Evan Tabak Atlas's Blog: Mapping with Atlas

I want to tell you about autonomoktisis. We could also call it the autonomy approach. Simply put: People, societies, and governments should seek to convert heteronomy into autonomy. Let’s explore what that means. What follows is a prolegomenon, intended to chart a direction, not conclude a journey.

The central journey of moral life is from heteronomy to autonomy. Heteronomy is the state of being a reader of rules—obe...

On the cold morning of November 14th, I found that my brother Frank had become a foxed, leather-bound, and mysteriously dusty hardcover of The Monadology by Gottfried Leibniz. Mondays, right?

It made sense, I reasoned. We had fiercely clashed the previous night along metaphysical fault lines. I tried and failed to explain my metamodern philosophy, which was partially inspired by the late German philosopher, along with the scientific advancements of the last few centuries. To Frank, this ki...

My first book is around 140,000 words, and requires readers to be able to follow along subjects ranging from metaphysics to complex systems science to game theory. My writing always makes sense to me, of course, but people have told me they struggle to follow all of these threads at once. That’s why my second publication was a picture book… I guess you could say I’m still struggling to find the best way to communicate with people. But I want more people to understand me and my work.

I’m writing ...

The more inscrutable the world becomes to the average person, the more we collectively lose our ability to tell the difference between heroes and villains. Complexity breeds confusion.

This creates a situation in which villains can either hide more easily behind masks of benevolence, or where would-be heroes are fooled into playing the part of a villain due to the ways malice masquerades itself.

Shadow of The Cave-escaper

In stories such as Flatland or the Cave Allegory fou...

Plato did not say many positive things about imitation, so I hope he would forgive me for writing this “apocryphal” Platonic dialogue.

As in almost all of Plato’s work, a fictionalized Socrates guides us through deep philosophical explorations in the form of dialogos. There are open-ended questions, challenges, and a reciprocal movement of ideas leading toward greater clarity. This style of Socratic dialogue has influenced many writers since Plato’s time—for example, Acastos by Iris Murdoch, and...

Last November I published a “children’s book for all ages” called Game in the Garden. It’s about evolutionary game theory.

In choosing this style, which was very different from the dense 486 pages of my first book, my hope was to convey certain ideas and lessons in a way which could be universally appreciated. In that sense, I want the book to stand on its own and have something to offer to readers—whether they are 5 years old or 50.

However, I’m not going to make you do all the heavy lifting by ...

Thank you for spending another year with me! I have some exciting news to share with you before we wrap things up and begin 2025.

No, not this one, another one! That’s right, I published my second book! It’s a children’s book called Game in the Garden. I actually consider it a book for all ages, because I worked hard to build in multiple layers of meaning. Children can learn lessons about things like fairness and cooperation, while adults can read b...

I wrote a book about what a small-but-growing number of people call a metacrisis, which is different from a crisis or even a polycrisis. Because it is such a young neologism, I feel inclined to write about the metacrisis concept as an explorer without a map. My goal is to discover new territory, and be one of its cartographers. In short, I prefer to make the following distinctions:

Crisis: A crucial, life-or-death moment of sudden, profound transformation, and a bifurcation between two significan...

I’ve been using Google’s AI-based tool, Notebook. I fed it sections of my recent book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto, and had it generate a podcast. I can’t 100% endorse what the two AI bots say about my work, but if you are looking for a concise overview of my work, this is pretty solid. Continue reading below for summaries of the podcast’s five parts.

A discussion about the first section of my book, which includes the following subsections: 1.1 Meaning; 1.1.1 Metamodernism; and 1.1.2 T...

When I was 13, I developed a love for stock trading. I spent many hours learning how to analyze the fundamentals of companies, as well as the technical patterns found within their price charts. Whenever I went to Barnes & Noble with my family, I would head to the finance section and pick out a few titles to look through while sitting in the carpeted lanes between bookshelves. (Back then they didn’t stop people from doing this.)

One day, I found a book which changed the direction of my life. It wa...