Too Close to the Blowtorch of Progress

From Singularity Sky, a 2003 sci-fi novel by Charles Stross:

"If Burya had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity—a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity—is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed—the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress."

Here's the basics on the idea of a Singularity, if you're unfamiliar. No, it hasn't arrived yet, but....