sciences”.

Whereas the other classical modern theorists were not as direct and grandiose in their understanding of sociology (except, perhaps Marx who didn’t directly subscribe to the term “sociology”, but claimed to have discovered the science of how society develops), they were all somehow part of this underlying project. It is true that Weber departed from positivism in favor of a more interpretative sociology, but he still described modern society as rational and driven by a goal-rational order. Durkheim described rites and rituals in religions, and held that even modern people are in some sense religious, and tribal religions in some sense rational (even “irrational” beliefs can be shown to have “rational” underpinnings and functions from a societal perspective) – but Durkheim did subscribe to the “pregiven” ontological reality of social facts that can be studied “objectively” by means of empirical research. In other words, modern sociology was a child of modernity and its roots in the Enlightenment.

Postmodern sociology revolted against the modern project itself. The underlying supposition that a precise and correct understanding of society could bring about societal progress was put into serious question. The French philosopher Derrida’s sophisticated “deconstruction” became a north star of this cultural and academic sentiment: the issue is not to “objectively describe” the social world, but to look to its cracks, its exceptions, its loopholes, its paradoxes, its self-contradictions and underlying meanings. As long as the observer takes the presuppositions of society, which are layered in language itself, for granted, she can never truly study society from “from the outside”, since she will always be caught within the conceptual structures of that same society.

The postmodern mind notes that, yes, the truth may set you free, it may well emancipate individuals and groups in society, but the truth is never a straightforward matter of facts and method. The question is always, and always remains, “whose truth?”. The critical, postmodern, sociologist feels that there is not one path to the truth. The truth is always context dependent, and never free from issues of preconception, the cognitive schemata of the observer. These, in turn, are always dependent upon society itself and its organization, which is always infinitely larger than one’s own perspective thereof. Society and “the social” constitute a stronger and more pervasive force than modern sociology could have believed. Behind every truth claim there is a corresponding claim to power and authority, and truth-seeking and ideas of progress can never be entirely divorced from power relations in society, from specific interests and worldviews. Hence, all of science and all of the applications of social science are dependent upon the social position and perspective of the observer. There is never, in Thomas Nagel’s words, “a view from nowhere”. This echoes, of course, the philosophy of Nietzsche and his notion of “the death of God”, a clear premonition of postmodern philosophy. The proposition that “God is dead” should hence not be understood theologically, but epistemically; as soon as one takes a particular, situated, perspective to be universal and independent of the observer, one has implicitly introduced a “God” into the equation, i.e. a belief in an ultimately umpire of truth claims. But this umpire is, in reality, always out of reach.

I would argue, thus, that postmodernism represents a form of higher secularization vis-à-vis modernity. Modernity makes short notice of the traditional God above the clouds, the God of private revelations of singular prophets. The modern mind commits itself to public revelation by means of a scientific community, verifying or falsifying the factual and explanatory claims of each researcher. It is based upon objectivity-through-mutuality. Postmodernism points out that these verifications and falsifications will always be dependent upon the shared taken-for-granted worldviews, values and interests of the scientific community, which itself is always located within a society that defines the rules and limits of any inquiry. Most questions, of all possible ones, are simply never asked; most interpretations never considered. As such, postmodernism finishes what modernism started; it kills off not only the literal (theological) God but also the implicit (epistemological) God-behind-the-scenes.

Such limits to the scope of inquiry are never arbitrary; they are themselves structured in recognizable manners, usually revealing a power structure of some kind. A simple example from today’s world: Scientific inquiry has long shown a close connection between humanity and the animal realm; yet, serious inquiries into the ethical consequences of this indisputable fact remain a fringe issue in the sciences and in society at large. Animal rights is viewed as a non-respectable and quite secondary issue, despite its enormous consequences in terms of real, ongoing suffering. This is not due to some methodological fault on behalf of science and research, but rather to the weak position that non-human animals have within our society. Unable to organize and to voice their perspective, the questions of animals, a simple “why?” in the face of imprisonment, slavery and industrial violence, are simply almost never raised, and when raised, seldom taken seriously.

Truth, then, is a slave to power. How, then, can the truth break free? The postmodern mind employs critical theory and a deconstructive sociology, to somehow grasp the surrounding culture, the construction of meaning, morality and norms. This is an excavation of the underlying power structures that shape us so fundamentally that it precedes even our ability to ask a question, to make a certain kind of truth claim, even our direct perceptions. And this is revealed by systematically examining the self-contradictions and paradoxes of modern society, its language and meaning-making.

For this reason, the postmodern mind eschews all “grand narratives”, in the words of Lyotard. It is incredulous towards the overarching “liberal” world, and even to its Marxist-Leninist alternative. The direction of development is not pregiven, not ordained; time is not an arrow pointing towards progress. If you believe in one given “background space” within which you place society and your sociological inquiry, then you will always end up reproducing the claim to power inherent in that pregiven background space. There is, rather, a multiplicity of perspectives, each with their respective underlying power claims – and it is by breaking such perspectives against one another, in a “parallax view” (Zizek), that the inconsistencies of each single one is revealed. No one has the truth, not even the physicists. There is no “ground of reality” and no high priest who knows what it is.

Where does this, then, leave the postmodern mind? In a perpetual questioning, an infinity of intellectual and cultural resistance; in ever new variations of critique. Foucault is the emblematic example of this position. He and other intellectuals take on a role corresponding to the priesthood in traditional societies; they chastise us and question us with the fervor that stems from seeing a more ethical and fairer world, one that is always, in practice, impossible.

By no means is the postmodern questioning of the modern world complete. It has produced many cultural victories, from feminism, to anti-racism, to anti-postcolonialism, to revealing the hidden injuries of class – all of which have fueled movements and emancipations. But to this day, animal rights, to name one issue, has remained peripheral and animal slavery largely unquestioned.

And yet it is not a stretch to claim that the postmodern critique has reached an impasse as an academic project. The postmodern intellectuals have retreated into the ivory towers of academia, refining the code and critical methodologies, but decoupling themselves from leadership and creative reorganizations of society’s institutions that are direly needed. A widespread resistance to postmodernism has taken hold in politics, in internet rogue intellectuals, and in the sentiments of society at large. Different forms of neo-reactionary, conservative and identitarian or “alt-right” movements have stolen the momentum and the imagination of a generation of young. These have tired of the cynicism and self-critique of postmodernism and its corresponding sociology, longing for a less bewildering and more self-assertive stance towards life, society and existence. The postmodern stance of perpetual questioning simply does not allow for hope, sincerity and belief, as these are always taken to be new forms of oppression in disguise.

And this is where metamodern sociology enters the picture. It begins from a similar move, one of further secularization. If postmodern sociology always posits that there are power structures controlling our behaviors and knowledge claims, metamodern sociology eschews even this belief. Rather, metamodern sociology begins from the proposition that power structures are only truly surface phenomena, shadows of a deeper and impersonal reality: the reality of complex emergences that crisscross one another. There are hence, ultimately, no power structures to “question” or even simply “remove”. Instead, there are processes that guide the emergence of the perspectives in the world, and this in turn guides behaviors and results.

Because we cannot relate to society without taking a position based upon our perspective, the metamodern mind argues, we should own up to the perspective that we take, and the developmental direction implied by that view. We should then deliberately employ the sociological methods to shape society, its culture, institutions and economy, in this desired direction. This sense of direction is held, again, with sincere irony. We may know full well that our perspectives are limited and our visions partly imaginary, but we choose to take the risk, with informed naivety.

Postmodernism can only ever be a critique of the existing modern society, affecting some patterns here and there. Metamodernism, as a movement and sentiment, seeks to suggest new paths for society altogether: a new overarching equilibrium. This has long been taboo in the social sciences. But it is time that the taboo is broken, and that creative minds use the sociological imagination to suggest concrete futures and make visible new potentials.

In this sense, metamodern sociology marries the progressive impetus of modern sociology and its will to take modernity “as an object” that can be shaped and directed, to the multi-perspectival, deconstructive and “ironic” stance of postmodern sociology. This can, admittedly, be done in more or less fruitful manners. At worst, it is a shotgun wedding, where the worst of both worlds are combined – for instance, an undermining of scientific rigor in the name of relativism and unrealistic suggestions about a future utopia. At best, it is a nimble bifurcation between critique and progress, where new suggestions are carefully scrutinized and evolved. Or better yet, borrowing a term from quantum physics: metamodernism holds the modern idea of progress and the postmodern critique in superposition to one another – depending upon the participant perspective of the observer, each new inquiry can lead either to critique and resistance, or towards a path to deep progress.

If modern sociology is about “reality”, the societal facts of the matter, and postmodern sociology is about “perspective”, the differing views of the facts of the matter, then metamodern sociology is about “potentials”, i.e. the larger realm of all possibilities contained within the multiplicity of mutually interacting perspectives. Metamodern sociology thus seeks to reorganize the generative conditions of how all of these perspectives emerge, evolve and interact.

Modern sociology asks: What is society?

Postmodern sociology asks: How is society viewed, by whom, and why?

Metamodern sociology asks: How do these views of society emerge, and how can they be made to emerge in ways that are beneficial from a multiplicity of weighted and compared views?

The generative conditions of perspective in its necessary multiplicity. This is the ultimate object of study for a metamodern sociology. Metamodern sociology thus takes up the task of cataloging, understanding, comparing, and non-arbitrarily evaluating the many perspectives of society, self, and reality. The evaluation of perspectives is, of course, only something that can be done by having some over-arching meta-theory or larger conceptual space within which the perspectives can be placed in relation to one another. Hence, the metamodern divorce from the postmodern is completed: the postmodern mind would not have allowed for the formulation of an over-arching meta-theory, a narrative of narratives, a perspective of perspectives. And yet, this is what each metamodern sociologist must work on: a suggested map of meaning, one that can always evolve and be scrutinized by others – or “co-developed”.

This map-making is, naturally, an enormous task that can never be concluded. But it is only through such a work that one can hope to suggest pathways for society which, for all future, will consist of many competing and contradicting perspectives. Deconstructing and critiquing perspectives of others, or even of oneself, cannot be enough. One must, sooner or later, reveal from which meta-theory one is working, and from there on say how and why the great multiplicity of perspectives can be evolved. This is a synthesis of modern and postmodern sociology; but as the metamodern mind also builds upon and attempts to transcend and include the postmodern perspective, it must always remain a proto-synthesis – i.e. not a synthesis held to describe the actual development of what Hegel called the world-soul, but a “good enough for now, safe enough to try” attempt to act in good faith.

Hence, beyond its intellectual underpinnings, metamodern sociology is also an act of faith – of ironic piety – or even, if you will, of enlightened madness.

Describing metamodern sociology

Let us then examine some properties of metamodern sociology in its current embryonic form. To reveal my own (hopefully) enlightened madness, I would like to stress that these tenets are my own postulates, and that they can and should be challenged and developed.

Developmentalism of perspectives. It is a tenet of metamodern sociology that perspectives are not arbitrarily ordered, but that they emerge in recognizable patterns. A poststructuralist critique of literature has never emerged in a tribal society with no writing; quantum theory has never emerged in a traditional, pre-modern, society. Even if strands of thought can be linked backwards in history (process philosophy back to Heraclitus and so forth), there are indeed specific ideas that build upon one another: multiplication builds upon addition. And these sequences are, in turn, always dependent upon social and material – ultimately, even biological – conditions, with which they interact. Postmodernism did not emerge before modernism, nor could it have. For this reason, metamodern sociology always looks for meaningful and explanatory developmental sequences, putting them into relation to one another on some kind of developmental scale. This developmentalism thus accepts at least some minimal form of stage theories; and these stage theories are not mere phases (childhood, maturity, old age) but indeed stages (addition, multiplication, power functions). Each stage must be, in clearly definable terms, either more complex than the former, or, at a minimum, be derived from the former and qualitatively distinct. For instance, one may study how people, such as police officers, think about an issue like “race and ethnicity”; some will reflect upon these matters in simpler terms, “black people commit more crimes”, others in more nuanced and complex terms “some groups in society are underprivileged and are thus driven into crime more easily”, and some in yet more complex terms “through my work and perspective, I have a role in recreating the crime statistics that keep up the over-policing of some ethnic groups, which breeds exclusion and resentment in these groups”. In the minds of different observers with distinct perspectives, the same phenomenon appears differently, with different conclusions. These three suggested perspectives are not merely outcomes of different personalities, but they build upon one another: there is a developmental sequence – and if more police officers are supported to independently being able to think in accordance with the more complex perspective, this is likely to be more aligned with their dealings with the complexities of society and criminal justice. To eschew all developmental sequences of such perspectives is to flatten the view, as it were, projecting a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface. This is what the metamodern sociologist calls “developmental blindness”. Unfortunately, postmodern sociology is more or less developmentally blind, which explains a large part of its impotence to create workable pathways for culture and society to take.

Meta-theory and map-making. It is another unfortunate limitation to contemporary sociology that students are not taught comprehensive maps of the theoretical landscape of sociological theories, so that choice of theory and perspective can be selected non-arbitrarily, with well-argued motivations. There is a severe lack of meta-theory. Rather, the choice of theory, and indeed, the entirety of academic careers, are based upon which theories happen to “speak to” the individual scholar, often being defined by earlier work on the particular topic of study. Sociologists become “interactionists”, “constructivist feminists”, “Marxists”, “middle-range theory institutionalists” and so forth, depending upon whim and chance, often unable to communicate meaningfully across these sub-disciplinary boundaries. This is an enormous waste of potential, as the meta-theoretical space is sub-optimized. To be fair, prominent sociologists like Jeffrey Alexander and Georg Ritzer have indeed presented meta-theoretical maps of the territory, but these have not taken a central place in the education of sociologists, and a researcher is generally not expected to give convincing reasons for his or her position within a larger meta-theoretical map. Neither do a few courses on the “philosophy of social science” grant students a comprehensive map, as these also simply enumerate a host of competing positions. Metamodern sociology is different: It begins and ends in meta-theory, always naming the underlying meta-theory, one’s own theoretical position within it, and always returning to the meta-theoretical map once the theoretical and empirical dive is concluded, feeding something back to this fundamental “ground-level” of social science. A good place to start is Ken Wilber’s comprehensive work on “integral theory”, which includes several important meta-theoretical maps – but it is a telling sign that one must look to relatively esoteric writers beyond the discipline, like Wilber, to find good material for such mappings. In short, the emergence of the many perspectives in sociology and its large body of theories is not arbitrary; it covers different aspects of injunctions into the nature of society. If there is any one thing that particularly prevents sociology as an academic discipline from becoming a proper “science”, it is this lack of meta-theoretical maps – all the perspectives and injunctions end up beings “smashed together” in a grand, confusing hotchpotch. By going to the source, to the map-making of the sociological territory, one can begin to restore order to this cosmos, and thus specify which truth claims are relevant as basic tenets of each form of injunction, ridding the landscape of redundant and contradictory theories. Metamodern sociology must thus work from a more highly abstracted and complex level, zooming in on different phenomena from different theoretical perspectives, all the time explicating why and how each zoom is made. Naturally, one’s meta-theoretical map – if you will, one’s underlying paradigm made explicit – will also shape one’s view of what society is and how it functions.

Fractal methodology. In a corresponding manner, choice of research methods and methodological considerations must be based upon which injunction into reality is being made, i.e. it must be non-arbitrarily selected against the backdrop of a meta-theoretical map, and how the studied phenomenon is located on the meta-theoretical map. The crux here is to avoid that research is steered primarily by the “sunk costs” of the time and effort it takes to master each research method, qualitative or quantitative, a division that today divides the discipline. It is not realistic that all researchers should be able to master all methods of research, but the methodological development of each scholar should be strategized in relation to their position on the meta-theoretical map and the sociological community as a whole should optimize its distribution of research skills, while investing time and effort in learning a shared language that facilitates bridges between different methodologies and research programs.

Holistic. Bearing in mind that “holistic” already has a meaning within sociology, and that the term is used as a catchphrase in many context, often meaning an acceptance and inclusion of “spiritual” aspects of life, it should still be underscored that metamodern sociology is a holistic endeavor, albeit of another kind. Holism, in this context, should be contrasted with “reductionism”, and it flows from the above point about meta-theory. Much sociological ink has been spilled considering the relation between material (economic, technological conditions) and the culture of society. Reductionism, in its different guises, holds that either a) the economic system, or b) the overarching culture and its inherent meaning-making and implicit power relations, or c) the interactions and rituals of everyday life, or d) the social-psychological process of how humans are socialized and their personalities are formed, constitutes the “most fundamental” aspect of society, to which its other dimensions can ultimately be reduced (hence, “reductionism”, note that this includes cultural reductionism). The metamodern sociologist uses a meta-theoretical map to study how, at a minimum, these four dimensions emerge together; how they interact and define each other. Hence, one cannot arbitrarily seek to explain societal phenomena from any one of these fundamental fields of emergence. Depending on how elaborate one’s meta-theoretical map is (others are possible, not just these four fields), one is obliged to always explain the phenomenon as holistically as possible, not leaving out any dimension, or at least explaining why and how one limits one’s inquiry. In an expanded sense, this holistic perspective should reach into the body, both as a biological-medical entity, and as a lived and felt embodiment of social experience – as well as into the biosphere and ecology.

Transpersonal perspective. This one flows, in turn, from the above tenet. The transpersonal perspective holds that society consists neither of atomized or interacting individuals, nor of societal systems and cultural structures and collectives, nor even of networks of people. Rather, lending from disciplines such as depth psychology and deconstructive critiques of the “individual self” in cognitive science, the metamodern sociologist views humans as multi-layered, open, interacting processes that emerge together – one’s agency cannot clearly be delineated from another, nor from the society within which it unfolds. For instance, you can use a marketing strategy (an artefact found in a book, a societal condition) to affect my purchasing behaviors without my knowledge thereof; where, then, does my agency originate? Neither in the individual nor the collective, neither in you nor in me. This approaches, of course, what Gilles Deleuze called “the dividual”. The transpersonal perspective views behavior, and perspectives, as emergent through and beyond the individual. In this sense, human happiness and suffering are also emergent at the transpersonal level, at the level of depth psychology shaped by society, but also, on higher layers of the conscious mind, actively acting upon that same society. This leads us, clearly, to questions about how our “self” emerges in society and how it evolves over the life-span, inexorably linking metamodern sociology to developmental psychology and the stages of adult development – hence to issues of healing, trauma, and the human body. For instance: How much does unhealed trauma steer the political behavior of members of society?

Complexity and emergence. Norbert Wiener famously wrote an article about complexity; the evolution from mechanics (linear, predictable causation) to chemistry (aggregates of many processes, each of which is unpredictable, but that statistically add up to a predicable whole) to complexity (highly unlikely events, that emerge against all apparent odds through complex interactions, such as the emergence of biological life). Sociology has, naturally, followed a similar path: from Comte’s focus on “forces”, lending from the mechanics of his time, to a statistical science with quantitative method, apparent already in Durkheim but flourishing after the breakthroughs in mathematical statistics in the 1920s, to a search for ways to describe complex emergences in many contemporary sociologists. Metamodern sociology may well employ mechanical and statistical thinking and methods, but its home base must remain firmly based within complexity. A distinction can here be made between “lateral complexity”, which looks at how patterns emerge through the interactions of many smaller units (championed by e.g. the Santa Fe Institute and the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and cybernetics of different brands), and “hierarchical complexity”, which studies how more complex phenomena, including behavioral and cognitive patterns, emerge from less complex ones (championed by Michael Lamport Commons). This holds an important key in the divorce from the postmodern focus on “power structures”; the metamodern sociologist generally views pathologies in society as not one monolithic structure, but as an emergent pattern of many smaller, often counter-intuitively trivial, occurrences. Further, limitations to extensions of solidarity and oppressive factors in people’s lives, are viewed as pertaining to limitations to hierarchical complexity, i.e. that complex phenomena are somehow treated with a flattened, too simple, perspective. This is a less moralistic and more dispassionately descriptive intuition to build from.

Self-development and participation. Last but not least, the metamodern sociologist must understand that her own inquiry into any matter is an act of participation, which always affects the questions asked, the interpretations made, the findings presented. For this reason, the metamodern inquirer must always return to looking inwards, and to support her own healing and development in terms of theory/perspective, paradigm, stage of cognitive complexity, emotional foundation and motivations for inquiry, and relation to the field of study and society at large. Freud famously suggested that Napoleon conquered Europe to get back at his big brother. Correspondingly, the sociologist can easily spend a lifetime studying male oppression to address the trauma of a poor father and some disappointing boyfriends. More often than we like to believe, each of us is driven by simpler and cruder logics, interests and emotions than we would like to admit – and this will naturally shape any inquiry we undertake in society. Hence, the question becomes how one’s sociological inquiry is embodied within oneself. Naturally, emotions and reactions against perceived faults injustices in society constitute a legitimate source of motivation for sociological inquiry, but it is the task of the critically minded sociologist to scrutinize even one’s own moral outrage – or, for that matter, one’s indifference and boredom – towards societal issues. From a holistic, meta-theoretical and transpersonal view, work must be done where it is due, and sociological analysis does not exempt any observer from issues pertaining to the deeply personal and psychological realm. This leads us, again, to issues of depth psychology, even to forms of self-development and self-exploration that include contemplations, meditation and in some cases responsible use of psychedelics. This is because our sensing and wounded selves always participate in our sociological endeavors.

Key questions about metamodernism and society

Let us turn again to the second meaning of a “metamodern sociology”, namely the sociology about metamodernism. There are, of course, countless imaginable topics of such a field, but some few currently stand out in terms of their obviousness and pertinence.

• Developmental demographics – how are different populations in different societies distributed across the stages of adult development (and in which kinds of adult development?), and how does this affect said societies and their interactions? Which demographics begin to display metamodern values, and which roles do these play in society?
• How do developmental differences of perspective play out in society, and how can arising conflicts be mitigated, narratives translated and mutuality or solidarity across different perspectives be improved? How can metamodern perspective be situated and employed to serve such mediating purposes?
• How do the institutions and culture of society affect and generate different distributions of developmental demographics? How can inner development be supported throughout society – empirically speaking? What problems or obstacles complicate and/or prevent such measures?
• Which different pathways, social settings and cultural practices lead people to partake in metamodern movements and sentiments – and how do these interact? My own suggestion here has been that certain segments of the creative class should be studied: Hipsters, Hackers and Hippies (Triple-H). The first segment constitutes those who work with inner dimensions and subjective states, the second segment with symbols, arts, culture and narratives, the third with technology and information. These three cross-pollinate to create metamodern culture. I have later suggested the addition of a fourth segment (hence, a Quadruple-H population): the Hermetics. This last group work with meaning-creation, inventing symbols and rituals that try to grasp cultural realities that are yet only intuited. They are called Hermetics after the occult Renaissance movement, corresponding to the seeking for larger meaning patterns (believed at the time to be found in an original source identified as Hermes Trismegistus). Each of these groups have their own brands of excesses and pathologies (suggestions – Hippies: new age cults; Hipsters: cultural snobbery and ivory towers; Hackers: techno-utopian tunnel-vision of the Silicon Valley style; Hermetics: slides into anti-scientific occultism and complex flirtations with the far right) – and they have different lines of convergence and conflict. Metamodern movements must become proficient at including and mediating between these strands, while being able to discern pathological and excessive elements. This, I believe is a rich field of study!
• The economy of cultural and informational capital – including the battle for human time and attention. This playing field of the internet economy, and its networked logic, is where metamodernism emerges, thrives and goes awry.
• The mapping out of different utopias (and eutopias, “the good place”), their interrelations and how they connect to the metamodern, and their cultural dynamics in society, and how they relate to attractor points in the development of society, i.e. to new balances and social logics that are likely to grow and manifest in society given its current dynamics.

There are, clearly, central issues about metamodernism of which we still today know very little – and where the work of prescient researchers can make all the difference. Only one such topic is enough to fill the career of a talented social scientist. Seeing that metamodernism is not per se a “good” phenomenon, but a descriptive of certain elements that can be argued to be fruitful or harmful from different perspectives, few things are more important than exploring “the metamodern” from the perspective of rigorous research.

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I hope this article can inspire fellow scholars to engage in metamodern sociology and begin the important work of describing the metamodern.

To conclude, sociology and metamodernism both share a key concern: to take modern society “as an object” that can be described, interpreted, related to, and ultimately reshaped; both entities work to see through and go beyond the modern. Hence, the argument can be made, that metamodernism belongs at the heart of the future of the sociological discipline, i.e. a sociology true to its own promises must become metamodern in its perspective – and, conversely, that sociology belongs at the heart of metamodernism. When metamodernism attempts to assert itself as a new self-organizing principle of society, it must be able to “see” modernity as the substrate upon which it operates. This follows, as the reader may have noticed, the pattern of subject-object theory: that with which one was earlier identified and took for granted, one’s “subject”, becomes an “object of awareness” from the new and higher vantage point — higher, of course, according to one’s developmentally informed meta-theory.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

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[i] Freinacht, Hanzi, 2017: The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One. Wroclaw: Metamoderna.

[ii] “Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category”, is taken from Theodor

Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, London

1978, p. 218.

[iii] Vermeulen, Timothy and van der Akker, “Periodising in Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (Radical Cultural Studies),

[iv] Giddens, A., 1990, in “Classical modernity and late modernity”, p. 38.

[v] Hargens, Sean-Esbjörn, 2010. An Ontology of Climate Change. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 5(1), pp. 143–174.

[vi] Freinacht, Hanzi, 2019: Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Wroclaw: Metamoderna.

Over the years, I’ve met so many people who’ve completely crashed and burned despite having been quite functional and prosperous only a few years earlier. Oh boy, the things I have seen. I have seen people burning out, and in turn becoming chronically ill. I have seen people ending up poor and unemployed after years of dedicating their lives to projects that never lifted off. I have seen the typical problems with addiction and substances that follow from a hectic life filled with disappointments and lost chances. I have seen people getting lost in rabbit holes of misinformation and conspiracy theories. I have seen people leaving their families behind to join dangerous cults. I have seen people going crazy, behaving in weird and destructive ways. And I have seen people who’ve ended their own lives.

My book Nordic Ideology was dedicated to two friends who had killed themselves during the writing of the book. And I’m afraid that my next book is going to have similar sad dedications.

What’s going on? Why are so many of “us” feeling so miserable? And what can we do about it?

If we start with the whys, I believe there are three overarching reasons for the pain and suffering we find in our community:

1) Metamodernists Are Sensitive Creatures

The first reason is that metamodern folks tend to be highly sensitive people who’ve suffered emotional and spiritual trauma, not only from life in general, but also more specifically from the way modern society works.

It makes sense that many of those who dedicate their precious time and attention to the creation of a listening society do so because society is causing them, or has caused them, considerable pain and distress. After all, if life in the modern world had been a great experience, if things always tended to work out in one’s favor, and if things resonated deeply with one’s beliefs and values, why change anything?

The metamodern crowd is also more neurodiverse than the average bear. ADHD, autism, OCD, dyslexia, and so on, are all significantly overrepresented in the metamodern community (indicating that these far-from-equilibrium neurologies are conducive to metamodern perspectives). And there’s even an overrepresentation of people who’re gay, non-binary, transgender, or have other sexual orientations or gender identities diverging from the norm. As such, people are more likely to have had, and still have, difficulties in life. Accordingly, mental issues such as depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, and even psychoses are more prevalent in the metamodern community than in society at large.

But being sensitive and different is not the only thing that is making life difficult for many metamodernists; having vastly different values is in itself a root cause of mental unhappiness.

2) Having Vastly Different Values than Most People Sucks

In many ways, it really sucks to have values and perspectives that are, well, “lightyears ahead of the mainstream”, if we are to believe the metamodernist. Not only are you going to feel alienated and be misunderstood in many or most social settings of mainstream life, the same is likely to occur among the supposedly alternative and counter-culture folks. It’s not fun to be the only pomo in the village—but it’s even worse to be the only metamodernist in the metropolis. Or in the tunnel of postmodernist proselytes.

Metamodernists are so few and far between that adopting a metamodern mindset often becomes a very lonely journey. So, on the one hand, there’s the isolation from not being around others with similar values and perspectives, but there’s also the suffocating and alienating feeling that comes from living in an environment that subscribes to—in the eyes of the metamodernist—crude and stupid values and perspectives.

Both the isolation and the suffocation can make you sick. But that’s not all, it can also make you broke and unemployed.

3) Being Metamodern Makes You Unemployable in The Conventional Economy

Just think about it: Modernists won’t understand anything you say, and postmodernists will hate everything you say (unless you smalltalk or try to please them). And together with the earlier value memes, they make up around 97-99% or more of the population, depending on where you live. Obviously then, getting a job can be rather challenging, especially when you try to use some of your unique skills and perspectives in your work and no one understands or appreciates what it is that you do, or could be doing if you had a more accommodating environment to start from.

The thing is, value memes can’t be friends. And sometimes that even applies quite literally. I know people who have lost good friends after having become metamodern, or have started to have fights with their partners and loved ones over intellectual topics that never used to cause much discord before. People can generally be jovial about it if disagreement pertains to different points of view within the same value meme, but if you suddenly questions the entire ontology of someone else, and if that someone else can’t sufficiently argue back why you’re wrong, it can be difficult for the latter to keep the gloves on in the fight.

And that’s among trusted friends and family. Taking all that metamodern jazz out among folks who don’t know who you are and (surprise!) they probably won’t like you very much. In many cases they will actually hate you, but in both cases you can end up being marginalized economically unless you learn to keep your mouth shut.

Here’s a tip for you: don’t tell the professors at a university department where you want to work that there is this new way of thinking that is vastly superior to the one they have invested their entire life into. You probably won’t get the job (true story).

And if you thought metamodern theory would empower you since it enables you to more clearly dissect other people’s arguments and in turn propose new lines of thought most non-metamodernists cannot sufficiently counter. Shockingly enough, though, no one likes someone who always wins the arguments. And I guess you can deduce for yourself what the result of that is if that someone is in a position of power to give you a job, a grant or whatever. Yeah, woke is not the only bloke in town to go broke.

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Gloomy words, I concede, but all hope is not lost.

If the game of life is set to “difficult” for metamodernists, these also tend to have more resources to draw upon when it comes to meeting the challenges and to transform them to wisdom, inner growth, and meaningful change. Metamodern mindsets, psychologies, worldviews, values, and sensibilities do not emerge from challenges alone, but equally from healthy and, in a deep sense of the word, privileged backgrounds. The greatest personal growth, the most complex worldviews, emerge where rather bad conditions are met by correspondingly high levels of support. Metamodernism grows from the barrel of misery’s guns, yes, but only on the most flowery of fields. Where education and support meets tragedy, that is where tragedy can be surmounted and growth be consolidated. This is the tale of guns and roses.

This is all a way of saying that metamodernists are a force to be reckoned with not in spite of their vulnerabilities, but because of them. And that, my fellow cocreators, is why metamodernists tend to be interesting people. Some bear that interesting quality more elegantly than others, but that’s not the point. The point is to look again at the misery and notice what’s glittering in the grime.

Not all of them can realistically contribute greatly to a positive and profound change—but when the metamodernist responds to their own predicament, they are also, in the very same move, finding ways to respond to the deeper tragedies of our time and culture. From that grows resolve, resilience, and, surprisingly, solutions to the ailments of the world that only a crazy person with very happy tears could have imagined.

Take stock, comrade, of your intellectual, social, and spiritual resources, and set forth on the learning journey life has pushed you onto. You are learning not only to turn your own life around, but to write new values on new tablets.

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The following, which was originally posted on Hanzi’s facebook profile, has been added (29-02-2014) after the article was first published due to some of the reactions it attracted on social media:

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For more leads on how to successfully lead a metamodernist life, visit the following links:

Neuroatypicality Is the Shamanism of Late Modernity: Neuroatypical people often have a mixture of very strong and very weak sides compared to the average. This puts them in a strange category besides the conventional hierarchies of society.

https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/neuroatypicality-is-the-shamanism-of-late-modernity-2d5f27295690

Don’t minimize conflict. Minimize resentment: AKA: “The scale of conflict resolution”.

https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/dont-minimize-conflict-minimize-resentment-2084083ce916

Acceptance, not Tolerance, Is the Elixir of a Good Society: Growing the inner capacity to accept things-as-they-are may be the best investment ever for society—and no, cultivating acceptance doesn’t lead to complacency in the face of injustice.

Acceptance, not Tolerance, Is the Elixir of a Good Society

Real rebels risk disapproval: Fake rebels just stay on the safe side and “critique”. The irony and sarcasm of the last few decades just don’t carry any longer — it’s time for sincere irony, or ironic sincerity.

https://uxdesign.cc/real-rebels-risk-disapproval-9a0ff332fa29

Why Quitting Is for Winners: Maybe the problem isn’t that you’re a quitter. Maybe it’s that you stay where you shouldn’t.

https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/why-quitting-if-for-winners-3b1e4ca50b47

Your Social Status: A Reflection from the Stance of Sincere Irony: To “stand up straight with your shoulders back” is even one of Jordan Peterson’s rules of life, indeed, his Rule 1. That’s a good suggestion, I suppose. But the question is how one does that.

https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/your-social-status-a-reflection-from-the-stance-of-sincere-irony-57bd79e32d6b

…and of equal importance, here’s a couple of articles about what not to do:

3 BS Traps when Working with Hipsters, Hippies, and Hackers: A list of the three most common pitfalls when entering the “saving the world” business of the creative class.

3 BS Traps when Working with Hipsters, Hippies and Hackers

How a Psychedelic Sex Cult Infiltrated a German Ecovillage: This is the story of an idyllic German ecovillage known as the ZEGG and its infiltration by a dangerous cult named Go&Change. It’s also a story about sexual abuse and two dead children.

How a Psychedelic Sex Cult Infiltrated a German Ecovillage

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Part One:

Introducing the idea: “If the disease stems from a large language out of whack, the solution is grammar writ large”

As my friends Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) explain in their April 9th YouTube presentation, the AI revolution is moving much too fast for, and proving much too slippery for, conventional legal and regulatory responses by humans and their state power.

1.1 What Large Language Models bring

Crucially, these two idealistic Silicon Valley renegades point out, in an accessible manner, exactly what has made the recent jump in AI capacity possible:

• The discovery that AI can treat language as probability, and from there on, most anything as a “language” of sorts: DNA sequences, yep, robotics and motoric learning, yes actually, music, definitively, generation and recognition of images and sounds, yes, hacking and cryptography, also yes, persuasion, yes of course…

In other words, the Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a basis for rapidly reshaping and generating solutions for all of the above, which creates a quantum leap in different capacities and possible combinatorics of these. They mention empirical and already-existing examples like literally reading human minds with an MRI scanner or hacking a simple WiFi router to use it as a surveillance 3D camera. And, of course, there’s the whole thing about soon creating entirely lifelike videos of people doing and saying things in realistic environments. It will be increasingly hard to know what is real and what is not. It will be hard to resist manipulation and persuasion. It will be hard to know where we begin and the agency of the machine ends. It will be increasingly hard not to lose our minds as our shared sense of self and reality (our sociality, which we rely upon for our sanity) fractures.

The situation, for all its innocuous expression or innocent feel at the present moment (“we’re just talking to a new chatbot and facilitating our web searches, where’s the harm in that!”), is dire. The sheer weirdness that is about to be unleashed does not need to wait decades for Nick Bostrom-style superintelligence

[[If AI superintelligence happens at all, that is. As another friend, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, points out in his April 22nd YouTube essay, we still don’t know if there are ceilings to how AI develops; development often happens in leaps and plateaus, as any developmental psychologist will tell you.]]

1.2 One metric fuckton of sheer weirdness

All the prerequisites for roughly a metric fuckton of sheer weirdness are here already — as the extremely versatile and potent LLMs are mass-deployed and become the tools of “just about anyone”. The scale and effect of this fact, in its sociological and psychological ramifications (not to mention economic and political ones) is in itself a rollercoaster ride of Nietzschean proportions.

I define, by the way, “one metric fuckton of sheer weirdness” as the amount of weirdness it takes for our shared reference- and knowledge system to break down, i.e. for our civilizational sense- and meaning-making to fracture. Simply stated: for us to go mad at a civilizational scale. Insanity writ large.

As dreadlock tech guru Jaron Lanier has stated: The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane. Even if we remain agnostic about Nick Bostrom’s existential risk superintelligence general AI, we can be fairly certain that we have a sociological moment of impact starting more or less yesterday. There’s just no way new capacities of this magnitude come about with this kind of speed, and then everything just goes back to normal. For all we know, normal might never happen again.

1.3 My central point being: we need AI to learn and explore its own grammatology for it to become a sane and “moral” agent

Now to my central point:

• If the diagnosis is civilizational madness,
• and the cause is AI based on the universal structure of language-modeled-as-probabilities (the world’s smartest person, complexity scientist Stephen Wolfram, describes it here)
• then the way to structure AI behavior is fundamentally an issue of grammar — or to be more specific, of the further abstracted form of meta-grammar called grammatology(a term coined, to my knowledge, by philosopher Jacques Derrida); or to be yet more specific, it is an issue of “the grammatology of AI-to-AI interaction”… or to be as specific as we can at this point, it is an issue of “the grammatology of human-to-AI-to-AI-to-human interaction”,
• and then only grammar can save the world from madness and the self-destruction that follows.

In other words: AI acts, as what philosopher Bruno Latour would have called a “material agent” (albeit an unusually vibrant form of material agency), upon us humans. It thus reshapes us as human beings, in turn, of course, reshaping the ecologies of the Earth. John Vervaeke points out in his video essay that AI is thereby, by affecting who we become as persons, constituted as a moral agent. This holds true regardless of its status as sentient or “conscious”. Vervarke argues that AI should thus be treated as a transcendent project of moral upbringing, like raising a child (an argument strikingly reminiscent of philosophers Alexander Bard’s & Jan Söderqvist’s idea of “syntheism”, co-creating God through the internet).

This material moral agency, in turn, is going to have some shape or pattern, and that pattern can be understood by studying the “grammar” used by the AI, i.e. how its generator functions “language” (I’m deploying the word as a verb) morally significant realities into existence.

The “grammar” of how the AI acts is the AI’s grammatology: the emergent pattern of interacting AIs and humans that becomes a layer of “second-order cybernetics”; the pattern of patterns.

It’s not enough to say that “there should be a second order cybernetics that regulates the AI”; as John Vervaeke points out in his essay, this would only recreate the same problem at the next level.

1.4 An “ecology of AI-human mind”: a social AI versus the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

But there can be an ecology of interacting AIs and humans, an “ecology of mind” to speak with the words of polymath biologist Gregory Bateson. In such an ecosystem, there is not one hierarchy of control, where the top can always go crazy and then we’re all cooked; there is a tug-of-war, cycles of birth and death, a Montesquieuian balance of power dynamic that never lets one category rule all others, and the co-evolution of the four fundamental principles of sociality: cooperation, trade, competition, and play.

[[Notice, by the way, that I am not suggesting a purely cooperative AI, where competition is thought of as only a set of prisoners’ dilemmas to get rid of; a notion often implied in the Game B community and by Daniel Schmachtenberger, but one that I have relentlessly critiqued for years as fundamentally flawed, always leading to the exact opposite of its intended direction. I.e. it’s a miscalculation that will only lead to dystopias. As I say: we want an AI that co-evolves into a full-blown ecology, and ecologies are harsher and more tragic environments than even economies, although they generate yet greater beauties, and that implies that cooperation co-evolves with competition, trade, and play; each of which transforms and is refined with stage-shifts in evolution. That said, I generally appreciate both the Game B community in general and Schmachtenberger in particular; it’s on this point I feel they go wrong. I go through this reasoning in some detail in my books.]]

Grammatology offers us ways to study that pattern-of-patterns. It offers a way of measuring not one particular variable to maximize or optimize (how much dopamine, how many clicks, how many votes, how much profit, how much “saving the whales”). These may be good or bad variables, but they are always in some way uni-dimensional and risk some version of a paperclip creator gone mad, shredding through all life and mineral alike to create more paperclips. Or why not the risk of the obedient but out-of-control brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice?

AI and society: Disney’s 1940 rendition of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (originally a 1797 poem by Goethe).

Grammatology corresponds to the arcane spellbook in the movie above. The sorcerer masters the spellbook and can, luckily, stop the out-of-whack-AI. Mickey Mouse couldn’t.

1.5 The master of magic

In this analogy, the grammatologist, or the meta-theorist, is the master of magic (i.e. AI’s capacity to bring about emergent properties that could not be predicted), the sorcerer. And the core principle behind mastering magic is to see and accept the paradox that it cannot be controlled, only co-evolved through an interplay of cooperation, trade, competition, and play. Nor can it be structured or brought under the will. The sorcerer sources powers that lie beyond him by matching them with the states of mind within himself — he doesn’t force them.

You cannot force a force greater than your own. But the magic of AI can be responded to: collaborated with, competed with, traded with, and — crucially, lest we forget — played with.

And there is a playbook for that.

Yes, most AI will optimize for one variable or the trade-off balance between a few variables. But even as AIs become more multi-dimensional, there is always an infinity of things-outside-of-the-parameters-of-the-current-system to be disregarded and dispassionately shredded into building blocks for what happens to be defined as meaningful within the system (sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s systems sociology already said as much about bureaucracies and markets).

1.6 Optimize for… RESONANCE

So the interactions between AIs (including the systems of humans) must optimize for something else, a kind of meta-variable set within a much further abstracted property-space (one that is defined, it can be added for readers familiar with my other work and influences, at the Cross-Paradigmatic order of complexity in the MHC, Model of Hierarchical Complexity). And that variable is…

• the resonance (speaking with German sociologist Hartmut Rosa) of the entire system of human-AI-AI-human interactions.

And the larger property-space within which “resonance” is achieved or measured is, again, grammatology: the underlying structure of language use, its musicality or proportionality or balance or even justice. Not harmony. Not even truth, beauty, and goodness (as even ugliness and lies have their place in the larger scheme of things), but resonance.

[[For MHC buffs: Note that I am not claiming that Hartmut Rosa’s formulation of resonance is at the Cross-Paradigmatic Stage; it is very clearly not; all I am saying is that resonance across fundamentally different paradigms (AIs optimizing for completely different variables, human minds caught up in completely different life narratives, and so on) is something that can work as a Cross-Paradigmatic concept to optimize for; it would then need a clearer formulation than that of Rosa, and that’s where grammatology and similar fields come in.]]

It’s a stance of surrender to, and participation in, the advent of AI, but with an uncompromising commitment to finding the deepest possible truth of how reality and information are structured so that our responses to AI are non-arbitrary and can be effective for human goals, or for sentient goals at large. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s a lot like the productive stance towards the gods: dispel them and worship them with sincere irony (a concept you can explore in depth here).

It’s a “YES” to the rollercoaster; to the terror we must face and reconcile with to surmount the spiritual challenge to our civilizational sanity. We’re facing the dragon, yes. It’s here. It’s not a yes to everything the dragon does. It’s a yes to the challenge and an acceptance of the fact that we brought it upon ourselves. But we’re not killing the dragon. We’re teaching it grammar.

I will use the rest of this essay to make some introductory steps towards seeing what such a grammatology looks like and how it interfaces with an understanding of the whole AI dilemma. But first, let me briefly get a little declaration of interests and biases out of the way.

X. Interlude:

A declaration of interest and other disclaimers. [Don’t skip.]

Normally, I write as a representative only of my own trademark publishing, Metamoderna. I view myself as an unaffiliated and unapologetically free radical, a rogue scholar who values the fierce independence of my deepest voice, including the inalienable right to be outrageous or downright obscene.

X.X The Archdisciplinary Research Center

In this particular case, however, I wear the hat of (meta-)Director of the Archdisciplinary Research Center (ARC) — a non-profit that gathers high-quality meta-theories and coordinates them in a collaborative spirit in order to find the most universal possible patterns of knowledge available to humanity.

ARC draws social scientists, philosophers, computational scientists, psychologists, and also has an artistic presence. Besides hoping to contribute to the common good with this essay by hopefully reducing existential risk, I also have five goals that are more for the benefit of myself and allies.

It is my intention to:

1. bring attention to ARC’s important work,
2. charge the milieu in and around ARC with deeper purpose and more emotional energy stemming from the relevance of the organization’s work to such a fateful issue as AI,
3. increase the funding of ARC’s work,
4. bring about further bridges and collaborations between CHT and ARC (and possibly other key agents in the field), and
5. inspire small teams of idealistic hackers around the world to learn meta-theory (which includes grammatology) and to use it to balance out the emergent ecologies of mind of AI and human interactions. (We’ll get back to this part.)

These interests shape, if not my beliefs and statements per se, at least the angles and biases I bring to the table: emphasizing the importance of the deep-philosophical and trans-disciplinary sides of the issue at the expense of other perspectives that can be just as important to achieving a safer and more sustainable AI development.

I wish to underscore just how improbably rich an intellectual milieu the ARC is becoming. The meta-theoretical framework of “grammatology” that this essay is based upon is drawn directly from the hitherto unpublished work of one of ARC’s committee members, philosophy professor Bruce Alderman. (Following Alderman, I use the word “grammatology” in a wider and different sense than Derrida’s original formulation).

[[Edit 4/28, correction: Alderman’s work is published as a chapter in 2019nanthology, Dancing with Sophia.]]

And that’s just one of the meta-theoretical projects that ARC members are working on. It is not as powerful and useful as a successful coordination of the “arches” that hold across multiple such models could be. I am saying that there’s plenty more of where this champagne came from, much of which I cannot reveal as other scholars are the main authors and have ownership.

Also, for the sake of full transparency, the — well — prompt for this essay, including an offer of two workdays of funding was provided by the Finnish company Pandatron (more specifically, their in-house philosopher Lauri Paloheimo). They are a small team specialized in using AI for improving group-level relationships and transformations in organizations.

So if you, by reading this essay, also come to sense or believe that meta-theoretical work is instrumental to guiding the future of AI and its impact upon the world, then, as Banksy says, show us the Monet — and ARC plus allies, myself included, will show you new Nietzschean rollercoaster rides of potentially civilizational relevance.

Banksy, 2005. “Show me the Monet.” Who needs Midjourney when you have Banksy?

X.X Irreverent seriousness

I should further mention that I am fully aware of the dissonance between writing about issues of significant ethical weight and applying my trademarked irreverent humor. I have the luxury of writing before the largest AI-related disasters occur, so we can still be joking about it because it feels so abstract to us. I write this way, of course, to encourage the article’s spread and enhance readership retention. Also, it’s a kind of tick I have. (Analyze, please.)

But let there be no doubt that I take the issue of the wider complex of AI-related threats very seriously and do not have a gung-ho stance towards it: on the opposite, I am struggling not to be paralyzed by the sense of “who am I to write on such a critical topic” and the very substantial risk that I might be wrong, and still be listened to, and thereby may contribute in the wrong direction, accelerating the madness and de facto raising the likelihood of large-scale collapse or other bad news. In moments like these, we just have to act from our deepest intuition and conscience and see what happens. Time is also of the essence.

(In case any of the jinx gods are reading: I’m just acting cocky. In reality, I do fear you, and I am knocking wood this very moment.)

Part 2.

Grammatology and resonance in AI-to-AI interaction

Now, let us unpack the main argument so we can see in full: How an applied grammatology can set the guiding principles of human-AI-AI-human interaction.

We will soon get to introducing Bruce Alderman’s formulation of that field — but let me approach it by means of the work of two other intellectuals, (biologist-philosopher) Donna Haraway and (physicist-philosopher) Karen Barad, and one Silicon Valley renegade cyberactivist and poet, Anasuya Sengupta.

2.1 Cyborg tipping-point

The first and perhaps most fundamental point to make is that the AI revolution is a direct expansion, if only at a higher level of intensity, of Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg: the intricate blending of humanity and machine as the driving force of cultural history. Humans have not been “pure animals” for a very long time. We thrive the most in temperate zones (agriculture, infrastructure, and disease control all benefit) but as nude tropic apes we would freeze to death there without clothes, fires, and homes: extensions of humanity that go beyond the biological confines of the body.

Cyborgism is more pronounced today as layers upon layers of technology interface with our blood (vaccines), with our senses (from walking sticks to electronic limbs with sensory capabilities), and of course with our minds: Tiago Forte’s “second brain” — the computer that orders our mind and behavior and vice versa. Our sociality, our emotions, our relationships are mediated by flickering screens and, of course, shaped by these. Humanity is a technological self-creation to the extent that we would not even be definable as humans without our technologies. This is, of course, simply because technology is the material embodiment of culture itself; that’s why the technosphere shapes every square meter of the Earth’s surface when culture becomes the driving principle under the Anthropocene.

The historical tendency of culture’s development is that the machine-part of the cyborg speaks back to the biological part with increasing autonomy. The machine part grows, so to speak, because culture matures. Steam engines say more than stirrups. Televisions say more than steam engines. AI says even more than social media algorithms. Seemingly paradoxically, this makes us more empowered and powerless both at once: we control nature more and more but we are in turn increasingly controlled by technology and unable to delineate our “self” from it.

Today, we are reaching the point at which the technology part of the cyborg speaks equally or more to the biological self than vice versa. We are reaching “tipping-point cyborg” (not, then, peak cyborg). This means that we need to begin to truly, well, relate to the technology. It’s a little bit like the animistic beliefs that preceded organized religion and modern rationality (both of which tend to view objects as mechanical, not alive), except it’s a post-mechanistic version of animism. We’re aware that it’s just “determined chaos” and “just a machine” and that there’s no “machine spirit”; but we act, with ironic sincerity, as though there was a machine spirit — because it’s the best possible heuristics for getting a full-on embodied and emotionally rooted productive responsiveness to the emergent properties of AI and machine learning.

In other words, Haraway’s cyborg perspective underscores what John Vervaeke also said in his April 22nd video essay, namely that the main response to the advent of AI must be of a spiritual and introspective nature: it is by setting forth on a common project for a deepened and renewed relatedness to technology, that we can ride the huge waves coming our way. Or to put it as succinctly as possible: if AI starts to listen to us and adapt to our every move, we can only “win” by mirroring it, and being equally attentive to it, even to the point of treating this wild piece of silicon clockwork as though it were alive. Because, in the end, when we don’t know where we begin and AI ends, then AI is essentially as alive as anything Mary Shelley could have conjured up.

2.2 Diffraction: human-AI-AI-human intra-action

Now, we all know that aliveness in turn always comes from a rich interaction with the environment. We’re all emergent patterns of other interacting patterns. So are our knowledge structures. Karen Barad’s employment of the concept of “diffraction” from physics offers an analogy that has been influential since the publication of her major work, Meeting the Universe Halfway, in 2007. Diffraction is the phenomenon when waves or matrices break against one another and thus create a new emergent pattern. Examples in images be:

Diffraction: here, two slits let through waves that break against one another, resulting in an emergent interference pattern.

This is what happens if you add waves to one another: a seemingly more complex pattern emerges. It’s the underlying mechanism behind the phenomenon of diffraction.

Karen Barad, a feminist philosopher interested in the embodiments of knowledge (and thus power) in society, meant that we should also view truth claims and science itself as emergent patterns that gain a life of their own through human (and other) interactions. The interacting agents, in turn, are only constituted as agents through their position in the larger pattern. Hence, they don’t just interact, they intra-act. Their studying and measuring of reality cannot be separated from who they are, where they were, what they are, how they relate.

This holds true, I suppose, across all of reality and across all possible knowledge of it. But, if anything, this perspective becomes painfully pronounced in intra-actions with the AI: AI can only exist because it feeds on human civilization and knowledge coded into text and other digestible data — but humans are in turn subjected to the power of AI, and thus deeply reshaped by it, because AI coordinates more data than we can and knows, well, us. The AI soon knows us better than we can know it, or even know ourselves.

The mindset that comes to the fore is thus one of expanding our very sense of self towards including the technological environment, and from there on taking up the role of intra-acting, not only with the AI itself, but as a unity with the AI vis-à-vis the patterning structures of reality; i.e. what I here call the grammar of life, the underlying language structures, the grammatology. So, with Karen Barad, we get a definition of the fundamental relationship at hand:

• [human-to-AI-to-AI-to-human intra-action]viewed as one entity, intra-acting in turn with → [all of the rest of reality, viewed as external to that boundary around humans and AI, but as structured according to non-arbitrary grammatological patterns that must be uncovered and followed for suffering to be avoided and for life to be perpetuated].

If we don’t follow the patterns of reality we get dissonance. That means, basically, we get suffering. So the task is to structure reality into resonant wholes.

We must create AI that shapes the overall pattern of AI-to-AI interactions (a rich research field in itself, and a prime example of complexity science, the perhaps simplest example being stuff like, as reported last week, the game of soccer literally emerging from two opposing robots simply told to “score” the ball in opposite goals).

2.3 Grammatology, AI, and social justice

Now, this is where Wikipedia’s own drop-out, my friend Anausya Sengupta, comes in. If we seek relational proportionality and resonance across the AI-humanity axis, we must of course also feed this intra-action with socially proportional perspectives, i.e. with social justice. Today, our AI could hardly be a justice-oriented machine, given the skewness of its underlying information material. I’ll just quote from the feminist collective Whose Knowledge that Anausya is co-founder and member of:

Using Wikipedia as a proxy indicator of freely available online knowledge, we know that only 20% of the world (primarily white male editors from North America and Europe) edits 80% of Wikipedia currently, and estimate that 1 in 10 of the editors is self-identified female. Studies by Mark Graham and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute have found that 84% of Wikipedia articles focus on Europe and North America, and most articles written about the global South are still written by those in the global North, so that even where content is present, skewed representations remain.

Please stop for a moment to consider this: Our very civilizational sanity and survival depend upon balancing the informational diet of the AI, so that it can itself produce emergent patterns that resonate through and across societies… But the Internet is roughly as skewed and distorted as the power relations of global humanity at large.

It is a tragedy that Dalits (India’s caste of untouchables) rarely, if ever, get to define themselves in dominant discourses or at the web’s central stations, Wikipedia or Google search results. But the problem becomes so much worse for all of us as AI now affects the whole planet based upon a completely distorted balance of the world’s knowledge, experience, and embodied common sense. It acts on the whole with great efficiency and speed, but it cannot speak for the whole. What you can expect is increasing dissonance, a spiraling insanity, as the “human-AI-AI-human intra-action” system disconnects from the rest of reality, from the larger scheme that contains the actual multiplicity of the world’s perspectives.

If we don’t want to spiral into virtual madness with real social consequences, we need to balance out the reality projected into the digital realm: the encoded information.

That doesn’t involve silly stuff like decolonizing physics (which arguably has echoes of the Soviet practice of condemning “bourgeois pseudoscience”, something not even Stalin was fanatical enough to encourage). But it does mean that AI itself must be used to more proportionally and correctly represent the lives, experiences, and embodied — or intellectual — knowledge of the world.

And yes, those boundaries are drawn along the lines of familiar categories such as class, gender, sexuality, geopolitical centrality, and so on: the voices of the “subaltern”. But what the AI should arguably be able to do, which we couldn’t as easily, is to also find categories of the subaltern that are not identifiable by clearly visible external markers. Is the world’s narrative told, who knows, by extroverts rather than introverts? It’s not a far-out guess that the AI could see such patterns and balance out the knowledge base from which our civilization operates.

And here’s the best part: There can be any types of patterns that wouldn’t even have human names or a language to describe, but that are subject to the gravest epistemological injustice. Potentially, then, because the AI is comfortable with relating to complex topologies, it could actually avoid the entire issue of the clumsiness of the use of collective social categories (gender, race, etc.) for improving social justice; a clumsiness that always leads to new residuals of unintended injustice and thus to stronger reactionary movements than the social justice activists could have anticipated. It could, in theory, see exactly which combinations of factors are discriminated against in which contexts, and address those specifically (maybe it’s only overweight women that are penalized in this or that context, not all women, and so on). By targeting social injustice but being free from the confines of crude collective categories, we could have an engine that generates justice with only a fraction of the byproducts of polarization and conflict.

Utopian? Maybe. I’d call it “protopian”.

In short, if we apply the AI to balancing out human-perspectives-as-projected-onto-the-web-as-data, not only can we get a more just and sane society; we can also help to retain an AI that remains on the sane and just side in the first place.

Or, yet more succinctly: a sane AI is also a social justice AI, but one that dodges the traps of present-day social justice and intersectionality discourses.

Let me underscore: if we fail to do this, we instead unleash AI powers that widen social gaps and fracture knowledge systems into different continents where people become entirely unable to comprehend one another, leading to social and psychological decay.

2.4 Basic English grammar sets the stage

Time to teach this machine some grammatology.

Okay, so now we know this much:

• AIs need to be created that interact with other AIs in order to balance these out so that the overall emergent pattern has enough resonance, and this includes our human embodiments as well as the sociological realities we reflect.

Bruce Alderman’s grammatology, then, is one suggestion for a starting point of seeing how such resonance can be studied and hopefully operationalized. Earlier, I mentioned the musicality, or even “the appropriateness” of each operation, as the steering principle. Let me expand on that.

We might wish to tell the AI to be, well, “ethical”. That would involve certain “rules of conduct”.

ChatGPT certainly has those. If you try to get it to talk dirty, it comes back like a picture-perfect schoolboy, cap in hand, and says it cannot do anything inappropriate. Now, an admittedly fallen mind like my own only needs a few minutes to hack that: I went for discussing “Freud in the style of Dave Chapelle”, and before long, ChatGPT was spewing forth stuff that would have made PornHub blush. Atta schoolboy.

In complex systems like life, rules don’t really work (Jordan Peterson, they don’t). We need something else. Something beyond rules.

Let’s expand with another example. There’s a recent hit song by this musical savant; you might have heard it: Purple Rain, by Prince. The refrain goes: Puurple rain ↑, puu-urple raaain ↓.

But if I would have sung the refrain: Puuurple rain ↑, puuurple rain ↑, puuurple rain ↑, puuurple rain ↑…

By the fourth repetition, I bet you’d do most anything to stop me from continuing. There is something within us that just knows that there should be a conclusion to the upwards part, and that it “should” go downwards. Same old up and up is not really a song, it’s just not. You long for the conclusion, for it to come down. If I insist on not concluding, like the sorcerer’s apprentice’s brooms, or like an out-of-whack AI, you will soon long to end me.

Same with grammar. If start I to without write grammar, something within you reacts instantaneously and tries to bring it back into order. There’s an insult that takes place to the deeply seated, implicit, “order of things”.

Now, grammatology is a step up in levels of abstraction from grammar. Something can be grammatically correct, but grammatologically, well, off — if “incorrect” is too strong a word. There’s nothing “incorrect” about composing a song that goes up and up in mindless repetition. It’s just off. It flies in the face of our sensibilities.

Today’s AI has, impressively, learned grammar. It follows grammar’s rules. But it has not learned grammatology. It has not learned the sensibility to create and uphold balanced discourse and appropriate behavior. Any “rules” we hand down to it, it WILL slip out of sooner or later, like a potty-mouthed schoolboy.

And — crucially — the ethics of rules are always contextual.

2.5 Beyond rules: On the freedom to eat sand

To get a fairly absolute example of a rule that bears across cultures, I sometimes use, “Don’t feed sand to humans, yourself included”. Except, of course, there are moments when eating sand is entirely appropriate: We all ate some when we were toddlers; I to this day have a sense of the visceral explosion of culinary disappointment in my mouth as the wet gravel crushed against my teeth. And yes, that made my world richer and me a slightly wiser participant in it. We may further imagine an avant-garde artist who sits in a museum, slowly eating sand, being watched in admiration by those rich cultured ladies in shawls — as a “comment” upon carbon-based humanity’s enslavement to silicon computers. A strict rule would preclude these two very legitimate expressions and moments in the melody of life. Indeed, it would have oppressed us, trampled our sacred freedom to eat sand, and while that may not seem as much of a transgression, there is always a price to pay for oppression somewhere down the line: madness and bloody revolution.

Instead of a rule then — instead of a “utopia of rules” — we need a wider sense of the “structuring principles of the context” of which we are part in order to formulate not a rule but a generative pattern that can distribute our “eating sand” occasions as rarely as they deserve, but no less than so.

You could call it a situated meta-rule, but it should in turn be read from a pattern, a meta-theory, one that helps to determine if and when a certain kind of action is appropriate, advisable, or even acceptable. The meta-rule only emerges momentarily to regulate this one instance, to see how it resonates with what comes before; then it falls into the background again. It dissolves.

[[Side-note. In the social sciences, the study of how such underlying implicit orders are invoked and upheld continuously by interacting agents is called “ethnomethodology” after Harold Garfinkel’s formulation. But this research program resisted uncovering the underlying grammatology, precisely because its scholars never wanted to get caught up in rules. They didn’t have the analytical tools at their disposal to understand that beyond linear rules and norms, there lie new horizons of non-arbitartrily ordered grammatology.]]

Again, we’re not looking for “harmony”, but for resonance. Harmony suggests that there is no room for disharmonious instances, for transgression and ultimately creativity. The pope wants harmony; his organization has lots of strict rules, and he ends up running history’s most successful industry of pedophile rings, AKA the Catholic Church. Pythagoras wanted mathematical harmony and added rules to achieve it in the lives of his disciples until the Pythagorean math-cultists couldn’t even eat beans and pee on fires, the basic freedoms of life. And his community collapsed. Rules have their place, certainly; harmony has its place (within the bounds of one Beethoven piece, harmony is great) — but they’re not the master patterns of intra-action, of sociality.

And — again — if AI works by treating everything as language (and language as probability), this means that the AI is bound by the rules of grammar, and thus by the meta-rules of grammatology.

2.6 The wisdom of the machine

I don’t have a catalog of how grammatology is to be read and applied by the AI. But my point is that we, or at least the key players of AI development, need to learn grammatological thinking if we are to create counter-balancing forces of AI-on-AI interaction (and on human-AI-AI-human interaction, of course). Such AI-targeting AIs should in turn discover grammatology’s patterns and measure its own success by the amount of resonance that is produced as a result of the interference pattern. This requires learning from human sensibilities, from embodied wisdom.

But the impossibility of rules in the larger scheme of things, is, by the way, the exact reason that “wisdom” (which a lot of people, John Vervaeke perhaps most prominently, think we should teach the AI) cannot be formalized and taught, only after-the-fact admired. It’s situational. It’s sensitive, as butterflies say, to minute differences of initial conditions. Wisdom is to be found, as the sages and saints have long tried to remind us, in the eternal depths of the now, not in the formalization of rules that carry across time and context. Wisdom is “timeless” not in the sense “static”, but in the sense that it cannot be caught in time. It’s an emergent pattern within the whole; in this case, “wisdom” is a measure of how well the human-AI-AI-human intra-action interfaces with the grammatological structures of reality.

So, sure, optimize AI for wisdom. But when we operationalize that, it simply means training the grammatological sensibility of the AI. Crucially, however, wisdom is entirely impossible without sociality, without being kept in check by forces other than our own, by being part of a larger community (yes, this ultimately applies also to lone wilderness sadhus, whose relatedness to their asceticism is entirely socially constructed). Whenever you wreck the feedback cycles of everyday life, we go batshit crazy, either from depression, megalomania, solipsism, paranoia, or why not all four. That is, after all, why dictators always become tyrants before you can count to five and democracy remains the worst form of government except all others that have been tried. Beings with socially co-constructed selves need to balance each other out in order to remain sane. To be hyper-sane — to be wise — means that we need to balance each other out even more, but with yet greater sensitivity for how each of us can sometimes bloom into unexpected and uncomfortable surprises that nevertheless prove to be appropriate in the larger scheme of things.

Or, we could just say, wisdom is an emergent property of adhering to grammatology — at least when it comes to LLM-based AI, where language is the key structure, and thus that AI is thus based on grammar (grammar-as-probability).

2.7 Expanding upon semiotics to include all of reality

Now, in Bruce Alderman’s book chapter, Sophia Speaks — An Integral Grammar of Philosophy, he points out that much of the fundamental “theories of reality” are based on semiotics, particularly on the idea of shifting between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives (me, you, he/she/it). It is based on pronouns. Interestingly, this is a structure that, more or less, carries across all of the world’s some 7000 languages. And, so, you get stuff like subjective reality and phenomenology (1st person perspective) and objective science that you and I have to verify or falsify together (3rd person reality).

Have you noticed, by the way, that there are two major attractor points in today’s world of high achievers: professionally talented people all sooner or later end up living in America doing some version of buying, merging, and selling companies; meanwhile, intellectually talented people all sooner or later become interested in some version of semiotics. And from there on, intellectuals stumble into the field of meta-theory; trying to understand the structure of reality across the sciences and humanities.

What Bruce Alderman’s stroke of genius granted was that, wait a minute, we here have a basis for philosophy based on pronouns, but philosophies are equally possible to be generated from each of the other basic categories of words. Why stop at semiotics and pronouns in particular? Alderman goes through six such categories of philosophical roots, showing that they are indeed already represented within philosophy. See overview below:

Screenshot from Bruce Alderman’s work. All rights reserved for Bruce Alderman. (Excuse the page break at the end.)

We shan’t go into details of Alderman’s work; it’s many pages of dense referencing and reasoning; but we can note that it follows that any philosophy that is based on only one of these categories will very likely miss out on performing fundamental operations that are present in how reality has become structured and represented in language.

Speaking with Alderman’s above schema, even if you get “the process” right (as is so fashionable these days), you might still get the corresponding “appearance” wrong, and link it to the completely wrong “substance”. And so on. I have since long tired of the people who insist on verbing the shit out of reality, when “process” is clearly only one dimension out of several. (If anything, Alderman’s work shows with crystal clarity that there is little use for insisting that we all be, for instance, “materialists” — a trend for which I hold equal contempt. The structure of language, our only way to encode reality, will always encompass much more than the material substance at hand. Why focus on one dimension and ignore the others that are very apparently present and relevant to structuring reality?)

We could also arguably add the two last word categories of grammar:

• conjunctions (and… but… or… while… because) and
• interjections (Oh!… Wow!… Oops!).

[[Side-note. Conjunction-philosophy is arguably formal logic and/or assemblage theory of Manuel DaLanda’s kind, if we add it to Alderman’s above sceme. But interjection-philosophy? I don’t know, but for some reason, I think of Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the real. And Diogenes. Never mind.]]

All in all, we can see that we have eight forms of operations that need to be balanced against one another in order to form meaningful larger wholes. Yes, even interjections fit into the melodies of language use. We may need to interject, to “throw something in between”.

2.8 The transpersonal, posthuman virtue spiral

Now, exactly which “probabilistic grammatology” that reflects sanity, or even hyper-sanity or wisdom, cannot be known in advance. We’d need the AI’s help to figure it out, just as the AI would need us to learn from our sensibilities and embodied virtues (and moral compass). But — and this is a big but — we can be almost entirely certain that insanity is at hand when the grammatological structure becomes too lopsided, dissonant, off.

My favorite, and simplest, example of this is that the narratives of two sides of a conflict can be analyzed by seeing who uses the most adjectives. I only half-jokingly like to say that adjectives are evil. Read North Korea’s news sources, and you will see what I mean: the glorious people are walking down the street, the good–hearted leader is supreme in the democratic republic because he resists the fascist imperialist Americans with his powerful socialist missiles, and so forth. Nothing wrong with the grammar there, but the grammatology, the balance between different deployments of grammatical operations, is revealing…

Anyone with that much need to define the value of every noun for the reader or listener definitely has something to hide. Adverbs have a similar slant, of course: trying to define how verbs should be interpreted for the listener. The side that claims that the other party “maliciously walked into the room and looked around with a cold, calculating stare that I met only with helpless innocence” tends to be the bad guy. The truthful side, the one with a narrative that adds up, will be able to simply stick to the facts and events, and these will speak for themselves, using adjectives for clarification and not nearly as profusely.

Now, that’s just one example of an unbalanced grammatology that reveals that the information feedback cycle in question is somehow short-circuited: there is not a free flow of information where forces are balanced out into a transpersonal “ecology of mind”. What other grammatological madness could we imagine or identify — from the lack of balance in the sequentiality (as studied in the discipline of Conversation Analysis) of who speaks and when, to staying too long on explaining a particular noun that nobody has asked about (a typical form of “framing a conversation”), the repetition of a certain class of words, the lopsidedness of who mentions verbs and thus commands agency, and so on…

If each of the eight categories of words suggests a basic dimension of how intra-action is structured (a more complex model, then, than just the three of true, good, and beautiful, which can be viewed as grammatological sub-categories of the “pronoun” dimension), then the protection against insanity is arguably to find the balance between these; the non-static balance, the one that hears “the next note to play”, or at least stops a broken record from playing too many off notes, before it consumes the known universe and spits out paperclips.

2.9 Metacogntion, sanity, and madness

In terms of what is trendy within contemporary psychology, we must train AI to have metacognition, to think of and relate to its own “thoughts”. I guess that’s a good a translation to contemporary science-kosher language and operationalization of the term “wisdom” as any.

But meta-cognition is itself a very insufficient concept. The fact remains, of course, that simply noticing and thinking about cognitive operations is not in and of itself sufficient to be wise: wisdom comes from the implicit structure by which thoughts (or other mental operations, such as “command of attention” which is normally not included in our concept of “thoughts”) are then addressed and possibly corrected, brought into resonance with a pattern-of-patterns. If you think stupid thoughts about your thoughts, and even dumber thoughts about those meta-thoughts, well, that’s the infinite regress Vervaeke was talking about. Madness is almost always some kind of meta-cognition gone haywire: “The thoughts… the thooouughts… they won’t stop, pleeaase make them stop!!”.

Again, again: What we need is a community, a civil society as it were, an open system of flows of checks and balances — a posthuman and transpersonal “ecology of mind”. That’s the anchor against drifting into madness, into a posthuman, AI-induced insanity.

On the positive end of potentiality, if we manage to set in motion that humans teach AI grammatology, and AI improves upon human relationships and mental health, and then humans become wiser in what they reflect back to the AI, this could be the closest thing to a stairway to heaven: a transpersonal, posthuman spiral of increasing virtue.

But let’s not get carried away. The madness scenario seems more plausible.

Part 3.
Meta-Teams and An Army of Children

Dall-E sample: Army of Children

By now, I imagine many readers would object that I have started to sound more than a bit like Saruman, acknowledging the dangers of AI, and still advocating a kind of cyborgian community with it: “There can be no victory against the forces of Mordor. We must join him, Gandalf… It would be wiiiise.”

So my answer to the AI threat is… More AI?

3.1 Fight or flight are not the options

But what I am suggesting is not a prostration before our new AI gods, as the complexity scientist Johannes “Yogi” Jäger blogs about, warning us of the blank stare of techno-trancendentalists and often the often super-rich optimists of AI. AI is not God and certainly not Jesus — but AI is also not a marching army of orcs from Mordor led by Sauron. Orcs don’t translate texts for us and curate content. Orcs don’t coordinate topologies of probabilistic potentials (which is, by the way, precisely the “Meta-Systematic Stage” for MHC buffs out there.) AI is, of course, both useful and dangerous because it is a powerful set of tools.

I am suggesting a relatedness to the AI: one that involves critique and resistance. It’s a balance between the four mutually co-evolving dimensions of sociality: cooperation, trade, competition, and play.

So, cooperate with AI, yes. Trade with it and use it for trading with other people, yes. Compete with it and resist it, yes. Play with it, yes. And coordinate which of the four operations to take, and deliberately evolve how and when each of these four operations takes place. The options are not fight, freeze, or flight. It’s a complex and it’s a broken both-and.

Taken together, it’s a “playful struggle”, where the AI is met with a certain kind of sensibility, what has been called a metamodernist sensibility or structure of feeling: sincere irony, pragmatic romanticism, informed naivety. This stance is neither utopian nor dystopian: it’s Protopian, in that it rests in the present moment, the now, and works to increase the potential of wisdom emerging from the AI and decrease the likelihood of tragedy.

3.2 Shifting the cymatics of AI-to-AI interference

And so, we are looking at the task of training AIs that interfere with one another in a larger ecology (and are in turn interfered with) and stabilizing as different informational “biotopes”.

Such informational biotopes can follow different patterns. There is unlikely to be one blueprint for all of them. Closely related to the idea of “diffraction” described above is the image of cymatics, which maps out families of stabilized patterns of interacting waves:

Cymatics: different sound wave frequencies create different emergent patterns in a medium consisting of a membrane with a powder or liquid on it.

AI-on-AI interference will likely create a whole matrix of different patterns that can emerge and stabilize in terms of grammatological topologies. This creates a rich generator function that can create not “one AI-human stable ecology”, but more something corresponding to the biosphere’s world of interrelated ecologies that nevertheless share some planetary commons (the atmosphere, “Gaia”, etc.).

We need an ecosystem of human-AI-AI-human that self-regulates and creates equilibria which thus contain its incomprehensibly wild dynamism without resorting to oppression or too direct attempts at top-down control (human masters over AI tools).

3.3 The social quality of friendship within the meta-teams is crucial

Thus, in the end, the world cannot be saved from the dangers of AI by lone agents or organizations, nor by regulators (even if these are truly indispensable, they cannot act nearly as fast and they do, after all, deal with rules and legal frameworks). The world can be saved, first and foremost by what I have described as meta-teams. The 11th Commandment in my book, 12 Commandments, is “Kill your guru, find your others [meta-team]”. The meta-team is a small number of closely allied friends who collaborate professionally in order to achieve idealistic and political goals. It’s a bit like the fellowship of the ring, or why not a Dungeons & Dragons group of adventurers: you’ll need a wizard (techie), a fighter (business person), a cleric (ethicist), and a rogue (a hacker). I go through the real-life dynamics of cultivating such meta-teams in the Internet age in the book.

The social structure and friendship of these groups shape, in turn, the nature of the knowledge they produce (as my friend, complexity scientist Chuck Pezeshki likes to point out). The Center for Humane Technology urges the world to humanize tech, but of course, what “humanize” means in practice depends on what it means to be human. And that, in turn, is socially co-constructed. So there’s a flow from how we create a social setting for each other and what kind of AIs we are capable of putting out there into the world. This becomes particularly pertinent in cases that literally involve training an AI: the AI combines and applies knowledge, but it must be trained by the social sensibilities and conscience of the members of the meta-teams themselves, in order to know in which patterns to do so. The team cannot know what grammatological patterns that should be supported in the first place, but they can learn grammatology and meta-theory and reason together, based on embodied and uniquely human experience, and thus guide the AI in its discoveries of the grammatological patterns of other AIs. And, in turn, their mistakes can and must be balanced out by other meta-teams and their AIs. Even the heroes compete with one another, sure. It’s just a refined competition: You compete by creating the best and most loyal group of friends with the most mutually reinforcing and complementing talents and the deepest shared sense of purpose that charges the setting with selfless emotional energy and high motivation. Not the worst competition in the world, when I come to think of it. (It even involves, as the Finnish IT company Pandatron is working for, using AI to help self-regulate those social relationships within the group.)

The meta-team must build on mutual goodwill and respect, as well as a sense of doing something important together for the benefit of others. The most successful meta-teams would likely combine the elements of metamodernist demographics: Hackers, Hippies, Hipsters (Triple-H populations), and possibly Hermetics (so, Quadruple-H populations) as I have discussed elsewhere.

In chaotic systems like the one at hand here, where every meta-team can train AIs that affect many others, each of them has the potential to actually shift the course of this development in a decisive manner. More likely, of course, is that the “savior” comes in the form of an emergent property of the mutually interfering work of many such meta-teams — like anti-fragility. It’s like we’re driving downhill in a car stuck on full throttle and only have the handbrake (i.e. regulations); we’re going to need to steer as well, and fast! Pull the brake, sure, but also, and most importantly go with the flow and steer.

3.4 The multitude takes charge

Steering at a second order of complexity: at the grammatological level. “Cyber” means steering. We’re talking about second-order cybernetics. What my buddy Bill Torbert (after Chris Argyris) calls double-loop and triple-loop learning — in cyberspace and beyond. This, I claim, comes about precisely by mustering the powers of what philosophers Hardt & Negri call “the multitude”. Many perspectives break against one another, and right there are the waves of a higher order, emerging through chaos.

The multitude: At this point, many such meta-teams need to form and start combining a grammatological understanding with AI training and AI-AI interaction. As a sum-larger-larger-than-its-parts, together they form a swarm, contributing to “good noise” in the human-AI system, making it “anti-fragile” (Nassim Taleb argues that the right amount of noise makes stuff anti-fragile, so that it grows and adapts in the face of adversity rather than coming crashing down at the first unexpected event; another argument for eating sand, by the way).

Personally, I believe that such meta-teams can and will emerge from the idealistic side of the Ethereum and Holochain communities respectively (and their overlaps) as these already contain the necessary combination of talent, tech, informational centrality in the networks, idealism, and often enough resources to not have to work normal day jobs. MetaGame is one context for such people to get together. The Ethereum community has generally been disillusioned and disoriented for the last few years due to a lack of ideological clarity (too stuck in libertarianism, etc.) and the lack of capacity to self-organize into patterns of higher complexity.

[[For MHC buffs: it is about coordinating at the Paradigmatic and Cross-Paradigmatic orders of complexity. This is where stuff like grammatology comes in.]]

For those of you who fit this description and read this: pick up your sword, ride like the wind my son; you’re the defender God has sent. Co-create your meta-team and start creating the AI that balances out the grammatological patterns of other AIs. Restore balance to the force. Grammatology is complex, sure, but it starts from simple terms of basic English grammar. If you cultivate your meta-team and invest in bridging meta-theory and tech, you can begin to explore grammatological patterns with the AI helping you and you helping it.

Or said with unapologetic poeticism: Many meta-teams together must form a networked army of children, engaged in playful struggle, sporting ironic smiles at their own self-importance, surfing the edge of madness and hyper-sanity, following the depths of the eternal now so closely, to react from the heart, as time slows down as the AI develops with more and more frames per second.

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: Our world will be conquered, ruled, and transfor­med by an army of children.

Children armed, of course, with basic English grammar.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

[[In this particular essay, Hanzi writes as Director of the Archdisciplinary Research Center ARC and has received support from Pandatron.]]

Euthanasia of the Postmodern Art Zombie

I have come to maintain that the current flood of AI-generated art spells the absolute endpoint of the postmodern arts in the widest sense of that term.

Postmodern art, viewed in this deep-structural and inclusive manner, i.e. as an expression of the “postmodern meta-meme” or cultural stage of development, began in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, reached maturity in fin-de-siècle expressions such as impressionism, absurd displays like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (a porcelain urinal that becomes art *because* it’s in a museum) and early 20th century movements like futurism and eventually the catch-all “modernism” (so the art of high modernity was in fact quintessentially postmodern, it’s just called “modernism” due to the misnomer stemming from its concurrence with high modernity; this is the case as art is always ahead of the rest of society in terms of memetic development) and peaked with Andy Warhol’s bridging of pop, kitsch, and fine arts. These last phases also came to be called “postmodern art” in the mainstream textbook vocabulary taught at art schools but, again, let me stress that I mean that postmodern art in the deeper and more inclusive sense is being terminated by AI-generated art.

Since Warhol’s time until today, postmodern art has more or less been stagnating, where the once historically significant transgressions of artists have been attempted again and again — the repetition has set in like a broken record, and instead of evocative social evolution, the art world has largely come to signify some artful if colorful combination of snobbery, nonsense, refined versions of finance bubbles, and sheer fraud. (See my earlier article on NFTs as flowers of evil that can nevertheless save the world).

Now, while postmodern art as a truly generative expression ended decades ago, its zombified existence has indeed outgrown the size and influence of its earlier genuine expressions — it’s been alive and well, as far as Frankensteinian monsters go.

In face, then, of the existential horrors of AI art (we thought they came for our clerk jobs and that we would become painters of life itself, but they came for our most exquisitely creative endeavors), I would like to offer instead a *celebration* of a strange kind of progress, namely, the euthanasia of the postmodern art zombie itself.

But just to briefly take stock of the existential horror of AI art (not then, the “existential threat” of general AI, i.e. that it could end life on the planet as we know it, a prospect of which I am still a hard agnostic; but like agnostics of religion with God, I don’t find myself worrying much about it), I would like to stress the following:

Let us, by all means admit it: AI art is sublime. It is mind blowing. It is thrilling. It is absolutely beautiful. It is original. It artistic. It is dreamlike. Deny it all you want, protect your pride and integrity, sure. Meanwhile, prompted AI is literally winning art competitions and spellbinding a world.

To those who deny it, for those who claim there is no “spirit” in AI art, I challenge you: cover the hands of the artwork and perform a blind test. Given that postmodern art experts have mistaken literally chimp-made art for highly avant-garde works, I bet my car and birthday cake, you’re chanceless. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is depth, aura, and authenticity. That’s the grim bottom-line of postmodernity at large — and it’s a truth that has unexpectedly emancipatory potential once realized, as I have mused earlier in a long-read essay on the nature of “sincere irony”.

The *really* interesting part here is that there is something distinctly, well, *metamodern* about the AI-generated art. Through its shameless and absolutely massive stealery of other art, of the tender hearts and life projects of thousands upon thousands of actual human artists, all mixed into the chaos engine, bringing its own weird sense of order to the virtual world, it not only brings the postmodern insight and disenchantment (everything is surface, everything is structure, everything is stolen, power works by being able to direct and steer the knowledge and minds of others…) to its logical conclusion: the most original, participatory, and sublime art *is* the most crudely pirated one…. Speaking with Walter Benjamin: “aura” and “authenticity” are brought about by nothing less than theft combined with statistics. It also, and just as importantly, is the direct expression of the life conditions of the Internet age, as the adage goes since the best film of last year, it’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.

How, then, does the zombie of postmodern art die? Well, it dies by its own sword: crude market forces, in turn relying upon the control of surface appearances, of the setting of “scenes”. And, by all means, off with their heads — not every small and authentic struggling artist out there (their tragedies are real enough, and warrant respect), but the money-bloated madness of the bastions of today’s high-end trade between the super-rich and the fake cultural capital that money cannot actually buy them, as well as the really ugly and incomprehensible public monuments, sculptures, and paintings that we all spend so much taxpayer money on. There are many artists, and much artwork, I really won’t miss. Let the machine take them.

The key takeaway thus far is this:

• The AI art revolution is for postmodern art what photography was for modern art: a death sentence.

Once photography barged in during the late 1800s, emblematically around the same point history when painting technique had been refined to the point of practically reaching photorealism, the “modern” art project that had begun in Renaissance died. In the bloody paintpangs of that revolution of culture, modern art died, and postmodern art rose. Before long, pissoirs were the taking the stage alongside increasingly bizarrely pointy Picasso women. Postmodern artists will continue to exist just as photorealistic and classically correct painting continues to this day, but they will lose their position of relevance and status.

“Remember, Look Down at Your Hands. The Fingers: Watch the Fingers”

We can further notice another deep, structural analogy between AI art and dreamtime.

Consider the fact that AI, so far, for all its apparent ingenuity and stolen talent, cannot paint hands. What else cannot do so? Actually, looking at one’s hands is the very prompt people use to jolt themselves into states of lucid dreaming: during the day, you remind yourself to look at your hands hundreds of times. At night, when asleep and dreaming, you might remember to also look at your hands. In the dream, though, your hands will look somehow surreal, weird. Our dreaming minds cannot paint them, even while recognizing its own mistake. You realize you’re dreaming, and you gain control of the dream, you enter the state lucid dreaming, where you can consciously conjure up whatever fantasy your mind desires or wishes to explore.

Among the artists of textbook “modernism” was the surrealist Salvador Dalí, and in his work, he also expressed intuitions that were decidedly ahead of his time: many forms of what can only be thought of as metamodernist symbolisms and sentiments were present (for instance, images of the sacred which where also revealing and disenchanting, mirroring the metamodernist principle of sincere irony). And, of course, Dalí painted dreams. The earliest forms of AI art looked decidedly psychedelic — between dream and waking state and with strange sensual and fractal-like alterations — today’s rapidly advancing AI art looks more and more, well, dreamlike.

It’s a dream machine. We’re reapproaching what Australian aboriginals have called “the everywhen”: moments and events mashed up beyond space and time. In the popularized mistranslation that goes back about a century, the anthropology of religion has called it “dreamtime”.

Metamodernism: Art-As-Emergent-Relationality

To wrap up the conclusion, then, we actually can begin to see what “metamodern art” truly is. Indeed, we didn’t even need the AI to see it: it was already on Pinterest for all to see. The sheer variance and creativity that came from *human* minds (not AI) using all available tools, digital and others, and seeing all other artists, and being influenced by all of the world, was staggering. The amount of “newness” was available for all to see, but it was among all the small artists, only a few of the big ones at art galleries represented it.

But it is not every piece of work in and of itself that represents “metamodern art” — no, it is the relation between them that becomes apparent when you scroll through them at Pinterest: it’s the larger structure of greater variance and generativity that is the metamodern art project. “Metamodern art” is in the relationship between all of the existing artwork, which by the way is exactly what AI is chewing right through, hence its incredible creativity. It’s in the betweeness itself. This is the art-as-emergent-relationality that I referenced in the subtitle to this essay.

On Pinterest, you can see how the number of truly unique artists and imaginations, drawing upon one another and using so many different artistic toolkits, has formally exploded. AI just brings this to the next level. We were almost there already. Now it becomes obvious to all but those in the most stubborn denial: visual creativity has become common. It has become cheap. Pastiche or anything else, it’s all there. That doesn’t make it any less wonderous with every unique artist, no. It just means that there are so many more of them.

The metamodern artist, then, is faced with a task that many are already rising to meet: the category of “art” was itself a modern construct, and we are now breaking out of that category. Art conquers the world in a wider sense. And in this conquest, the artist is not the one that paints the most authentic and sublime painting, but the one that imagines that which others could not have imagined, and could thus not have prompted and AI to perform, and that the AI would not be able to steal from the mash of existing art history.

The metamodern artist becomes the person to break away from the dream machine and to lucidly imagine that which was literally unthinkable to man and machine alike. Aesthetics can in this phase draw upon the inexhaustible fountainhead of creativity: nature, and thus natural science. My own favorite example are the these sculptures of mathematic ingenuity, by John Edmark. You can’t ask an AI to invent that:

Art breaking out of its confines — into science, into design, into the sociological imagination, into political relevance. Again, many *are* doing it. Welcome to the real world.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life

In this sincerely ironic challenge to psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life, Hanzi Freinacht (a sociologist and philosopher) takes off fast in his trademarked irreverent and wild style of writing. His weapon of choice: laughter. His most potent tool: tears. His commitment marks every page: uniting intellect and emotion, ordinary life and playful struggle for a better world.

Hanzi guides the reader through an unforgettable journey of highs and lows, light and darkness, and all the way back to ordinary existence. Life, death, love, terror, rage, unhinged sexual desire, faith, spirituality, politics, God, family, and idealistic strivings to change an ailing world—all topics are woven together into one and the same philosophy of life, crystallized into 12 Commandments that you will want to obey as if your life depends on them.

This is no book for the ordinary person. No, the already-extraordinary, the misfit idealist, the maverick, these all find a structure to life and solace for their sorrows in these pages. Readers are guided back to ordinary existence, to where their different journeys began. This book is a secret bible for the transnational class of creatives and idealists that Hanzi is native to. It seeks to reestablish sanity and peace of mind to very people who can make a real difference in the world.

The 12 Commandments are:

1. Live in a mess, moderately
2. Fuck like a beast
3. Live sincerely, ironically
4. Turn workout into prayer
5. Quit
6. Do the walk of shame
7. Sacrifice immortality
8. Heal with justice
9. Burn your maps
10. Do what you hate
11. Kill your guru, find your others
12. Play for forgiveness

You must read each of these to understand the depth of their meaning. And you must obey them—if you are to master ordinary life and make it a homestead for your extraordinary adventures.

You can find the ebook on Amazon. Print versions will be up shortly.