Stephen Downes

Writers are always hopeful that their age represents fundamental change that that their work has identified the nexus of that change. I am not immune to it, I confess. Neither is this paper, which argues that just as "the transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age," which "opened the depths of individual interiority," today's "planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude," through "the systematic cultivation of ordinary people's inner development, moral imagination and civic agency." Again, though, this is an argument that sees the future as a return to the past, a subsumption of the individual to the collective. "We now must reimagine our existing institutions and create new collaborative structures that our sectorized setup mostly lacks."