Engineering history
Eric S. Raymond - how can a small percentage of a population have a huge effect on its future? By engineering its technology infrastructure.
Sometimes, when society reaches a cusp point, the decisions of individuals and small groups can have very large downstream consequences that are even visibly large in the near term.
I have personally been present, and an actor, for at least two such hinge points of history: the finalization of the Internet design in 1983, and the mainstream emergence of open-source methods in the late 1990s. Even in the relatively short time since it has become clear that these are game-changers on the civilizational level, with ripple effects that will shape the rest of human history.
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