In the move from enlightenment to entanglement, Indy Johar sees a new path through a world in flux
It’s been a while since we profiled Indy Johar, one of the earliest friends of the Alternative Global (see archive here), and this Greenpeace “System Shift” podcast interview with him seems like a good point - in its expansive view - to reconnect with Indy’s big-picture work on cities, environment, economy, technology and human potential.
From the Spotify blurb above:
Indy Johar, an architect who specialises in re-imagining institutions and envisioning different economies and relationships, argues that we are vastly underestimating the scale of the challenges we face.
According to Indy, the next few decades will completely redesign everything around us, including our material world such as our clothes, food, and furniture, as well as some of our concepts, including those of value, pricing, ownership, and work.
He sees us on the threshold of a structural transition that will fundamentally change society and our relationship with energy. Indy believes that civilisation is coming to the end of a 400-year-old vision of our world based on Cartesian dualism, where object and subject have been separated, and we are beginning to witness a re-entangling of the world around us in terms of interdependencies and externalities.
Indy predicts that this transition will lead to a reassessment of philosophical, material, social, risk, and costs, bringing about a new vision of the world that is more interconnected and holistic.
Indy Johar is an architect and the co-founder of Dark Matter Laboratories, an organisation dedicated to developing new support frameworks for collaborative system change.
More from Indy at his Twitter stream, and this 2022 FT interview:
“The scale of what we’re about to face is completely underestimated,” Johar tells me. “I think we’re going to have to redesign everything around us, our clothes, our food, our furniture, what we value, what the price of goods is, who owns matter, how we value durability and resilience, how we shift to an intangibles economy over a material economy?’
“The economic geography of our places and the way we live is fundamentally changing,” he continues. “The structure of society, our theory of work in a machine-assisted environment is changing and at the same time we need to transform the relationship with energy, so we’re in a structural transition of pretty much everything around us. It’s something no civilisation has ever faced before, a class of challenges which can only be solved on a planetary scale.”