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Bazaar Clock

/bəˈzɑːr klɒk/ The rhythm of the crowd.
Definition The timeline of societal adoption and mastery, marked by a slow, continuous curve of "Scaffolding" and "Cultural Adaptation." Unlike the Cathedral Clock, this clock ticks through distributed experimentation in the "Bazaar" (the open market of users). It measures not what an AI can do, but what humanity knows how to make use of. It typically lags the Cathedral Clock by 18-36 months.

Constraints on Wisdom

Why can't the Bazaar speed up? Because wisdom is not information. Information can be downloaded; wisdom must be grown. Developing the norms to handle a super-intelligence takes actual time—time for mistakes, time for lawsuits, time for arguments at dinner tables. This process (Ogburn's "Adaptive Culture") is bound by the speed of human communication and trust-building, which has remained constant for millennia.

The Diffusion S-Curve

While the Cathedral scales exponentially, the Bazaar scales via the Logistic S-Curve (Rogers). It starts slow (Early Adopters/Innovators), accelerates through the Early Majority, and eventually plateaus. This linear-to-logistic pace creates the Wisdom Deficit: the gap between the Cathedral's vertical ascent and the Bazaar's gradual slope. In this gap, we find the chaos of the transition.

Field Notes & Ephemera

Field Note: The Cathedral builds the engine; the Bazaar builds the road. A Ferrari on a dirt path goes no faster than a mule. This is why GDP did not explode in 2024 despite the invention of general-purpose reasoning.
Stratigraphy (Related Concepts)
Cathedral Clock Capability-Mastery Gap Scaffolding Phase Diffusion of Innovations Distributed Cognition

a liminal mind meld collaboration

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