The Prevail Project

In fact, The Prevail Project aims to make it clear how heroic and profound "muddling through" has been for the human race. Prevail stories ring down through the ages, from the Bible's Exodus, to Huckleberry Finn, to the British "nation of shopkeepers" prevailing against the Third Reich. Technodeterminism says that the future is shaped by our creati... ons - by how many transistors we can hook up. The humanism of Prevail boldly asserts (hopes?) that the future will continue to be controlled by how many ornery, cussed, surprising humans can be hooked up in a bottom-up way to throw the Curve a curve. That's our story and we're sticking to it. The heart of Prevail is: perhaps there are two curves of change, not one. If our technological challenges are heading up on a curve, but our responses are more or less flat (like we're waiting for House Judiciary to solve our problems), the species is clearly toast. The gap just keeps on getting wider and wider. But suppose we are seeing an increase almost as rapid in our unexpected, bottom-up, flock-like social adaptations. Then you'd be looking at high-speed human-controlled co-evolution. There are reasons for guarded optimism about this. If you looked out at the future of the human race from 1200 A.D., you'd see marauding hordes, and plague, and you'd say, okay, it's over for this species. But then in 1450 we developed moveable type and the printing press, and a brand new way widely to share and store our ideas.Read More