The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
When I read the above tweet by Tiago Forte, I coudn’t help but write this post.
Some folks got lucky, early in their childhood and got sucked into the whirlpool of internet culture. They are now able to see how the future looks like very clearly, or at least what the 3/4 likely pathways are. Simply because it’s prototyped right in front of their eyes, in the town-squares of the Internet.
It’s not because these folks are ‘smarter’ in any way (some are, yes). They’re just mostly better exposed to these mega-trends simply because of their unique vantage point.
Eg. ‘Fortnite’ playing pre-teens using in-game collaboration tooling are without their knowledge helping chart the blueprint for ERP software of the 2025 to 2030s. ‘Discord’, the collaboration tool that’s massively gaining popularity has its origins in ‘kids just playing online games’. Discord’s story is testimony.
These individuals are struggling to communicate with their peer network what they are seeing to get others onboard too.
It’s a good idea for others to get others onboard simply because these are world changing mega trends that are also one of the most powerful forces on the planet at the moment.
When I first decided to be a part of this, I had no fucking clue how big this was going to be. I did it, back in 1999/2000 types simply because it was a lot of fun to fiddle around with. Also, this ‘Internet’ thing was disrupting my thriving side business, and I was forced to pay attention.
This also lead to my choosing to pursue higher studies in ‘Engineering’, because this new ‘Internet’ thing was so so interesting. No one told me that Computer Science was what I had to take to be truly part of this, and that ‘Electronics’ was not the foundational layer. Nevertheless, the syllabi for everything was 20 years old. It didn’t matter in the long run.
It’s so frustrating when we’re unable to articulate to someone outside this circle as to what we’re seeing. The beauty, grandness and the myriad possibilities. Most often my incoherence and artless articulations end up pulling the others into the vortex of my own confusion, rather than helping them also see clearly, everything that’s happening.
The incoherence of it all is not just the result of individual failing. It’s also because of how new, fragile, vague, unstructured and uncertain these ideas and prototypes are. Ideas and perspectives that are so new and orthogonal, even the best minds of the world are just toying with it like toddlers fiddling around with a new toy.
Outsiders, when they apply their mental models that worked with legacy systems are frustrated when their old mental models are utterly useless to ‘box’, ‘label’ and ‘explain’ these new systems, often causing them to give up midway, developing an aversion in the process. They then return to the comfort of their existing functional systems - mature, nearly done with all the iterations, scaled up, thriving and ‘socially accepted’.
The majority of the loopholes in legacy systems have been closed, mostly with inefficient human interventions. However, these legacy systems reek of design flaws and scaling flaws (size scaling and time scaling) that are simply ‘unfixable’.