We may be entering a second Axial Age ⊗ Radical abundance

More than a few times I’ve considered spinning off an AI-focused newsletter with some Sentiers taste/curation/tone/opinions. Boy am I glad I never did it! Hashtag-tired-of-it.

Also, sorry, this is a long one.

We may be entering a second Axial Age

Otto Scharmer’s essay in Noema picks up the same Axial Age, which I mentioned in passing last week, but turns it into a working diagnostic for the present. His framing rests on an image borrowed from his family’s farm: social soil. Trust, shared reality, the capacity to sense and act together—this is the substrate that holds up everything visible in a society, its institutions and economies. Scharmer argues that soil is depleting fast, and names three symptoms: anomie, the erosion of shared moral norms; atomie, the breakdown of social bonds into loneliness and polarisation; and atrophy, the slow loss of the human capacities needed to think, converse and act together. Underneath all three he places a fourth problem, a rising “epistemic monoculture,” a single, computational way of knowing the world as a set of objects, pushed by AI and starving out every other way of understanding. For Scharmer, AI isn’t quite the antagonist; it’s the mirror, a “brilliant automation of subject-object knowing” that shows us, at scale, the single way of knowing we’d already settled into.

Perhaps the essay’s most useful proposal is splitting “intelligence” into three kinds that need to coexist: artificial intelligence, which only knows the world in the third person, as data and pattern; organic intelligence, which adds first- and second-person knowing—the lived, relational sense of being one living thing among others; and what Scharmer calls source or field intelligence, a fourth-person awareness in which a group becomes conscious of itself as a whole. The first Axial Age, he argues, opened up individual interiority—the inner life that produced the prophets, philosophers and contemplatives of 800 to 200 BCE. The second one, if it happens, would need to do the same at a collective scale, building the awareness and institutions that let groups sense and decide together rather than leaving coordination to markets, bureaucracies and algorithms.

Where this connects back to Sharon Blackie’s piece on metanarratives in last week’s issue is in the tension between the two arguments. Blackie’s case was that metanarratives accrete—they can’t be designed into existence, only lived into being by enough people changing how they tell their own stories. Scharmer’s essay is full of design language: new social contracts, reimagined schools, citizens’ assemblies, “civic infrastructures” built for the express purpose of cultivating social soil. He does gesture at something closer to Blackie’s emergence model near the end, borrowing from Ilya Prigogine’s work on systems far from equilibrium, where small “islands of coherence”—regenerative farms, folk schools, mission-driven enterprises—connect and tip a whole system into a new state without anyone centrally planning it. The unresolved question is whether collective interiority is something institutions can be built to produce, or something that can only be cultivated and waited for. Scharmer wants both; Blackie would say, I think, that only the second is real.

As Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the long arc of this development eventually gave rise to modernity and its “buffered self,” a self that is autonomous and self-authorizing, but also increasingly disembedded from the larger cosmos. Mind became separated from body, subject from object, self from nature. […]

Our information and media ecosystems must shift from attention-fracking to collective sensemaking. We need media architectures that support deep understanding and dialogue rather than polarized echo chambers. […]

Our economic institutions must move beyond mere shareholder value, the perfect expression of mono-epistemic intelligence. They currently treat nature, humans and our own attention as commodities that can be extracted and depleted. […]

We need to reclaim our data sovereignty by recognizing that people and their communities are the subjects, not the raw material, of the AI-enabled economy. We need a social contract that allows us to collaboratively govern how AI operates in our lives — not behind closed lobbying doors, but through democratic processes and dialogue. A constitution for the age of AI. […]

The deepening of our current rupture creates space for a possible intentional shift from intelligence without interiority to intelligence with interiority. From pattern without presence to pattern with presence.

Radical abundance

At the Future Observatory Journal, Kai Heron in conversation with Justin McGuirk. A really inspiring take/angle on what existing abundance talk means, what degrowth means, and what a radical abundance could be. Heron and his co-authors, Bertie Russell and Keir Milburn, separate two ideas: “bullshit abundance” and “artificial scarcity.” Bullshit abundance is what capitalism actually produces once the full picture is counted—not just the goods on shelves, but the microplastics, emissions and traffic that come with them. Artificial scarcity is the flip side: a manufactured shortage of the things people need to live well—free time, affordable energy, clean water, biodiverse land.

Radical abundance, in their framing, means the freedom and capacity to decide collectively what to create once that scarcity is lifted. That’s what separates this version from the abundance agenda associated with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which Heron reads as an eco-modernist rebrand of the status quo: more housing, more transit, vertically farmed food in every fridge, all still operating inside capitalism’s limits. Heron is equally unconvinced by “fully automated luxury communism,” faulting it for sidelining ecology, and places it, half-earth socialism, degrowth and the Green New Deal among a wave of post-2015 utopian visions he credits with imagination but faults for skipping the messy work of getting there.

Filling the gap between vision and method starts with two ideas. “Popular protagonism” means creating institutions where ordinary people find common interest and act on it together, changing how they think and organise in the process. “Contested reproduction” describes the tangled overlap of any transition period, where socialist and capitalist logics operate side by side, and where progress comes from pushing that mix toward post-capitalist outcomes. He argues that an institutional form for putting both into practice is the public–common partnership (PCP): where a public–private partnership hands state money to private firms, a PCP hands resources to the workers and communities already using them, with any surplus required to seed further PCPs elsewhere.

Heron’s example is Seven Sisters Market in north London, where traders facing displacement are building a community-owned plan, paired with a revived council farm to supply it. Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, the Basque region and Venezuela’s communal councils show the same model at work elsewhere, and Heron is clear that none of this is meant to stay local: food sovereignty only functions as an international movement, and communities that control their own food and energy are better placed to support each other through strikes and other collective action.

Instead of giving money to the private sector, why not give money to workers and communities who themselves are already using these assets, know how they work, know the territories, have the networks and so on, to allow them to provide their own services, assets and resources. That’s one part of what a public–common partnership is. […]

We need to transition away from monocultural food systems, industrialised food systems, towards something more biodiverse – what’s called agroecology. […]

I’m very aware that what we’re talking about here is generating ‘surpluses’ and using them to invest in the production of new things. That does sound quite capitalist, right? But we’re going back to this idea of contested reproduction – that in these moments of transition, there will not be a clear break where we have organised socialist production. We’re going to have to empower each other to step away from capital for our collective reproduction. And in those moments, capitalist and socialist dynamics will exist side by side.

§ Signals #002: the frame vs. the framer. Designer and excellent blogger Christopher Butler recently started a nice signals format, I didn’t feature it since I’ve already linked to two of the same pieces, but definitely worth a read for the others and the concept from the title. “The frame is not the framer. Models fill frames brilliantly, but they don’t choose which frames matter, or when to abandon a frame that’s stopped working, or how to hold multiple conflicting frames in tension. And I suspect they’ll never truly escape them, just as Moriarty’s escape from the holodeck was, itself, just another frame. That gap—between executing within constraints and deciding what the constraints should be—is where humans remain structurally necessary, not as a temporary condition until the next model drops, but as a permanent feature of how intelligence works when it’s embedded in time, consequence, and care.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• The formula won. Scott Smith with a look back at a design fiction project from 2014 about … football (soccer).“The paper had match reports built from network diagrams, a transfer market bankrolled by tech money, an agent accused of doctoring his clients' performance statistics, pitch-side screens showing high-frequency betting odds that got inside strikers' heads, a hacker awaiting extradition for blacking out a match's sensor feeds, a host nation deploying biometric border systems that made majorities of foreign fans reconsider attending.”
• The future needs more than forecasts. It needs urgent optimism—and now we can measure it. “Lumisphere invites visitors to move through three interlocking domes filled with panoramic projections, immersive soundscapes, and guided storytelling designed to spark imagination about the future. In the final dome, participants use an AI-supported creative tool to design the kind of ecological future they want to live in — translating imagination into possibility.”
• Black Mirror Survey Study. “We want to know how people speculate about the future of AI! We’re asking people to pitch their own Black Mirror-style science fiction story about generative AI (e.g., tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Midjourney). Your episode will be set in the near future and involve a situation where something goes wrong. There are no right or wrong answers - your imagination and instincts are exactly what we’re looking for.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Landmark German ruling declares Google’s AI Overviews are Google’s own words and makes it liable for false answers. Wait, what? Accountability?! “In this case, Google’s AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices. The court treated the AI overviews as Google’s own content and rejected Google’s argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.”
• India, UAE partner on AI sovereignty to bypass Google, Microsoft. “This is an example of India’s pragmatic approach to AI sovereignty, using the power of its scale to adapt what’s available from other countries, whether AI leaders like China and the U.S. or others, to adapt to its own needs.”
• A software engineer won a religious exemption from using AI at work. “Maus, a Unitarian Universalist, said she proposed the special treatment in April, citing environmental and ethical objections to AI that don’t align with her religious beliefs. She also said she consulted an employment lawyer and her local chapter’s minister to help make her case.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• World Without End. I’ve mentioned this book before, now it’s out in English and I highly recommend it. “In this intelligent, eye-opening and witty bestseller, an eminent climate expert takes a graphic novelist on a journey to understand the profound changes that our planet is experiencing.” (The reminder about the release and my learning about the Bookpile service, which looks fantastic, both via DD.)
• Mangroves comeback is a rare climate success story.. “These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science.”
• Visual feature: Beat The Heat: 50@50. “Extreme heat is pushing people, infrastructure, and ecosystems beyond safe limits, with cities hit hardest. Until recently, no city in the world experienced five days above 50°C in a year. Today, more than 100 cities do and this could rise to around 150 cities at 2°C of warming… and about 250 at 3°C.”

Asides

• Big Walk Is a new video game about … walking and talking. “In the ever-expanding pantheon of open-world video games where combat, survival, crafting, and anarchy reign, the simple idea of taking a virtual walk while chatting with a few friends might seem pointless. A new video game from Melbourne-based developer House House begs to differ, though, turning a casual stroll across dreamy landscapes into a uniquely collaborative game, where puzzles and the lengths required to solve them take center stage.”
• How Canadian rock duo Angine de Poitrine play with neurobiology and physics to make viral music. Finally! A Sentiers compatible “excuse” to mention those guys! (archive.ph). “This isn’t dissimilar to Indian classical music, where notes are divided by 22 instead of 12. But almost all of Western pop, rock, hip-hop and jazz is based off the system of 12 notes and their specific overtones—as a result, our brains have become attuned to them, and anything outside that system can just sound weird.”
• It hunts using its shadow Goth af (video on Instagram), and more here: Black Heron: the majestic hunter with styles. “Now here’s the most fascinating part, this clever bird uses its wings to form a canopy when fishing. This unique tactic is known as ‘canopy feeding’, where a black heron uses its wings like an umbrella to create shade. As it slowly takes a step or two in the water, it stops and creates a shadow to attract fish.”