Love this. In the spirit of polymathic being gathering excellence from multiple domains, your piece makes me think of this Alan Watts riff of eastern philosophy of confusing symbols for the object itself.
Glad to have you here! Sam is a great dude. And yes, to Alan Watts. We definitely do confuse the symbol for the object. That's what I love about eastern philosophy: it seems to be able to hold the metaphor that the West makes literal.
Looks like a well known NYT columnist is glomming onto the "Poly" thing.
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Welcome to Our New Era.
What Do We Call It?
By Thomas L. Friedman
For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?
I was born into the “Cold War” era, and most of my career as a columnist was in the “Post-Cold War.” The latter era — those decades since 1989 characterized by American unipolar dominance — ended in the 2020s with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exploded Europe’s Cold War and post-Cold War security architecture, followed by China’s emergence as a true peer economic and military rival to the U.S.
My initial thought was that we should call this new epoch the “Post-Post-Cold War,” but that made no sense. No, we have arrived at a moment that is much more than the aftermath of a largely bipolar superpower rivalry born in the mid- to late-1940s. It’s the birth of something novel and highly complex to which we all must adapt, and quickly — but what to call it?
Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as the historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations, as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
It was a neologism — a word he just made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale.
So, welcome to the Polycene. It’s been an interesting ride getting here.
Nothing changes. When I left Vietnam I had to go to the airfield, a dirt strip in the jungle and wait a couple of days for a C-130 to pass through in the right direction. There were no “facilities” save a shack with a 50 gallon drum in it and a Sears catalog for TP. It took days to get to Tan Son Nhut Airfield where the Freedom Bird departed. No showers or decent bathrooms. At Tan Son Nhut you slept on the floor, there were bathrooms with hour lines to get in them, toilets but no showers. So all in all, you come in out of the field, and if you’re lucky you got to Tan Son Nhut in a week. Finally your number comes up and you get in line get on the freedom bird and there’s a full bird Colonel with an MP checking your haircut and uniform before you get on. WTF. Clearly a REMF divorced from reality.
They do wear helmets when needed. They have a different head-wrap that works if I remember right. The truban just replaces the normal hat. They also don't have to remove their turbans when going indoors like everyone else.
Excellent! I see this all the time at work where the wrong behavior is rewarded over and over again and I'm just like... can't we see we're measuring the wrong thing?
Love this. In the spirit of polymathic being gathering excellence from multiple domains, your piece makes me think of this Alan Watts riff of eastern philosophy of confusing symbols for the object itself.
Put to nice music from an album’s interlude:
https://on.soundcloud.com/viVuaBbMYzHPteKPny
(Also I found your great essay from Sam Alaimo’s repost)
Glad to have you here! Sam is a great dude. And yes, to Alan Watts. We definitely do confuse the symbol for the object. That's what I love about eastern philosophy: it seems to be able to hold the metaphor that the West makes literal.
Looks like a well known NYT columnist is glomming onto the "Poly" thing.
----
Welcome to Our New Era.
What Do We Call It?
By Thomas L. Friedman
For the past few years, I have had to ask myself a question I never asked before in my life: What should we call the era we’re living in today?
I was born into the “Cold War” era, and most of my career as a columnist was in the “Post-Cold War.” The latter era — those decades since 1989 characterized by American unipolar dominance — ended in the 2020s with the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exploded Europe’s Cold War and post-Cold War security architecture, followed by China’s emergence as a true peer economic and military rival to the U.S.
My initial thought was that we should call this new epoch the “Post-Post-Cold War,” but that made no sense. No, we have arrived at a moment that is much more than the aftermath of a largely bipolar superpower rivalry born in the mid- to late-1940s. It’s the birth of something novel and highly complex to which we all must adapt, and quickly — but what to call it?
Many climate scientists call our current epoch the “Anthropocene” — the first human-driven climate era. Many technologists call it the “Information Age” or now the “Artificial Intelligence Age.” Some strategists prefer to call it “the Return of Geopolitics” or, as the historian Robert Kagan put it, “the Jungle Grows Back.”
But none of these labels capture the full fusion taking place between accelerating climate change and rapid transformations in technology, biology, cognition, connectivity, material science, geopolitics and geoeconomics. They have set off an explosion of all sorts of things combining with all sorts of other things — so much so that everywhere you turn these days binary systems seem be giving way to poly ones. Artificial intelligence is hurtling toward “polymathic artificial general intelligence,” climate change is cascading into “poly-crisis,” geopolitics is evolving into “polycentric” and “polyamorous” alignments, once-binary trade is dispersing into “poly-economic” supply webs, and our societies are diversifying into ever more “polymorphic” mosaics.
As a foreign affairs columnist, I now have to track the impact and interactions of not only superpowers, but also super-intelligent machines, super-empowered individuals taking advantage of technology to extend their reach and super-global corporations, as well as super-storms and super-failing states, like Libya and Sudan.
I was musing about all this one day with Craig Mundie, the former head of research and strategy at Microsoft. I told him that in nearly every domain I was writing about lately, the old binary left-right systems were giving way to multiple interconnected ones, and, in the process, shattering the coherence of both the Cold War and post-Cold War paradigms.
At one point Mundie said to me, “I know what you should call this new era: the Polycene.”
It was a neologism — a word he just made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek “poly,” meaning “many.” But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where — thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity — every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale.
So, welcome to the Polycene. It’s been an interesting ride getting here.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/opinion/era-technology-poly-epoch.html
Nice!
Nothing changes. When I left Vietnam I had to go to the airfield, a dirt strip in the jungle and wait a couple of days for a C-130 to pass through in the right direction. There were no “facilities” save a shack with a 50 gallon drum in it and a Sears catalog for TP. It took days to get to Tan Son Nhut Airfield where the Freedom Bird departed. No showers or decent bathrooms. At Tan Son Nhut you slept on the floor, there were bathrooms with hour lines to get in them, toilets but no showers. So all in all, you come in out of the field, and if you’re lucky you got to Tan Son Nhut in a week. Finally your number comes up and you get in line get on the freedom bird and there’s a full bird Colonel with an MP checking your haircut and uniform before you get on. WTF. Clearly a REMF divorced from reality.
Haha. I'm sure it's a human tendency as old as time. It's still anoying! Thanks for sharing your story.
Hi sir. Thanks for your insight. Honest question: can the Sikhs in turbans still wear the helmets?
They do wear helmets when needed. They have a different head-wrap that works if I remember right. The truban just replaces the normal hat. They also don't have to remove their turbans when going indoors like everyone else.
Excellent! I see this all the time at work where the wrong behavior is rewarded over and over again and I'm just like... can't we see we're measuring the wrong thing?
Yeah, it’s ubiquitious!