Narrative Tug-of-War

When you look around at all the major candidates for wealth-production frontiers today — blockchains, AI, biotech, renewables — none of them seems capable of producing enough of a grand narrative slipstream to bind today’s complex and large modern societies. So I have to conclude that we’re in for a great deal of antiflocking and divergence.

I'm generally in the first camp; I am concerned about the prospect of both the West and China settling into a kind of low-growth conservatism, I love how imperfect coordination between nation states limits the enforceability of things like global copyright law, and I'm concerned about the possibility that, with future surveillance technology, the w... See more

So, to sum up, beware narratives of technological inevitability. Resistance, if it be necessary, is not necessarily futile, and, as Heffernan reminds us, “Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it.”