"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along"
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Clarke compresses the sociology of innovation into a three-act comedy where the punchline is collective amnesia. The line reads like a neat, almost bureaucratic taxonomy, but the real engine is his contempt for how power protects itself: first by declaring novelty unthinkable, then by belittling it, and finally by laundering its origins once it proves useful. The numbered stages mimic a lab report, yet the subject is ego.
The intent isn’t just to celebrate revolutionary ideas; it’s to expose the choreography of resistance around them. Stage one (“completely impossible”) is less a factual claim than a gatekeeping move, a way institutions weaponize “common sense” to stop the argument before it starts. Stage two (“not worth doing”) is the retreat of the skeptic who’s been forced to admit reality; now the fight shifts from feasibility to value, from physics to prestige. Stage three is the sharpest: appropriation. Once the idea has status, the same people who dismissed it rewrite the record to place themselves on the right side of history, because being wrong is survivable; being late is not.
Context matters. Clarke wasn’t only a science-fiction writer spinning futurist fantasies; he was a public intellectual who watched technologies move from speculative to inevitable within a lifetime. His wit lands because it captures a pattern recognizable in everything from spaceflight to the internet to today’s AI arms race: resistance isn’t principled, it’s positional.
The intent isn’t just to celebrate revolutionary ideas; it’s to expose the choreography of resistance around them. Stage one (“completely impossible”) is less a factual claim than a gatekeeping move, a way institutions weaponize “common sense” to stop the argument before it starts. Stage two (“not worth doing”) is the retreat of the skeptic who’s been forced to admit reality; now the fight shifts from feasibility to value, from physics to prestige. Stage three is the sharpest: appropriation. Once the idea has status, the same people who dismissed it rewrite the record to place themselves on the right side of history, because being wrong is survivable; being late is not.
Context matters. Clarke wasn’t only a science-fiction writer spinning futurist fantasies; he was a public intellectual who watched technologies move from speculative to inevitable within a lifetime. His wit lands because it captures a pattern recognizable in everything from spaceflight to the internet to today’s AI arms race: resistance isn’t principled, it’s positional.
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| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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