Distributed Futures
Vol. 3, No. 27
What begins as a tool becomes a behaviour, then a culture, then an institution. The next paradigm is already being written, not by the old order, but by scenes of people experimenting with what comes next.
History shows that when a new technology arrives, it often introduces behaviours that could not have been predicted at the outset. Those behaviours press against the boundaries of existing culture, testing what a society considers normal or acceptable. As culture shifts, institutions are eventually forced to adapt, reorganising themselves around the new realities. Over time, these adjustments accumulate until they define a new techno-economic paradigm, with technology, behaviour, culture, and institutions woven into a fresh order.
Applied to our present moment, this model suggests a shift from a relatively stable world to a more fluid reality. Since the invention of the microchip, each breakthrough has layered upon the last at an accelerating pace. The World Wide Web would not exist without the computer. Generative AI would not exist without the Web. In between came cloud computing, smartphones, and the explosion of programs and applications that now run across every device around us. Together they form what increasingly looks like a technological supercycle, each development amplifying the next and leaving society struggling to keep pace.
These breakthroughs are already reshaping behaviour, but beneath them lies an even larger transformation: the rise of distributed agency. What we see on the surface — the rejection of top-down authority, the erosion of trust in legacy institutions, and the search for alternative ways of organising — all point to this meta shift.
Gen Z turning Discord into a platform for democratic action in Nepal might have been unthinkable in a pre-internet world, yet today it feels almost inevitable. In the workplace, younger generations are dismantling the fiction of the “company family,” treating corporate jobs as transactions and saving their energy for what matters outside. With AI, billions of people who once consumed software can now begin to create it, expanding the circle of developers far beyond the professional class. Creation has always been there, but now it is exploding outward, swallowing every industry, not just software.
When more people can create, the myth of the lone genius gives way to scenius: scenes alive with individuals coming together around projects, then dissolving once the work is done. These are the same projects people often nurture quietly alongside their corporate jobs — a shift from fixed systems to living, reconfigurable ones.
History teaches us that paradigms shift slowly, but when they do, the ground underneath everything changes. What begins as a tool becomes a behaviour, then a culture, then an institution. The microchip, the internet, and the cascade of digital technologies that followed are no longer just technical breakthroughs. They are already reshaping how we organise, how we create value, and how we govern ourselves.
Nepal’s Discord election may look like an outlier, but it can also be read as a signal. The next paradigm is already being written — not by the institutions of the old order, but by scenes of people inventing what comes next.
Where Passion is Political : A Case Study of Emotion and Dissent in Nepal
Just last week Nepal witnessed a groundbreaking moment in its democratic history, led by a tech-savvy and politically disillusioned Gen Z. As a passionate and charged people, Nepal's youth took a step so distant from our own electoral process in the UK, in selecting their interim prime minister via Discord, a platform typically used by gamers. Here, they optimised the digital sphere as a means through which to filter out corruption and mainstream media influence, after realising their capabilities to elect their own government were more than sufficient.
ASISA KADIRI | 11 Minutes
The death of the corporate job: Part 2
The comments revealed something significant. People have stopped trying to make corporate work meaningful. They've accepted it never will be. Instead, they're establishing boundaries. Doing what's required, nothing more. Saving their energy for what matters outside. Building lives where work is just work. The younger generation gets this instinctively. They never bought the lie about "career fulfilment" or "company family." They show up, perform adequately, go home.
ALEX | 5 Minutes
3 Billion Developers
Until Q4 last year, the realistic TAM for a web centric developer tool like Netlify was about 17 million professional JavaScript developers, and the companies they work for. Today, AI-based code agents have broken down the biggest barrier to building software on the web. Anyone among the ~3 billion people who are currently online and proficient enough to use software like spreadsheets can now also build software for the web.
Matthias Biilmann | 2 Minutes
The infinite jukebox
There’s this idea of contributing to something that’s greater than oneself, and that’s kind of how I see these AI models. I see them as a grand collective human accomplishment. I kind of started working with machine learning before the most recent wave of generative AI models. And so the first question that you’re kind of asking yourself when you’re trying to train a model is what’s the dataset? And as a composer, it felt like a creative choice. Like, like I needed to make my own dataset.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney | 28 Minutes