Launching Monthly Essays

Across the next 12 months we'll anatomise the past, present, and future of technological modernity.

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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🎧 If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s instalment, go here for the audio version of Launching Monthly Essays. 🎧

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This instalment marks a turning point for NWSH. It’s the last Sunday note in its current form.

As I mentioned in last week’s New Beginnings, I’m moving to a new format: instead of the note each Sunday, longer essays published once a month. It’s time to go deeper on the big ideas that have always informed the Sunday instalment, and a monthly cadence will allow that.

So what can you look forward to when it comes to these longer essays?

I want to write about the technology revolution we’re living through, and how it’s changing our relationship with ourselves, one another, and reality itself. A connected world – one in which each of us has instant access to the hivemind – is bringing into being a new form of consciousness, and we at NWSH need to explore that.

I want to write, too, about the interrelated set of social and cultural changes we’ve seen across the last decade, including populism and the species of progressivism that some call the woke movement. Both have their roots in two ideas that fuelled the Enlightenment, and that are still writing their strange logic through our lives: freedom and equality.

Also, about the psychic tension attendant on life inside technological modernity, a system that edges us closer each day to environmental collapse and supplies 24/7 news coverage of each step along the journey. What does it mean to live inside a dispensation that you know is broken?

I could go on, but you get the idea. We’re going to cover a lot of ground. But above our heads, a set of fixed stars will help us navigate.

Among them is the idea that this moment has exhausted the old conservative vs progressive dichotomy, which for so long has shaped the way we think about our communal affairs. Now, we need new ways to think about the collective choices we face. And that means new ways to think about what we are, and how we should live. I keep using the word ‘new’, but I suspect some of the answers we need lie with a project to remember the old.

Meanwhile, our pole star will be an emerging tension. That is, a tension between the human and a set of overlapping systems – of global capital, data, biotechnologies and machine intelligence – that want to wrest control of our destiny from us, or even literally end us as a species.

An assortment of thinkers urge us to prepare for this post-human future. Some even want us to welcome it. As you’d expect from the author of a newsletter called New World Same Humans, I’m not so sure. I suspect the emergence of such a future is less straightforward a matter than its proponents want to make out; and certainly, it’s not to be welcomed. Instead, we should seek out new ways to conserve recognisably human ways of life in the face of the an all-conquering machine that wants to dismantle them.

Plenty, then, to keep us busy. And now, as we head into 2022, we’ll have an email schedule that makes sense. The midweek newsletter, New Week, will be a scrapbook of events and first reflections. The monthly essays are where the deeper thinking happens.

Don’t think this change means I’ll be sending you fewer pieces. In fact, though I hesitate to say this, it means I’ll be sending more. I’ll still be in touch intermittently on Sundays with additional articles to support the monthly essay, including interviews and recommended reading.

And with that, this little turning point is official. I hope you’ll enjoy the essays that are coming, and that they form the basis of an even richer conversation between us. The first, provisionally called The Worlds to Come, will land in your inbox on Sunday 13 February.

In the meantime, I’ll be back as usual on Wednesday with another New Week. Thanks for reading, and be well,

David.