A period of tremendous social, technological, industrial, and memetic transformation, beginning with the great info- , bio- , bio-nano tech, and space colonization advances of the 21st century Information Age, which culminated in an evolutionary wavecrest that carried representatives of both biopunk, cyberpunk, and nanopunk, both transhumanist humans as well as AIs (both individually and symbiotically), almost to the threshold of transapience, while the masses remained behind, unable or unwilling to even understand, let alone follow.
Hence the singularity went unnoticed by 99% of the population, and as the world entered a period of permanent 80% unemployment the masses on Earth became entrenched in an oppressive cyberfeudalism.
As the decades wore on, early transhumanist fancies of collective technorapture turned out to be just that - a pop-transhumanist adaptation of judeo-christian millenialism. But those that understood and were open and ready did advance - and some advanced further than others - to form stratified "toposphic levels" (from ordinary baseline 100 IQ to bright early genemods and bio-punks, superbrights, and superturing AI, and eventually to first singularity transapient posthumans and hyperturings).
For some there was lucrative work in the megacorps, for others in labs, but the vast majority remained eccentric hobbyists who sowed the seeds for memetic engineering that way. Meanwhile humanity expanded throughout the solar system, establishing polities and utopias in orbital habitats, on the Moon and Mars, and the asteroid belt and beyond. It was the new age of adventure, the high frontier.
Entrepreneurs, prospectors, visionaries, lunatics, rebels and outlaws, space-going megacorporations, terrestrial and orbital governments, and an abundance of superbright, parahuman, and post-human cultures, great and small, they all contended for their peice of the limitless resources that deep space held.
All the while technology kept spiralling upwards, governments were unable to cope, and superbrights, ais, and posthumans manipulated the masses of humans, splices, provolves and virtuals beneath them. But worse were the covert nanotech crises and wars that developed as more and more ultratech fell into the hands of those lacking the moral responsibility to use it, culminating in the great nanodisaster.
The survivors of the swarms, and those technically able to cope, sheltered under shields of blue goo, or fled to the Oort cloud and established cultures and isolationist societies that would last for centuries, some becoming increasingly stratified and rigid, others undergoing astonishing flowerings, until civilization once again emerged in the form of a brave new federation of humanity.
