24th march 2004
. . . it struck me forcefully (again) that the more 'richly connected' we make our world the more vulnerable we make it. Empowerment cuts both ways: as the complexity of things increases, so does the ability of an increasingly minute number of people to destabilize it. This, it strikes me, is the real limit on development - that we will accept the threat of terrorism as a limit on how complex we make things. So the Utopian techie vision of a richly connected future will not happen - not because we can't (technically) do it, but because we will recognize its vulnerability and shy away from it.

So I expect a limit to be reached, a sense of pulling back from what is possible. and this will be followed by waves of nostalgia for the future that could have been . . . a sense of disappointment with ourselves - perhaps like the sense that pervaded Europe on the failure of the League of Nations.

- Brian Eno, email to Stewart Brand, March 1995

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