Is civilization slowing down? 🤔

As in metabolic rate/tempo not a valuative notion like progress

I think it is… and I think the more people talk about acceleration and accelerationism the more true it is. Events are weirder but the tempo is actually significantly slower. FUD rate up, change rate down.

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

If you believe progress is basically a function of how much energy we can harness (sounds plausible to me), that’s been levelling off for a couple of decades. I hope we see a step-change in that (fusion? Something else?) in my lifetime.

Over what timescale? The state of the art in home computing went from the C64 to the Retina MacBook Pro from the 80s to the 2010s, but my 2011 rMBP was fine for a decade. That seems to be levelling out.