Still, many questions have global aspects. Our information networks, our trade routes, our dependencies are truly global. Because of it many of our issues, including climate emergencies, are global in both their roots and consequences. We all suffer from small earth syndrome these days, as I phrased it in 2010 at the SHiFT Conference, where everything anyone of us does reverberates around the world because we are continuously bumping into real global limits, Club of Rome style.
\nThe same is true in reverse: many of the pathways to agency, to resolution and mitigation are global in nature too, or at the very least need us to look at available information, thinking, and perspectives globally as well.
\n\u2018Global\u2019 therefore is not to be taken here as a level of abstraction or aggregation, which erodes your own place in it and throws out your own localised experience and stories, but global in the scope you yourself default to when it comes to who you see as part of the whole, as worthy of consideration and/or empathy, as affected by your choices and actions. Global also not as an equaliser or one-size-fits-all thing, unmooring identities e.g., but using differences as an energy source and as potential for creativity. In any situation there are boundaries between groups and narratives. Power differences, and identities resting on opposing or similar assumptions, differences in who has legitimacy or standing in which situations and issues, differences in who has or is afforded agency and in which ways, all abound. All these differences are potential energy to tap into.
Put together it spells to me that when I am doing some deskresearch shining a better light on literary \u2018dark matter\u2019 becomes much more important. Are there any francophone resources, Nordic authors, Eastern European authors, hispanic movements around an issue I am exploring? Yes, the scientific world largely uses English as lingua franca, but language areas also have their own spheres outside of it. Look in any French or German book store for instance and compare the shelves on topics of your interest to e.g. a UK book store. They also all have their own scientific publishing channels. That is all still within a largely overlapping European context. What about ongoing Chinese perspectives, Southern-American movements, the various spheres of discussion on the African continent, and across Asia? Those will be almost completely invisible to me on any topic, when my own tools are limited to my personal language skills and the general anglo-american bias in online search tools.
\nEnter AI tools as a middle way, along the lines of what Jeremy Cherfas wrote recently. He posits his own AI use for \u201cthings that you perhaps could manage on your own, but that would take too long to be worthwhile.\u201d And while \u201cthere are plenty of areas in which I feel that AI could never be appropriate\u201d he \u201cwas happy to use generative AI to extend my capabilities\u201d where that strengthened his own efforts andv where outputs are for his personal or intermediate use in his own work processes.
\nWhen I ask e.g. Claude about a book and its message, and to help build a more syntopic reading list around something, what you get is a few English titles, as would be expected given their origin. Adding my own language skills, it will add a few other resources. Any extension beyond that you need to directly ask about: is there anything in e.g. Nordic countries, are there traces of similar discourse in China etc.? In steps what will emerge is a fuller list of pointers. Many of those I won\u2019t be able to read directly, but I can circle around them, e.g. through secondary sources, by machine translating parts etc. I\u2019ve noticed that to do this, to go beyond middle of the road AI responses, I need to build it up, in steps. Which is something I can put together as a recipe and feed into Claude.
\nI won\u2019t speak or read Chinese, Igbo, Swedish or Polish in my lifetime. But I can ferret out resources and what they may tell me this way.
\nToday I started reading in Rest Is Resistance by US author Tricia Hersey, it was mentioned to me recently in the context of maintaining hope or optimism while also feeling dread and despair about the state and direction of the world, alongside Rebecca Solnit\u2019s Hope in the Dark, and the Dutch title \u2018Optimism without hope\u2019 by Tommy Wieringa. Turned out I already bought it in 2023. I wondered about other similar or adjacent texts and used Claude in the way described above. First came a list of mostly English resources, and one German, most of which I was already aware of. Then following up a handful of francophone resources, nordic ones, and hispanic ones came up, which unearthed a link to Latin-American texts I had already explored a few years back related to a local legal initiative in the Netherlands w.r.t. climate adaptation. It struggled with providing pointers to resources from the African continent, but ultimately did. Further prompting brought both official and grass roots perspectives from China, more francophone resources from the Caribbean world, and also more potentially relevant African and Indian resources.
\nA first approximation of a syntopic approach like this is no output in itself, but a starting point, meaning I now have more to do than if I had been satisfied with just the titles I already own or am already aware of. But I am casting a wider net, even if what the net brought up may not all be equally useful, it pushed me to look further and broader. It stretches my Library of the Mind.
\n![\"\"](\"https://www.zylstra.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/rMaastrichtlibraryTonZijlstraccbyncsa.jpg\")
The University of Maastricht Library, which I walked by a week ago. Its collection limited by necessity, like our global digital library is limited by our tooling.