{"id":230,"date":"2021-03-25T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimclarke.net\/?p=230"},"modified":"2021-03-25T01:17:20","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T01:17:20","slug":"are-we-living-in-an-alternative-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/2021\/03\/25\/are-we-living-in-an-alternative-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Are we living in an Alternative History?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It&#8217;s a compelling idea. So many outlier events, both the scary Black Swan-type that N.N. Taleb writes about as well as the simply unlikely, seem to be regular occurences all of a sudden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether it&#8217;s Donald Trump&#8217;s election as US President, the Brexit referendum, a global Coronavirus pandemic, or even just Leicester City somehow winning the English Premier League football title a few years ago, the world seems to have taken a turn into the unpredictable, the unstable, and the frankly bizarre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And if we are in a uchronic timeline, is there any way back? We probably aren&#8217;t going to be able to reverse time, but perhaps we can leverage the idea of alt-history to understand and manipulate our own reality going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is something I suggest in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciphijournal.org\/index.php\/2021\/03\/24\/sailing-the-seas-of-time-what-if-we-took-alternative-history-seriously\/\">my latest article for the always excellent <em>Sci-Phi Journal<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a compelling idea. So many outlier events, both the scary Black Swan-type that N.N. Taleb writes about as well as the simply unlikely, seem to be regular occurences all of a sudden. Whether it&#8217;s Donald Trump&#8217;s election as US President, the Brexit referendum, a global Coronavirus pandemic, or even just Leicester City somehow winning &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/2021\/03\/25\/are-we-living-in-an-alternative-history\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Are we living in an Alternative History?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[132],"tags":[133,134,63,10,14,112],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternative-history","tag-alternative-history","tag-donald-trump","tag-football","tag-politics","tag-science-fiction","tag-uchronia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcnZAt-3I","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimclarke.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}