Welcome to Our New Era: The 'Polycene'

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was born in the "Cold War" era and has lived much of his life in the not-so-imaginatively-named "Post-Cold War" era. But what to call the era we're living through now? It's a tough question, he writes, because so much is happening in so many arenas: artificial intelligence, climate concerns, geopolitics, etc., much of it interconnected. In talking about this with Craig Mundie, former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, Mundie came up with the "Polycene." And Friedman was instantly sold:

• "It was a neologism—a word he just made up on the spot and not in the dictionary. Admittedly wonky, it is derived from the Greek 'poly,' meaning 'many.' But it immediately struck me as the right name for this new epoch, where—thanks to smartphones, computers and ubiquitous connectivity—every person and every machine increasingly has a voice to be heard and a lever to impact one another, and the planet, at a previously unimaginable speed and scale."
• "So, welcome to the Polycene. It's been an interesting ride getting here." Read the full column, in which Friedman documents that ride and asserts that the Polycene is "the first era in which humanity must govern, innovate, collaborate and coexist at a planetary scale in order to thrive."