Power, Porn, and Portals
Reflections on key moments of The PolyOpportunity so far
by Tim Leberecht
I was in a café in Istanbul’s vibrant Cihangir neighborhood — a familiar haunt for expats like myself — when it struck. It felt less like a jolt and more like a wave, soft yet sudden. I seemed to be the last one to notice. Others dashed outside. I remained seated, paralyzed. My first thought was vague: a bomb, perhaps? A man confirmed what I eventually realized: it had been an earthquake. A quick Google search delivered a strangely reassuring truth — 6.2 on the Richter scale, its epicenter in the Sea of Marmara. A big one, but most likely not The Big One that everybody’s expecting here. I felt my face turn pale, and more than 200 aftershocks later, I think it still is.
Earthquakes freak the hell out of me. I wonder why I’ve been spending so much of my life in seismic hot zones: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Lisbon, Istanbul. I’m afraid of nature in the first place — even a walk through a forest unsettles me, and I see sharks in the most tranquil lakes.
This wasn’t the only disruption nature demanded recently. A massive power outage plunged Spain and Portugal into stillness. Civilization, briefly, came to a halt, leaving many disconnected, stranded, in the dark.
“Power is the ability to move energy through a system,” leadership coach Larissa Conte told us at The PolyOpportunity Retreat in New York. Earthquakes are nature’s violent demonstration of that principle. So too, as David Brooks observed, is the Trump administration: not only cruel, but relentlessly energetic, a long, disorienting tremor in its own right.
In an earthquake, millennia of pressure are released in seconds, with repercussions that echo across time and geography. In the days since the quake, I’ve been thinking about moments in life, not only those that can end or upend a life, like the one in Istanbul on Wednesday, but any given moment really. How we always — always! — underestimate their power. A careless word, an impulsive gesture, a mishap, misstep, misunderstanding, a chance encounter, a sudden gaze, a casual line in a conversation that the other person never forgets, a near-fatal accident, a smell, a sight, a touch that can change your life forever. We are always inches away from devastation or delight. Moments strike out of nowhere, they are gone before you grasp them, but then they linger and refuse to ever go away. Moments have staying power.
Combine many such powerful moments, and you have momentum. The term has become a buzzword. Coaches invoke it, businesses pursue it, movements rely on it. Momentum gives form to randomness, a sense of direction. It is the illusion of control, the architecture of possibility. Momentum directs energy towards one shared destination. It connects moments of connection into a movement.
THIS is the Opportunity: To collect and create moments carefully — to curate them — so that they move us and move us somewhere.
I’ve been reflecting on the moments of The PolyOpportunity, our year-long global initiative in partnership with the Acosta Institute and The Holon Institute to create a new story, a new economy, a new politics for polycrisis times. As we are two in-person gatherings, three online sessions, and many conversations and writings into it, has the polyphony of moments added up to momentum, and if so, where is it headed?
At our kickoff, The Berlin Salon, we staged an absurdist, Beckettian welcome in a very Berlin industrial loft. Posters mocked the corporate ideals of the beforetimes — DEI, purpose, mindfulness, sustainability awards, “chief soul officers” — now fossilized remnants of good intentions. In the center: a humble bowl of potato soup, inviting attendees to stare the polycrisis in the eye from a point of austerity. Later, performance artist Lori Baldwin’s humanoid robot, NEKRA, offered its services as a “death concierge,” a future-proof job if we’re indeed nearing an “age of extinction.”
All of this underscored one certainty: loss. Of stability, prosperity, status, and meaning. Germany, once affluent and secure, now confronted its decline. The “fat years,” as one says in German, are over. Belts are to be tightened, costs to be cut, vacations to be postponed. What is true for Germany is true for our whole species: never having truly learned how to thrive, we must now learn how to survive.
THIS is the Opportunity: To appreciate what’s essential to us when losing is our natural predicament. To move from failure to failure with enthusiasm, as Winston Churchill once said. To understand rock bottom as a tabula rasa from which to create something beautiful — even if just for one night.
Later, we danced the depression away: with a drag artist ensemble led by Alvin Collantes, a DJ set by DJ Discotopian, and a live performance by vocalist Elena Moroder, the granddaughter of Giorgio Moroder, the godfather of 80s disco hedonism, an era that seems as far away from these aftertimes as Donald Trump is from decency.
And yes, of course the man himself was the elephant in the room. Journalist Andrian Kreye depicted the unholy alliance of tech and dictatorship as a power play increasingly outside our control; ethicist Carissa Véliz called out the perils of surveillance capitalism and impressed on us the importance of privacy as an essential public good; and former Meta tech policy executive Alexis Crews spoke of an “invisible war” against us raged by the tech platforms, and pointed out that 70 percent of people around the world believe that government leaders, business leaders, and the press purposely mislead them.
We’re in Dark Mode, says Matt Klein, the cultural theorist, head of foresight at Reddit, and writer of the ZINE newsletter: a vice-over-virtue response to the previous belief in moral correctness and betterment (“Light Mode”). In New York, at our Retreat at the Garrison Institute, a former Capuchin monastery in the Hudson Valley, he held a meditation on the search terms on Pornhub, the largest porn platform and the 7th most viewed website in the world (more frequented than Amazon.com). If Sophie Gilbert, author of the upcoming book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves thinks that “we are all living in the world porn made,” Klein asks, “What if we were to respect its data without judgement?”
Having been granted access to Pornhub’s data, he observed a few surprising patterns: “Hentai” — a style of Japanese pornographic anime — is the number one most searched for term on Pornhub globally. Trans porn has grown to become the 7th most popular category worldwide, all the while anti-trans legislation has grown nearly six-fold during this same exact time period. Brazil is more than 63 percent more likely to view Trans content than the rest of the world, while also maintaining the highest rate of trans murder than anywhere else. And, in 2024 searches for “authentic sex,” “real authentic,” and “real amateur,” grew year over year.
Klein drew three main conclusions: First, the surge in searches for the “real” reveals a deep tension in our collective psyche, “a desire to pierce through artificial, filtered, and performative culture and to witness something more raw, human, and intimate.” Secondly, “the paradox of human sexuality and social politics, and the tension between public performance versus private desire is worthy of our attention. Public condemnation often masks private fascination.” “What contradictions do you carry?,” he asked us, and: “Where do your public expressions diverge from private thoughts? What hypocrisies do you hold? Which stigmas do you wish would cease to exist? Which do you perpetuate?”
If Light Mode was defined as “pretense, insincere social posturing and rapid, mindless, meaningless growth,” can we embrace Dark Mode as a moment for self-reflection and accountability? Klein concluded:
“Our present darkness is not to be feared or escaped. It holds wisdom if we dare to listen. In darkness, our senses are sharpened. We notice what may have been obscured or overlooked for too long. An outcome of Dark Mode isn’t just cynicism. It’s honesty. There’s newfound permission to acknowledge all the contradictions of ourselves — the virtuous and the villainous, the tender and the transgressive.”
Roger Berkowitz, the founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, in his talk, said that the humanities instilled in him the need for an uncorrected life:
“Some people maybe don’t have that much to hide, but they’re sort of boring. Most great artists have a lot to hide. I think most people who take chances and fail a lot in their life and do things that maybe they regret have a lot to hide. It’s part of what made them human. I think depth is related to having a hidden life. And we are increasingly living without a hidden life.”
He suggested we keep friends with whom we can make inappropriate jokes: “If you are afraid of trying out bad things with your friends because they might report you or your students or your professors, you can’t actually experiment with who you are and you become a flattened version of a human being.”
THIS is the Opportunity: To find and embrace the full complexity and strangeness of our humanity in the dark, without judgment. To have a hidden life and allow others to have one, too.
He then uttered a sentence that struck like an earthquake: “We must choose humanity over justice.” One attendee immediately rose after Berkowitz had concluded his talk: “Did I hear you right?” she asked politely, but the tension was palpable. Berkowitz answered that he believed in the “plurality of humanity” but not the concept of an absolute truth. “We are all fundamentally different,” he said, and the humanities had taught him truth is something that we’d need to work on “bottom up,” wrestling with each other, accepting dissent, and agreeing on some things, while disagreeing on others.
True, truth may not be an orthodoxy, as Plato suggested, rather a contact sport, but it’s difficult to embrace this notion without the suspicion of ethical relativism. Some of us would no longer be alive if those who defended us had chosen humanity over justice.
In an earlier session, Irvin Weathersby Jr., the author of the book Open Contempt that explores structural racism in the arts and culture world, gave a sobering account of what it means to be held in open contempt of one’s humanity. “The Black experience globally,” he said, “is often like we are openly hated. And the powers that be who are currently in administration are not hiding that they want to erase all or at least attempt to erase all of our achievements for this country.”
So is “choosing our humanity over justice” really the only way to overcome polarization, or merely a cop-out? Must we really be close to get closer? To let go of our absolute beliefs, to give up the idea of an overarching justice? That is perhaps THE question. Jennifer Brown, the opening speaker who still proudly wears the DEI label, asked a related one: “Can we belong without othering?”
THIS is the Opportunity: To create belonging without othering, to hold intimacy over ideology.
Such belonging, such intimacy may heal our ‘world alienation.’ Berkowitz used this term by Hannah Arendt to lament our desire to control life, from the scientific to the AI revolution. He cited William Blake’s 1795 painting of Isaac Newton, showing the physicist sitting naked on an outcrop of rocks by the sea, with his compass and his tools, completely oblivious to the nature that surrounds him.
This is the very crux of our alienated way of living. One doesn’t really know anything unless one is either very close and or views it from a distance, the Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt once remarked, and demanded we must take a “long, loving look at the real.”
One way to do this is to change our relationship to uncertainty. Maggie Jackson, author of Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, reframed uncertainty as positive stress and claimed that when the stakes are high, those who do not know gain the cognitive advantage: “When you’re unsure, you’re working harder, your brain literally becomes receptive to new data. Uncertainty is a signal that it’s time to forget the autopilot and start rising up and meeting the world and updating your understanding of it.”
She cited studies showing that emergency room doctors self-report heightened attention in moments of uncertainty and say that it helped them be more focused and alert. The key is to focus on the present rather than the outcome: “Outcome fixation undermines performance,” Jackson explained.
THIS is the Opportunity: To not just ‘tolerate’ uncertainty, but consider it an ally that prompts us to be more present, more focused, and higher-performing.
Uncertainty is of course also both the subject and raison d’etre for religion or any form of spiritual belief. Anything we don’t know, or don’t know for sure, tends to get delegated to the realm of the mystical. And it is clear that our traditional institutions of knowledge production are in crisis. Trust in academia, media, and politics is eroding, the liberal consensus on understanding the world based on enlightenment and scientific rationality has been called off, with the demise of the Bretton Woods actors of transnationalism being the sorry political equivalent.
All the while the interest in supernatural or mystical experiences helping us access a non-rational, spiritual sphere, often enabled by psychedelics, shamanic facilitation, astrology, or simply moments of collective effervescence, has grown. Likewise, we are rediscovering Indigenous wisdom, as the filmmakers Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo so beautifully captured in their new documentary, The Eternal Song, whose trailer they premiered at a PolyOpportunity online session on “Collective Healing” last week.
A new term has made the rounds lately to describe this phenomenon: transrational. The transrational is not simply irrational, it is not just a return to some form of pre-rational, naive (as in, devoid of modern rational knowledge) intuition; it is a school of thought well aware of its non-rational elements, a form of enlightened irrationality, if you will.
At the same time, it combines the enlightened irrational with a form of data-based, quasi-objective, super-rational ‘total’ knowledge designed to compute knowledge faster and more efficiently than any human brain ever could, ultimately resulting in a transhumanist stance: I am of course talking about artificial intelligence.
The transrational is where Silicon Valley and autocratic leaders, where Musk and Trump 2.0 meet. Both are characterized by extreme levels of irrationality, of excessive, impulsive behavior; both are viewed as messianic figures by their followers, and at least in the case of Trump his return to power is seen by some as a mystical event, as a long overdue rupture of a system that had long been in agony, riding a wave of historical change at the nexus of AI and the end of the liberal order, humanism, and globalization. As the historian and fascism researcher Timothy Snyder points out, Trump may well be what Francis Fukuyama has called “the last man” — an all-too-human incarnation of our worst human tendencies before these are superseded by technology or some other transhuman force that will sweep them away.
Berggruen Fellow Boris Shoshitaishvili proposed the “planetary” as a category for this new post-global, post-anthropocentric era, and it is no coincidence that right-wing figures like Steve Bannon are claiming the concept as well. The planetary can be seen both as the ultimate act of world alienation or an act of re-attunement to the world. In any case, it seems like the less-threatening, lesser-evil twin of the transrational.
Both concepts mark the ushering in of a new epoch in which our conventional concepts of knowledge are upended and replaced by speculation (from financial derivatives to prediction markets, meme coins, dating apps, and conspiracy theories). In Berlin, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou argued that speculation has always been a systemic attribute of capitalism, but what’s new now is that speculative elements have become integral to politics and even the personal realm. Speculation is the MO of a post-truth society. It is the only possible action in a flood of uncertainty and not-knowing.
THIS is the Opportunity: To integrate the mystical into the means of knowledge production, and acknowledge the transrational as the most apt philosophy of our time.
Another way to tackle uncertainty is to think better, together. Philosopher-du-jour Agnes Callard, infamous not only for her strong opinions, but also for living with both her ex-husband and husband under one roof, in her most recent book, Open Socrates, makes “the case for a philosophic life,” and in New York, together with economist Robin Hanson, she enacted a Socratic dialogue to illustrate her argument.
With relentless precision and insistence, Callard pursued what she calls “untimely questions”: questions that are so big that we don’t dare answering them or so fundamental to our lives that “by the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we should live our lives, we’ve long been taking heaps of answers for granted,” as she writes. “What is success?,” “What is love?,” and “What is the meaning of life?,” and “Is life even worth it?”
She wants us to not shy away from them, and in fact, question everything instead of rushing to find convenient, actionable answers, problems to be solved. Thinking, Callard told us, happens when two people who see themselves as equals pursue a question together.
Watching her and Hanson do exactly that, turning one stone after another as a way of getting closer to a common truth rather than discovering it, was a spectacular, mind-blowing experience, and a zealous pledge for unabashed intellectualism in a time when intellect is subject to a smear campaign covered up as cultural revolution. “I’m pretty alienated from my body. I don’t think it teaches me anything. I don’t think it gives me wisdom. I just know my back is really, really hurting,” Callard responded to a question from the audience about her focus on the mind and disregard for other, more holistic forms of intelligence.
THIS is the Opportunity: To question everything and ask, in particular, the big “untimely questions” in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Only then can conversations be true meetings of the mind and serve as the source code for flourishing societies.
Sophie Strand, the writer and poet and self-acclaimed “troubadour animist” would disagree with Callard’s skepticism towards the body as a source of wisdom. For her, the body is a portal. She first appeared on stage when she joined regenerative economist John Fullerton and Garrison Institute founder Jonathan Rose for a conversation about the cycles of life and what a caring, truly life-centered economy might look like. And her first words cut through the serenity of the former monastery’s meditation hall like a knife:
“I come to you as someone with an incurable degenerative disease who writes about the concept of wholeness and health and how it is always perspectival. And how it might now be used to haunt us and to plug us into the capitalist system, to be constantly paying our hard earned money, to come back into some kind of fictional normativity.
And as someone who studies ecological systems, I know that most of our history are actually giant extinction events and not the kind of brief moments of equilibrium and regeneration, and that many, many, many different times in the history of the biosphere, 99% of life has died. And I come to you as someone who struggles to pay astronomic medical bills, who routinely gets my lifesaving medicine denied, who has had friends die because they couldn’t afford things, people who were drowning in student debt, drowning in medical debt, unable to even pay rent, homeless.
And my question is, how can we root this conversation out of the abstract? How? How can we admit that we are not inside a forest where the mother trees are giving sucrose and carbon to other beings? When we live in a society that is actively destroying our extended body?”
John Fullerton responded by describing how the current economic system had been designed to extract natural and social capital in order to optimize financial capital:
“Slowing growth is not going to change the equation. What we need is going back to living systems. We need to have this imbalance of financial capital composted, and recycled into natural and social capital on a scale that no one’s willing to talk about. Trillions and trillions of dollars of financial capital in surplus to be recycled into natural capital. Now, I don’t know how to cause that to happen, but that is the pathway if we were to follow how living systems work.”
THIS is the Opportunity: To create a non-extractive economy that serves our “extended body,” that serves all species, and defines value as the generation and regeneration of life.
Douglas Rushkoff, for one, does not believe that business can be a viable tool for “solving the problems caused by business, any more than we can look at a wellness meditation app as the solution to the social media apps that have made you crazy in the first place.”
A sharp-tongued cynic with a big heart, the bestselling media theorist and critic has never been one for posturing. At the New York Retreat, he threw some curveballs at those conscious, progressive business leaders in attendance. His talk, at times an obituary (of capitalism), at times standup comedy, was so poignant, so moving that we’ll publish the full-length version soon, but suffice to say for now that a critic armed with sardonic humor will almost always make you think but rarely drives you to tears. Rushkoff did.
He traced the invention of “jobs” back to the late medieval ages and pointed to feudalism as the reason for the “time is money” productivity paradigm dominating our modern societies. “Before they put the clock on the tower of medieval villages, the only people who worked for wages were slaves,” he said.
“What the f*** is business?,” he asked and gave the answer himself: “a necessary compromise of our social values, a last resort for a society that’s lost the ability to take care of each other.” He suggested that “if you give technology to a bunch of hippies, you get something wonderful, but give technology to a bunch of capitalists, and you get digital feudalism.” Like technology, business is what he calls a “nonspecific amplifier.”
He is against “going meta” and lambasts it as a tendency of intellectuals to remove themselves from the world, another form of Arendtian ‘world alienation,’ if you will. “I get that we’re living in a planetary way, but human beings don’t live at scale,” he said. For Rushkoff, the key to reconnection lies in the most concrete expressions of humanity, to allow ourselves to feel “a state of compassion that is almost unbearable.” He continued: “Underneath any reality, there is an ocean of tears. But we are so afraid to touch it.”
He wants us to “denaturalize” things so we can see them as weird as they are. And he wants us to get into the weeds, get our hands dirty, touch the soil, or go to our neighbor when we need a drill rather than to Home Depot.
His credo: “Make things weird, so the weird can make things. The weirder you are, the more likely the things you make are going to be pro social, pro human.”
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Rushkoff’s appeal to our weirdness closed the loop to the strangeness Matt Klein found in the search terms on Pornhub, the wisdom of Ubuntu and other Indigenous belief systems, the “choose humanity over justice” and “live a hidden life” proposals by Roger Berkowitz, the “belonging without othering” challenge by Jennifer Brown, the “embrace uncertainty” call by Maggie Jackson, the rise of the transrational, and the “Other AI” championed by Dr. Sará King, Neil Redding, and Wakanyi Hoffman on an eponymous panel.
With the words of education pioneer Karima Kadaoui, founder of the Tamkeen Foundation in Morocco and a speaker at our upcoming Tangier Festival: We must trust our humanity in a crisis of humanity.
These are some of the moments I remember. They are foreboding the many more that are yet to come.
THIS is The PolyOpportunity: an attempt to touch and shape reality together — not to come up with yet another utopia, but to make sure that the future — with business as its nonspecific amplifier — is beautiful enough for us to want it.
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This article first appeared in Beauty Shot, the weekly newsletter of the House of Beautiful Business. Learn more about The PolyOpportunity and the upcoming Tangier Festival (May 15–27).