If You Are Not Sure

If you have read the book and do not yet know what your relationship to the work is, that is appropriate. Most readers will not have an immediate clear answer. The book has not been written to produce immediate clarity. It has been written to articulate conditions clearly enough that readers can begin to recognize their own location within them, which is a process that takes time and cannot be rushed.

What helps, in such cases, is to begin doing whatever feels most accurate to do, at the scale your conditions allow, and to trust that the work will become clearer through being done. The inner work the previous chapters described is available to anyone willing to begin. The relational work is available to anyone in relationships willing to be deepened. The institutional and economic work is available to anyone working inside institutions or economies that the book’s argument has changed how you see. The technological work is available to anyone whose work touches technology.

The threshold the book has been describing does not require everyone to do the same kind of work. It requires enough people to do enough of the work, in their own forms, that the substrate the next civilization will depend on actually gets built. Your contribution does not have to look like anyone else’s. It only has to be real.