New Now: a programme of online talks seeks to find answers to the dilemmas of our rapidly-changing world

How can we learn to comprehend and relate to shifts in our changing contemporary world? Online platform and discussion forum NEW NOW is launching this weekend with a programme of expert monthly talks, with panellists including philosophers, artists, activists, and researchers.

The platform’s inaugural event, “Neomythologies and the disintegration of reality”, will go live on 18 September at 6pm BST. Viewers can join philosophers Federico Campagna and Reza Negasterani, as they talk to Sarah Shin, co-founder of feminist publishing house Silver Press, on how revisiting myths can help humanity adapt to climate change and promote gender equality.

Organised by St Petersburg’s The Manege Central Exhibition Hall, the platform will stream events online for free in English and Russian. Prior to each talk, the platform will also publish a curated list of suggested readings.

“What drives the programme is the absolute uniqueness of the present moment. Humanity as a whole is facing the necessity of analysing its history and where it has led us,” creator of the programme Anna Kirikova told The Calvert Journal. “As American writer William Gibson famously said back in the 1990s: ‘The Future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed’. The NEW NOW is one of the means to put the ‘unevenly distributed’ pieces together, and allow us to accept challenges and risks, get insights into opportunities, and indeed take better control of our own fate and shared future.”

While details on future talks are still to be announced, the programme promises discussions on mental health, environmentalism, transhumanism, and the idea of post-truth.