The world is presently a strange mix of the old - building things and destroying them - and the new - technologies that replicate human thought and intelligence. A year ago I wrote a series of notes on ‘reckoning with AI’. To recap some conclusions: Part 1: Part 2: Part 3: Nothing I have seen in the intervening period has led me to revise these judgments.

This year the cherry blossoms have been late to arrive. Waiting, waiting, with expectation, they have finally appeared. Matsuo Basho in Spring 1688: And yet, with the clouds and the rain, the blossoms scatter too soon. Basho a few years and seasons later: More than a century passes, and with it, many seasons, and Kobayashi Issa pens: The deep appreciation of the seasons is one of the most distinctive features of Japanese culture.

Ernst Jünger , On the Marble Cliffs ( 1939): - Hannah Arendt, ‘From an Interview’ (1978): - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964): - Arundhati Roy, ‘Intimations of an Ending’ (2019): - Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is Not Enough (1952): - Albert Camus, ‘Are We Pessimists?’ (1946): - Pankaj Mishra, ‘Welcome to the age of anger’ (2016):

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, this time recorded in-person during a trip to Australia in February 2024. Donald Horne famously described the country as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.’ That depiction could easily be applied to much of the West over the last few decades. Central to our conversation is the issue of scale, prompted by a rare interview with Vaclav Smil.

A central theme of these notes is thinking through and thinking with : searching out and identifying fragments, frames, clues, people, texts: whatever might assist in reckoning with our collective conditions. We need partners, collaborators, aids and inspirations. With that in mind, this note engages with a series of artists and artworks, classical and contemporary, centred around a recent Europe trip.

Tolstoy’s depiction of the jumbled mix of good and bad, continuity and change, is one that still holds. Invariably, though, our attention is drawn to the specific ideas now appearing and perishing. With the new year, the content monster rolls on, with previews replacing reviews, all while the trendlines remain in place.

How to finish writing in, through, and on the fractured, fracturing year that is hastening to a close? Initially, a long post was drafted, full of quotes and charts, but on further reflection, more analysis is not needed at this point. Grimly marching towards the new year with more trepidation than anticipation. The balance of probabilities would suggest that conditions are likely to get worse. Pseudoreality prevails.

In Kyoto, the calendar indicates it is middle of December and winter has started. Looking around, red leaves gathering on the ground, it still feels like late autumn. Seasons and schedules increasingly fall out of sync. The translators note that ‘ aki no kure’ ‘ can mean either “autumn evening” or “the end of autumn.”’ Twilight hours and twilight times.

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World . Using frames of mirrors, shadows and others, Klein manages to capture something about the deeply weird and warped relations that now prevail between online and the real / ‘real’ world.

What to make of our present conditions? The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase.

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism : - Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil: - Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy : - Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’: - Paul Valéry, ‘Politics of the Mind’: - Anton Chekhov, In the Ravine :