Late Modernity
Discussion
Venkatesh Rao:
"Late modernity is localized, slowly unraveling, zombie persistence of the modernity machine, including both natural persistence, and conscious political projects to perpetuate it while that’s still an option, or restore it to a pristine state once it is clearly entering a state of dereliction.
There is not much more to be said about late modernity (the associated intellectual currents are fairly weak — Zygmunt Bauman and a few others come to mind), but there is a lot to see of it. Almost everything you see around you is late modern. Almost everything in the news headlines is late modern. We won’t see the last of late modernity in our lifetimes.
Arguably, the bulk of the energy of the world will continue to flow through late-modern pathways for at least our lifetimes, even if very little of the evolutionary intelligence of the world flows through those pathways (hence “zombie” or perhaps “energetic zombie” would be a better term, like the ones in the Korean movie, Train to Busan).
China as it is being imagined and conjured by the CCP today, if not its people, is primarily a late modern world process. But China, the larger, more nebulous civilizational unit and world sub-process, is a more complex beast, not reducible to late-modern dynamics and phenomenology being supervised by the CCP.
Late modernity is not a focus for us, but I liked Adam Curtis’ fevered account of it as “hypernormalcy” in his 2016 documentary. All the energy of the Trumpist planetary turn, right up to the Maduro kidnapping/rendition this weekend, is late-modernity in action. Trumpism and related reactionary turns worldwide are obviously late modern, at least doctrinally, even if they are tactically more open (including borrowing from postmodernity and meta-modernity, which we discus next) in their attempts to shape the fate of the world."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine)