> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hypermodern.online/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Weirder and Weirder... - URL: https://www.hypermodern.online/weirder-and-weirder/ - Published: 2026-08-28T06:10:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T06:10:18.000Z - Author: David Cash > Curiouser and curiouser... > > *“I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. The systems in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces unleashed. The good news is that, as primates, we’re incredibly adaptable to change. We can put up with about anything. And it’s a good thing, because we’re going to be tested to the limits.”* > > — **Terence McKenna, ethnobotanist and philosopher** --- In 1936, Charlie Chaplin debuted *Modern Times*, a seminal film depicting the reality and supposed evolution of the era of the global industrial revolution, from Ford factories to a Nazi ballet and everything in between. The film's preface labels it "a story of industry, of individual enterprise–humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness." The film was made, in part, to both satirize and rationalize the rapidly changing world of the Industrial Revolution that Chaplin and his colleagues were experiencing. This film is, retrospectively, regarded as one of the great works of early cinema; however, in Chaplin's time, he was widely chastized by governments and media alike for being a communist opposed to industrial capitalism and, thereby, ironically, the progression of *Modern Times*. Why do I mention this film? Well– in this series of essays and, penultimately, my work-in-progress book *Hypermodern*, I would like to be so bold as to draw a line in the sand and officially label our current era (as of August 2026) as "Hypermodern times." What do I mean by this? Per my original thesis, Hypermodernity can be defined as the phenomenon in which technology develops at a rate faster than humans can comprehend. My philosophical standpoint is that this same logic applies to nearly every industry, if not all, as well as to sociology, anthropology, and beyond. In the era of *Modern Times*, "modern" citizens of the 1930s and 1940s were graced with the industrialization and mass-accessibility of automobiles. In terms of people of the time wrapping their minds around a car as a means of transportation vs a horse and buggy as transportation is and was, arguably, a small logic leap. Despite this, people of the time were often confused, outraged, and flabbergasted by these machines taking over their streets. To this day, the word for "car" in Italian is "machina," literally translating to "machine," which makes sense considering Italy was only "modernized" into a republic in 1946\. But I digress. When we think about technological evolution today, we're considering ***exponential*** change vs rapid change. In the past 40 years, we've gone from needing to use landlines or "car phones" to communicate with each other beyond physical proximity to having, essentially, supercomputers (smartphones) in our pockets that consume 8+ hours of our time on average and make us hyper-accessible all the time everywhere all at once. This is far more of a mind-fuck (read, once again, "logic leap" and, please, pardon my French) than the evolution from horse-drawn carriages to cars. Not to downplay evolutions of the past, but we're moving from 100 horsepower to lightspeed in terms of the exponential change in how we interface with the world around us in every way, shape, and form. In a 1965 magazine article, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, made the empirical observation that: *"the number of transistors on a microchip doubles roughly every two years, while the cost of computers is cut in half."* To quote an article in the New York Times: > > > *"When Dr. Moore made his observation, the densest memory chips stored only about 1,000 bits of information. Today’s densest memory chips have roughly 20 billion transistors. To put it another way, the iPad 2, which went on the market in 2011 for $400 and fits in your lap,* [*had more computing power*](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/the-ipad-in-your-hand-as-fast-as-a-supercomputer-of-yore/?ref=hypermodern.online) *than the world’s most powerful supercomputer in the 1980s, a device called the Cray 2 that was about the size of an industrial washing machine and would cost more than $15 million today."* 💡 The NYT article features computer scientists and IT executives predicting the end of Moore's Law as far back as 2005\. [Read the full article here](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/technology/moores-law-running-out-of-room-tech-looks-for-a-successor.html?ref=hypermodern.online) How does this apply to what we're talking about? Well, Moore's observation, now coined and better known as "Moore's Law," has been applied across disciplines and contexts incredibly disparate from microchips and, to some extent, has been a basis of justification of exponential growth and flux of technology and, often, other industries and cross-disciplinary schools of thought as well. But we've drastically surpassed this rate of "exponential" growth. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/8a/b38afdc5-eaeb-495a-93c0-ba7c17f9c3aa/content/images/2026/08/newsroom-gordon-moore-feat-1200x675.jpg) Image via [Intel](https://newsroom.intel.com/press-kit/moores-law?ref=hypermodern.online) The term "exponential growth" itself can be defined as: *"When a quantity increases at a rate directly proportional to its current size."* Or, mathimatically, We write this as ***dy/dt = ky***, where ***y*** is the current amount, ***t*** is time, and ***k*** is a positive growth constant.The total amount over time is shown as y(t) = y\_0 e^{kt}\\) (where \\(y\_{0}\\) is the starting amount and ***e*** is the mathematical constant for exponential change. This is most commonly applied to bacterial growth in science or compound interest in mathematics; however, it can, in theory, be applied to anything. Exponential change is constantly increasing in rapidity (quite literally); thereby, it makes sense that we've moved beyond Moore's law of "doubling" to a totally new parameter of rapid growth and change from the mid 1960s to 2026\. 61 years after Moore's law was written into the zeitgeist, a lot has changed. In Hypermodern times, it becomes difficult for humans as a species to wrap our heads around the hyper-exponential rate of change we're experiencing across all disciplines because the amount of information and variety of subsets of society that are changing are vast and all-encompassing. Many of the "changes" that we're experiencing today aren't just confusing; they fundamentally change the way we interact with the world and live our lives on a day-to-day basis. That idea in and of itself is quite frightening to many of us. For the rest of us, this is incredibly exciting. To go back to the quote I used to open up today's essay, one of my favourite contemporary thinkers of the 1980s–1990s, Terrence McKenna, accurately stated that at some point, "*it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is."* And, whether we like it or not, the time, dear reader, has come for us to talk about it! > To re-quote McKenna once again: > > *"The good news is that, as primates, we’re incredibly adaptable to change. And it’s a good thing, because we’re going to be tested to the limits."* This rings true as we collectively witness the hyper-rapidity of hypermodern evolution. Look at the consumer-facing onset of AI for instance. Merely \~3 years ago (in 2023 when writing this), most run-of-the-mill people had never used, or experienced AI firsthand beyond receiving automated spam emails or automated nuisances of the like unless you were a software developer, researcher, computer scientist, or academic in an affiliated field. In late November of 2022, OpenAI launched *ChatGPT* into the world as a free and public tool. Within five days of the product becoming publicly available, it had already reached its first 1 million users (0.012% of the world's population). By its second month of public access, in January of 2023, the user count of *ChatGPT* had surged to 100 million users (about 1.2% of the total world population). Today, as of August 2026, *ChatGPT* has over 1 billion active monthly users (roughly 12% of the world's population. So, within a 1-month span, *ChatGPT* 100x'd their user count, and, within a timespan of 3 years and 7 months, from January of 2023 to the time of me writing these words, the user count has 10x'd. Talk about exponential growth moving far beyond "doubling." And, it should be noted, that even the rate of growth is in constant flux. In one month, we witnessed a 100x growth rate in usership. 100x in 30 days. Moore contemplated 2x growth over the course of a year. This was only 61 years ago. Within those \~3 decades, we've fundamentally changed the way we actualize and rationalize "change." Even considering the 10x growth rate *ChatGPT* experienced over the coming years, we're still 5x beyond Moore's law, so this logic is now antiquated and no longer applies to the rate of technological, or any, form of evolution. We're now in the era of hypermodernity, where evolution is ever more hyper-exponential. I'd like to think of our current age of Hypermodernity as a stage of human evolution in "hyper-flux." Everything is changing constantly at a rapid yet undefinable rate. Furthermore, when we consider that only roughly 40% of the world's population owns a computer and 70% owns a smartphone, we're actually looking at a much higher penetration rate of humanity. And this is only considering *ChatGPT*! When we bake in the usage of *Claude*, Google's *Gemini*, *Perplexity*, *Cursor*, *Grok*, *Meta AI*, Microsoft *Copilot*, and all of the other unicorn companies and AI chatbots (not even considering LLMs, private use cases, etc.) that have come out of the AI boom– **we're looking at an even more invasive, rapid, and transformative popularization of a technology that fundamentally changes the way we live our lives as a species.** (Well, at least 40-70% of us) It's difficult to even contextualize "AI" as a technology, as it has recently manifested into so much more than that– but if I dive down that rabbit hole, I'll end up writing a second book, so more to come on that in later essays and writing. I digress once again. All of this is to say what once was a tool for automating email follow-ups in the 90s is now powering semi-conscious "brains" of literal humanoid robots within a span of 20-30 years. Comparing that to the rate of evolution present during the industrial revolution or even during the dot com boom, it's almost impossible to fathom– hence why Hypermodernity is what we need to be wrapping our heads around vs every single thing that is changing rapidly in and of itself. It's impossible for any one human to "keep up" with everything. That is just a fact. And that is a fact that all of us will have to accept at some point in our lives. If not, we'll literally, unfortunately, be left behind by the rest of society. In my coming essays, I'll share my contemplations of "comprehension" vs "understanding," which is my rationalization of the onslaught of information that the internet, and now AI, make accessible to us everywhere all at once. More on that soon. 💡 ****Prediction as of August 2026:** Within 2 years, we'll see humanoid robots walking on the street as often as we see self-driving cars (such as Waymo) on the streets today. They will become commonplace. So, in closing, what should you take from this short essay on hypermodernity? Well, we briefly contemplated everything from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of consumer-facing AI in the effort to illustrate the rapid rate of evolution we're collectively experiencing. > This is hypermodernity. While this concept may seem inherent or obvious to some, please consider the fact that only \~0.3% of the world's population today has used a paid version of an AI chatbot or model as of August of 2026\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/8a/b38afdc5-eaeb-495a-93c0-ba7c17f9c3aa/content/images/2026/08/defkn2xgy8ng1-1.jpeg) [cc Steven Bartlett's Linkedin Post](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevenbartlett-123%5Fi-saw-this-visualisation-last-week-and-it-activity-7434541861111005184-oYnf/?ref=hypermodern.online) If you're someone like me who interacts with *Claude* co-workers more than my co-workers or friends, this is perplexing, to say the least. That is the point of this series of essays: to attempt to, in McKenna's words, "test the limits" of what we can comprehend as it pertains to what the near and distant future of humanity might and can look like. I suggest we take a utopian view of this rapid change, because what is the alternative? As the world continues to get "curiouser and curiouser," we need to open our minds to realities beyond our current belief systems and even the very thresholds of what we consider reality. We've collectively evolved beyond the Judy Jetson vision of the future, so **why not work together to create a future we're all excited about and leverage rapidly evolving technologies, conventions, ideas, and infrastructures for the collective betterment of our lives and humanity as a whole?** I'll leave this entry at that and get off my soapbox. Thank you for reading– until tomorrow. \- David Cash | August 28, 2026 --- > *"'Curiouser and curiouser!' cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English)"* > **— Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland**