Technolag

Technolag is the result of the long life expectancy and rapid technological change of 20th Century western and 21st Century globalized cultures.

Let's say that you died in 2010 and ended up in the New Real. You would not be able to buy a smartphone right away, because to make a smartphone you need a factory. The factory needs a blueprint. The blueprint needs to be made by engineers.

Oh, wait, most people with enough wealth to get an engineering degree or experience in hardware design live to be 80-something at worst? That means you only have a fraction of the engineers available in the Old Real, and most of the ones you can find gave up on understanding new technology a couple decades before they died!

In short, it is extremely difficult to source the expertise needed to make a smartphone in the New Real. Sure, Steve Jobs gets resurrected and suddenly Quill creates a smartphone, but it looks and acts like a PDA, and most technological development isn't that lucky.

But it wasn't always this way...
Technology lags behind the Gaian Holocene Equivalent because electronics in the Old Real progressed quickly and Gaia is incapable of keeping up. However, before electronics, the Old Real was actually the one affected by technolag. For centuries, technolag referred to the slow pace of progress in the Old Real; the meaning of the word has only been reversed in the past few decades.