What will matter philosophically in 2026 is not a single grand theory, but the ideas people are already using to make sense of a world under strain. As political authority weakens, technologies accelerate faster than our capacity to govern them, and scientific power shifts from explanation to intervention, familiar frameworks for knowledge, meaning and responsibility are beginning to fail.

In this IAI News feature, a series of short reflections from across philosophy, science, politics and culture set out what their authors see as the most important ideas shaping the year ahead. Contributors Minna Salami, Cory Doctorow, Guy Standing, Paul Davies, Sophie Scott-Brown, Ivette Fuentes, and Nolen Gertz offer concise provocations rather than extended arguments.

Many of these contributors will be joining us at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay, 22–25 May, where they will build on these ideas in live debates and discussions, testing them against opposing views and current events. These pieces offer a first glimpse of the questions that will be explored in depth at the festival, as thinkers come together to argue over how we should understand, challenge and reshape the world ahead.

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Cory Doctorow

Activist, writer and journalist; special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation; co-founder of the Open Rights Group; Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the Open University. 

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Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade has opened up an important policy space; whereas before, every American trading partner was obliged to have laws that banned their own tech sector from disenshittifying America's defective tech exports (say, by modifying printers to take generic ink, or modifying phones and consoles to use generic app stores, or modifying apps to block spying), now, everything is up for grabs. For the entire 21st century, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to keep every American trading partner in line. Now that the tariffs are here, everything is up for grabs. After all, if someone tells you that they'll burn down your house unless you do their bidding, and then they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep following their orders! We are on the verge of a post-American internet, and every country in the world has it within their power to become a disenshittification nation.

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Ivette Fuentes

Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Southampton and Emmy Noether Fellow at the University of Oxford.

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