We keep telling ourselves we’re in transition. From industrial to digital economies. From human-centred to AI-mediated systems. From fossil fuels to renewables. From stable employment to portfolio careers. The language implies temporality: a threshold we’re crossing, with stable ground waiting on the other side.

But what if this framing is fundamentally wrong? What if we’re not transitioning through temporary disruption but into permanent disruption as a sustained condition? What if the threshold itself has become the terrain?

The anthropology of thresholds

Liminality – from Latin limen, threshold – describes ritual states in which normal social structures dissolve. Anthropologist Victor Turner studied how societies create bounded spaces where hierarchies are suspended, identities blur, and transformation becomes possible. A wedding ceremony, a corporate retreat, a gap year abroad: these are liminal spaces where you’re temporarily neither what you were nor what you’ll become.

Turner’s insight was that culture gets made in these threshold moments. When normal rules don’t apply, new meanings emerge. Communities form. Identities shift. The person who enters the initiation isn’t the person who exits.

But Turner’s model, borrowed from Arnold van Gennep‘s earlier work on rites of passage, assumes liminality is temporary. You enter the threshold, cross through uncertainty, and emerge transformed into a new stable state. The ritual has endpoints. Separation, transition, incorporation. The middle phase – however disorienting – resolves.

What happens when the endpoints disappear? When the ritual itself becomes the only available state?

Three domains of structural asynchrony

Look across three different domains – technological infrastructure, institutional governance, and collective sense-making – and a pattern emerges. What appears to be temporary friction is actually permanent misalignment. The business world has tried to name this condition before: VUCA, for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. But VUCA assumes these are environmental conditions organisations must navigate through, with tools and frameworks to manage the turbulence. The term “permacrisis” captured something closer to reality, but still assumed crisis as aberration rather than ground state. Permanent disruption suggests something more fundamental: the turbulence isn’t a phase to weather. It’s the new ground state.

Infrastructure determinism

As we documented at CES 2026, AI’s bottleneck has shifted from algorithms to physics. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman put it bluntly:

We simply cannot launch features because we are compute constrained.

Not data constrained. Not talent constrained. They can’t get enough electricity and chips to run the AI they’ve already built.

This isn’t a temporary bottleneck awaiting resolution. McKinsey estimates $5–7 trillion in infrastructure investment needed just to power the AI systems currently in development. US data centres are projected to consume 12% of national electricity by 2028 – up from 4.4% in 2023.

The gap between algorithmic capability and deployment capacity isn’t closing. It’s widening. Progress happens at the speed of power generation, transmission lines, cooling systems, and semiconductor manufacturing. And unlike code, infrastructure doesn’t scale exponentially. It scales linearly, expensively, and with massive regulatory friction.

This is permanent asynchrony. By the time you build the infrastructure for today’s AI models, three more generations of models will have emerged, requiring different infrastructure.

Political capacity gaps

Recent research reveals how institutions are responding: almost half of C-suite executives have shortened their strategic planning horizons. Their 2030 strategies? Changed yesterday and last week. They will likely change again tomorrow.

War rooms are no longer the exception. Nearly two-thirds of executives report establishing permanent, cross-functional rapid response units to address ongoing economic, political, and regulatory developments. This isn’t crisis management awaiting a return to normal operations. This is normal operations now.

Democratic institutions operate on policy cycles that assume stability that lasts long enough to draft legislation, debate amendments, implement regulations, and observe outcomes. But technological change no longer waits for this sequence to complete. The OECD’s work on digital government reveals persistent implementation gaps – the distance between policy aspiration and execution capacity.

Governments can draft AI ethics guidelines, but lack the technical expertise to audit proprietary systems. They can mandate sustainability reporting, but can’t verify supply chain emissions claims. They can restrict certain AI applications, but enforcement requires capabilities most regulatory bodies don’t possess.

This isn’t policy failure. It’s structural asynchrony – the inherent mismatch between technological change cycles and governance timelines. The gap isn’t temporary. It’s endemic to the system.

The circuit that never resolves

Consider how we collectively process transformation through institutional cycles: annual convenings where problems are named, frameworks proposed, commitments announced. As we examined in our analysis of the circuit, these spaces serve a purpose: they create shared language, identify patterns, and convene stakeholders. But they also reveal something uncomfortable about permanent liminality.

The gap between identifying challenges and addressing them widens not because institutions fail at analysis – they don’t – but because analysis happens in one space while building happens elsewhere, on incompatible timelines. While one group processes implications, another deploys infrastructure. The processing never catches up because it operates at the speed of deliberation, whilst transformation operates at the speed of capital deployment.

This creates a permanent split between those who think about transformation and those who enact it, between the institutions that convene to discuss and the entities that simply build. The conference circuit itself becomes a liminal space: a ritual of collective sense-making that never resolves into collective action. Processing without resolution gets institutionalised as the primary mode of response.

What are the implications?

• First, it legitimates a particular kind of inaction. If we’re always in the middle of processing, we’re never late to act – we’re appropriately cautious, properly deliberative. The threshold becomes an excuse as much as an explanation.
• Second, it concentrates power with those who don’t need collective processing to proceed. Those with sufficient capital can build while others deliberate.
• Third, it transforms what should be instrumental – these convenings are meant to inform action – into something terminal. The ritual becomes its own justification.

The circuit will repeat. The processing will continue. But permanent liminality means acknowledging that processing might never resolve into a coordinated response. The question becomes whether processing alone, without resolution, serves any function beyond making participants feel they’re addressing challenges they’re actually just discussing.

The cognitive condition

Recent consumer research reveals how people experience this sustained uncertainty:

The unrelenting churn is straining people’s ability to process change. In this always-fraught environment, nuance is flattened and the speed of the next imminent change compresses reflection. People are collectively compelled to move on before they can process what’s just happened.

One respondent captured it precisely:

I do stay informed, but I try really hard to not get sucked into it.

This isn’t temporary disruption. It’s sustained cognitive load with no respite. Traditional transition narratives promise that liminality resolves – you exit the threshold into a new stable state. But when infrastructure constraints create permanent friction between capability and deployment, when policy cycles can’t synchronise with technological change, when strategic planning horizons contract quarterly, there’s no stable state to arrive at.

Almost half of those surveyed say their desire for stability has grown stronger in their lives. A third report intensified feelings of fatigue and exhaustion over the past year. They may not always recognise stability when they have it, but they feel its absence deeply. In the world of entertainment, stability is dull. In real life, it has become a premium.

The threshold is the state. Permanent disruption is the operating condition.

What permanent liminality enables – and forecloses

Turner argued that liminal spaces are generative precisely because normal structures don’t apply. When hierarchies suspend, new forms of community emerge. When identities blur, transformation becomes possible. Cultural theorist Johan Huizinga extended this:

For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilisation arises and unfolds in and as play.

Culture gets made in spaces outside normal social structures.

There’s evidence this is happening. Recent research shows 77% of people love moments of spontaneous fun, especially when those moments serve no practical purpose. Nearly as many want more space for spontaneity, creativity, and joy. Third spaces, beyond home and workplace, are multiplying precisely because traditional structures feel increasingly temporary.

The costs of permanent uncertainty

But sustained liminality also forecloses possibilities:

Long-term institutional investment. Why commit capital to 20-year infrastructure projects when strategic horizons contract to quarters? The infrastructure gap widens not just because building takes time, but because permanent uncertainty discourages the long-term commitments required to build at scale. One observer noted the paradox: affluent populations tend to benefit first from breakthrough medical advances, while others wait, “thus delaying the potential impact on public health and widening gaps in vitality and longevity across income levels.”

Democratic deliberation. Governance requires time for debate, amendment, and consensus-building. When change outpaces deliberation cycles, either democracy gets bypassed, or governance arrives perpetually late. Democratic institutions face a particular bind: the legitimacy that comes from deliberative process requires time the system no longer has.

Collective processing. If people are “compelled to move on before they can process what’s just happened,” this isn’t just exhaustion – it’s the foreclosure of shared sense-making. We can’t build collective responses to change we haven’t collectively absorbed. Boycotts against brands have

largely become more aesthetic than impactful. They happen frequently but rarely endure long enough to cause significant economic damage.

Not because people don’t care, but because the next crisis arrives before the current one resolves.

The organisations best positioned for permanent liminality aren’t necessarily the most adaptive. They’re the ones with sufficient capital reserves to maintain optionality when planning horizons contract. The condition that demands institutional flexibility most also concentrates power among institutions large enough to absorb sustained uncertainty.

Building for the threshold

If permanent disruption is the condition rather than a temporary phase, what do you build?

There’s no point building for stability that won’t arrive. Nor for transition that implies resolution. But you can build for sustained capacity to operate in threshold conditions – to make meaning, govern collectively, and allocate resources when the ground won’t solidify.

This requires acknowledging something uncomfortable: the next stable state isn’t coming. The infrastructure gaps won’t close. The policy cycles won’t synchronise. The cognitive load won’t ease. Waiting for resolution means waiting indefinitely.

But this acknowledgement also opens possibilities. If liminality is permanent, then the spaces where culture gets made, where play happens, where meaning emerges, where communities form, aren’t temporary refuges. They’re the primary sites of social life.

Matt Shumer, CEO of Hyperwrite, recently captured what this means in practice:

The people who come out of this well won’t be the ones who mastered one tool. They’ll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself… Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.

This isn’t advice for navigating disruption toward stability. It’s operational guidance for threshold existence itself.

Turner wrote about “communitas“, the intense feelings of solidarity that emerge in liminal spaces when normal hierarchies dissolve. He thought communitas was temporary, a brief glimpse of alternative social relations before structure reasserts itself. But what if communitas becomes the default rather than the exception?

The question isn’t what comes after the threshold. It’s what becomes possible when we stop waiting for the threshold to end. Not crisis management awaiting normal operations, but new operational logics designed for sustained uncertainty. Not transition planning toward stable futures, but capacity-building for permanent adaptation.

The territory beyond endings

This is the territory beyond “The End”. Not what comes after endings resolve, but how we inhabit the space where endings don’t resolve. Where the threshold itself becomes home.

The conference circuit will repeat annually. The infrastructure gaps will widen. The policy frameworks will arrive late. Strategic planning horizons will contract further. People will feel more exhausted, crave more stability, and seek more spaces for play and spontaneity outside formal structures.

We’re learning to live in between. The question is whether we can build institutions, meanings, and communities adequate to permanent disruption – or whether threshold existence becomes simply permanent precarity for everyone except those with capital reserves large enough to wait indefinitely.

Not transition toward a new stable state. Adaptation to threshold as terrain.

Photo by ANTIPOLYGON YOUTUBE on Unsplash