Had an enjoyable evening yesterday listening to Steven Johnson in conversation with Brian Eno about Johnson’s new book, Ghost Map, which tells the well-known story of John Snow, the man who discovered that cholera was water-borne.

As the evening was organised by Paul Miller on behalf of The Long Now Foundation, the conversation strayed very quickly from the book to the long-term prospects for humanity. It rambled all over the place, taking in Second Life, urban communities, the rich/poor divide, whether Monbiot’s ideas for global government would be good or bad, climate change, US electoral politics and a million other things. I think it could have been a bit more structured. And I was astonished to learn that Eno is in fact the moderate wing of the Long Now Foundation, at least relative to Kevin Kelly-esque fantasies of technologised omniscience.

It was interesting to get a sense from these two very well-known figures of the topics that ‘mainstream’ futurists cluster together. And at one point, Eno said something that really intrigued me. He compared the world we live in now to the Soviet Union in 1989: apparently ossified, stuck in an intractably problematic set of structures - structures that, over a period of months, then suddenly disappeared. ‘It’s like something about to burst out of a chrysalis’, Johnson added.

I was fascinated to find that under all the laudable speculation about long-term urban planning and so on, both of them were in fact anticipating some kind of imminent cultural explosion. That, they share (amongst others) with the 2012 nutcases, and also with me.

So the question I have is this: what do these two eminent gentlemen imagine will emerge from this chrysalis? What will be the side-effects of its hatching? What are the possibilities, and what are the risks? And what are they doing about it?