Sublime

Donald Durant understood the common person, someone élite bankers, including the Higginsons, had politely ignored for decades. Since the Civil War, bankers had focused on wealthy institutions: first the railroads, then industrial companies, and most recently foreign corporations and governments. But now that individual human beings, men and women,

Exploiting energy often involves exploiting people. In Amity and Prosperity, as elsewhere, resource extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust, both with companies that undermine the land and with the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who risk their lives to power them. Today, the fracking boom has rei

to whom that new wealth will go. At the same time, success or failure

If our reasoning is correct, the nation-state will be replaced by new forms of sovereignty, some of them unique in history, some reminiscent of the city-states and medieval merchant republics of the premodern world. What was old will be new after the year 2000. And what was unimaginable will be commonplace. As the scale of technology plunges, gover

Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.

The point is that underlying technologies change, but, after a point, technology market shares don’t change and so they’re highly predictable.

a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that

Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing inventions work better than anyone had thought possible. But how they worked was to Edison less important.