Thread by @daveg

A brief history of the world since 1995:

The effects of Chinese economic reforms and the linking of computers started to be felt. This increased flows of capital and information at a global scale just as the discovery of the new world and the printing press had in the 15th C.

This was a 500 year shift. In the 15th Century the distance from the printing press in Mainz and and from an Atlantic port determined how quickly society would adapt to the post feudal world. The closer you were to these two things the quicker medieval guilds and fairs...

...were replaced by joint stock companies and capital markets. Today, traditional companies are being replaced by platforms, which control influence outside of their balance sheet by acting as hub in a network and at the same time the characteristics of production have changed.

This was a 200 year shift. A shift from the industrial to information era, characterised by networked organisations replacing rigid hierarchies and self contained, may-to many production modules vs assembly lines. These modules can be remote in other markets and that fact...

combined with the destabilising effects of the transition from industrial to information based economies has created rising inequality.

Meanwhile, more information and more transparency in financial markets created a natural backlash where pockets of opacity were deliberately created to allow for information advantage. In 2008, this artificial opacity was revealed, creating a market seizure in the West...

Governments had to provide liquidity to financial institutions and this resulted in 'quantitative easing' programs which exacerbated inequality and passed debt onto the public sector, creating a potential issue with less government money to pay for...

more services for an ageing population (but that's a problem for the future). This watershed moment for inequality happened at a time when changes to information flows because of the Internet were changing the way politics worked.

This was a 100 year shift. When you rewire the world for information to flow differently, which the Internet has done, the way you rewire it, the type of network, matters. Only particular types of network allow complex ideas to spread and these are called 'small world' networks.

Small world networks are goldilocks ones, just connected enough that ideas can spread at all and not too well connected that groupthink prevents new ideas from updating them. It takes time for a network to settle into a small world configuration and until it does...

complex ideas can't spread, only simple ones. This changes politics becuase there are an infinite number of lies so there are an infinite number of simple lies. There are a finite number of truths, however, so there are a finite number of simple truths.

Because of this, in a non small world network like you have in any new one as it evolves, lies will spread better than the truth, We now have people who are angry because of inequality and information flows that favour lies. This creates populism just as it did 100 years ago.

While progress in China has created an authoritarian technocracy that is operated like a ruthless but very successful corporation, where a presentation by the Chinese Communist Party is more like an Apple keynote than a political rally,...

...in the West, noisy information flows have turned democracy into mob rule, with the rise of populism. People blaming individuals such as Cameron or May for Brexit are falling for an anthropocentric illusion, the environment has changed, it doesn't matter who the actors are...

there is a reason why the US has a reality TV President, why Sweden is the world capital of ultra right literature, why Corbyn and May are both pushing for Brexit and why the Italian left has partnered with neo-fascists...

There is no right and left anymore, but technocracy vs democracy, The tectonic plates of global culture have shifted East, and while the Western left squabble over the minutiae of identity politics, the xenophobic right have hijacked the defence of culture...

based on race rather than values. As a result there is an existential fear that the two centuries out of the last twenty, where the majority of the world's GDP was China and India alone, may have been a blip.

But none of this matters, because we're seeing a shift that eclipses all of these. Not a 500 year cultural one, a 200 year technological one or a 100 year political one, but a civilisational one: climate change. We should all get along and figure out how to tackle it together.

There's an @anthemis talk I did on this subject with more detail, here:

Should have read: "where the majority of the world's GDP WASN'T China and India alone".