Civilization as a sequence of coordination shocks
A coordination shock happens when a new technology makes something — energy, food, memory, violence, information, capital, cognition, embodiment, biology — newly scalable, faster than institutions can adapt. Amplitude marks disruption magnitude. Click a tremor to open its era.
How civilization climbs by destabilizing itself
Breakthroughs do not abolish scarcity — they move it to a higher layer. Read bottom to top: each rung makes one form of scarcity cheap, then forces society to reorganize around the next bottleneck above it.
The Cognitive Industrial Revolution
AI is doing to symbolic labor what mechanization did to physical labor: it turns formerly skilled human outputs into scalable machine outputs.
The Industrial Revolution first mechanized the working class. The AI Revolution first destabilizes the educated class — articulate, institutionally embedded, credentialed, urban, and culturally influential.
Likely winners
Likely losers
The scenario fan, not a single future
The future is not one guaranteed path. Whether technology creates broad abundance or concentrated power depends less on raw capability than on ownership, institutions, energy, and legitimacy. Six branches diverge from the present shock.
Optimism, calibrated by domain
AI lowers the cost of cognition. It does not automatically lower the cost of healthcare, longevity, housing, or physical abundance — those remain constrained by biology, regulation, liability, energy, land, ownership, and institutions. The optimistic 2035+ story is directionally right but too compressed.
Every shock runs the same eight-step program
Visible in agriculture, writing, printing, industrialization, electricity, computing, the internet — and now AI. The loop ends where it begins: a new scarcity, waiting for the next breakthrough.
The pattern is a spiral, not a circle — each turn ends higher up the scarcity ladder than it began.