The Great Disruption

I was looking at the twitters the other day, and someone somewhere said something about “The Great Internet Disruption”… and it seemed to me like a really apt term – like The Great Depression, or The Great War, both of which were shite.

I would broaden it though – it’s not just to do with the Internet. We’re in an era where a whole load of exponential curves that were more or less horizontal have become more or less vertical. Things like running out of :
oil
ice
credit
space
Amazon
water
fish

etc etc. We’re presiding over what’s know as the Holocene Extinction Era. There are other biggies like Peak Oil (and we use oil to basically mine the soil for food) and climate change… but we’re also hitting peaks with just about everything else as well.

We have a global economic system which isn’t just based on, but which is actually built out of, debt and exponential growth. Now that’s not going to last forever is it. We can’t just keep adding zeros. That’s the nature of exponential : you run out of zeros.

(from New Scientist Graphic)

There are also a number of fairly tectonic demographic shifts – aging populations, the fact that before long the biggest English speaking country in the world will be China…

etc etc

The Internet is having a massive impact, but it’s not the only disrupting factor… so “The Great Disruption” it is.

The Great Disruption was actually the title of something or other by Francis Fukuyama about 10 years ago – but I’m confiscating it. It really is that simple.

Mind you, it does sound a bit 1920s. It’s a kindof steampunk description of what we’re going through. We could also call it :
– Reformation 2.0.
– The End 2.0
– The Rapture of The Nerds

or just give it a trendy, friendly-but-meaningless Web 2.0 type name – which is basically just a noise because all the other names have been taken. Like BleeBloo or Blorf or something. This could be its avatar:

(click photo for others)

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ps: Biotech
pps: Nanotech