Every era is remarkable, and in each, a compelling-enough case could be made that it was the most unique, the most consequential, the worst, the best, and so on. Due to some form of recency bias, we “living ones” tend to assume such importance in our time. This is not unique, and throughout human history, many believed their allotted time on this earth was of particular significance relative to others. And they did so with justifiable reasons, I’m sure.
There are indeed some periods of history that are of greater significance than others in terms of altering it with permanence, and more deeply affecting the course of events that followed.
Having recognized the potential bias I may have, I nevertheless believe that we are living through such a period, one in which we are subject to drastic, life-altering, environmental shifts causing the structure of human life to change at a dangerous rate. And it’s an era from which we may never return to “how things were” (-however that quote may be interpreted).
Of course, there is never a possibility of a return to normalcy, as there is evidently no such norm to be found. Environments and species are always changing, and those facts presuppose a relative flux in behavior of the species within that environment- as any ecologist will know.
Excessively tumultuous periods of history entail an environmental rate of change so rapid, that adaptation can barely keep up with the structural alterations underway. When I suggest that we are in such a period, I should clarify; I'm not really talking about climate change or any supposed crisis of the sort. When I say “environment,” yes, I also mean climate and trees and everything green that you may expect to read about in your introductory college bio textbook. However, such features of our environment are no longer as relevant to the induced necessity to adapt.
Of far greater concern than the effects of man-made technology, is man-made technology itself—for this too is your environment. A beaver’s dam is the beaver’s environment, and so too is the internet yours. That it doesn’t feel natural, makes no difference to the structural, selection effects it will have on you, dear reader. And when the rate of change in the environment is dangerously high, we’ll henceforth refer to such periods as ‘transitional periods.’ (Wow, so creative.)
Not always, but often transitional periods are marked by the word “revolution.” Two revolutions of particular significance (and likely the two that are most significant) are of course, the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These events permanently altered the technological, dietary, social, political, and economic structures (i.e., the environment) of human life; and as a result, they altered the biological (i.e., evolutionary, i.e., genetic) trajectory thereof.
As of 2026, the time of this writing, if we examine the past 30 years, we have undergone the democratization of internet access, the invention of the iPhone, now LLMs, and a bunch of appendaged nonsense in between (e.g., tik tok, e.g., pornography… e.g., tik-tok-pornography.. and like, a million other utterly novel things). I believe this to be a transitional period of equivalent significance to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution—which you’ll recognize to be quite a substantial claim if you’re familiar with the consequences of either.
I’ll use the Agricultural Revolution (AR) as an example, and I’ll limit the scope of wide-ranging effects to politics alone: the political consequences of the AR were not slight... Pre-AR was pre-politics. Nomads stopped “nomad-ing,” settled on fertile soil to start farming <—duh. Being in a single location as opposed to many, means that you have to live with a group on a piece of land. When you have to live with people in immobile permanence, you’ll probably want to start making some rules- we’ll call those laws. But what good are those if there’s no one to enforce them? Not very good at all, so proto-police can handle internal defense. What about external defense? Arable land is valuable and finite capital, so you’ll have to protect your territory with things like borders, and things resembling a military. You’ll probably want to have a leader, who is probably going to be the land owner. If you’re the land owner, you’re probably going to want to induce the lesser ones to go collect your carrots, and then give them something like, a piece of wheat in return—oh look there’s money, and O—an economy, that’s new too. Amalgamate all of that and you’ll get the definition, and thus the invention of politics. “Transitional periods” may not be creatively named, but they’re seen as significant for clear-enough reasons; they change everything, and they do so with permanence.
Industrialization is deserving of a full and separate treatment in a forthcoming piece, as we are now living through the concluding act of its long “new normal.” The technological acceleration we’ve seen from the ~1990s-2026 was, of course, a consequence of the industrial revolution(s) from 1760 to 1914. “The industrial revolution and it’s consequences” continue to reduce the Agricultural “norms” unto obsolescence. Just as the Agricultural Revolution instantiated an acute Aufheben of nomadic life, and just as the Industrial Revolution made agricultural values “old-world,” so too will our current Revolution nullify anything that your ageing parents think is normal.
To remain on the subject of political consequences of transitional periods, I’d like to point out that the post-industrial responses to politics generated three leading theories: Representative Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. These were all valid responses to the Industrial Revolution. It’s easy to condemn any of them in hindsight, but I will not be engaging in criticism of any of the three. From an ecological perspective, it is understandable to scramble for (economic/political/etc.) solutions to an environmental shift that so drastically relegated the feudal-monarchical environment into irrelevancy. With that said, I believe the shift we are currently undergoing has symmetrically made irrelevant the concepts of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism —it has rendered them obsolete, or fundamentally altered them in kind, if not in name. For better or worse, what’s coming will be something fundamentally new. From this lens, the chaos of the news-cycle seems appropriate and expected.
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