Thread by @AlexSteffen

In foresight circles, there is much discussion of general-purpose technologies.

These are techs that change everything: Printing, steam, computation.

Much effort is spent anticipating what's next.

I think, tho, that the planetary discontinuity is what will next fill that role.

It's orthogonal, uncomfortable to imagine.

We like to think of game-changers as being either events in the world that happen to us, or technologies we create that let to change the world.

The idea shifts in our physical relationship to the world can have similar impacts is new.

But the physical world is not just the environment in which our actions play out, it is deeply interconnected with every action we can or could take.

A physical-world discontinuity of this magnitude, then, is also a massive social, cultural and technological discontinuity...

And judging discontinuity only by the metrics of loss, and not on its own terms and in light of its own possibilities, is an amateur move.

And in the metrics of change, of torque and disruption and estrangement and ferment, I think the planetary crisis is already a set of forces with an impact as big on humanity as any of the technologies people usually cite as GPT.

To think that how we do things, what is possible to do, what people will find worth doing, etc will no be changed utterly by those forces — that we'll go on along the same technosocial pathways and trajectories — seems to me to be a huge foresight / strategy blindspot.