In Reset Modernity!, the Karlsruhe exhibition we just opened at ZKM, visitors are requested to follow a series of specific procedures to reset the instruments that allow them to find their way in this highly complex question: where is Modernity heading and how can we orient ourselves through its metamorphosis? An excellent way, it seems to me, to consider the theme of this year's lecture series, Zukunftswissen. Visitors are handled a precious little booklet that we call a “fieldbook” because they are invited, really, to play an active role in surveying the quickly transforming landscape. At the end of each procedure, a cryptic message is provided about a somewhat mysterious triangle. The curators seem to be arguing that once this triangle has been understood, things will become really much clearer. It is this claim which I would like to comment on by developing a bit what this triangle could mean and how it has been drawn.

CM: still I am infinitely far from granting any symmetry between poor and rich, the victims and the profiteers of the capitalistic land grab! BL: But would you really disagree that it would be possible to detect a sort of inverse history at work here? At the beginning of Middle Ground, remember, we are in the 16th century, you see how weak are the envoys of the Kings of England and France, they have to parley their ways through nations that are still powerful (whenever English and French think they are strong enough so that they don’t need to negotiate, they are roundly defeated!). Two centuries later, there is no need to discuss at all: the Indians have been literally pushed aside. CM: So? BL: So what I am hinting at with this new version of symmetric anthropology is that, because of the ecological mutation, three centuries later, we are now bound to observe a reversal that I take to be exactly symmetrical to White’s narrative: the Old Empires so to speak, are so much weakened, so much taken aback, that they have to negotiate anew, and are looking everywhere for cues on how to cope! Those who were doing the colonization now exclaim: “Ah that’s what you meant by having your culture broken down” and those on the receiving end of the colonization sigh back: “Ah! may be, finally you will now understand”. CM: Bruno, Bruno nothing of what you say works here. Where have you seen a negotiation going on? What chance had, for instance, the Fuegans to negotiate? In 50 years they have been wiped out. All of them. To the last canoe. Who is sent as a diplomat? Guns, microbes, greed, an abominable landgrab. Diplomacy? This is a sickening idea really.

Introduction to the catalogue When you think about it, it’s clear that the moderns have inherited a tradition that started badly. What we used to celebrate at school as one of the greatest achievements of Western philosophy is the strange story of cavemen who are kicked out of their cave and end up blinded by the sun because they were stupidly instructed to look at it directly without anything to protect their eyes! What a great parable this is, one that portrays mortals blindly stumbling in the open air instead of staying prisoners in a dark cave below. We have to recognize that such an excursion out of the cave is not terribly good training for those who wish to be earthly-minded.

In the last few years, electronic media brought a revolution in the traceability of social phenomena. As particles in a bubble chamber, social trajectories leave digital trails that can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of collective life. To make sense of these traces a renewed collaboration between social and natural scientists is needed. In this paper, we claim that current research strategies based on micro-macro models are unfit to unfold the complexity of collective existence and that the priority should instead be the development of new formal tools to exploit the richness of digital data.