What this is not
Synchronism has many neighbours, and the first sensible question from an informed reader is how it differs from what already exists. Below are honest answers, including the cases where the difference is smaller than we would like.
- Progress studies
- Studies the conditions under which progress happens, and mostly asks how to make it faster. Our question is different: not how to accelerate progress, but how to detect and close the imbalances inside it. This is the nearest neighbour, and part of our work is literally progress studies with a normative addition.
- Cultural lag
- Ogburn’s concept describes a situation in which social adaptation trails technological change. That is effectively a special case of our gap, formulated a century ago. The difference is that there it is a descriptive concept, while we build a research programme and a demand for redistribution out of it.
- Metascience
- Studies how the production of science is arranged: reproducibility, peer review, funding. We use its results but look one level up — not how to improve science, but which areas of knowledge civilisation systematically underinvests in.
- Technoprogressivism
- Shares our technological optimism and attention to social consequences. It differs in being primarily a political position. Synchronism offers no political programme — it offers a diagnostic function whose results could support different political conclusions.
- Effective altruism
- Also concerns itself with redistributing resources by importance and neglectedness. But its frame is expected harm and benefit, and ours is the gap between capability and understanding. We ask not «where is there most suffering» but «where does our failure to understand cost the most». These frames often point in different directions.
- Acceleration and its critics
- The dispute over whether to speed up or slow down is badly posed for us. The question is not speed in general but which components are currently lagging. We want to accelerate — mostly the things not usually thought worth accelerating.
- Ethics of technology and bioethics
- Disciplines that work with the consequences of particular technologies. We regard them as allies rather than competitors, and claim that they are systematically under-resourced relative to the volume of questions placed on them.
Where we genuinely risk being redundant
The honest version of the risk: synchronism may be a convenient name for the intersection of several existing traditions, and its contribution may amount to a vocabulary. We do not think so, and we have no convincing proof of the contrary.
Our working answer is that none of the traditions listed makes the detection of imbalances a standing function with a measurement methodology of its own. As long as we have no such methodology either, that statement remains a promise rather than an achievement.