That is not to say technology determines all paths. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the technologies of the Second Disruption – principally Watt’s steam engine – were merely the final element in the broader transition to capitalism. Here industrial innovation came after centralised states, the emergence of a class of ‘landless labourers’ and certain ideas of private and intellectual property. So, while technologies can herald new moments in history, they are just as likely to depend on what went before.
The Third Disruption appears to express both tendencies. Rather than technologies like AI, renewable energy and gene editing being exogenous disruptors of the status quo, they have developed alongside new ideas of nature, selfhood and forms of production.
Take the green movement as just one example. In any successful transition to meat without animals – as outlined in Chapter Eight – its worldview, advanced over decades of activism, will have played a decisive role. While technologically speaking synthetic meat is impossible without digitisation, these products were only created in response to vegan and vegetarian demand, as well as their developers having concerns about the impact of agriculture on climate change and animal welfare.
The same is true for renewable energy. Here too the green movement has been a vital player in making the issue of climate change salient to the wider public. While political failure at the international level is undeniable, with nationstates failing to suficiently reduce $\mathrm { C O } _ { 2 }$ emissions over the last twenty-five years, that does not mean the movement’s legacy is one of defeat. The increased capacity of wind and solar to meet our energy needs again results from technological innovation which would not have materialised without generations of campaigners demanding a shift away from fossil fuels. Fracking bans in a constantly growing number of countries, municipalities and cities, are only the latest testament to that.
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