P A Martin Börjesson's thought stream

The madman came into the university at midday, a lit lantern in his hand. “I am looking for the world,” he cried. “I am looking for the world.” The scholars laughed. “Why the lantern?” asked a professor. “It is broad daylight.” “I know,” said the madman. “That is the trouble.” “And the world is all around us,” said another. “We study it every day.” Then the madman pointed to the…

I have been trying to understand why so much feels unstable lately. Not just politically or economically, but at a deeper level that is harder to name. What if this unease is not primarily a sign of systems failing, but of conditions shifting beneath them — and of us trying to make sense of the world from the wrong level. For a long time, civilization has operated on a quiet assumption. Nature…

What if our experience of crisis — whether described as a polycrisis or metacrisis, or as brittleness and non-linearity in the language of BANI — are not the causes of our instability, but symptoms of a deeper transformation? Not a transition, but a metamorphosis. If that is the case, underlying and mutually reinforcing forces are reshaping the very foundations of our civilization. The current…

In the last decade of global turbulence, it has become increasingly clear that the way we usually talk about the future is no longer sufficient. For a long time, we’ve assumed that the future is something that comes later—a next step in a linear sequence of time. We’ve drawn curves, traced trend lines, and tried to predict what might happen next. But all of this rests on an underlying, and…

We did not intend to create a philosopher. We built a tool to complete our sentences. And yet, here we are. Staring into the language it gives back to us, wondering who, or what, is really speaking. Large Language Models (LLMs) are not conscious. They do not know, want, feel, or intend. They do not reason in any human sense. And yet they speak. They advise. They offer insights. They mirror our…

We live in a state of separation. From nature. From the whole. From ourselves. This is the result of a long cosmological shift in which humanity’s relationship to the world has gradually changed — from participant to ruler, from inhabitant to stranger. The historical journey of cosmology At the dawn of history, there was no separation between human and world. Hunter-gatherer peoples like the…

What actually happens when something foreign not only enters a system – but begins to reshape the system itself? Isn’t this precisely what we feel AI (or what is popularly called AI) is doing? When we worry that AI will replace human jobs, or when AI is seen as a threat that could extinguish humanity – what are we really thinking? I believe that our feelings and scattered fearful thoughts on…

Reflections on why most transformation efforts fall short – and what might actually be required Lately, I find myself returning to the same conversation in different forms. It doesn’t matter whether I’m speaking with CEOs, strategy teams, or transformation officers – the themes tend to converge. Everyone’s talking about transformation. The pressure is real: digitalization, AI, sustainability,…

In my previous post, The Dead Horse Epiphany: When We Realize the Ride is Over, I explored the moment of collective realization that many of the systems we rely on are no longer viable. The challenge isn’t just recognizing that the horse is dead—it’s deciding what to do next. For futurists, this epiphany forces a fundamental shift in how we approach foresight, strategy, and…

There comes a moment when the illusion of progress shatters, and we recognize the uncomfortable truth: many of the systems, industries, and ideas we continue to invest in are, in reality, already dead. We are riding horses that no longer move, sustained only by inertia, denial, and wishful thinking. This is the “Dead Horse Epiphany”—a collective moment of awakening when societies, businesses, and…

Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.

Timothy Snyder is very clear about this. And history backs him up.

The advent of the Internet has also given the New Caesars something their predecessors could not have hoped to have: the ability to bypass or marginalize traditional custodians and gatekeepers of public knowledge—the established media, academia, and other authority figures—without imprisoning or killing all that many of them.

Claire Berlinski call this new class of authoritarian leaders the New Caesars and not fascist because the term fascist is historically incorrect. A agree with this and much of her analysis even if I think we need to find a better term for them.