Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?: A Short-Listed Essay

When the Berlin-based cultural magazine LETTRE INTERNATIONAL organized its philosophical essay competition, it received 2,481 submissions in seven languages from 123 countries. Juries chose 33 authors as finalists: this essay is one of these short-listed papers. It sends a farewell to the twentieth and a welcome to the twenty-first century. The essay deals with physical travels from the voyages of dicovery to our more mental journeys through cyberspace. It looks at communications, world history, developments from Gutenberg’s printing press to the Internet, and much more. In doing this, it finds ironies. One of these ironies is the re-creation of white spots on the map: we can now find the old terra incognita all over again. That’s the unintended result of our advanced technological and widely (mis)informed age. We will have to roll up our sleeves and work to deal with the situation. Media coverage about the essay contest was widespread. Articles appeared in the New York Times, Neue Zuercher Zeitung, El Pais, Der Spiegel, Die Welt, Die Zeit, and elsewhere. The Munich paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung called the event the _Fest of the Unknown Thinkers_.