Too many things don’t make sense right now. I sense a peculiar creepiness when contemplating two seemingly unrelated topics. One of those topics is metamodernism. As you know, this has engaged my thoughts over the last week or so, so much so that I feel convinced that the subject is worth spending a lot of time understanding. It is new, at least in philosophical terms. Although the term has been around since the mid-seventies, it has largely been a phenomenon in the arts and literary worlds. More recently, the term has been given more substance. In 20010 Vermeulen and vandenAkker published a compilation of essays largely from a sociological bent.This publication has become a staple definition. More recently, in 2021, a book by J.A.J. Storm called “Metamodernity: The Future of Theory” has produced a substantial and broad philosophical description. From metarealism to process social ontology and from hylosemioics to knowledge and value, one gets the impression that the book bites off more than it can chew. But from the snippets that I have read so far the book doesn’t choke. It samples morsels and assimilates, constructs, and contextualizes a wide variety of sub-topics each of which much can be written about, each of which would stand as a worthy subject on its own.

The other subject paired with metamodernity is the recent and giant advance in artificial intelligence. Large language models have proliferated… so many in fact that, and so much better performance wise, that some of the newsworthy generations of only a year ago seem quaint and outdated. Most recent is the fantastic degree of realism found in text-to-video generators. The potential and ease with which the creation space can now be inundated swirls the mind.

Yet both subjects reveal a fact-fiction interplay cast in meaning: the uncanniness of AI stretches the boundaries of what might be deemed to be conscious while metamodernism rescues humanity from the horns of a pseudo-dilemma. The modernist near arrogant optimism together with its nihilistic postmodernist alter-ego form and reform into a self-contradictory sensibility that approaches understanding and wisdom, if not knowledge. On the one hand, it is a place where truth can at best be triangulated and never certain. The only guideposts we have are each other. On The other hand, AI will undermine our confidence in the internet and that will drive further into each others’ arms.