The Coming Age of Imagination

Sometimes it’s hard to look forward.

In these moments, I find that I can gain understanding from looking backward and trying to see a pattern. Like rewinding a melody, then playing it forward in order to predict the next note.

It’s clear to me, at least at some level, that most creative people are struggling right now. We’re seemingly in an endless cycle of destruction. Ecological. Economical. Societal. Escalation of warfare. Political point scoring.

This observation could be true.

But knowing exactly where we are in this cycle of destruction would change how we respond. What if we’re right at the end of the cycle? Knowing what would naturally come next might create more time to prepare for.

It does seem obvious to say creation follows destruction, but you can’t really postulate this without proof or rigor.

So, I started to look at the pattern of human progress, from building to destruction to rebuilding. Trying to see if this progress happens in predictive cycles.

We organize time into ‘the ages’. Distinct periods within our larger historical timeline. Each age, sharing cultural, technological, or political characteristics, that represent a significant era.

I did this from my own vantage point of being in the Western World, living in America, born in Europe. The Ages aren’t universal, nor is my understanding of them.

But, from where I stand, it seems clear that we’re on the verge of, or entering a new age, let’s, for the sake of argument, call it the ‘Age of Intelligence’ evolving around a new, sentient semantic web.

If we look back, to the previous age, the ‘Digital Age’, it had a massive impact on society, the economy, and access to information. As in all ages, this age felt like a critical reaction to the ages before, a dialog of sorts, on the structure of society, on who had access to information, a debate abot a new social contract based on more open sharing.

The digital age promised so much: web 1.0, freeing information and adding commerce. Web 2.0 layering on a social structure seemed to connect hopes for humanity with a growing understanding of digital systems. But, as Tim Berners-Lee shared with me privately at an industry dinner, ‘Human beings have a perverse ability to fuck up even the most beautiful of things.’

Once the idealism of the social web rubbed off, it became clear that in the wrong hands, this new technology could be used for rapid social engineering. Fast forward. Social Media became a tool for propaganda for all sides of the political spectrum. It became the way that countries invade each other, impact elections, and educate Large Language Models about all the facets of human failure.

But maybe this was the intent?

The Digital Age gave us the tools to look at ourselves in unprecedented detail — and in doing so, we were able to be critical of who we had become. We leaked, reported, shared, and sensationalized our own demise. We became the object of our gaze, and we were finally able to see everything, and it became excruciating.

If the Digital Age was critical. What was it critical of?

The digital age was likely a reaction to the previous age — Postmodernism, the age of artifice. Egg Cups on buildings. Fabricated patterns and textures in one media that belonged to another. Sotsas. Garish colors. Toxic Formica. If Post Modrnism was about engineering a lie, then the digital age set out to expose it.

The age predating Postmodernism was of course modernism. A great re-imagining. The Eames’s experimentation with glass fiber and ply. Bauhaus emigres rethinking societal structure after the destruction of WW2.

Before Modernism, Romanticism — a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized logic, reason, and order, often at the expense of emotion and individual imagination; essentially, it was a rejection of rationalism and a push towards valuing feelings and nature more prominently. Romanticism was deeply critical.

The Age of Enlightenment, logic, reason, order — Engineering

The Renaissance — A period of Imagining

It became clear that a distinct cycle of Engineering, Critique, and then Re-imagining existed.

And so, it led me to the conclusion that if the Digital Age was a critical evaluation of post-modernism, the next age should be an age of imagining.

The destruction that we’re seeing now is just a vestige of a bygone age and the creative people are about to take over and rethink what’s possible with all we have.

Wouldn’t that be a lovely thought?