Interesting, I need to think more about this.
It also resonates with (what I understand from) John Robb’s idea that the (Western) society is failing at the Orientation phase of the OODA loop:
Orientation matters more. Moving fast in the wrong direction kills you faster.
This is helping me to understand what I’m really trying to address here. It’s related to “quantitative changes become qualitative when the quantity is large enough”. And I’m talking about the “change in the speed of change”, not “changes in technogy”. If the world becomes slightly “faster” (or slower) in its rate of change, there are ways to deal with that change. But we are bounded by the scales in which we operate (space and time scales) and what lies above and below the thresholds is not accesible by us.
McLuhan’s idea * is that we cannot percieve processes that are too slow, it’s like those time lapse videos of plants growing. We need to speed the video up to “hours per second” to see how the plants move. It’s a quantitative change (the video just plays faster) that produces a qualitative change (it allows us to see what we weren’t able to see before).
* linked on the first John Robb’s twitt from the previous message) - EDIT: link changed with archived version because it’s broken right now.
I’m thinking about the other extreme, when changes become so fast that it goes beyond our “fastest rate to process changes” and it all becomes blurry, with no signs to slowing down. The problem here is not any specific change and how we adapt to it. The problem is the always-increasing part of reality that we have no time to process.