For the first time in some fifty years, now is the moment to choose a new name to define our new age, the emerging now that we are now living in. A uniquely new dawn rises upon us; a new age of Western consciousness; a new chapter opens in the story book of our contemporary Western history. Our new now is sufficiently distinct from our recent past, even just a few years past, that it needs its own name and identity. Call our new age Metamodern. And its new condition of life Metamodernity.

Once in a long lifetime, or maybe twice in a century, the river of history abruptly changes course. When it happens, we sense it in our bones, even if we can’t put our finger on it. Seemingly unrelated changes in politics, the economy, the arts, cultural life, human relations, technology, and institutions catch us unawares, suddenly adding up to a revolution in our collective sensibilities. What once felt “normal” no longer does; what used to “work” doesn’t anymore; common sense fails to explain it. We awaken to a new consciousness of the world and to a new logic for living in it. Today, we awaken to the metamodern “now,” history’s latest bend in the river. 

Every new “now” arises for a reason and metamodernity is no different. It arises from widespread crises among what matters most to us. We are exposed to new risks and must quickly rethink our reality. And this calls for a renewed sense of responsibility: At the beginning of any new age, how we resolve our emerging situation—now—will set the pattern for how life in the emerging “new normal” is lived for decades to come. We create the conditions now for what happens next. So, let’s not foreclose the opportunity for coming generations to thrive because of our own inaction today, and our failure to recognize—failure to name—what is happening to us.

What is at stake as our new metamodern reality begins to unfold? Our future: A future with risks urgent enough to demand our immediate attention now. We face a looming, abrupt transformation of humanity’s very identity and our relationship with the earth as powerful forces come at us like an invasion from the future.

The thought that we face powerful forces as if “an invasion from the future” is key to understanding the metamodern now and our emerging condition of life. Here, then, is a quick sketch of the essential idea that explains metamodernity’s rise. We will color in the sketch in detail in a moment.

A new “now” has arrived on our doorstep. It knocked quietly for some time. Now it raps louder, urgently, hoping to rouse us. Soon it will call fire engines to wake us from our sleep with sirens. Who is this insistent visitor? Nothing less than a weary messenger—sent by The Future. 

Who is this “Future”? What does it want from us? How can The Future send a messenger backwards in time from a world yet to happen and, like Dickens’ Christmas ghost, show us our new now arising from the future instead of from the past? But this is our puzzling situation in the new metamodern now, the now that arises from the future, and that confuses our sense of past and present.

In the metamodern now, The Future awakens us to a double consciousness of time. On the one hand we continue to live in the present: a present moment beset by all the trends and crises of recent decades. But at least we are familiar with them. On the other hand, our lives increasingly are flooded by the new now sent from the future. And this doesn’t feel familiar at all, even if we sense it happening deep inside, in our anxieties, and in our intuitions.

More and more we come to sense the experience of living in both the present and in the future, and in both the present and the future at the same time. This is the double consciousness of our metamodern now and we may describe the metamodern condition of life as life in the future-present.

Our emerging doubled consciousness—that of living in the future-present—defines what is new in our emerging metamodern era. Our new sensation of the future-present sets our emerging metamodern age off from the experience of life even a few years ago. Life as we’ve known it is fast disappearing and will never return. The metamodern now marks a turn in history’s river. We need to understand what is happening to us now if, indeed, we wish to survive and flourish in the metamodern future.

The purpose of this first essay is to introduce metamodernism: To describe our emerging Western consciousness; what is meant by the concept future-present; and to put metamodernity into historical perspective to understand what makes the metamodern age different from the past. And then to grasp metamodernity’s urgency and what it portends for human consciousness, social change, and the earth’s future.

We begin by listening to the messenger sent by The Future.  

I

As never before, we are beset by powerful secular tends over which we have little control and which, unawares, shift our consciousness even as they define our future. By ‘secular’ I don’t mean non-religious but what social scientists call ‘secular’: Forces created by autonomous long-term structural trends; societal influences that while not disconnected from human actions, behave as if they have a life of their own. Force majeure, they bear down upon us like acts of God, not human creations. And there are three secular trends that concern us most.  

First, demography: population growth and migration. For aging baby-boomers, global population has increased three-fold already in their lifetime. According to the United Nations, we soon will hit the 8 billion population threshold; boomers may live to see 9; their children 10 or 11. Population may level off at around 13 billion early in the next century; fertility rates mercifully decline worldwide. Meanwhile, nothing short of global calamity, or genocide, will stop massive population expansion for many decades. The subsequent overwhelming of existing institutions and epic levels of displaced migrants (estimates as high as 500,000,000 by mid-century) will pressure all of us to adapt. It will not be impossible to support so many lives, yet it will be difficult to make sure they thrive.

Second, climate change: overheating and habitat loss. Two recent and definitive books, The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, and Bill McKibben’s Falter, close the argument for global warming for all but denialist bitter-enders. We live in the now of planetary overheating. It can be mitigated, but it can’t be stopped from increasing on its own, not for quite a long while. Consult Wallace-Wells and McKibben for the details; suffice it to say here, the earth’s humanly habitable space is shrinking, drying up, growing less fertile, putting less oxygen back into the air—as the planet continues to heat, population surges, and species go extinct.

Third, technology: artificial intelligence and gene editing. This is a bit more complicated to explain as a secular force yet it is essential to understand it. As we look forward to mid-century, let’s let runaway artificial intelligence remain science fiction, though runaway AI remains at some point a less-than-negligible risk. Much less fictional is Silicon Valley, hell-bent on reducing the world to data, embracing everything within the flow of ‘information.’ The end in mind is best symbolized by Ray Kurzweil’s figure of the “singularity”—the event in 2040 or so when machine intelligence surpasses human; becomes able to sustain itself on its own; and thus, to challenge humanity with a competing intelligence and locus of control.

What then of the human future? We will, in a data-centric age, reimagine humans as ‘information,’ as nodes in data flows, as parts of networks, as conscious expressions of a universal digital mind. And reconceive humanity as a ‘flesh-and-machine’ hybrid; a technologically enabled evolution beyond the limits of ‘mere’ biological flesh. We will reinvent ourselves as “beyond” or “trans” human. At some point, we may no longer need bodies, perhaps live forever.

That’s the vision, at least. Technology will make us the ‘god’ of our own evolution into an entirely brand-new, digitally enhanced species. The influential prophet of transhumanism, historian Yuval Noah Harari, provocatively has already named our successor species: Homo deus, the human god, Homo sapiens’ evolutionary replacement.

But even ‘mere’ flesh, as such, can be improved. Rapid progress in CRISPR gene-editing technology, approaching retail prices and simplicity, makes the redesign of humans possible and at scale. What do you want your babies to be? It’s your choice.  

At present, ‘flesh-machines’ and ‘CRISPR babies’ are design proposals. To the credit of researchers, they remain tightly fenced in by ethical conventions and regulation. And otherwise we have plenty of incentive to cream off technology’s advantages which are many and beneficial: better health, deeper understanding, greater capabilities; though we might wish to stop short of replacing humankind altogether or creating irreconcilable bio-cybernetic social classes.

The problem is not technology per se. It’s been said that technology is neither good nor bad, but it is never neutral. The problem is technology’s location in the private sector; fueled by immense private investment; tempted by galactic-scale profits; driven by first-mover advantage to leverage market power; and caught up in nationalist political rivalries to dominate the globe and maintain military advantage. Not much of its development is open to democratic discussion, much less voting; technology’s cutting edges are mostly invisible to the public which absorbs tech innovation through market forces.

An aphorism (attributed to Fredric Jameson, though apparently not his) goes: It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The genius of markets is—at least it is claimed—that no one controls them. This is more-or-less an accurate casual empirical observation, though not literally true. But markets certainly are unpredictable and unstoppable, especially new markets in technologies with enormous financial up-sides and consumer utility. Even the centuries-old carbon market, for example, still runs as if with a mind of its own, even in the face of clear evidence of its destructive power.

Think of technology similarly, as another ‘mind’ of its own. We’ve proven to be its willing, if not unwitting, enablers. Already we’ve become functioning parts of the ‘social network,’ the ‘internet of things,’ dwellers in ‘smart cities,’ endlessly surveilled, selling privacy cheap, running headlong into artificial intelligence and virtual reality, and absorbing ourselves in it with enthusiasm. But, theoretically, its increase doesn’t have to be inevitable. At least for now we can ‘unplug’ it, or so we hope, but for how long?

That said, the power of technology’s geometric progression in real time might now already be, in fact, the unstoppable project of a world civilization intoxicated by a dream to transcend human limits and ‘mere’ human problems. The cyber-dream of human flourishing coexists with its death wish for Homo sapiens. No-one meaningfully stands in its way. Technology has secured itself as an autonomous secular trend.      

These secular trends portend unprecedented transformations in human experience. But as we examine secular trends, at least these three, we might counterintuitively also find them quite helpful to us in their own troubling ways as we face the future. Why? Because each one is reasonably predictable. So, if Moore’s Law of the doubling of computer power every so many years still holds, and advances in quantum computing continue, it’s not hard to believe in Kurzweil’s “singularity” arriving by 2040; money continues to pour into its development. We can also project climate models showing 1 or 2 or (God forbid) 3 or 4 additional degrees Celsius of heat buildup later this century and foresee the consequences. Population projections for the next 50 years are on a rail.

It’s remarkable, in fact, how clearly we can see planetary overheating and population growth intersecting at mid-century—and the dire results for hundreds of millions of us and for countless other species. In the meantime, we can grasp the unfathomable choices we will have to make about what we want humanity (‘mere’ flesh) to become in the face of technology. And we can visualize all three of these secular trends converging at an intersection a few decades from now.

Normally, we shrug off the prognostications of ‘futurologists’ and ‘prophets’ as the stuff of dreamers. But we, nowadays, are not dreaming. Our future is now, by contrast, in the mid-century time horizon, remarkably concrete. The outcomes already baked in.

These secular trends provide us with remarkable clarity. More clarity perhaps than we can bear. And this is the problem: It takes little intuition at all to experience the near-term future, one less than a lifetime ahead, as if it’s already happened. We stand in shock before the future at hand, exposed and vulnerable, and tremble for our existence while still having to cope with the crises of the present.

In its own peculiar way—traveling toward us on the iron rails of secular trends—the specter of The Future already enters our minds and souls. Its messenger—the now-from-the-future—alerts us that the ground crumbles, the slide already begun into the future we know damn well is upon us. The new now is here, we can’t go back. We find ourselves alive in the future-present.

Back in the 1990s go-go days of globalization, British sociologist Anthony Giddens alerted us to a new fact about the world and gave us a word to use to think about it: reflexivity. Giddens described accelerating globalization as a new situation in which, for the first time, humans had become so deeply aware of the rest of the world that all its global goings-on had become a part of everybody’s everyday consciousness. Giddens found this unprecedented condition of global simultaneity disorienting and confusing. It overloaded our minds with too much information and created stress from having to process too many worries about what is happening to us at a time. It conflated personal worries with global crises, scrambled our traditional sense of identity, and left us feeling overwhelmed by problems far beyond our capacity to absorb, or even our nations to control.

Reflexivity, as Giddens described it, refers to the psychological process we use to internalize so many messages coming at us all at once and to make sense of them. But reflexivity is more than just sorting out risks, anxieties, and our situation in a globalizing reality. It also produces a mood, one that creates an inner sensation about what’s going on. Back then, a troubled mood without precedent, a jumble of global confusion which shaped our sense of being alive in a chaotic, rapidly globalizing world.

The experience of assimilating change is even more acute today in the metamodern now. On top of our now-familiar global-reflexivity, we’ve added the burden of future-reflexivity: a double-mindedness about time, of living in the present while simultaneously anticipating a looming future that includes its concrete, knowable and measurable risks. The knowable future presses into our consciousness with enough urgency to skew our accustomed, ‘natural,’ present-tense lives toward anxiety about what we know is coming. We’ve come to live in a moment that is simultaneously now and 50 years from now: a new mood and a new sense of living in the world. 

This new, unprecedented future-reflexivity and its resulting mood drives the consciousness arising in the metamodern now. We must come to grips with it. The first step to do so is to pay attention to our reflexive reaction; to listen inwardly to ourselves; and to sense what is taking place around us and within us. Then, to recognize how metamodernity’s double consciousness is shifting our sensibility about the world and the looming future. To grasp these new sensations, to recognize the effect on us of our future-reflexivity, is to take the first step toward becoming self-consciously metamodern persons. This is our starting point in understanding the metamodern condition of life. This is our first clue to our new, emerging consciousness: the simultaneous, reflexive experience of the present and the future.

Metamodern consciousness is startling, new, and unforeseen. Unawares we have entered a new now. The knowable, measurable reality of coming events awakens us, disturbing us deeply within ourselves. We become conscious of a looming, troubling feeling of being alive in a new reality, one sent to us by the future. Only slowly, fighting it as we go, do we come around to recognize it, to admit it. Our past ‘nows’ and the certainties they provided slip away. A new mood, a new shared consciousness, envelops us all as if in a rolling fog.

The future portends difficult days ahead. Is this the end of the world? No, probably not. Don’t take this as doomsday. Fatalism leads to inaction and that’s the easy way out, so let’s not get carried away, although some do. Here’s an example:

For years climate scientist Guy McPherson has predicted rapid runaway climate change. Now, with Arctic permafrost melting and belching methane, he believes that the first signs of a mass extinction event have arrived earlier than expected. We’re doomed in measurable time, he says—an alarmist par excellence. It’s unsettling, though, that enough of his predictions have come true, especially the acceleration of burping tundra, that he’s no longer roundly considered a nut.

Assuming he’s right, what to do? he asks. Well, celebrate life, love your families, quit making children, take leave of the world. Come dance with him on the edge of extinction. Celebrate human existence as it dies. But this amounts to metamodernism run amok.

Few indicators point to our being wiped out. Though some of us, far too many of us, and far too many of the world’s poor who don’t deserve it, will be wiped out, or dislocated and immiserated. Survivors might find this emotionally harder to watch and to bear than outright extinction. But this is the tragedy that survivors will witness, reflexively processing reports from around the world every day. We can’t turn our heads. We will watch and lament. We will grieve. And we will worry about wars, disorder, and disruptions.

Yet, unless nihilism takes us over entirely and we choose the cruelty of letting others perish while we protect only ourselves, we will somehow summon the strength to mitigate our calamities even as we suffer our way through them. Either way, we will still preside over an age that sees the planet, living things, and our own species diminished before our eyes. Secular trends—in particular, the three trends we’ve described—guarantee it.

Our new now will be experienced as a passing through a canyon narrows, a passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. We will be squeezed from both sides as the planet heats and population surges, caught between the “rock” of the present and the “hard place” of a certain future. Sometime later—when, we don’t know, and in what form our humanity (‘mere’ flesh) will take then we can’t imagine—we will emerge in a broad place, much diminished, much changed (maybe even much improved), but undimmed. Another now will begin then.

The metamodern now is but a single moment in the long history of human beings, just one more ‘now’ like any other past ‘now.’ Hopefully, humanity has a long and prosperous future ahead of it after we emerge from our present situation. Let’s keep things in perspective. We in our day are nothing special, historically-speaking, nor is our ‘now’ particularly interesting in the epochal terms of human evolution, though crucially interesting to us today. But at present we must buckle up for a difficult ride through our metamodern future and be glad that the new metamodern era at hand now has a name.

II

This description of the metamodern now might still seem abstract. We can imagine academic specialists and theorists happily speculating about it, but then again, it’s their job to examine changing trends in our social and cultural lives and to write books about them. What about the rest of us? Can we bring this discussion down to earth and talk about our metamodern now in practical, concrete terms that affect our everyday lives and that explain our situation in familiar ways? Sure.

Here is a second way to describe our predicament in the future-present: It is a breakdown of our existing public orders unfolding at precisely the moment that tangible and measurable future crises are breaking into our present reality. We’re caught between the “rock” of a chaotic present—in politics, society, economics, race and gender relationships, and all the other domains of public life—and the “hard place” of our certain in-breaking future. And this sets up a dilemma that threatens to overwhelm our democracies. 

What does it mean to be caught between a rock and a hard place? Let’s begin by taking the pulse of our public life in the last few decades: the present half of our future-present equation. What, concretely, have we inherited from the last fifty years of our history? In historian Daniel Rodgers’s telling phrase, we’ve inherited “an age of fracture.” We are presented with splintering, chronic difficulties. Call this the “rock.” For brevity we can sketch only the highlights here (references for citations are found in the endnotes):

• Politics: In a detailed statistical historical report covering the last hundred years, Anna Lührmann and Staffan Lindberg warn that we have entered a global “third wave” of anti-democratic “autocratization.” Similarly, Yascha Mounk and Roberto Steffan Foa describe an ongoing “democratic deconsolidation” in traditional Western democracies: a profound collapse of institutional legitimacy, not just of liberal democratic governments, but also of the public institutions (the press, academic authority, labor unions, political parties, religion, etc.) which integrate governance with the public mind, and upon which democratic governing depends.
• Economics: Widening economic inequality that is inherent to capitalist investment itself, as economist Thomas Piketty for instance has documented, and will only worsen without state intervention or financial catastrophe; a problem compounded by global financial and industrial restructuring and automation. Insecurity, precarious jobs, and poverty grow while wealth accumulates among a small, defensive plutocratic minority increasingly able to dominate politics in its favor.
• Culture: In the last several decades, traditional Western hierarchies of male patriarchy and white supremacy have, at long last, slowly begun to diminish (though with a long way to go, and more political struggle ahead). Formerly suppressed identities, especially racial and gender, have strengthened their voices and political power, and there is new respect for ethnic traditions around the world. For this we must be thankful. But this is a mixed picture: The breaking down of traditional hierarchies also creates perceived identity threats and racial-ethnic backlash among formerly dominant white majorities, as well described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild; and fractious competition between identity communities for political power; repressive police violence; religious fundamentalisms; and ethnic nationalisms.
• Society: Connected to economic and cultural changes is the race-inflected class polarization of the “left out,” of which Brexit, Trump, and France’s “yellow vests” are recent symptoms, and cogently analyzed by political theorist Wendy Brown. Add to this, related anti-immigrant white nationalist populist movements; a new taste for authoritarian suppression of the “other”; and epidemic “deaths of despair” described by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
• The world generally: Risks of longstanding remain (beyond climate change), including sudden financial collapse and existential threats from nuclear annihilation, biowarfare, and disease pandemics. Toby Ord, an Oxford ethics professor who has painstakingly compiled an analysis of pan-human existential risks, puts the odds of global cataclysm and civilizational collapse at about one in six in this century.

To these problems, and to which many more can be added (please do; this is only a short list and you may not agree with these priorities or interpretations), we must attend. Not to take them lightly, however, for they are exceedingly complex, but they are fixable within our existing political structures: “normal” human problems, as vexing as they are. Merely they are, if anyone demands proof, primary signs that Rodgers’s “age of fracture” has left many of our present Western democracies and institutions divided, struggling, feckless, and exhausted.

But now the “hard place”: The problems above are not all that we confront. In contrast to our “fixable” problems, new problems confront us from the future, quickly becoming our present reality. Recall the autonomous secular forces above: massive population growth and migration; climate change and habitat destruction; finance-empowered technology. Political philosopher Hans Sluga has named these together the “TPE-syndrome” (technology-population-environment); he calls them “wicked” problems. These problems are not, in any reasonable sense of the word, fixable at all. Survivable, perhaps; at best mitigated; they present challenges unique in human history and portend a permanent transfiguration of human life and the earth.

What happens, then, when the rock and the hard place collapse onto each other? When the unstoppable future crashes into a present that is fractured, reactionary, polarized, weakened, and lacks coherent vision for moving ahead? At worst, outright catastrophe if things don’t change. At best, we limp to the ramparts like wounded soldiers under withering fire, our defenses in shambles.

We are confronted by an unprecedented future; in great need of summoning all our powers to survive it and perchance to flourish; while at the same time we are entirely undermined by our present “age of fracture.” This is the metamodern dilemma: To be caught in the middle between present chaos and future threat; caught between weakened social and political structures, and a slow-rolling tsunami breaching their walls, not knowing which direction to turn and which problems to address first.

So, outwardly, in our public orders of life, the future breaks into the present moment, demanding a response at a moment of weakness and vulnerability. Inwardly, too, it reshapes our consciousness of time, and overwhelms our secure sense of being in the world. The messenger-from-the-future invades our feeling states to unsettle us, while threatening our social structures and institutions with dynamite. This is our metamodern now. The alarm is sounded. We have far less than a generation to sort it out. 

III

Then, here is a third way to think about our emerging metamodern now. To do so, let’s turn back to recent history to put the metamodern experience in sharper focus. Even as the river of history turns in its new metamodern course, it remains important to take stock of the old “now” that formed our present moment and that history turns away from.

We started this discussion of metamodernity above by pointing out that for the first time in some fifty years, now is the moment to choose a new name to define the new historical age that is appearing among us. And “fifty years” was meant more literally than you might think. This singular fifty-year period has stamped the present into its unique historical shape. It preconditions our emerging future-present.

As time passes, we are beginning to see with reasonable clarity that our most recent age was bookended by two decades of unusual social turmoil, offset by about fifty years: the 1960s and the 2010s. This singular era arose in the 1960s amidst political and cultural revolution and hope; and in the 2010s, it faded amidst political, economic, and cultural turmoil. This is Daniel Rodgers’s “age of fracture.” More precisely, it is called postmodernity. Postmodernity has run its course. On its heels comes a new metamodern reality. 

The problems of the present that we have inherited from the last fifty years, the “rock” as they were called, are thus postmodern problems. We must understand them as such. But it will take time to trace out the roots of postmodernity’s crisis. In fact, it will take the next several essays in this series (essays 2 – 5) to examine these roots in detail. For now, we must settle for a quick sketch of postmodernity to put it in perspective.

Postmodernity grew in the shadow of 1960s’ upheavals as a reaction to earlier periods of modern Western history, especially two world wars, the Great Depression and New Deal, and the Cold War. In these periods, the political sphere strongly defined society, and not always fairly; government commanded legitimacy, until it lost it over issues of race, imperialism, and inflation; and white society predominated, at the expense of non-white minorities. The postmodern reaction marked widespread lost faith in democratic institutions. Instead, postmodernity offered “post-political” solutions to organize public life: pushing forward free markets and multiculturalism as new forms of economic and social order, and globalization as the new form of international order.

Postmodernity created, as well, a new collective consciousness reflected in the arts and intellectual culture of the period where the term “postmodernism” is most familiarly applied. Likewise, growing from under the 1960s’ shadow, postmodern consciousness, too, carried a reactionary tone, an undertone of negativity, and a dubiousness toward Western tradition generally. It created a consciousness strongly colored by ambivalence toward the ideologies, political cultures, and institutions—left and right—inherited from earlier twentieth-century traditions, colored as well by a spirit of radical social and cultural critique.

To its credit, postmodernity attempted to resolve the social crises that brought its previous “modern” era to a spectacular end in the global protests of the 1960s. Postmodern scholarship, in fact, turned on the lights to expose three major, enduring injustices that long plagued modern life, and that Western societies long kept buried. Postmodern scholars and activists made these injustices familiar to us. And they did so by developing and explaining new concepts that by now most of us have come to understand: patriarchy (male domination of women and gender minorities), white supremacy (racism and white privilege), and imperialism (resource and labor exploitation abroad, but also at home). Together, these form a problematic triumvirate that even today our Western democracies struggle to resolve or even to fully recognize.

Postmodernity brought these problems to light because at its core postmodern thought leaders sought liberation from oppression: for women and gender minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, those with disabilities, and in many parts of the world, liberation from Western domination. But after fifty years, enduring injustices remain yet to be adequately resolved. Pitifully, even now, the white majority still must convince itself that Black Lives Matter; that Me Too genuinely reveals gender violence; that being LBGTQ+ remains dangerous; that indigenous peoples and impoverished nations still suffer from Western ‘development.’

Much has changed in fifty years, some of it for the better. With many caveats as we will see later, we can celebrate postmodernity as an improvement on the modernity older Westerners grew up with. Yet, today, despite postmodernity’s many contributions, here we find ourselves: in the very moment of postmodernity’s exhaustion and a world in turmoil. Postmodernity’s early promise went off the rails late in the twentieth century, and we need to understand why. This must be explained before turning to the metamodern now and to the unique now-from-the-future we confront. We must know who we have been before we can become something new.

Keeping this sketch of postmodernity in mind, then, here is the third way to define the metamodern age. It in terms historians like to use—periods, eras, ages—metamodernity marks a new turn in the river of time; a new historical age; the replacement for a postmodernity that collapses in upon itself.

The problems we inherit from postmodernity’s fifty-year run are in theory fixable with the human tools at our disposal. But postmodernity (as we will see later), in its many fragmented dimensions, has badly undermined our social imaginations, diminished our moral capacity to cooperate, and collapsed our vision for the future. Its failure fractures and endangers our democracies. It is no longer realistic to believe we can make step-by-step incremental changes to address our problems from the foundation postmodernity provided us.

The now-from-the-future confronts us within ourselves whether we’re ready for it or not, as it plays upon the futility of our postmodern present. We might be grateful that The Future offers to correct our vision: The messenger from the future slowly shifts the way we see the world and the way we feel about it; away from the postmodern toward the metamodern; insisting that we look at our emerging metamodern now with fresh perspective.

Postmodernity dies around us. The future presses down upon us. Much as we might prefer continuing to do things as we’ve done them for decades, the future forces us to admit our futility. And the future is forcing us to entirely change the subject. It forces us to change direction; to give up our old habits; to liberate our ingenuity under the pressure of looming disaster; and thus, to press ahead toward new forms of public order, values and norms. We are at an historic crossroads; there is no alternative to life in the future-present.

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Notes

Journalist David Wallace-Wells distills ten years of climate science reporting into a description of twelve “elements of chaos” in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, 2019). Bill McKibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Henry Holt, 2019) is more ambitious including sections on the climate crisis, the growing transhumanist cyber and bio-tech revolutions, the ideologies behind the “denialist” movement, and a host of ethical questions.

The Ur book for the transhumanist digital future is Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Penguin, 2005). Less utopian is Kevin Kelly’s vision of a transformed humanity in the mid-century cyber future in The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape our Future (Viking, 2016). Kia-Fu Lee traces the social consequences of AI on our emerging future in AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2018). Franklin Foer warns of the effects of runaway, monopolist technology on democracy and culture in World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (Penguin, 2017).

Anthony Giddens’ concept, reflexivity, in globalizing, modern society is developed at length in The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, 1990) and Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, 1991).

Hans Sluga’s formulations of the “TPE-syndrome” and “wicked problems” are found in his Politics and the Search for the Common Good (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 229 and 245-250.

Guy McPherson speaks for himself: Only Love Remains: Dancing at the Edge of Extinction (Woodthrush, 2019).

Historian Daniel Rodgers traces the social, cultural and political fragmentation of Western society during the period I call ‘postmodern’ in Age of Fracture (Harvard, 2011).

Citations from the list of current problems: “Third wave anti-democratic autocratization”: Luhrmann, A. and Lindberg, S. (2019), see here. “Democratic deconsolidation”: Mounk, Y. and Foa, R. (2016), see here; and also see Yascha Mounk’s development of the idea in his The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It (Harvard, 2018). “Economic inequality inherent to capitalist investment”: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard, 2014). “Formerly dominant white majorities”: Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016). “Race-inflected class polarization”: Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia, 2019). “Deaths of despair”: the term coined by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, see here, and their Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, 2020). “One in six” existential threat: Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Hachette, 2020).