The Shortest History
of Tomorrow
Escaping Plato's Cave

We noticed something fascinating: throughout history, groundbreaking artists like Rembrandt, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol seemed to be in a creative conversation with the scientists of their time. Art and science, colliding and collaborating, pushing the boundaries of what was possible. This electric dialogue became the heartbeat of our book.

Think of the book as a journey—a winding path through the history of ideas, where art, science, and power collide in the most unexpected ways. Ready to take the first step? Let’s go.

Plato’s Cave: The Original Reality Show

Picture this: You’re chained in a dark cave, forced to stare at shadows dancing on a wall. That’s Plato’s 2,400-year-old metaphor for his BIG idea—that “true reality” is a perfect, unchanging world outside our messy human experience. Philosophers, he said, could escape the cave and find this truth through reason and logic.
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This idea stuck like glue. For centuries, Western science, religion, and art obsessed over finding the “real world” out there—whether in God’s heaven, mathematical laws, or the human soul. But here’s the twist: AI is bulldozing Plato’s cave. Algorithms now mine our thoughts, predict our desires, and even mimic our creativity. There’s no “inner truth” left to protect—just data patterns, says thinker Riccardo Manzotti. Plato’s wall between “inside” and “outside”? Crumbling like a cookie.

The ’60s were an intense period for the invention of ideas and art. Not only was the vacuum cleaner transformed into a sleek machine, but fridges and music from bands like The Beatles also transformed the entire feeling of life. In science, breakthroughs came suddenly with the realization that our universe was just one among many. The metaverse and the many-worlds theory were born. Artists like Andy Warhol anticipated the digital age by creating endless identical copies of originals. Andy Warhol screen-printed Marilyn Monroe’s face endlessly, asking: What’s original? What’s real?

Michel Foucault, in his book The Order of Things, made it clear that humans can never fully grasp or describe reality in a definitive way. Every era reveals a portion of reality, which is constantly changing. Old knowledge disappears, new knowledge emerges, but as Foucault noted in a famous conversation with Noam Chomsky, new discoveries often obscure other parts of reality.

Fast-forward to today. Companies like Amazon, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) mine our lives for data—what we buy, search, and secretly crave. This data is called cloud capital, and it’s worth trillions. Why? Because knowing your secrets lets them predict (and control) your next move and your next shopping list.

But there’s a twist: Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin promised to break free from banks and governments. Instead of trusting the “Logos” (Plato’s elite guardians of truth), crypto used math to create money anyone could mine. Sounds democratic, right? Not quite. As Finn Brunton warns, crypto’s anarchist roots are fading. Now, it’s less about freedom and more about new billionaires minting “Trump Coins   ” and meme currencies.

Plato’s cave metaphor is haunting us again. But this time, instead of philosophers, we’re using AI, quantum computers, and telescopes to ask: What’s outside the cave?

The Bottom Line
From Plato’s cave to quantum waves to TikTok algorithms, humanity’s story is about one thing: chasing the invisible. The future won’t give us answers—it’ll ask us to embrace uncertainty, rewrite the rules, and maybe laugh at how seriously we once took “truth.”