30 March

Innovations that succeed follow the famous S-curve pattern. For a while nothing much seems to be happening. Then suddenly the change explodes and everybody is doing it. It’s not gradual. This is the status thing again. The principle universally used to guide people’s lives is ‘what everybody else is doing’. The imitative status games people play, to ‘fit in’ with their social groups. We call it peer pressure in kids, but it’s all adult life too. With a new innovation, you reach a tipping point where enough people are starting to do the new thing, that Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) comes into play. That’s when things explode, when everybody rushes to do the new thing ‘that everybody else is doing’. We may have reached that point in Anglo countries now with renewables and EVs, due to Trump’s glorious stupidity. He pushed us to the FOMO tipping point. Electrification has gone viral.