WAKE ISLAND
Teodor Mitew: Complexity, Collapse & the Myth of the Future
Today’s guest is Dr. Teodor Mitew . He’s a systems thinker, historian, and digital media scholar at the University of Sydney, and the author of a new book called T he Red Queen Trap: Complexity, Collapse, and the Myth of the Future , along with a volume of Balkan Neogothic short fiction called T he Samodeva Queen and a newsletter called Turbulence , where he focuses on complexity, systemic transformation, and the emerging architecture of the near future. We discovered his work through a recent essay called “ The Gated Age ,” about the war in Iran and how it is likely to fracture whatever remains of the old Enlightenment dream of universal consensus, pushing us back toward a New Dark Age of mutually incompatible fiefs and sovereign realities. He argues that the Local -- material reality, food, plumbing, geography, and actual bodies -- always eventually wins out over abstract universalist ideology, no exceptions in history. Universalism, he argues, was always a kind of con, Enlightenment reason just replacing God as the guarantor of truth for a period of time that is now drawing to a close. Now that the trapdoor beneath this waning universal order -- the sea lanes, the payment rails, the energy flows, the mutually incompatible eschatologies -- is finally visible, we’re moving from a world of sovereign equality into a world of gate permissions, a neo-medieval world of madmen, fools, and wanderers. A new Renaissance, if we're lucky. Whoever controls the gate controls the future. As Teodor will now demonstrate, this isn't altogether a bad thing... Outro music by Teahouse Radio: “Dreaming Splendid Spaces.” Cover art by Franciszek Starowieyski
