Post-Globalization, Neo-Traditionalism, and Society’s Transition to the Mode of Augmented Modernity

Abstract

The article presents theoretical analysis of changing the dominant scenario of transition to the future under conditions of the globalization crisis. The author highlights, that, 30 years ago, the ‘future society’ was viewed global, informational, networked. Globalization was the dominant scenario of social change, and neo-liberalism was a driver of development in economy, technologies, politics, and governance. Globalization promising structural homogeneity and cultural unity now is over and the turn to post-globalization becomes the newest challenge to sociology. Post-globalization is a set of tendencies towards: 1) localization of globality in networked super-urban enclaves where flows of things, symbols, and humans made social life really global ― open, borderless, mobile, multicultural, 2) widening economic and social gaps between super-urban points of access to networks and flows of resources and surrounding towns and rural areas, 3) rising new barriers, such as trade wars, sanctions, anti-migrant walls, quarantines, military confrontations etc., to restrict transnational networks and flows. Post-globalization is challenging neo-liberal patterns of economic integration and construction of transnational solidarities. Neo-traditionalist movements and governments across the globe promote their own agenda of economic, political, and social integration. Neo-traditionalism is discursive frame for reinventing traditions and promoting such reinventions as strong values with use of advanced technologies. Neo-traditionalist solidarities arise as sets of networked relations based on sense of unity among actors and communities with very different economic and political interests, ideological and cultural orientations. These solidarities are becoming new platforms and driving forces of structural integration in the society of the nearest future which will be society of augmented Modernity. Augmented social reality is developed through hybridization, mutual penetration of old and new social structures. At the junction of the first Modernity structures (institutions and interactions) and the second Modernity structures (networks and flows), the newest social structures arise: platforms, projects, communications, and events. The augmented Modernity now is associated with saturated and dynamic spaces of super-urban areas, and it contrasts with exhausted Modernity in small towns and rural areas. The author concludes, that, in the future, the common form will be balanced existence in different social realities at the same time as well as voluntary switching from one reality mode to another.

Acknowledgments. This paper presents the research supported by Russian Science Foundation (project No. 24-18-00261).