A time to reckon with the gods of our making

We know where the road we're on leads.

- R Sukumar

We live in a world of filter bubbles and alternative facts. What's next? The big question for 2026 and beyond is simply this: How can we build on what makes us special?A quarter of a century ago we started forgetting phone numbers. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing; a good memory may be a sign of high cognitive abilities, but intelligence, it is not. As Sherlock Holmes says in A Study in Scarlet: “A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.”

The reason we forgot phone numbers was because all the important (and unimportant) ones were in our mobile phones, which, over the past 25 years, have only become smarter. The phone has also become the easiest way to stay connected to the internet — and, by extension, to shop, search, consume and create content, interact with people and, with the arrival of mass-scale artificial intelligence, analyse and code (though this was possible to some extent even before the advent of AI).

No man is now an island; though every man and woman now is just their mobile phone. (Want to lose yourself? Just lose your phone).

So, for all these years, we have been living a life explained by the two sentences that precede Marshall McLuhan's most famous quote: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”