Today’s guest is Dr. Teodor Mitew. He’s a systems thinker, historian, and digital media scholar at the University of Sydney, and the author of a new book called The Red Queen Trap: Complexity, Collapse, and the Myth of the Future, along with a volume of Balkan Neogothic short fiction called The Samodeva Queen and the Turbulence substack, where he focuses on complexity, systemic transformation, and the emerging architecture of the near future.
We discovered his work through a recent essay called “The Gated Age,” about the war in Iran and how it is likely to fracture whatever remains of the old Enlightenment dream of universal consensus, pushing us back toward a New Dark Age of mutually incompatible fiefs and sovereign realities. He argues that the Local -- material reality, food, plumbing, geography, and actual bodies -- always eventually wins out over abstract universalist ideology, no exceptions in history. Universalism, he argues, was always a kind of con, Enlightenment reason just replacing God as the guarantor of truth for a period of time that is now drawing to a close.
Now that the trapdoor beneath this waning universal order -- the sea lanes, the payment rails, the energy flows, the mutually incompatible eschatologies -- is finally visible, we’re moving from a world of sovereign equality into a world of gate permissions, a neo-medieval world of madmen, fools, and wanderers. A new Renaissance, if we’re lucky. Whoever controls the gate controls the future. As Teodor will now demonstrate, this isn’t altogether a bad thing...
Outro music by Teahouse Radio: “Dreaming Splendid Spaces.”
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