To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." In other words, expect to see some things getting better while other

To quote William Gibson, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." In other words, expect to see some things getting better while other things we've long taken for granted get worse. It all gets much patchier, the interdependencies more fragile, more brittle, until, quite suddenly, collapse is upon us. So at the same time as we're getting better network connectivity, the electricity supply is more erratic, prone to unexpected failures. Just as we're getting better vaccines, postal service is coming apart. And so on. And it's different kinds of patchiness in different parts of the globe, and the more tightly we interdepend different geographies, the more sudden and weirdly perplexing the failure modes manifest. Container shipping, anyone? It's a process, not a single inflexion point. Only somewhere deep in the future will historians put a stick in the ground and say, "There. That was where the collapse was undeniably evident."