And Now What : Disruption And History

My credentials are more silicon than parchment.

I am a tech entrepreneur — steeped in technology, business, and innovation for the better part of three decades. I built products, led teams, conquered markets (peacefully, I assure you), and learned more from the failures than the wins.

I have spent my career navigating disruption - examining why and how some changes take hold and scale, while others collapse.

That was my first mountain. A few years ago, I felt the urge to climb a different one.

I began reading—voraciously and without discipline, which turns out to be exactly the right way to do it. I waded through history, philosophy, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, and the economics of innovation.

What I found was not a shortage of knowledge, but a critical shortage of synthesis.

Recent decades have produced extraordinary research across dozens of fields. But academics, constrained by specialization and the need to protect hard-won reputations, rarely venture beyond their niches. The result is a vast, fragmented literature. Each discipline illuminates its own corner; none of them turns on the lights.

That gap is where this project lives.

I am aware of the presumption involved. But consider the precedent. Yuval

Harari's day job was medieval military history — his scholarly work carries titles

like Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry, 1100–1550. He is also one of the

most widely read historians of the last twenty years, precisely because he was

willing to venture onto the biggest story there is. Academics were unimpressed.

("What is correct is not new, and what is new is incorrect." "A deceptive

hodgepodge.") Millions of readers disagreed.

The lesson I draw from Harari is that synthesis requires a certain freedom from consequence—the willingness to connect dots across fields without worrying about which academic department you might offend. I have no tenure to lose and no historical reputation to protect, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful credential for this kind of work.

What I do bring is a founder’s grasp of systemic complexity and a habit of looking for the mechanisms that actually drive disruption. I have spent decades examining how technology reshapes behavior and connecting disparate dots to find the pattern beneath the noise. I have done this repeatedly in the tech world; now, I am applying that same lens to the most disruptive story of all: human history.

This project draws on the work of historians, economists, and scientists far more specialized than I am. I make no claim to the last word on any of it. What I do claim is that the questions are the right ones, and that the moment demands we take them seriously.

The argument is mine. The conclusions are yours.

Didier Moretti