The times they are a-changing – for once, for the better

The world is splitting, right before our eyes. Not into left and right. Not into rich and poor. Into those clinging to a dying system and those who have finally stopped pretending it can be saved.

This is what I saw at Davos in January 2026, what the Epstein files have laid bare, and what the next decade of technology and humanity will determine: we are living through the death of one system and the labor pains of another. The question is no longer whether the old order is passing. The question is who is willing to be a doula of its death — and who is still trying to keep it on life support.

Davos: Two co-chairs, two worlds

The 2026 World Economic Forum staged its central tension in plain sight. Its two co-chairs were Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, and André Hoffmann, vice chairman of Roche. Standing side by side, they could not have represented more different futures.

Fink spoke the language of a system on life support — capital flows, market discipline, the careful tending of the existing financial order. Every other word out of Hoffmann's mouth was regeneration, systems change, nature-positive solutions. Two co-chairs. Two paradigms. One stage.

Then Trump took that stage and shattered what was left of the post–Cold War multilateral order, calling instead for a multipolar world of strongmen pursuing self-interest. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a counter, but his vision was less a restoration of multilateralism than a multipolar buffer — a coalition of middle powers trying to absorb the shock rather than rebuild the architecture.

Walking out of those sessions, the split was unmistakable. On one side, the careful management of decline dressed up as stewardship. On the other, the first serious institutional acknowledgment that we are not trying to sustain something — we are trying to regenerate something. Sustainability, as Donella Meadows warned us as far back as 1972, cannot save a system whose foundational logic is extraction. Sustainability is not sustainable. Regeneration is.

The Epstein files: A court of Borgia moment

Then came more of the files. Over three million pages were released by the Department of Justice in late January, naming roughly 340 individuals across politics, finance, science, media, and spirituality.

The Epstein files are not a story about one man's crimes. They are a symbol of a system in its terminal opulence, a system whose elites came to believe themselves so above scrutiny that the suffering of children became a transactional cost of doing business. This is the 16th century court of the Borgias. Pope Alexander VI, his son Cesare Borgia, bought cardinals, the dinners,  and the alliances — a Catholic Church so consumed by its own decadence that its rot eventually birthed the Reformation. The Epstein files are our Borgia moment.

And like the Borgias, what makes the moment historically clarifying is that the rot does not respect ideological lines. The released files contain documented relationships between Epstein and figures across the entire spectrum: Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Peter Thiel and Noam Chomsky, Ehud Barak and Deepak Chopra. Conservative power brokers. Liberal intellectuals. Spiritual gurus. Tech investors. The World Economic Forum's own CEO, Børge Brende, is now under independent investigation by the WEF board over documented dinners with Epstein. None of these names mean criminality — appearing in the files is not the same as being implicated in his crimes — but the pattern is its own indictment.

This is what a dying system looks like when its private architecture becomes visible. The same elite networks, the same conferences, the same flights, the same dinners — circulating across what we are told are opposing worldviews. The files reveal that there was never as much daylight between the camps as we believed. They were all swimming in the same water.

And now, watch what is happening. Leaders across politics, business, and culture are racing to distance themselves from the names in those files. "I don't want to be associated with that." In short: I don't want to be associated with that system. The people who are not racing to distance themselves are telling you something important about which side of the threshold they have chosen.

Ask yourself: do you want to be affiliated with the system that produced the files? Or with what comes next?

Technology: Tool, mirror, threshold

Many of us have seen the writing on the wall for years. Some were too scared to say it out loud. Some were too comfortable. Most were simply paralyzed because changing a system this large feels like trying to redirect a river with your bare hands. That paralysis is human and forgivable.

But our ecological, social, and economic systems are now visibly degrading. The signal-to-noise ratio has flipped. And precisely at this moment, we have been handed tools more powerful than any generation has ever held. Artificial intelligence. Distributed computing at scales unimaginable a decade ago. The technical capacity to weave decentralized, interoperable systems at planetary speed.

These tools could underwrite the regenerative future. They could also accelerate the dystopia. As I have written before, AI is a mirror, not a monster — it reflects back the deepest logics of the civilization that built it. The technology itself is not the question. The question is who controls it, who governs it, who profits from it, and what values it is trained to optimize.

There are really only two paths from here. In the first, computational power consolidates in the hands of a small number of tech strongmen and their political patrons — a brutal optimization layer laid on top of a collapsing biosphere. In the second, that same power is held as a commons: distributed, decentralized, accountable, governed as a public good in the lineage of Elinor Ostrom's work on collective resource stewardship.

Same tools. Two completely different futures. The path is being chosen right now, not by treaty or election, but by who is allowed to own the infrastructure.

Regeneration is the future worth naming

Regeneration is not new. It has a long lineage in modern thought — Donella Meadows, Carol Sanford, Daniel Christian Wahl, Buckminster Fuller, Joanna Macy, Vandana Shiva — and a far longer lineage among Indigenous peoples who have practiced regenerative science and stewardship for millennia. Lyla June Johnston has written and spoken extensively about how Indigenous food systems across the Americas were not extracting from ecosystems but actively building soil, expanding biodiversity, and increasing the carrying capacity of the land. Regeneration as practice predates regeneration as concept by thousands of years.

And regeneration is not restoration. The two words are often confused, and the confusion matters. Restoration tries to return a system to a previous state. Regeneration creates conditions for a system to keep generating new states of life. Restoration looks backward. Regeneration is alive.

This is what life itself does. Living systems take matter and energy that already exist — atoms forged billions of years ago in dying stars — and reconfigure them, again and again, into new arrangements of life. A forest is not sustained. A forest is regenerating, every second, through a thousand interlocking processes of birth, death, decay, and emergence. All life shares this single common purpose: ensuring that life continues to thrive in abundance.

Our species deviated from this path a long time ago. We built social and economic systems of extraction and exploitation whose purpose was to help us survive and find joy — the two basic needs of every human. They have now evolved into systems of extreme inequity, corruption, and destruction of the very things they are predicated on: Nature and humanity. And so, they are ready to pass.

Humanity’s work is to be the doulas of that death — to bring this system to its end with as much grace as we can manage, to honor what it once made possible, and to let the best of its memory inform whatever we choose to build next. This is what Joanna Macy has called the Great Turning: the simultaneous unraveling of the Industrial Growth Society and the emergence of a Life-Sustaining one. We are inside that turning right now. It is not coming. It has begun.

The great coming together

The times are changing. For once, they are changing for the better; not because the dying is gentle, and not because the future is guaranteed, but because more of us than ever before can see clearly what is ending and what is being born.

We have the will. We have the means. We have the compass. What we need now is each other.

Let 2026 be the year of the Great Coming Together — across nations, across ideologies, across generations, across the false divisions that the old system needed us to maintain. Not a movement of the few. A Re-generation of the many.

The system is composting. The question is not whether you will witness it. You already are. The question is what you will plant in the soil it leaves behind.