I concur with everything the author says here. If you want to visualize this for yourself, just take yourself back to the whole science/anti-vaxx debate we've had the past 2 years. That was a pretty accurate picture of the biblical tower of babel. Social media as a tool keeps sowing more division than ever because that's the growth incentive and we are too afraid to kill the golden goose. Once the metaverse becomes a thing, we will have better bricks to build the tower even higher.

China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. This disruption will have devastating effects. The accelerated move to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be even more disruptive, unlike anything we as humans have ever known. We keep on ignoring the global warming threat because we think our survival will be under threat if we go cold turkey on fossil energy and the creature comforts necessary to forestall the climate disaster. The covid pandemic gave us all a unique opportunity to recalibrate our collective lives. Today, we go about our daily lives as if the past 3 years was just a bad dream. I very much doubt we can make it through another global pandemic on a scale as or bigger than covid was in the near future.