Who Am I?
Either a worldwide pandemic, or a major international economic depression, would be plausible reasons.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Depends what you're trying to do in the rest of the story, but I'm partial to 'nope, the industrial and information revolutions are unique. You picked that fruit and now you're going to get incremental improvements, not transformative changes.'
A Self-inflicted Disaster
To add to Demarquis' good answer:
During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, a lot of companies laid off their research scientists but the bean counters mostly kept their jobs. This had lasting impacts; STEM fields became unpopular college majors for a decade
"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow
No more resources to use anymore.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
@De Marquis & minseok42: Well, I was going to have both of these happen anyway, along with a wave of superstorms, earthquakes and other natural disasters wrecking havoc on vital parts of the global economy with little to no time between them for proper recovery, so that's a relief.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
That's way too extreme; it will basically lead to a typical post-apocalyptic setting.
Who Am I?
"along with a wave of superstorms, earthquakes and other natural disasters wrecking havoc on vital parts of the global economy with little to no time between them for proper recovery"
Sheesh. Yeah, that'll do it.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
How does that setting not lead to an Post-Apocalyptic scenario?
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
Easy: They don't happen all at once, and they don't ravage every place on the planet. Just in enough critical places to cause enough damage at the "worst" time possible that, combined with the other events before and/or after them, set off a big domino effect.
Edited by MarqFJA on May 20th 2022 at 9:05:02 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Peeks from Under Rocks
You don't really need anything big and dramatic, if you're willing to make some (not terribly implausible) assumptions:
- Quantum Computing never really pans out, or is really only useful for certain niche problems.
- Semiconductor transistors end up being impossible/impractical to reduce in size and power consumption from something near their current levels, and no practical replacement is ever found. This completely ends Moore's Law expansion regarding computing resources. (Note: Even today, upper-end cell phone processors can only be run at full capacity for a few seconds at a time. Otherwise, the chip would melt itself - or the phone body - due to lack of cooling. The software industry is already pivoting from a "Throw more hardware at it" model of upgrades to "Make more effective use of our existing processing capacity")
- Per-capita energy availability caps out somewhere, possibly due to a combination of limited renewable sources, limits in storage density, and Fusion ending up being trickier than we currently expect.
This puts some caps on what is and is not possible:
- Autonomous robots like the Boston Dynamics robo-dogs would probably be more common, but not light-years ahead of what we can already build
- Space infrastructure is quite possibly much more extensive, but not really all that much more advanced. (Note that the most advanced civilian projects currently in development would have been technically possible decades ago, just not economically feasible.)
- Electric autonomous ground vehicles are much more widespread if the population is still using personal vehicles.
- Personal aircraft/flying car stuff on the other hand is still expensive, and probably has a lot of restrictions on airspace and traffic lanes. The vehicles themselves are much more refined, but they still take a huge amount of energy, which limits their applicability.
- Overall, expect much broader market penetration for what is currently "High-Tech"
Could just have it that they hit a wall with their technology, and couldn't find a way around that wall in the intervening time.
Like if us developing FTL drives needed a special kind of element, which was mined out by aliens or Neglectful Precursors, meaning that we were more or less stuck. We're already reaching limits in transistor density, simply due to the laws of physics.
The wall could also be legal or cultural. The Voth in Star Trek: Voyager, and the Time Lords in Doctor Who became stagnant for millions of years, the former due to adherence to Doctrine, and the latter from become too comfortable and decadent in their position as undisputed masters of the multiverse.
In My Hero Academia, it is mostly legal. After everyone initially got superpowers, they nearly caused the collapse of civilisation. As such, laws were passed to limit the use of those superpowers, and everything has only just returned to a 21st century level of technology, despite being some 300 years ahead of us now.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
IIRC the Modern Stasis of the MHA setting has more to do with just how long the post-Quirk emergence upheaval throughout the world had lasted and and how damaging it was, in no small part due to the Greater-Scope Villain Diabolical Mastermind using his extensive resources and grossly OP Quirk for the deliberate fomenting of societal collapse in favor of an extreme "might makes right" environment. And where the hell did you get the 300 year figure from? There's only been about 150-ish years since the emergence of the first Quirk note , at most (and this deemed very unlikely) 200 years.
Edited by MarqFJA on May 31st 2022 at 5:20:43 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
How about "energy crisis, it tokk 50 years to convince politicians to yang lobbist (for non renewable energies) and the transition period to electric/nuclear had growing pains but it was done (we even have nuclear energy that lacks nuclear waste now).
So yeah, make that line to say "this is what politicians got people busy as a distraction".
Make some lines about "the new cell phone improved model 2120 now with extra [insert current feature x 30] and call it the "economical series".
And the ocasional line of "the rest of the world got a tiny bit better in quality of life/equality and call it a day.
Just keep on mind a few weeks ago a man discovered a way toake internet like a "million times faster" so expect computers to have video games described as "4k ,120 fps , demolition/physics simulator" as an Indie game option
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
WTH does "yang lobbist" mean?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Like reflections in the glass!
Some of the future histories that I'm trying to make are set towards the end of the 21st century, and would be much easier to do if I had a way to justify having the future world remain largely if not entirely similar to our modern time frame in terms of technological advancement, but I'm not sure what kind of global event (or combination of events) would be plausible to cause most technological progress around the world to stagnate for several decades that doesn't involve something as fantastical as Reality Warping or an Alien Invasion enforcing such stagnation. For example, unless I'm very mistaken, a World War III scenario whose damage is severe enough to cause such damage to humanity's technological advancement would just essentially send the world back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels at best.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.