Paradigm Lost — Original Long Essay on Donald Trump — December 29, 2016

https://paradigmlostproject.medium.com/paradigm-lost-original-long-draft-december-23-2016-e629a6d78935

[this early version was sent to friends, journalists and editors after the 2016 election of Trump, including Guardian (Long Reads), Economist, Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. It was (I think rightly) considered too long and unorthodox for mainstream publications at the time. After publishing the shorter versions earlier this year (incorporating Covid etc.), friends and associates asked me to repost the earlier, longer version.

“Soon enough, the unspeakable is chanted in streets and stadiums and the unthinkable is aspired to, and eventually done.”

1

One moment stood out — among dozens of once-in-a-lifetime utterances and sordid revelations — in the grim spectacle of the US presidential campaign of 2016. Toward the end of the second debate on October 8, Donald Trump glared menacingly at his Democrat opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and informed her in front of 60 million viewers that “…there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it, and we’re gonna have a special prosecutor.” The audience gasped, and some cheered. When Clinton retorted that “it’s just awfully good that somebody with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country…” — he interrupted: “Because you’d be in jail.”

Even though he would casually walk back his most popular incantation — “Lock her up!” -after his dramatic upset a month later, Trump’s spectacular threat was a high water mark for his followers, as measured by social scientist Zeynep Tufekci.[1] It was also straight out of the tyrant’s handbook, as practiced throughout the ages and across the globe: delegitimizing his predecessor, criminalizing his opponent, scapegoating vulnerable groups, bombastic insults and wild promises, the promiscuous appropriation of new modes of communication, attacking the media and ultimately questioning (if he lost) the validity of the election itself. By these standards, the toxic Brexit debate five months earlier — which decapitated Britain’s leadership and careened it out of Europe — was played by Marquis of Queensbury rules.

Thus it was to the bitter end: election night November 8 was hugely symbolic and manifestly consequential for all concerned: to his millions of supporters at home and abroad Trump felled the contradictions and condescentions of the liberal establishment. He also delivered blow on behalf of the “plague-on-both-your-houses” discontents from both sides of the isle who either held their noses and voted him in, backed third parties or stayed home. For an even larger group of voters and aghast spectators around the world the night was equally momentous: the United States had crossed the deep divide that separates the exceptional from the ordinary: the youngest and most dynamic republic ever to dominate the world stage had leaped into the company of grizzled and angry faded empires of the silence-the-press and lock-up-your enemies variety. Wittingly or not, the President-elect joined hands with his pretend-friend, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the ranks of emboldened autocrats from around the world, including China’s Xi Jinping (who he has already provoked), Egypt’s General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, among others.

A little over a decade earlier the United States (and Britain) invaded Iraq on the pretext of ridding the world of an unhinged autocrat ostensibly armed with weapons of mass destruction. Now, more than half the electorate — and much of the world — believes it has elected one. Until very recently, the “Washington Consensus” of rich democracies and their institutions vigorously imposed economic and political liberalization with an iron hand around the world: dismantling the Soviet Union, luring a reforming China into the World Trade Organization, sweeping the globe with a record 120 electoral democracies governing well over half the planet’s population, and drawing billions of humans out of endemic poverty.[2] Now the march of democracy is comprehensively reversed, according to Freedom House, a research and advocacy group.[3] Trade and currency markets that once ruthlessly enforced liberalism now fear democracy’s instability and welcome strong hands, while hackers and insurgents stoke its divisions, often with the help of powerful governments led by Russia and China.[4]

And, more is on the way, not least in that other great exceptionalist project of the modern age, the European Union. There, Britain has spun out of a European orbit toward which it acted as a restraining force for five centuries. Recent arrivals from the east, led by Poland and Hungary, have shed the veneer of social democracy under which they entered the world’s largest democratic block. And while Austria pulled back from the brink of an ultra-nationalist presidency, Italy — that eternal font of great art and terrible politics — has plunged the superstate’s currency union, the Eurozone, into renewed and possibly decisive reckoning. It roundly rejected a constitutional referendum in a stark rebuke to its centre-left prime minister, Mateo Renzi and his centrist allies. Thus, the crisis of legitimacy has finally penetrated the core the EU. In short order, elections in four out of its six founding members — Italy, Holland, France and Germany — will be played out against a backdrop of deep internal and external tensions. The right is aiming at foreigners, refugees, Muslims and liberals while the left fires at itself. Any one or combination of those plebiscites could collapse the modern Leviathan that brought peace and prosperity to its perennially warring states.

Meanwhile, the Middle East the ongoing war between two strands of Islam — Saudi Arabia leading the majority Sunnis and Iran leading the Shiite rear-guard — transmutes rather than receding, with gains in one theatre opening up battles and butchery in another. Swept up in a vast arc of violence, statelessness and desperation — stretching from Africa through the Fertile Crescent and reaching northeast into tracts of Pakistan and Afghanistan — more than 65 million people are displaced from their homes, a scale of suffering not seen since the great wars of the last century.[5] More than a million of these souls have sought refuge in a Europe that doesn’t want them, cannot integrate them, and doesn’t even have a political language to talk to or about them. Their presence in turn adds fuel to the far-right challenge in every country in the EU. This feedback loop is not a “Clash of Civilizations” in the sense intended by Samuel Huntington in his controversial 1996 book by the same name. Rather, it is the opposite: the clash of insurgencies with vastly different means but the same aim — thrusting their societies into an imagined past.

Democracies nations are straddling hardening autocracies like China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and the Philippines and crisis-bound states at risk of repudiating democracy in all but name, including the US, India, Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Malaysia.

Five years ago, that relentless bullhorn of British public sentiment, the Daily Mail tabloid, made an impassioned plea for democracy in an article entitled “The Spectre Of 1932: How A Loss Of Faith In Politicians And Democracy Could Make 2012 The Most Frightening Year In Living Memory.” Now, it celebrates the referendum that split its country — from Europe and its own nations and regions — and savages politicians and judges who would temper and democratize the process.[6]

It is tempting to view the current gyrations as another iteration of the Postwar era’s periodic spasms that brought earlier predictions of “the End of the West” or “the End of History” and even “the Late Great Planet Earth.” It was, after all, punctuated by the Cold War’s deadly calculations in the Fifties, worldwide upheaval in the 60’s, stagnation and conflagration in the 70’s, political revolution in the 80’s, the Soviet collapse in 90’s, and wars and recession in the benighted first decade of the new Millennium. The fever, like its predecessors, may pass and the consequences could on balance prove, if not benign, at least corrective to excesses and deficiencies that have crept into the system, both real and imagined. This is the considered — if self interested — view of bankers, tech monopolists, generals and oil men making common cause with the insurrectionist American president-elect, including the heads of oil Exxon, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, private equity behemoth Blackstone Group and serial technologist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel.[7]

At the opposing corner, ever-larger cohorts — young and old, from the left and right — can’t wait to tear down a corrupt old system that has left them with nothing but insecurity, debt and bleak prospects. [8] Internationally, South America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East were not so much transformed as mauled by the Cold War’s machinations and subsequent interventions; they can hardly be expected to mourn the passing of the system that viciously exploited them.

Looking through the prism of history, both views seem ill-conceived. The former tragically miscomprehends the historic nature of the times and the latter downplays or ignores altogether the consequences of collapse and the recklessness of those who stand to bring it about.

A growing third group of increasingly despondent commentators, experts and historians are heavy on catastrophe and light on what comes after. They include heralds the of “The End of Democracy”, “The End of American Exceptionalism”,“ The End of the West” (redux) and even the “End of Reason”. Salvos are lobbed from all parts of the political spectrum, including the American right’s Charles Krauthammer and George Will, the German left’s Joscha Fischer, establishment historian Robert Kagan, the cosmopolitan Guardian’s Pankaj Mishra and Paul Mason, Harvard’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and an entire series from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal titled “The Great Unravelling”, to name a few.[9] More are pouring in as a dour batch of year-end think pieces.

The tell-tale signs of historic realignment are readily discernable: the upheavals are synchronized of around the globe, they effect (albeit in different ways) both sides of the political divide, usurpers are rushing to fill the void, and there is a lack of a countervailing power against tyranny — in the way Britain balanced Continental European hegemons from for centuries, and the US balanced the Axis powers and the Soviet Union. Today every actor that can push back against autocracy seems beset with, and distracted by, some combination of the forces lining up against the system. These are symptoms of the inevitable ageing, and ultimate collapse, of a governing order that was established by the major powers after the wreckage of World War II. The transnational institutions that came out of this system — the United Nations, the European Union, the Soviet Block, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO and the Warsaw Pact — have either crumbled or been reduced to feckless incapacity. The dominant political institutions within the democratic powers — the centre-right and centre-left political parties that carved up national politics — are under unprecedented attack; their leaders have lost trust and respect as their joint projects of globalized finance, trade and progressive cycles of liberalization are denounced as conspiracies — threatening their underlying coalitions with structural disintegration.

We are left with a picture of dissolution, a wrenching “Winter Season” as predicted by demographic historians William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1996 survey of generational shifts, The Fourth Turning.[10] Though their prism can be argued as Anglo-American and their view of cycles formulaic, their central thesis of a pronounced, violent transition from an old to a new order could turn out to be a useful prism through which to see the implosion of the Postwar order. What’s lost with it is the emulsifying balm of Modernism at its Postwar apex: the hope, the dream, promising that if you held out against your most tribal instincts you’d be rewarded by a fairer, more just and promising society. You’d have to fight for inclusion, but what you were fighting to be included in — the Modern world — seemed to billions of people worth the battle. That’s what John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan preached, what Jean Monet, Conrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaul built Europe on. The Soviets and Maoists fought for it. Ataturk, Nasser and Gandhi sold to it their ancient civilizations. And, they all believed it. Unmediated, the vacuum threatens a Hobbesian “state of nature” within and between states — paradoxically reinforcing the hands of autocrats — even as the bright green blades of a new paradigm arise from under and around the crumbling walls of the old.

In the end, it may turn out that some aspects of all three otherwise contradictory perspectives turn out to be right: the fever may pass, as the optimists hope, but so will the system that gave rise to it; grievances will likely be redressed, as the insurgents demand, but at far greater cost than anyone imagines; and something will be lost, as the pessimists fear, but history suggests that eventually more will be gained.

2

The unravelling of a governing paradigm historically entails accelerating corruption and disruption at the core of mighty empires, and simultaneous interrelated wars at their periphery, as those powers recede. Third, technological progress doesn’t attenuate the collapse but expedites and amplifies it. This threefold pattern is causally related, self-reinforcing and repeated throughout much of Western history. Today’s gyrations can rightly be viewed as “revolutionary” in the same sense that the Reformation, Enlightenment and Modern eras were fundamental shifts of Power itself against corrupt old orders. They were long in the making but intense and fast in their culminations toward violence. The sharp beaks of the new pecked mercilessly at the grasping claws of the old order. They led, each of them, to multinational, multigenerational wars. Neither side won decisively and no one was spared; instead, new syntheses emerged: Protestantism combined with the sovereign state; the height of the Enlightenment saw Napoleon conflate Revolution with Empire; at their worst, Modernist avatars fused Nationalism with Socialism. These syntheses exacerbated rather than abating the violence of the transitions. Eventually — through exhaustion if nothing else — new understandings of citizenship and social and international relations emerged; an inexorable, gravity-like force — a “regression to the mean” — bent Power in the toward equilibrium around new governing paradigms.

The European context is important because it has formed so many of the structures of politics, economics and international relations that, for better or worse, have shaped the world for more than half a millennium. These include the founding principals of the US Republic and the economic and political structures exported to or imposed on the rest of the world; they include (but are not limited to): capitalism, colonialism, democracy, fascism, liberalism, Marxism, military dictatorship and socialism. Europe has seen multigenerational cycles of war, consensus, growth, stagnation and collapse, followed by new wars, play out in discreet intervals throughout its history, the most recent iterations of which are captured in Chart 1 below:

The Protestant Reformation split Western Christianity and after a century led to the 30 Years’ War between 1618 and 1648. That war eventually sucked in all the powers of Europe and cut Central Europe’s population by almost a third. The exhausted parties signed the Peace of Westphalia that inaugurated the age of the sovereign nation state.[11] The Westphalian order collapsed a century and a half later at the height of the Enlightenment; opening a period that led to the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution in 1789, the Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the Napoleonic Wars between 1803 and 1815; another awful 30 years in Europe, roughly. With the closure of the revolutionary chapter via the Concert of Vienna (1815) came a century of extraordinary invention, growth and aggressive world domination, led by the British. By 1914 colonial competition, asymmetry between France and the recently united Germany, plus the birth of nationalism amidst the progressive declines of the sprawling Hapsburgs and Ottomans, created the conditions for World War I. This “Great War” — which few initially expected would last more than a season — eventually led to the collapses of the great Russian, Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires, heralding unprecedented economic dislocation and human carnage on the world stage starting in 1914, lasting another 30 years until 1945. Each of these cataclysms was “unthinkable” before they occurred — except if you looked at them from the point of view of Power: the ageing governing paradigms were attacked from within and without; new ideas, technologies and opportunistic actors challenged corrupt systems, brought them down, and eventually all the great powers got drawn into war. Other elements to note from the chart: · Periods of relative peace appear to be getting shorter with the advances of technology, not longer, and the wars are more brutal in each successive interval. Psychologist Steven Pinker has argued the opposite in his book on human violence, The Better Angels Of Our Nature.[12] · And yet the conflagrations themselves seem to consistently last 30–40 years with distinct characteristics that always include economic and political upheaval, a collapse of the political order, and multiple inter-related wars. · Advances — even dramatic accelerations — in science, technology and communications hasten rather than mitigate the collapses. And yet, every age yields techno and trade optimists proclaiming in contemporaneous works that war is rendered obsolete by the march of progress.[13] · The intellectual environment that leads to collapse is often the outcome of progress itself: the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the advance of the Modern era were not born out of the wars — the wars were born out of them. Today, the dispersion of power internationally and away from Europe would seem to negate or at least qualify any conclusions from prior conflagrations. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Each successive world war has spread increasingly around the world as interconnected trade-routes and imperial ambitions amplified rather than dissipated conflict. Second, the major powers outside the US and European orbit are facing economic and social challenges that largely stem from their very embrace of variants of US and European models of development; in renouncing liberalism, they lurch toward statism, itself eminently European. Finally, there are three new factors to deal with: the prevalence and exportability of nuclear arms in a dozen countries, many of them unstable; the fragility of a crowded planet;[14] and the spread of technology and cyber-warfare, which allows rogue actors to inflict asymmetric damage on states, businesses and citizens. So while contemplating the fate of an ageing system, it is vital to reflect on the risks embedded in its collapse. 3 As an order ages, what were once vices become habits — and bad habits become part of the structural operating mechanism of Power. This is not because the old order is “bad” — in fact, it is good and bad — but because it is old. The outputs of the system — income, capital gains, tax breaks (and outright avoidance), and subsides — get progressively redistributed toward the rich with increasing concentration, as chronicled by economist Thomas Piketty in his surprise best-seller, Capital in the Twenty First Century. More importantly, the vital inputs are gamed from cradle to grave: healthcare, childcare, education, job opportunities, housing and pensions skew from the many to the few. While many have analysed the problem, Berkeley Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich uses the US as a monumental case study on corruption’s progression to its current state in Saving Capitalism. The processes include increasingly sophisticated (and legal) tax avoidance,[15] the skewing of subsidies and other incentives in favour of corporations, and the systematic dismantling of prudential regulation against financial excess, monopolies and abuses of workers and the environment. He argues that: “…widening inequality has become baked into the building blocks of the “free market” itself. Even without globalization and technological change, and even absent the tax breaks and subsidies, the share of total national income going to corporations and to the executives and investors whose incomes largely depend on corporate profits would still be rising relative to the share going to labor. The vicious cycle would achieve this on its own.[16] In an increasingly digitized economy, five additional effects permeate: First, “network effects” create structural monopolies in technology and tech-driven businesses. While promising great vistas of creativity and innovation in the future, these behemoths embody labor displacement by machines in their own organizations and impel it on other industries. Second, money, supply chains and jobs move abroad or disappear altogether as technology enables businesses to relocate away from customers and their communities toward cheaper labor markets, on the one hand, and to increasingly pricey cosmopolitan knowledge centres on the other. Third, digitally savvy “outsiders” — cosmopolitan youth and immigrants — outmanoeuvre industrialism’s historically recent and increasingly vulnerable “citizens” — blue-collar workers and midlevel professionals. Fourth, technology-led efficiencies spread unevenly, forcing laggards — including empathy-centric sectors like healthcare and education — into endless confrontation with their increasingly cash-strapped monopoly buyers, mainly governments.Fifth, as economists Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee note in The Second Machine Age, digitization reduces barriers of space and time, making top performers more ubiquitous; this dramatically increases what they call the “spread” — the gap separating top performing talent, expertise, companies and regions from everyone else.[17] Consequently, quite apart from the long-term benefits of each strand of automation, in the short turn it leaves labour as a whole fighting a war on five fronts: trade, immigration, automation, generational shift and dilution of worker protections. In a bustling economy — like Japan in the 80’s, the US in the 90’s and Germany in the last decade — these shocks might get absorbed and jobs re-circulated. However, as a system of Power ages its arteries corrode. Access, knowledge and capital are hoarded by gate-keepers and toll-collectors: once called “robber barons” they are today euphemistically labelled “platforms”. As the establishment bible, the Economist has put it in a series of articles that amount to a crusade, these are simply monopolies by another name, run and financed by monopolists. The most honest among them, Facebook investor and Trump advisor Peter Thiel brashly proclaims “competition is for losers.” Thus in one breath crumbles the bedrock of “free market democracy” — presumably to be replaced by oligarchy. By tightly controlling access between products and consumers platforms convert what should be competitive profits into “economic rents” that distort the market, inhibit innovation, surge inequality, compress employment and suppress demand. This not only applies to tech behemoths but to consolidating banks, oil giants and large swaths of other critical industries.[18] In fact, monopoly is the institutionalization of corruption. It concentrates all forms of Power — politics, money, access, dynasty, information — in the hands of the few and replaces it for the many with diversion, debt and division. It means “austerity” for workers, industrial regions and debtor countries, but “surplus” for the beneficiaries of decades of exorbitant government largesse, including Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Big Oil and those twin paragons of selective rectitude: the Republican Party, which spent its way into Iraq, and Germany, which did the same with unification. Moreover, tyrants are better at the game than democrats: they have jettisoned “austerity” altogether while the hapless center tinkers at its edges. Even the chief economists of the current order’s worldwide enforcers, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, apologize for getting “austerity” so wrong;[19] but the centre left and right cling to it because their policy language arises out of the paradigm itself. Hence the concordance between Putin’s oligarchs and those attached to the incoming American administration — they call for mobilization on a massive scale and expect it to happen more or less outside of normal democratic constraints; now, they both have the means to do so. History tells us how this story typically ends: as economist Robert Gordon notes about the Great Depression in his Decline and Fall of American Growth, dispossessed labor eventually gets recycled as revolutionary insurgents or munitions workers and soldiers on the battlefront.[20] 4 The road to conflagration extends outwardly from corruption at the core of empires to escalating conflicts at their borders and the amplification of grievances — real and perceived — through new means of communication.These extensions are “asymmetric” in the sense that a little goes a long way: as an aging order veers toward collapse, geographic and ideological usurpers take advantage of longstanding grievances and intensifying inwardness to settle scores and make strategic gains against powers vastly superior to themselves. They act — as the Book of Revelation’s 12th chapter puts it — “with great wrath, for they know their time is short.” Eventually, the aging powers are provoked and react; all sides miscalculate the scope, intensity and duration of the ensuing conflicts. In this sense, the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 by a Serbian nationalist didn’t “create” the devastating conflicts of the early 20th Century — the build-up was nearly 50 years in the making: the attack, and the seeming parochial feud behind it, simply lit the fuse — asymmetry works by using the heavy weight of an unstable structure against itself. First, one must see the escalating conflicts at the borders of empires in context: the Enlightenment’s great creation, the United States, is proud of its prowess, and yet has not won a war since 1945. Meanwhile, Modernism’s apotheosis, the European Union, is suffering from indigestion, having absorbed without democratically integrating much of the old Soviet Union’s western front. Grousing at the sidelines for two decades has been an angry and resentful Russia. It was twice invaded by the West’s ‘Great Ideas’ gone wrong: the French Revolution metastasized into the Napoleonic Wars and marched into Moscow in 1812; a little more than a century later German National Socialism sieged the capital in 1941. The last ‘Great Idea’ imported from the West was the mass privatizations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. These impoverished and humiliated them. The Atlantic alliance, led by the EU, showered one after another former and current client state of Russia with membership, trade deals, NATO protection, and avenues for expression which Russia sees as a direct challenge to its own order. During the Cold War the West was envied and respected and Russia’s people yearned for what the it had. Today, they don’t respect it and many blame it for their problems. In the words of speculator and market theorist George Soros: “The most effective way [Russian President] Putin’s regime can avoid collapse is by causing the EU to collapse sooner.”[21] It is exploiting military, political and communications asymmetries against an economically and militarily mightier Atlantic alliance of the US and Europe, both of which it sees as existential threats. It is hardly surprising that the most violent theatre of this competition is the Middle East. Its historic nexus of geography, riches and religion has placed it in the crosshairs of empires since the dawn of civilization. The exacerbation of the split between the two main strands of Islam can be traced back centuries, to the imperial competition between actors around but not of the region: Sunni champions the Ottoman Turks and Shiite exponents Iran. In the Postwar era the collection of poorly mapped states became a stomping ground for regional and ideological powers inducing and inciting dictators and monarchs into hot, cold and proxy wars. Its carve-up by colonial powers after World War I — shown in the map below — was just one of many pile-ins that disfigured the area. The United States and Britain abolished the region’s oldest democracy in 1954, installing a repressive Shah in Iran. A quarter century later they supported Saddam Hussein in his brutal war against Revolutionary Iran. A quarter century after that the same powers toppled Hussein without an exit strategy in 2003. In doing so they squandering an historic opportunity, post-9/11, to shift the region into their orbit, instead igniting a quagmire. At one point or another the Atlantic alliance has induced into armed action dozens of factions drawn from Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and other groups, only to leave them butchered and betrayed on the battlefield. The Economistrightly points out, with indignation, that the recent slaughter in and around Syria’s Aleppo marks a high-water mark of shame of Russian malice and American bungling. [22] It is a calamity one billion Sunni Muslims are unlikely to forget or forgive. The magazine rightly warns that the incoming Trump administration promises to make matters worse by cynically trading, Yalta-like, its allies as pawns with unscrupulous powers like Russia and possibly eventually China. That the Middle-East is a Frankenstein of the West’s creation should in no way diminish the responsibility, despotism and occasional acts of extraordinary heroism of local leaders. Nonetheless, the region is not destabilized by Islam, Islam is destabilised by the mess in the region. These lands have embedded in them all the hallmarks of an asymmetric path to war on a grand scale, in the manner of the Balkans a century earlier: betrayal, rage, terror, proxy wars, dictators, non-state actors, and ready access to the world’s most dangerous weapons. Without a functioning paradigm through which to filter and mediate their multiple crises, nations around the world grasp for imagined pasts and hard men to protect them. Like Proust’s pastoral Combray — which magically reconstellated itself through the taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea — the spirits of nationalism and empire rise up like ghost houses at the scent of the West receding. They revel in nostalgia — not for the passing of the order that kept the peace between major powers for seventy years, but for the belligerent nationalism before it that produced two World Wars and a Great Depression in one generation. The new American president’s recent incitements — nuclear re-armament, destabilizing NATO, walling off his southern neighbour, embracing dictators and provoking China -promise to convert these ghost houses into armed fortresses. Unencumbered by even a remote sense of history, Trump threatens to repeat its worst disasters: institutionalized militarization and belligerence among major power leads to conflagration via the localized conflicts: China retaliating against US threats by bullying Taiwan and Hong Kong or aiding North Korea; Iran going nuclear or being bombed by Israel; Russia threatening the Baltics or provoking Sunni retaliation and nuclearization in the Middle East — these or any number of other asymmetric conflicts can suck a Hobbesian world of autocrats into war. Trump’s Dr. Strangelove-like security team of rogue generals seem eager to oblige. In a fitting irony, the world looks, of all places, to sleepwalking France and Germany — progenitors of three multigenerational wars onto the globe — to preserve peace and freedom. 5 The second arena of asymmetric action is, literally, everywhere and nowhere at the same time: the digital realm. Spreading like weeds underneath the thick crust of relentless pessimism in the West, it offers the only viable pathway the future. These pages refer to the intertwined array of computations and infrastructure as the Digital Network for practical reasons: the digital aspect makes the network faster, smarter, more scalable and replicable; the network enables digital content and computations to be crowd- and machine-sourced, largely borderless, and cheaply accessible to and from billions of people and objects. Today, the Digital Network sends more than one trillion gigabytes of data a month over high-speed cables to 6 billion computerized screens and 60 trillion public webpages around the planet.[23] These transactions are accelerating at a remarkable pace and are expected to triple in five years.[24] In addition to much of daily life, vast tracts of Power are being digitized and networked, including money, industry, institutions, politics, communication, knowledge and mobility. Over time this hive of activity has profound effects on the structure of Power itself, but the consequences are neither linear — they progress in wild gyrations — nor self-determining: they require intensive human and government action at every stage to be broadly useful and remotely fair. The asymmetry of the Digital Network comes from the fact that is fast, abundant and infinitely porous compared to any other mode of human organization — enabling targeted action to have outsized consequences.Unlike traditional hierarchies, the Digital Network exchanges data rather than hoarding it. As such, it devalues authority by challenging its monopoly on — and shaping of — information; it values authenticity as layers of authority are peeled off of leaders and institutions. Networks operate differently from hierarchies: they thrive on reciprocity rather than directives, collaboration (often on a massive scale) over commands; they tend toward engagement, sharing and abundance ­– as opposed to remoteness, restriction and scarcity. These are not just attributes but values: authenticity over authority, reciprocity over command-and-control, transparency over secretiveness. They provide millions if not billions of people with previously unimagined avenues for discovery, communication, creativity, inclusion and serendipity. These values are embedded in the basic structure of the Digital Network and have been in full view since its formation in the ‘90’s. They led to the explosion of creativity, innovation, productivity velvet and colour revolutions of the era. But it didn’t last. Working against asymmetry is another deeply grained technological property: the Network Effect, which pulls in the opposite direction.Technology products improve with the size of their audiences and customer bases; this in turn creates “platform effects” favouring the biggest in a sector, like Google in search, Facebook in social networking, Microsoft in operating systems and productivity software, Oracle in databases, etc. It also comes into play in highly digitized businesses, like finance (Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, trading platforms, and the like), supply chains (Apple’s iPhone), commerce (Amazon), as well as, increasingly transport, leisure, bookings and entertainment. Where asymmetry gives access to the many, the Network Effect redirects the benefits of that access to the few. When the two effects collide, as they are doing now, profound and explosive ruptures in the underlying structure of Power occur. The most visible arena of that collision is the politics of grievance engendered and amplified by a handful of social media platforms. These platforms — mainly Facebook, Twitter, Google and their owned and operated properties — are in the business of creating counterfeit “you’s” based on your behaviour.[25] As researcher Jen Golbeck explained in a TED talk on the subject, this data can predict most of your critical personality traits, and your personal and group behaviour, with 95% accuracy.[26] It can “decide” you are pregnant, gay, fundamentalist, dangerous, adulterous, or anything else for that matter, before your family or employer. It sells those models of “you” — today to advertisers, tomorrow it could be to employers, insurers, universities and even governments. To create these models the platforms suck up thousands of data points from all your digital touchpoints. Consequently their primary incentive is to keep you engaged at any cost. In what Eli Pariser calls The Filter Bubble, platforms filter “out” content and points of view you may not agree with and filter “in” search results and content streams that fit the “you” they have on file. They hire scores of behavioural psychologists to optimize the time and investment you make in their products and what buyers of the counterfeit “you” get. In a competitive market, both the “inputs” — what engages the consumer — and the outputs — what is packaged and sold about them — would be subject to competition, variation, serendipity and innovation. And the “rules” of the market would be regulated for fairness, accuracy and openness. Because of the Network Effect — and its exploitation by insurgents and poor regulation — a small number of platforms enable a vast array of prejudices and grievances to spiral out of control: first through repetition, then amplification, and ultimately by filtering out contradictory facts, law and reason. Through the determined work of social scientists and engineers, the Filter Bubble activates and reinforces — at lightning speed — innate distortions in thinking: “social proof” (confirming prejudices through one’s peers),[27] “confirmation bias” (embracing the flimsiest of evidence for a favored view), the “availability heuristic” (overvaluing recent and repeated assertions as facts),[28] and “gamification” (conferring status on the most aggressively engaged).[29] The digital dimension merely accentuates a process of polarization deployed over decades as political and media strategy on both sides of the political divide, not least the “we create our own reality” mindset widely attributed to George Bush senior advisor Carl Rove.[30] It is equally virulent with Cosmopolitans from the great cities — who have nothing to fear from immigrants and minorities but loath their fellow citizens whose values are different — as it is with the left-behind “Integralists” of the Trump and Brexit variety, who paradoxically embrace the very narrative of victimhood they derisively attribute to “privileged minorities.” In the end, the dueling hatreds utilize new communications mediums to over-run governing narratives when — like today — identity is atomized and trust collapses at the end of a reigning paradigm. In the bloody early part of the 20th Century what today is called “fake news” was then “propaganda.” During the Revolutionary era of the late 18th Century, it was “pamphleteering.” The Reformation saw the flourishing of the printing press, local language bibles and “heretic commentaries” against the reigning order. Studies show that the fear and anger stoked by new media measurably curtail inter-group empathy and social trust.[31] This in turn creates contempt for norms, hatred of the Others, and a widespread and self-reinforcing diffusion of responsibility. Soon enough, the unspeakable is chanted in streets and stadiums and the unthinkable is aspired to, and eventually done. 5 If a recurrent theme in these pages is that the most dangerous attacks on the system are asymmetric, there is no small irony in the premise that the primary — and possibly only — way of avoiding the kind of multigenerational, multinational upheavals and wars of the past is also asymmetry. Specifically, Power is now so digitized that fundamentally shifting it need not — at least in theory — entail the kinds of mobilization and conflict of brute force deployed in previous paradigm shifts. If the Factory was the ultimate symbol of Modernist command and control hierarchy, the Campus embodies the mixed and dispersed Power model of the Digital Network. Total war, atom bombs, concentration camps, purges, pogroms, forced industrializations and cultural revolutions were mass factory-like projects that turned the Modernist dream into dark nightmares. Those risks remain and could prove conclusive given today’s weapons. But modes of organization are shifting fast and will shift even faster when the grasping claws eventually lose their grip. Conflicts and their resolution in the Digital Network era will be disproportionately localized, networked horizontally and “stacked” vertically — escalating to higher powers but resolving locally and regionally. In this form, they mirror the hive of activity of university departments and administrations at their best: autonomous, heterogeneous and yet hyper-linked. The first-order issue of what to do with lumbering economies lends itself disproportionately to the asymmetric leverage of technology: simply put, the more an economy is digitized, the more effective is fiscal stimulus. This is because bits and bytes are more agile and responsive than bricks and mortar. The “bang” for fiscal expenditure’s “buck” — the so called “fiscal multiplier” — has been grossly underestimated by the admission of economists from austerity’s chief enforcer, the International Monetary Fund.[32] In addition, economists have had to admit they overestimatestimulus’s harmful effects.[33] When inflation is stubbornly low and savings are hoarded rather than recycled — the default since 2008 recession — deficits behave like butter: rock solid in “cold” economies, and quick to melt in “hot” ones, the way Germany’s towering unification deficit shrank against a backdrop of exporting to a fast-growing world economy. This is not to say that austerity is “wrong” or economic liberalism is “bad” — having provided necessary correctives in overheated decades, they are simply out of tune with deflationary times. Many of macroeconomics’ leading lights have recognized that pivoting away from them is now critical to the viability of the profession as a whole.[34] In short, the impulses of the extreme right (including the US President-elect) and extreme left are both tactically correct on the narrow point of jettisoning austerity. Strategically, neither offers a vision of a knowledge-based planetary economics critical to generating sustainable gains. Moreover, the right shows no inclination to tame the monopolies whose black-box platforms hasten inequality and degrade civil society; if anything they seem bent on wholeheartedly adopting their own versions of Russia and China’s death-embrace of oligarchs and fake news. Consequently, a reconstructed left will have to quickly get over its fractiousness and forge a new synthesis. In addition to mobilizing the economy, that new coalition will be called on to champion Thomas Piketty’s wealth tax and innovations in education, health delivery and regionalisation (on which more below); it will need to foster guilds rather than unions for sharing-industry workers, and Universal Capital Accounts — endowing workers of all ages with capital, knowledge and market access — rather than the unproductive and uninspiring Universal Basic Income advocated by many socialists and also libertarians. The second grand arena in urgent need of action is the periphery. Every shift in Power has eventually redrawn borders. Nowhere are reconfigurations more urgent than Europe and the Middle East. In Europe, the founding core EU states will have to give antidemocratic nation states like Hungary and Poland a stark choice: allow for free and open society, or leave. In the EU’s currency unit, the Euro, debtor nations are too weak to leave and too shackled to stay. Heretic as it seems, George Soros’s proposal seems the only viable option: giving all-mighty and intransigent Germany (and its allies) the option of a “time out” from the common currency.[35] For example, new German debt, savings and trade obligations could be denominated in a non-cash “special reserve” Deutschmark. The prospect of a 75%-plus revaluation of their exports would make for real mandate-elections in Germany and the Netherlands. Both institutions — the EU and the Euro — would, after these adjustments, require popularly elected executives, legislatures with teeth, independent judiciaries and simple, brief but coherent constitutions. Whether they remain separate or merge into a smaller more cohesive whole, their constitutions should demand only the basics: freedom of expression, association, press and movement; due process and equality under the law; transparency; separation of government from private interests (a “Berlusconi clause”); and freedom from discrimination and monopoly power. That way, Russian interference in the coming European elections would actually mean something: voting for the EU would be a vote for democracy, and against would mean voting for Russian autocracy — that would focus European minds and debate. No words in passing can do justice to the devastation foisted on the Middle East from within and without; nonetheless, any respite — let alone peace — seems inconceivable without eventually heeding outgoing Vice President Biden’s decade-old admonition to redraw borders with the inclusion of Sunni and Kurdish states between Shiite and Alawite incumbents Iraq and Syria.[36] Moreover, as the Economist rightly points out, Western notions of “democracy” will need to give way to historic legitimacy — the most stable leaders date their lineage all the way back to the Prophet — as a counterpoint to Russian-backed brutality.[37] And, as the New York Times’ David Ignatius notes, it will take generations for the West to earn a modicum of trust after decades of bating and betrayal. [38] The incoming Trump administration seems destined to mirror Russia and do the opposite: despotize and betray; however, the ensuing prospect of a fully nuclearized region will capture the attention of even the most hardened of the generals around him. The Digital Network itself is remaking political boundaries within and between states even as nationalists strive in vain to buttress them. As Parag Khanna points out in his landmark survey of economic geography, Connectography, political borders are largely anachronistic. He stresses the importance of regions organized around “hubs” of knowledge-centric “megacities” and specialized “spoke” districts connected to them through high speed rail, internet and supply chains as displayed in Chart 2 below. [39] Critically, one must add to Khanna’s list of connections: university networks, social projects and cultural affinity. Khanna traces 7 regions for the US; at very least two seem needed for the EU: a Mediterranean knowledge corridor from Lisbon through Athens and a Northern cluster from Paris through the Benelux, Hamburg, Berlin the Nordics and Baltics. Chart 2. Megacities Source: Megacities As The New Economic Geography Parag Khanna. Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2016. Kindle Location 6969. “Urban archipelagos represent a growing share of national economies. Moscow, São Paulo, Lagos, and Johannesburg are representative of growth markets where one city dominates the economic landscape.” Regionalization is a clear-eyed prism — and practical compromise — to look at the hot-button issues of immigration and trade. The more regions thrive, the more of both they need and want; when they stagnate or are cut-off, resentments pile up. The array of regionalization options for the rest of world defy a brief description here, in part because the West has to get out of the business of exporting its own models of development and organization abroad; moreover, its long and ongoing history of extraction, expropriation and exploitation eventually becomes redundant in the abundance of the Digital Network. The West can and should instead focus on rapid digitization, sharing its technical tools, sustainable trade and learning from others. The third and final array of solutions — harnessing the full potential of the Digital Network — must focus on the central issues of the times: the displacement of work and threats to the environment. Here the Digital Network provides the decisive vehicle for resolution, but only if it is channelled. One toxic fallacy circulating in economic circles is that the current round of innovation is over and comparatively useless. Most comprehensively advanced by economist Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth this logic claims the days of high growth are over. The thesis has found its way onto the pages of establishment publications and journals under the by-lines of respected economists and economic journalists.[40] It also happens to directly contradict another well-worn scare: the “Rise of the Machines” theory of artificially intelligent cyborgs taking over vast professions and eliminating the need for much of human work.[41] The two scenarios cannot occur on the same planet at the same time. And, if governments make the right synchronized moves, neither will come to pass. Chart 3 below illustrates the case that the Digital Network is phase-shifting internally, from amplifying human activity to the full integration of thought and machinery. Chart 3 — Dual S-Curve Innovation If governments don’t inhibit and monopolies don’t hijack them, machines filled with precision sensors and linked to databases with learning capability will radically alter nearly every strand of the world’s economy, including: transportation, manufacturing, health care, agriculture, education, finance, administration, exploration and the military. The second surge in innovation is not only possible but, as futurist Kevin Kelly argues persuasively, it is most likely The Inevitable.[42] However, its scope, intensity, remuneration and distribution between people and regions depends on Power. While there is no consensus on an inherently unknowable future, some plausible but inconclusive speculations on who benefits and who loses have been published by MIT, Oxford, the World Economic Forum and private economists.[43] Taking into account past cycles, a strong case can be made for going further than the Economist magazine’s cautiously optimistic conclusion in a recent survey of automation: [44] today’s evolution, like those before it, has the potential to unleash a nearly boundless new array of jobs infinitely more rewarding than the repetitive tasks it is displacing. For example, it can add expert knowledge to caring: the nurse who can, with the right technology, diagnose and prescribe with greater accuracy than a doctor earning five times her pay, while offering more caring empathy at the same time. Networked iPad apps can arm teachers and social workers with vital data and interactive tools that enhance rather than replace the indispensible rapport needed to educate and provide assistance. An Uber driver is liberated from hunting for fares and navigating maps, but is required to enhance his or her driving skills, empathy, sociability and hygiene — far more valuable traits for anyone who has suffered through Parisian or New York taxis. When driverless cars eventually hit the roads, people will hire engaged tour guides, concierges, stylists and experts and companions of every shade and type to accompany them on their many journeys, including those abroad and into the digital realm. The list of skills that are unique to humans is long: empathy, creativity, leadership, teaching, deployment, courage, decisiveness, organization, care-giving, negotiating, mediating, story-telling, entertainment, art and a slew of other capabilities and tasks not yet unimagined. Entire armies of machine-supported knowledge workers will be needed to assist and mediate in a crowded, aging and vulnerable planet. Today, the gatekeepers of both the old and new economies inflate their own worth and pretend themarket undervalues these critical aptitudes. In fact, machines dramatically enhance each one of these capabilities and make them more valuable. When creativity replaces repetition the market rate for labor should go up over time, not down; this holds true in any market that rewards value and productivity over toll-collecting and rent-seeking. Undoing the vast array of market distortions described earlier would go a long way: pre-distribution of inputs fairly, redistributing gains, promoting symmetry in bargaining power and regulating monopolies would all go a long way, but they are not enough. In the Digital Network, knowledge is capital. As such, the tendency is for the privileged to hoard its most valuable morsels no matter how open, flexible and porous are its underlying networks. Knowledge needs to be radically diffused through active intervention in the economy and the world’s population. Fortunately, in the digital world it is easily replicated and rapidly communicated if released from the sharp beaks of the platforms and the grasping claws of gatekeepers. This in turn requires the “Campus” to move from a mere metaphor to an actual organizing principal within and between diverse societies, both physical and digital. The diffusion of knowledge requires the broad diffusion of knowledge centres; the best of these are now expensive and rationed by and for the rich. Replicable interactive graphically enhanced video and new approaches to regional specialization and development can reverse this hoarding with fewer resources. Little of the harnessing and diffusion of the Digital Network can be expected from the far right cabals in or near Power today: Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Le Pen, the triad of “Leave” Brexiters around the UK’s Theresa May, or their many fellow travellers. At least for now, stand with, and for, the past. By contrast, even the most dreadful protagonists of prior transitions — Robespierre, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin among them — were in their own way avatars of the future. The current lot represent the clinging, festering claws of the old. They think they can co-opt the Digital Network with fake news and intimidation, and are doing so now. But in the long-run they will have to confront its rapid-fire and all-consuming expansion. The Digital Network’s inherent porousness, asymmetry, openness, diversity, serendipity, diffusion of knowledge and infinite flexibility provide the values for a cause worth fighting for, and virtually limitless means by which to turn the weight of unitary, controlling and paranoid systems against themselves. Moreover, even if the tyrants somehow sustain those relentless attacks, there is the vast weight of history: they will eventually miscalculate, turn on each other, and squander their gains. In an ironic symmetry, the same logic applies more or less equally to crusty hard-left warriors yearning to lead the resistance. The unreconstructed left in the mold of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Luc Melenchon, Arnaud Montebourg and Oscar Lafontaine has not made peace with technology, so it stands to crush them. More likely, the Digital Network itself will dynamically reconfigure the needed alliances against autocracy as the magnitude of over-reach, broken promises and conflicts escalate. In the end, the Campus will come to the defence of the University. The Digital Network has one final — and decisive — advantage over the old ways of mobilizing: it replaces the grubby energy of industrial “horsepower” with environmentally clean exchanges of data. Millennials and have already figured out how to live in what Thomas Friedman famously calls a Hot, Flat and Crowded planet. Their embrace of virtual worlds and digitized lives is far more adaptive to the future than the deepest musings of tenured economists and political blowhards. Their norms of authenticity, inclusion and fairness will, soon enough, find voice and grow into a new “greater-than-all-of-us” narrative, as have all previous transitions in Power. Eventually, data becomes information, information bends toward knowledge, and knowledge blossoms into wisdom. The only question is whether we will let our children teach us, or fitter away their futures and learn the lessons of our forefathers the hard way. [1] Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times, What We Saw In The Second Debate, October 10, 2016 [2] Robert Kagan, Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics, Brookings Institution, January 26, 2015 [3] Freedom House, Freedom In The World, 2016, Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure [4] Russia: Spenser Ackerman and Sam Thielman, Guardian, US Officially Accuses Russia Of Hacking DNC And Interfering With Election; China: By Andrew Blake, The Washington Times, NSA Director: China Still Hacking U.S., But Motive Unclear, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 [5] United Nations High Command for Refugees, Global Trends — Forced Displacement In 2015, UNHCR.org [6] see: Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Mail, The Spectre Of 1932: How A Loss Of Faith In Politicians And Democracy Could Make 2012 The Most Frightening Year In Living Memory, December 31, 2011; and, Richard Spillet, Daily Mail, The Unelected ‘Activist’ Judges Who Mounted A ‘Power Grab’: High Court Trio Who Blocked Brexit Are Led By One Who Founded Group Dedicated To Furthering European Integration, November 3, 2016. [7] Portia Crowe, Business Insider, Jamie Dimon: ‘I Want To Do My Share To Help America Get Better’, and Goldman Sachs CEO: ‘The Declared Policies Of Mr. Trump’ Are ‘A Good Thing’, Schwarzman: Donald Trump Is Going To Change The ‘Architecture Of The World’, December 6, 2016; Jack Nicas and Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump Strikes Conciliatory Tone in Meeting With Tech Executives; December 14, 2016 [8] Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune, From Brexit To Uber, The Thrill Of Tearing Down Old Order Builds To What?, June 24, 2016 [9] Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, After A Mere 25 Years, The Triumph Of The West Is Over, December 1, 2016; Joscha Fischer, Project Syndicate, Goodbye To The West, December 5, 2016; Robert Kagan, Financial Times, Trump Marks The End Of America As World’s ‘Indispensable Nation’, November 19, 2016; Pankaj Mishra, Guardian, Welcome Anger, December 8, 2016; Paul Mason, Guardian, The Soviet Union Collapsed Overnight. Don’t Assume Western Democracy Will Last Forever, December 5, 2016; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, New York Times, Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy? December 17, 2016; Wall Street Journal, The Great Unravelling, A Wall Street Journal Series Examining The Causes And Consequences Of 2016’s Political Upheaval — http://www.wsj.com/specialcoverage/the-great-unraveling [10] William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning, An American Prophecy, Broadway Books, 1997, Chapter 1, Winter Comes Again (esp. Kindle Locations 63–144) [11] Henry Kissinger, World Order, Penguin Books, Random House, 2015. P 25–26 [12] Steven Pinker, The Better Angels Of Our Nature, Viking Books, 2011 [13] See, eg., Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, 1910, Cosimo Classics ed. (2014); Francis Fukoyama, The End Of History and the Last Man, Free Press, 1992; Pinker, op. cit.; Thomas Surowiecki, The Wisdom Of Crowds, Anchor Books, 2005; Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age, Transforming Nations, Businesses and Our Lives, Vintage Books, 2013; Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Free Press, 2014; Philip N. Howard Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up , Yale University Press, 2016 [14] Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Out Of Africa, April 13, 2016. [15] Eric Lipton and Julie Kreswell, Panama Papers Reveal How Wealthy Americans Hid Millions Overseas, New York Times, June 5, 2016; Jon Lee Anderson, The Secret Life Of Panama City, The New Yorker, April 5, 2016 [16] Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For The Many, Not The Few, Knopf, 2015, Chapter 9 (Kindle Locations 1587–1590) [17] Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Chapters 9 & 10,. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014. [18] Economist Editorial, The Problem With Profits, March 26, 2016. Also, see Economist Briefing: Business In America, Too Much Of A Good Thing — Profits Are Too High. America Needs A Giant Dose Of Competition, March 26, 2016; and The Economist, Special Report: Companies. The quote from Peter Thiel is cited in Part 1: The Rise Of The Superstars [19] See, International Monetary Fund, Independent Evaluation Office, The IMF and The Crises In Greece, Ireland, and Portugal — An Evaluation By The Independent Evaluation Office, July 8, 2016.; International Monetary Fund, Finance and Development, Jonathan D. Ostry, Paraksh Loungani and Davide Furceri, Neoliberalism Oversold? — “Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion”, June 20, 2016, Vol. 52, №2; International Monetary Fund, Research Department Working Papers, Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh, Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers, January, 2013. From the World Bank perspective see a working paper from its chief economist: Paul Romer, The Trouble With Macroeconomics, September 14, 2016, https://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/WP-Trouble.pdf [20] Gordon, Robert J. (2016–01–12). The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War , Princeton University Press, Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 10297–10298. [21] George Soros, Guardian, Putin Is A Bigger Threat To Europe’s Existence Than Isis, February 11, 2016 [22] The Economist, Leader, The Lessons From Aleppo’s Tragic Fate, December 17, 2016 [23] Google, How Search Works, http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/index.html [24] Visual Networking Index, op. cit. For more recent data, see: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/Cloud_Index_White_Paper.html [25] See Sue Halpern, New York Review Of Books, “They Have, Right Now, Another You,” December 22, 2016 [26] See Jen Golbeck, University of Maryland, The Curly Fry Conundrum: Why Social Media “Likes” Say More Than You Might Think, TED Talk, April 2014 [27] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence, Harper Collins Inc., 2009, Chapter 4, Social Proof [28] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast And Slow, Farrar Straus, and Giroux, 2011, p 81, pp. 129–130 [29] see Schlomo Weisen, Social Media Week, 5 Ways Gamification Can Magnify Social Media Campaigns, October 11th, 2016; also, BrainSins.com, How Companies Use Gamification To Amplify Social Media: http://www.brainsins.com/en/blog/how-companies-use-gamification-to-amplify-social-media/3210 [30] Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, Without A Doubt, October 17, 2004 [31] Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O’Brien, and Courtney Hsing, Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2011; in relation to social trust, see Pew Research Center, Millennials In Adulthood, March 7, 2014 [32] International Monetary Fund, Research Department Working Papers, Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh, Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers, January, 2013. [33] See Martin Wolf, New York Review of Books, How Austerity Has Failed, July 11, 2013; also, Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books, How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled, June 6, 2013 [34] see, Janet Yellen, At “The Elusive ‘Great’ Recovery: Causes and Implications for Future Business Cycle Dynamics” 60th annual economic conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, Macroeconomic Research After the Crisis, October 14, 2016; Agence France-Presse, Fed’s Fischer Says Government Needs To Boost US Economy, Monday, October 17, 2016; Financial Times, Jason Furman, Five Principles To Follow For A New Fiscal Policy, October 19, 2016; Mario Draghi, Unemployment In The Euro Area, Speech by Mario Draghi, President of the ECB, Annual central bank symposium in Jackson Hole, 22 August 2014; Robert Skidelsky, Project Syndicate, Economists Versus The Economy, December 23, 2016; also Martin Wolf and Olivier Blanchard, op. sit. [35] George Soros, New York Review, The Crisis And The Euro, August 19, 2010 [36] Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb, New York Times, Unity Through Autonomy In Iraq, May 1, 2006 [37] The Economist, Special Report, The Arab World, Sykes Picot And Its Aftermath, Unintended Consequences, May 14, 2016. [38] David Ignatius, Washington Post, Why The Middle East Knows Not To Trust The United States, October 25, 2015 [39] Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2016, China’s Supersize SEZ’s, Kindle location 4987. [40] Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton University Press, 2016; Marc Levinson, Wall Street Journal, Why The Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore, October 14, 2016; Lawrence Summers, Foreign Affairs, The Age of Secular Stagnation, February 17, 2016, Martin Wolf, Foreign Affairs, Same As It Ever Was, Why The Techno-optimists Are Wrong; Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, How A Ho-Hum Economy Fueled A Vicious Campaign Cycle, Wednesday, November 2, 2016 [41] Sue Halpern, New York Review, The Machines Are Taking Over, April 2, 2015; June, 2015; Andrew Griffin, The Independent, Robots Are Going To Steal The Jobs Of Chefs, Salespeople And Models, Researchers Say As They Unveil Full List Of Likely Robot Professions, Monday 14 September 2015 [42] Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable, Understanding The 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Your Future, Viking Press, 2016. [43] Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race Against The Machine, Digital Frontier Press, 2011; Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne The Future Of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation? Oxford Martin School, Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology September 17, 2013; Eric Suskind and Daniel Suskind, The Future of Professions, Oxford University Press, 2015, Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, 2016 [44] The Economist, Special Report: March of the Machines, Part 3, Automation and Anxiety, June 25, 2016