In a world that worships tech, ‘can’t’ is heresy; but it defines our limits.

As we head into the unknowable future, I think discerning between Didn’t, Couldn’t, and Can’t is an increasingly important line of inquiry to pursue and skill to sharpen.

If something didn’t happen, is it because it couldn’t happen, or it can’t?

If a technology didn’t take off, is it because it couldn’t at the time, or that it can’t ever?

The importance of this question is obvious when you realize, in the techno/religious consciousness, there is no problem technology cannot be positioned to be the savior of.

There is no ‘can’t’ for technology or technologists. The ‘can’t’ way of thinking has to be eradicated. Can’t, can’t exist.

And if there is a Can’t we agree exists, we are very quiet about this heresy. But we all know it; that Can’t is definitively out there, in the Didn’t around the corner.

Setting the Frame for Can’t

I was wondering the other day, why I wasn’t creating, trading, and mining NFTs or selling them in the metaverse. Why didn’t that future arrive? Was it because it couldn’t arrive at that time, or that it can’t ever? Or is it something even deeper, or, perhaps simple and shallow?

In our technopoly-based society, ‘can’t’ is the closest thing we have to a sacrilegious word. Anything and everything is possible for the doers and dreamers. All the failures and “didn’ts” of the past are the result of lack of access, imagination, and grit. I write more about this in “The Myth of Fairness in the Sandbox”

To the techno-determinists, the reason some glorious future didn’t happen is because it couldn’t at the time. Never that it can’t happen.

The promises and pillow talk of the hucksterers and con men of the past and present, the armageddons that have come and gone, the gallons of urine that never alchemized into solid gold, the utopian visions that swelled up and died on the vine; the story of humanity hinges between failed breakthroughs and “just you wait.”

In an odd paradox, our culture of determination, striving, and hard work, has rewired the interpretation of most future-tech failures as “premature,” very rarely “impossible.”

When It’s Actually ‘Can’t’ (Not ‘Couldn’t’)

Defined and known natural laws, like thermodynamics, biology, gravity, make up the hard floor we build our dreams on. There’s also fluctuating quantum principles, philosophical considerations, and other “laws” that are implicit and veiled which also influence and define the limits we can act and think within.

Whether we take all this into consideration or not determines how far we’re able to take certain innovations or ideas.

The hard truth is, there are definitive ‘cants’ in the world.

Perpetual motion machines can’t work because they violate the laws of thermodynamics. You can’t get unlimited energy without input, ever.

The scarcityless scarcity of NFTs showed us scarcity is impossible on top of infinite reproducibility, this is simply supply and demand.

A universal metaverse as a life replacement can’t happen because VR spaces ignore human embodiment, social structures, and physical needs.

We’re not riding around in Segways, we’re not dodging level 5 autonomous flying cars, we’re not traveling faster than light, and we’re not teleporting to the grocery store.

But if I pay attention to my brain, there is a part of me that reads the above examples and quietly says, “not yet, but not never.” Why is that?

The Collective Pretend

In imaginary group play among children, anything is possible as long as everyone agrees to collectively pretend.

If kids can ignore that they’re in the living room, they can easily be in outer space. If they overlook the rug from Ikea, the floor can be lava. And, the more they lean into pretending, the more they experience depth and realism in play. At this point, it’s fun.

In imaginary group play among adults, AKA existence in society, the same rules apply.

Among many other social fabrics, money, law, religion are pretend, consensual hallucinations. They work only because everyone agrees they work, and they scale up through selective ignorance in the adult world in the same way lava floors do in kidland. And in opposite contrast to the fun of imaginary play, the pretending adults do turns into faith, families and friends, finance, and fiduciary reality.

And in both cases, the moment when someone stops seeing lava and sees a floor, or questions the flawed logic beneath the groupthink du jour, the impossible meets its maker. Some things (good and bad) only work if everyone agrees they work, others fail because no amount of agreement can fix the underlying fraud.

For NFTs to have taken off, we would’ve been required to agree to pretend and remain ignorant about the infinite scarcity aspect and plain-wrong economic principles. For us all to be in the metaverse, we would’ve been required to divorce from reality and ignore the embodied nature of human existence.

Point being: the reason these particular things didn’t take off is they required us to remain stupid.

And it’s because we really don’t like feeling stupid that silly ideas actually get as far as they do.

The Psychological Case for FOMO-sapiens

If you’ve ever had a secret kept from you, or found out something important too late, you know the feeling of missing out and you might over-correct and turn into a FOMO-sapien, living life based around avoiding the fear of missing out.

Along with ignorance, another reason our society keeps falling for hype and perpetual futures of “not yet” instead of “never” is the same reason we don’t want to miss out as individuals; fear.

There is a whole litany of companies and consultancies, like Gartner and McKinsey, and predictive technologies that are based around fear and preventing a critical miss. The industrialization of techno-optimism makes it difficult to escape the cultural inertia of fear.

The technopolists believe “can’t” is the mind killer that stops progress, but Frank Herbert’s definition of ‘fear as the mind killer’ is more appropriate and accurate.

Simplicants think contemplating the “can’t” is what kills momentum and dumbs us down, when it’s more likely the deep terror of being wrong that propels genuine smarts into the stupidest shit imaginable.

Smart-people-dumb-shit, is what I’ve called this. Idiocy isn’t just for the idiots!

Why We Can’t Afford to Ignore Can’t

I’m not gonna point fingers, but I don’t think I’m saying anything crazy by mentioning the bubble in AI, referencing the insanely poor business strategy, pointing to the scaling failures of the flagship LLMs, referencing the articles about workslop, the failure rate of AI projects, or listing the HUNDREDS of lawsuits these companies are embroiled in from governments, parents that have lost kids, publishing companies, and competitors.

I could list the fundamental laws, philosophical and religious principles, and legal & moral codes that clearly detail the unsolvable misalignment between humanity and AI, but these have all been ignored by the blase-faire. The richest men in the planet are toxically irreverent in the face of so many different kinds of “can’t” and the financial hope is that we remain ignorant and stupid and pretend the floor is lava.

Which is why we can’t ignore the cants anymore. But, we have to define them, in order to defend them.

Whether it’s science, law, religion, spirituality, philosophy, each of us can find and reestablish a grounding interpretation for the ‘cants’ in life. When we identify with principled thinking and rigorous reflection on one or many mental anchors of meaning, we can define our own thinking and interpret information more clearly.

The hope of the simplicants behind AI is that we will forget all cants and take a chance, unmoor ourselves completely from these principles and embrace the future without any hang up or hesitation. But the further we lean into the future, the more we’re vacant in the present moment.

We can’t let that happen.

In a blue-flame brilliant article from JA Westenberg, “I’m Done Future-Proofing My Life,” they articulate in fewer words what I’ve tried to lay out it in too many, so I have to share this chunk:

“We’re spending more time rearranging our ambitions around speculative graphs than doing the actual work in front of us. We’re outsourcing our sense of purpose (and any // all direction) to futurists who, if history and their own track record is any guide, will likely be wrong.”

The future is not a problem to be proofed against. The future is an inevitability that will break us, one way or another, whether we prepare or not.

My goal is this and only this: to survive tomorrow with some dignity, to keep faith in what I care about, to meet disruption without surrendering to its omniscience before it even fucking arrives. Simply put: I refuse to let the specter of the future rob the present of meaning.”

Get amongst it → https://www.joanwestenberg.com/

Navigating the Future Through Negation

At the end of writing this, I suppose I’m making a case for negation as a positive force. We seductively think ‘can’t’ is the word of quitters, but it’s actually a guiding force to getting to what matters and what’s lasting, faster than chasing the can-cans.

Here is a quick reference framework to differentiate between didn’t, couldn’t, and can’t:

Didn’t happen: Social or infrastructural misfire (e.g., electric cars in the 90s).

Couldn’t happen (yet): Awaiting breakthroughs in tech or cost curves (e.g., reusable rockets before SpaceX).

Can’t happen: Violates physics, economics, or human nature (e.g., perpetual motion machines, scarcityless NFTs with speculative value).

We don’t have to be less interested and curious and imaginative about the future, but we need to be more precise about what’s possible. Otherwise, we’ll keep mistaking nonsense for destiny, can’t for couldn’t, and the absence of life for living.