Human societies have been far more diverse and political than we commonly portray them. Archaeologist David Wengrow, co-author of the bestseller The Dawn of Everything and the forthcoming book The Third Freedom, shows that for millennia, people have experimented with very different ways of organising power, property and collective decision-making – and have also been able to abandon these arrangements and repeatedly change them. In his keynote talk and the following discussion, he will therefore look not only at the past, but also at what it can tell us about our future. Why have we become accustomed to choosing between options that already exist instead of changing the rules themselves? And if today’s world is not the only one possible, what can we still change about it?
