Intellectual Gourmet Bullshit
Lately, I've come across many sentences along the lines of the following: "A transdisciplinary research project to cultivate new forms and practices of planetary cognition" (via). While it might sound intriguing at first, what does this actually mean precisely? It's quite possible that i am simply to dumb to "get it", but this stuff strikes me as intimately related to the intellectual gourmet bullshit that the likes of Gregory Bateson pioneered.
This "use many impressive fancy words, which in essence are totally incomprehensible for most" mentality seems to be taking hold of the wider ecology/regenerative movement across the Anglosphere. In a peculiar way, moving it closer to the mainstream "everything is for sale - buy or die" culture, which they proclaim to be an alternative to.
These developments are somewhat predictable and mirrored across many sectors. For example, Ted Nelson describes the MIT Media Lab as follows: "The whole point of the Media Lab is 'we know something that you don't know!' It is led by con men. Con men and politicians aren't necessarily held to telling the truth at all.".
I for one strive to adhere to the "explain it so a child can understand it" maxim and not hide behind a cloud of artificial complexity, that is mostly there to make one look important.