Regime Shift vs. Tools Upgrade

The most consequential misperception in any technological transition is the one that mistakes a change of kind for a change of degree. Jared Diamond's comparative study of civilizational collapse identified this misperception as structurally present in every collapse he examined: the Norse continued improving their pastoral farming techniques as the climate regime shifted away from one that could support European pastoralism in the Arctic; the Maya continued building more elaborate monuments as their agricultural base deteriorated beneath the weight of the labor those monuments required; the Easter Islanders continued felling trees for increasingly urgent purposes as the forest passed the threshold of self-sustaining regeneration. In each case, the society's response was calibrated to a tools upgrade—to the need to do the existing practice more efficiently—when the situation demanded a regime shift response: the recognition that the existing practice itself was