Premature Settlement

Premature settlement is the pattern by which the first institutional response to technological transformation is treated as the final one, converting what should be experimental hypothesis into naturalized necessity before alternatives can be tested. Every major technological revolution has produced such moments: the factory system crystallized before labor law, railroads before antitrust, the internet before privacy regulation, social media before attention protection. In each case, premature settlement imposed costs on generations who bore consequences of institutional arrangements they had no part in designing—costs that better institutional imagination, exercised earlier, could have mitigated. The AI transition is producing premature settlement at unprecedented speed: arrangements crystallizing in months (vector pods, prompt workflows, platform models) that are already being treated as permanent features of the AI landscape despite being contingent products of specific market conditions. Unger's experimentalism is the systematic alternative—institutional mechanisms that prevent settlement through sunset provisions, structured evaluation, and the permanent capacity for democratic reconstruction.