Planet: Critical

Crisis of Mastery | Bayo Akomolafe

6 snips
Aug 8, 2024
Bayo Akomolafe, a philosopher, writer, and professor, explores the crisis of mastery that plagues our modern world. He dissects the impacts of 'white modernity' and its colonial echoes, urging a reevaluation of what progress means today. Through captivating metaphors, he discusses the importance of minor gestures in challenging systemic issues and how cracks can lead to innovation. Bayo also touches on the themes of belonging, failure, and the transformative power of our collective realities, inviting listeners to dance on the edges of thought and being.
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INSIGHT

Crisis As Failure Of Mastery

  • Bayo Akomolafe argues the crisis is a failure of mastery rooted in white modernity's project of control and extraction.
  • That quest for mastery now meets planetary and biological limits and curdles into catastrophe.
ANECDOTE

Ants Dying In A Circle

  • Akomolafe tells of ants marching in a circle until they die because their pheromone trail fed back on itself.
  • He uses this as a metaphor for humanity's exhausted march toward a collapsing notion of 'home'.
INSIGHT

Cracks As Seeds Of New Realities

  • Cracks are the underground tendencies that disrupt dominant moral fields and can birth new realities if cultivated.
  • Minor gestures and syncopations innervate colonial structures and open experimental spaces.
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