Metamodernism

NFTs were contemporary art crossed with crypto, attracting speculation and fraud— but ironically, they can help us democratically reimagine society. In the wake of AI art, don’t forget about them! — Remember NFTs? Sam Bankman-Fried, anyone? As recently as 2021, the phenomenon of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) shocked the world. In the wake of AI art, it’s easy to forget about this craze. But, more importantly, we should not forget the positive potential of this mostly bad phenomenon:

My early 2017 appraisal of these two public intellectuals proved more on point than I could have imagined — Preface to 2023 re-launch Welcome to this re-launch of my detailed reading and commentary upon the first time Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia spoke together: about society, about identity politics, about feminism, about campus activism. In retrospect, I can see that my resistance to the trend of these two rising at the time was…

Jumping off the edge of your “maps of meaning” takes a sense of inner safety — (from the book, 12 Commandments) Owned by Our Maps Maps aren’t there to be owned. They own us. And then we draw our little life projects on them, our little dramas and traumas and stories and rises and falls and getbacks. So once you break the chains of shame and guilt, and face the…

Premodern, Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern — Picking a fight with the Hipster PoMo 30 Somethings of youtube over on the Science Fiction channel. In fact I like Thomas Flight’s video essay a lot but I think he makes the mistakes that all postmoderns make about metamodernism…they make it a pomo rebrand. So I go to bat…

In times of war, issues of ethnic and national identity overshadow all considerations of class. We are thereby forgetting a crucial question: Which class relations should we aspire towards? — Protopia and the Metamodern View of Class Can class society and its inequalities, its mechanisms of “stratification”, truly be transcended — or is the vision of the classless society a distraction that puts us at odds with social reality, ultimately always leading to oppression?

If one were thinking up metamodern advertising angles, the tagline ‘once more with feeling’ would fit the bill. This was one of the promotional hooks that was featured on posters for Marvel Studios’ final (as of now) installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy series. The Guardians are probably the…

This is a lightly edited transcript of a talk I presented at the Glocal Metamodernisms Conference, at the University of Jyväskylä, in Finland on April 28, 2023. If you are unfamiliar with the concept “metamodernism” please take a look at this article I published on Medium in 2018. If we…

Across the world, Multiculturalism has been failing over the recent decades: conflicts, racism, discrimination, antagonism, distrust, ghetto despair, the rise of rightwing populism, riots, crime, and even ISIS as an emergent transnational vortex of discontent and violent regression. These realities are grasped differently across the political spectrum, damning or defending Multiculturalism. But none of the established positions seem to embrace a proper update of the Multiculturalist stance: Transculturalism.