Part 4: Toward Renaissance17

Chapter 17: Contention in the Future: Between the Inevitability of Conflict and the Possibility of Renaissance

After a journey across the whole of history, the book turns to what has not yet happened. Contention will not stop, and the chapter sees in this a promise rather than a threat: a law that never stops is an opportunity that never ends. It takes up the new arenas in which algorithms and data have become a battlefield, and addresses the reader directly: you are not merely a recipient of awareness, you are its maker. It then asks how a community moves from being a field of attrition to an effective force, from defense to radiance, from survival to building, and who will carry this: the young, women, and scholars. The title of its conclusion sums it up: the future is not ours because it is coming, but because it is being made now.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

This chapter does not open with one of the numbered cases.

The Cases