Are We Living in a Golden Age? – With Emmett Shear, Anna Gát and Visakan Veerasamy

In this exciting upcoming SuperSalon, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, the internet’s favourite “friendly ambitious nerd” Visakan Veeraasmy, and Interintellect founder Anna Gát discuss the future that is already here, just unevenly distributed.

As we (hopefully) approach the tail end of the pandemic, many of us have started thinking, internally and in unison, what’s next? How do we recontextualize our lives in the grand scheme of things, how do we reorient ourselves, and the work we feel we must do? How should we take stock of who we are, where we are, and how do we articulate for ourselves where we want to go, in a way that is compelling and nourishing, in a way that makes life worth living?

Let’s talk a little bit about the “Golden Ages” and hyper-creative scenes of the past – were they real, or were they imagined in retrospect? Did people know when they were living through the best of times, or were they always nostalgic for some more romanticised era of the past? And what of evolving visions of the future? Were we more excited about the future at the turn of the millennium than we are now?

If we look around us: Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitch, Interintellect – we have access to tools and knowledge at our fingertips that our predecessors would’ve done anything to get their hands on. If we are living in a Golden Age already, why doesn’t it feel like it? And what should we do about that?

In our last SuperSalon together, we discussed online communities, global bonding, emerging subcultures and cyber families. In this one, let’s talk about what comes next.

We hope you can join us!

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Emmet’s TED Talk on being home on the internet.

Further readings to check out:

• “We are already in the Golden Age of the 2000s” – https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1469808970386739200
• “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts
• A review of Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin, about the Industrial Revolution: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/26/libertys-dawn-emma-griffin-review
• The Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age, by Ada Palmer

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Cover art: Moebius

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