A decade of paradigmatic technology change
or, how the mainstream emergence of multiple disruptive, exponential, paradigm-changing technologies over the coming decade will drive systematic change of our daily lives.
If you ever wished to live in more interesting times, then I have good news and bad news for you: the coming decade will grant you your wish. As is the nature of wishes, when at last you get what you wanted, it will come in a form unexpected, and leave you changed.
Technology is a two-edged sword; solving old problems and making new things possible or advantageous, but also creating new problems, and depreciating or disadvantaging old things and ways.
It is often hard to grok how these changes will unfold, because they typically require us to let go of old things that feel important and comfortable to us, and embrace perspective shifts that bring us closer to the new or emerging reality. This is, at heart, the art of radical acceptance; seeing more of what is, and less of what we want to see.
I believe that the coming decade will be one of great change, as we bear witness to the unfolding of numerous exponential, paradigmatic technologies, leading to deep, systematic changes in how we structure our lives, work, play, and how we coordinate with each other.
Whilst the lever of technology can, at times, be very direct, the greatest changes tend to flow from externalities: second+ order changes to the structure and dynamics of the environment, and what is systematically advantageous or disadvantageous. In short, the most significant changes driven by technology are through the mechanism of changes to system dynamics, and which strategies and structures those dynamics enable or incentivise.
It is outside of the scope of this post to canonically discuss the specifics of those technologies. What I’d like to do today is focus in on one area, our models for networked coordination and community (for example, social media and networked communication, collaboration and community tools). I’d like to share some observations about how I think these might change, and some of the factors that I think are driving those changes.
Some of the paradigm shifts that I see underway today include:
→ digital reality is becoming at least as important in many peoples’ lives as physical reality, which is driving increasing value to both scarce and non-scarce digital artefacts.
→ the world has become far more dynamic, adaptive and connected, and rigid, monolithic structures and institutions - which we still rely on heavily - are experiencing increasing friction, driving increasing conflict, and increasingly doing more harm than good.
→ it is becoming exponentially easier to create and wield technologies and content of all kinds, and exponentially more difficult to contain consequences using techniques of control; some of these emergent technologies are potentially catastrophic.
→ the benefit of momentum from open, interoperable, networked systems and coordination, is now increasingly at an advantage to the benefit of closed, control-driven protectionist approaches, and this will accelerate; this is a disruption change in the dynamics of value and momentum accumulation.
→ the power of data is compounding, because data is increasingly insightful, predictive and actionable; leading to a rising and fundamental (in the human-rights sense) need for domains such as cognitive security, privacy and self-sovereignty.
These will drive changes in the properties of viable networked coordination:
→ sovereign, private, and granular
→ local first, robust state sync
→ composable, open, extensible
→ pluralistic, substrate-independent
→ adaptive, dynamic, evolutionary and emergent
I am not suggesting that all open, public networks will cease to exist, but that the architecture of our networked systems will shift radically in response to these paradigmatic changes, driven by old architectures causing increasingly more harm than good for their users.
There is much danger ahead, but also much opportunity. Like many emergent effects, what happens is not fully within the domain of our control. However, we can - and should - lean in to the greatest extend possible, and coordinate together, to shape the direction and form of these changes; increasing the positive effects, and decreasing the negative.