1 Introduction

In this chapter, we shall argue that the course of the information revolution since the late 1970s exerted a critical influence and in turn was influenced by the political revolutions that took place in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991.

One central consequence of this interplay between technology and politics has been a fundamental re-ordering of the global geopolitical architecture, which is already underway but whose outcome remains uncertain.

The United States is actively resisting the loss of its power to East Asia and China in particular. We are in the moment identified by Antonio Gramsci where “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new is struggling to be born: in this interregnum, the most varied morbid phenomena occur” (Gramsci, 2014).

The speed with which technological innovation has provoked dramatic social change since the mid-1980s is unprecedented. However, the coincidence of political and technological revolutions, leading to a shift in political and economic tectonic plates is not. In the modern history of Europe, we have seen similar processes twice before.

The first saw Europe emerge from the medieval period at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation and lasted approximately 150 years until the mid-seventeenth century by which time northern Europe, in particular the Netherlands and Sweden, had largely eclipsed the political primacy that Spain had enjoyed at the beginning of the period.

The second began in the two decades before the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and again culminated roughly one and a half centuries later in 1945. It was during the second half of this second process that Germany, the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union also assumed decisive roles in both the geopolitical and technological revolutions, ultimately leading to an end to Europe’s domination of the world after nearly five centuries.

Technological developments in these three periods led to social changes that are broadly comparable with one another, albeit refracted through very different cultural prisms.

In both these cases, the fusion of political change and technological progress culminated in mass violence on a scale never previously witnessed in human history. Both periods contain valuable lessons for our understanding of the interaction between politics and technology that we are currently experiencing.

But while we will highlight the underlying similarities, we will also alert the reader to what explains the qualitative difference between them that ensures how the continuing fallout from political upheaval and information technology will remain unpredictable, in particular the issue of scale that is at the heart of the contemporary interaction between politics and technology.

2 Renaissance, Reformation, Printing, and Ships, 1440–1648

The single most important technological development that explains the revolutionary changes of the early sixteenth century was the invention half a century earlier in the 1440s of movable print by Gutenberg and his associates. Until this point, the manufacture and distribution of books were limited to the Church hierarchy, the aristocracy, and some members of the growing merchant class. The overwhelming majority of Europeans were illiterate. Until the printing press, the Church had used its domination of education to control the circulation of books and their contents, compellingly described in Umberto Eco’s masterpiece, The Name of the Rose. This was a central pillar of Rome’s ideological hegemony over Western Christendom.

In the 60 years that followed, printing presses were established all over Europe, churning out books at a remarkable rate so that by the end of the fifteenth century, some 35,000 editions amounting to 15–20 million copies at the very lowest estimate were circulating around Europe. But even these figures were dwarfed in the first 50 years of the sixteenth century (Febvre and Martin, 1976). Literacy rates rose, although it is worth remembering that the consumption of books and pamphlets remained an elite activity.

Courtly romances were one of the most popular genres, but there was also a sharp growth in instruction books, which helped expand merchant and banking activity between northern and southern Europe. Among the most enthusiastic to engage with the literary boom were religious scholars who began re-interpreting biblical texts and the philosophical and historical works of antiquity. Together, they became known as the humanists of whom Erasmus of Rotterdam was the most celebrated.

As a movement, humanism did not set out to challenge the authority of the Church. Indeed, scholars like Erasmus actively avoided any association with ideas that explicitly questioned Church authority. But to some groups of clerics, monks, and princes, especially in the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire, humanism provided an implicit ideological framework for questioning Rome’s monopoly on power. Secular and religious critics of the Church initially focused less on topics relating to dogma and more on the practical issue of corruption, which was the primary fiscal and political driver of papal power.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther gave full expression to this discontent when he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, a town in Saxony. Three months after this event, the Theses had been printed and distributed so that Erasmus, the towering figure in European intellectual life until Luther’s rise, had not only read them; he had even sent a copy to his great friend in London, Sir Thomas More. Within 3 years, scholars, clerics, merchants, and courts across Europe were discussing Luther’s criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope had declared his arguments to be heretical, a judgment which previously would have immediately consigned the perpetrator to ignominy and almost invariably death.

Just over a century earlier, that very fate had befallen Jan Hus, the Czech religious reformer. The Council of Constance proclaimed him a heretic in 1415 and ordered him burned at the stake for good measure. Hus’s death, however, did not deflate the movement inspired by his radical sermons, which railed against the corruption of the Church of Rome and demanded far-reaching reforms. But critically, the Hussite Rebellion never expanded beyond the relatively small Czech-speaking population of Bohemia and Moravia.

In April 1521, a century after Hus’s martyrdom, Rome and the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms to defend himself against the charge of heresy, prefacing a possible death sentence.

In contrast to the arraignment of Hus at the Council of Constance, a much broader spectrum of Europe’s public followed the proceedings and outcome of Worms in the form of pamphlets, which were quickly reprinted across the continent. The Council did indeed confirm Luther’s heresy.

Luther survived, thanks to the printing press. In contrast to Hus, his cause was adopted by powerful political instances around Europe who knew of his case, thanks to the new technology. By the time Luther’s printer friends were churning out translations of the Theses and his other works in German, a book could become a bestseller across Europe within 2 months, which explains why Erasmus was able to alert Thomas More so soon after Luther had attached his Theses to the church door.

A hundred years earlier, this method of disseminating his ideas was unavailable to Hus. In addition, Hus’s message was communicated in Czech. His movement was intertwined with an early expression of national consciousness that intentionally excluded the many German speakers in Bohemia and Moravia. It was spread by word of mouth but only among those who could understand the language. There was no possibility of translating it—it was an overwhelmingly oral message.

Once printing was invented, not only was Luther able to record and distribute his ideas, but he could do it in the German vernacular, thanks to the economies of scale, which even the early production of printed books enabled. He wrote in both Latin and German, but before long, printed editions of his book had appeared in French, English, Italian, and even Czech.

Fully aware of the power of this new technology, Luther collaborated with his neighbor in Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach the Elder. Cranach is renowned as the great portraitist of Luther, but he also owned a printing press and was a bookseller. Cranach quickly grasped the importance of adapting print to include images as well as words. The social impact of the image was immense as for the first time, this could reach much of the population who were illiterate. The propaganda machine that the two men fashioned turned Luther not only into one of the most-read individuals in the sixteenth century but one of the most recognizable as well. This marked the beginning of celebrity.

Among those inclined to adopt Luther’s teachings were several German princes in the patchwork quilt of territories that made up the Holy Roman Empire, along with large parts of the aristocracy and merchant classes in Denmark, Sweden, and England. Included among them was Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, Luther’s home territory who defied both Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, by offering Luther sanctuary so he could escape the death penalty.

With adherents of the new Protestant faith proliferating across Europe, pressure was growing on secular authorities either to adopt or to confront the new religion. Several German princes changed confession in a direct challenge to their overlord, Charles V. The reformed faith was also making inroads in three north European countries, England, Sweden, and Denmark. By 1934, all three had renounced their allegiance to Rome. This was the first time that heresy had conquered entire countries—dissent was for the first time wedded to the power of the state.

For those who experienced or encouraged it, the polarization of European society during this period was every bit as remarkable and pervasive as the polarization we have witnessed since the advent of social media combined with the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 to create a wholly new and divided dynamic in politics across the globe. Furthermore, the underlying emotional drive of identity politics with which we struggle today would have been immediately recognizable to those who experienced Europe being torn apart during the long sixteenth century.

People adhered to identities of confession, language, perceived nationality, and class. Conspiracy theories proliferated, and as early as the 1520s, there was an upsurge in individuals and their followers predicting the imminent end of the world. In protestant countries, the thesis of the Pope as anti-Christ spread like wildfire. Among Protestants, anything perceived as detrimental to one’s daily activities often attracted the pejorative description “papal.”

In response, the Catholic Church announced the Counter-Reformation at the Council of Trent in 1545. In areas under the control of the Habsburgs, communities that had adopted the reform faith were forcibly reconverted, a process which included the murder of thousands. Successive Holy Roman emperors bolstered the activities of the Inquisition, an early form of religious police.

In the first 60 years of the printing press, less heralded technological innovations in maritime and weapons technology had an indirect but nonetheless important relationship with the politics of Lutheranism. These engineering advances may not have had the same long-term impact as the coming of the printed book, but they should not be underestimated. Combined with the growth of Protestantism among north European countries, especially in the Netherlands, they were influential in shifting the locus of political power in Europe from the Mediterranean to the North Sea over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, shipwrights started to experiment combining lateen (triangular) and square sails. Not only did this provide sailing vessels with increased power, but by harnessing wind currents more effectively, European ships were able to cease navigating via coastal landscapes and were now able to engage in regular transoceanic travel.

The extraordinary wealth of the New World, which started filling the coffers of the Habsburg kings of Spain, proved a double-edged sword. Poorly managed, it triggered a century-long period of inflation, which, certainly at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was an unknown phenomenon. So while the continent as a whole became richer and more prosperous, prices and wages kept rising, but nobody understood why. What many did observe, however, was how the growing prosperity was unevenly distributed.

This first wave of globalization brought with it increased threats to maritime trade from rival states and from privateers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, navies began experimenting with the deployment of large bronze siege guns on the bottom deck of their newly mobile warships. Although the Spaniards were able to put to sea large armadas for their Atlantic crossings, the design of their ships was informed primarily by the sailing conditions on the Mediterranean which, on the whole, were relatively benign.

By contrast, the Danes, Swedes, Dutch, English, and members of the Hanseatic League had a tradition of shipbuilding, which they were forced to adapt to the much more unstable North and Baltic seas. This meant the ship’s body rose higher out of the sea, enabling it to carry more guns without putting the ship out of kilter. From the 1580s, Spain’s extraordinary maritime prowess was eroded in a series of humiliating defeats by northern powers, notably England and the Dutch Republic.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, the technological advances in printing, ship design, and weapons wrought huge changes on European society. But it took roughly a century for the most far-reaching of changes to become evident—a fundamental realignment in economic power from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

The Dutch Golden Age had begun at the same time as to the north the Swedish military was developing into what would eventually prove the decisive protestant force in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). In the meanwhile, Dutch and English mercantilism, based on the revolutionary structure of the joint-stock company, was emerging in anticipation of the following century when first Dutch then British naval power would dominate the world’s oceans.

Protestantism leant itself to more flexible systems of governance and the economy in all three northern European great powers of the seventeenth century, enabling them to exploit advances in maritime technology more quickly and more effectively than the Mediterranean rivals like Spain and Portugal. By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Spain had lost its primacy in world politics forever. This issue of governance and how to exploit technology most effectively is critical to all three periods under review.

3 The French Revolution, Steam Power, and the Industrial Revolution, 1769–1945

Toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the revolution in steam power encouraged the spread of mass industrial processes at the same time as decisive political revolutions broke out in America and France. As with the Reformation, the industrial revolution led not merely to rapid changes in people’s lived experience but also to a change in the tectonics of geopolitics over the period of a century and a half. Military and political power moved away from western Europe first to Germany and then across the Atlantic to the United States and eastward toward first Japan and then the Soviet Union, a Eurasian state. Just as Spain never recovered its leading position in the world after the Thirty Years’ War, Europe would never regain it after World War II.

In 1600, Europeans believed in witchcraft and werewolves. They thought that “Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs…[and that] mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw…that it is possible to turn base metal into gold…[that] the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil… [t]hat the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.” They had “heard mention of Copernicus, but do not imagine that he intended his sun-centered model of the cosmos to be taken literally” (Wootton, 2015).

A 130 years later, Voltaire wrote that England was leading the world in social culture. The country was unrecognizable. “An Englishman has looked through a telescope and a microscope; he owns a pendulum clock and a stick barometer…He does not know anyone who believes in witches and werewolves, magic, alchemy or astrology; he thinks the Odyssey is fiction, not fact…Like all people in Protestant countries, he believes that the Earth goes around the sun. He knows that the rainbow is produced by refracted light and that comets have no significance for our lives on earth…He believes that science is going to transform the world” (Wootton, 2015).

Some exceptional minds had understood this much earlier. In 1611, John Donne, the English poet, scholar, and cleric, announced that Galileo’s recent discoveries represented a “new philosophy,” which “calls all in doubt.” A crucial consequence of the split in Western Christianity was the critical reassessment of the Roman Catholic’s fundamental doctrine about the universe and the earth’s centrality therein. In the second half of the sixteenth century, astronomers were the demolition experts who started dismantling the House of God built on clerical dogma before constructing a replacement temple out of a new, infinitely more flexible material: empirical observation. A century after Donne, people were still reluctant to give voice to atheism, but ever greater numbers were privately questioning the existence of God.

This first phase of the scientific revolution stretched out over a 150 years, during which time Europe (and Britain in particular) grew pregnant with the transformative possibility of material growth and prosperity. To ensure a successful birth, all the continent needed were some breakthroughs in engineering so that scientific knowledge could be put to practical uses.

In 1769, James Watt’s steam engine superseded the older but cumbersome Newcomen engine and, in the process, acted as midwife to the modern infant that soon grew into the strapping adolescent of the industrial revolution. Until this point, manufacturing was constrained by the limits of human and animal power. Just as the printing press had unleashed the dissemination of knowledge on a scale beyond anything in history, steam increased productive capacity to a hitherto unimaginable degree.

Over the next 50 years, the transformation of Britain, England and Scotland in particular, was breathtaking. “Where previously, an amelioration of the conditions of existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains achieved,” writes David Landes in his landmark study, The Unbound Prometheus, “now for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation, a flow that lifted beyond visible limits the ceiling of Malthus’s positive checks. The Industrial Revolution thereby opened a new age of promise. It also transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilizations; revolutionized the social order; and as much changed man’s way of thinking as his way of doing” (Landes, 1969).

Britain enjoyed several advantages that together ensured other European countries lagged behind its industrial development by as much as 50 years. Britain had achieved naval superiority over France with its victory in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the first conflict which took place on more than two continents. This enabled London to rapidly expand its overseas empire, whose resources would prove invaluable in its economic advance during the nineteenth century.

This combined with significant progress in the productive process of iron and steel, fueled by Britain’s large coal industry. The result was an extraordinary proliferation of the machine tools, which lay at the heart of Britain’s expanding manufacturing base.

Most political power had been in the hands of the bourgeoisie in Scotland and England for over a century since the revolution of 1688 had created Europe’s first constitutional monarchy. Britain’s landed aristocracy and gentry still looked down at “traders and manufacturers,” but the latter ignored the social disdain in which they were held as their wealth quickly outstripped that of their supposed social superiors.

By contrast with the entrepreneurial dynamism of Britain, the absolutism that dominated the giant empires of continental Europe and France was hindering reform and economic progress. France offered Britain serious competition in technological and scientific research, but its sclerotic politics meant French entrepreneurs faced much greater difficulties in applying that research to the economy.

Britain had suffered one major setback in its colonial possessions when America’s revolutionary army won the war of 1776. However, defeat did not lead to revolution at home in Britain but consolidation. And it was not long before the 13 newly liberated colonies across the Atlantic were arguing among themselves and struggling to create coherent political structures.

Inspired in part by the successful anti-British insurrection in America, the masses of France rose against Bourbon absolutism in 1789. In the short term, the revolutionary chaos widened the developing technological and economic advantage, which Britain enjoyed over France. But politically, the event was an extraordinary harbinger of what would develop into a decisive break in European politics. Just as British technology and engineering introduced the age of mass production and consumption, France ushered in the era of mass politics.

Napoleon seized the opportunity which the revolutionary chaos presented to reorganize French society. Most importantly, he introduced the levée en masse, the mass mobilization of the male population into the army. The new emperor had begun the process of persuading all classes, and not just the aristocracy, that they should be invested in the French state and its military aims.

While Napoleon instilled a new mass patriotism in France, the factories that sprung up all over Britain, producing everything from clothes to ceramics to clocks, created an entire new class—the proletariat. Some early capitalists in Britain came from religious communities such as the Quakers or the Methodists. They regarded all workers as part of a community to be nourished and cherished. Many others, however, were ruthlessly venal: the less money one invested in workers, the bigger the returns on capital investment. In various forms, these new social relations would determine the politics and governance of the Western world for the next two centuries.

The bulk of the population exchanged a life of subsistence farming for the grindingly monotonous and dangerous work of the factory. Among the artisan classes, the rise of the factory provoked a backlash against the new technology enabling mass production techniques. The Luddites in England and the Weaver Uprising in Silesia, immortalized in Gerhard Hauptmann’s drama, Die Weber, are powerful reminders of this.

As liberal capitalism consolidated itself across the nineteenth century, it also fashioned a new political construct that emerged first in Europe and then the world—the nation state. It has dominated ever since.

The nation state was critical in the deployment of the countless new technologies developed in the nineteenth century. The unification of so many fragmented political entities, notably the German and the Italian lands, steadily dismantled bureaucratic obstacles to growth, such as internal tariff systems.

Two technological developments spurred on the modernization and centralization of the nascent nation states. In 1825, the first rail line was opened between Stockton and Darlington in England’s northeast. For 4000 years, travel had been limited to the speed of horses. Within 75 years of Stevenson’s rocket making that inaugural journey, rail lines criss-crossed huge stretches of the world, enabling people and goods to travel over vast distances at undreamt of speeds.

On August 16, 1858, Britain’s Queen Victoria sent a message to the authorities in New York. It arrived from London in a matter of seconds, thanks to the massive telegraph cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean by two ships, meeting in the middle. Before this moment, messages across this distance were conveyed over months. “Since the discovery of Columbus,” wrote the London Times, “nothing has been done in any degree comparable to the vast enlargement which has thus been given to the sphere of human activity.”Footnote 1

These advances in transport and communication magnified the explosion of scientific activity across the Western world and a concomitant expansion of the secondary and tertiary education sectors. The French Revolution, the German Romantic Movement, and the enormous progress made in natural sciences during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also led to significant changes in the structure and purpose of universities, especially in some parts of Germany, Britain, and the United States. An especially fruitful collaboration emerged between scholars in Germany and Britain, which drove many of the advances in engineering and manufacturing.Footnote 2

The positive consequences of the industrial revolution and the emergence of the nation state were remarkable. Human longevity suddenly shoots upward. In 1870, the mean life expectancy around the world was 32. Even in the region with the longest average life span, Europe, it was still under 40. These figures had been broadly consistent for several centuries. Just a hundred years later in 1970, the figure for Europe, the Americas, and Asia was over 70 years old, and even in the world’s most challenged region, Africa, it was already over 50.

But this period was subject to the Manichean duality of technological advance, which characterized the preceding epoch and would go on to define our era.

Much of the British Empire’s early success was due to it enjoying easy and cheap access to the resources that its colonies provided. As other European nations and the United States joined in the global scramble for the wealth that the Americas, Africa, and Asia provided, the violence visited by humans on other humans reached heights previously unscaled even though a considerable intellectual and literary industry presented the enslavement and annihilation of tens of millions as “progress.”

More ominously, each major power boasted at least one major arms manufacturer, and by the 1860s, Le Creuset, Skoda, Krupp, and Vickers were eagerly recruiting the growing number of graduates specializing in physics and chemistry. From the period of the American Civil War, 1862–1865, to the Balkan Wars, 1912–1913, these companies would use conflicts as a showcase to highlight the efficacy of their weapons. Not only were the advances in weapons and communications technology able to inflict greater casualties than ever before, but as military strategy developed in the twentieth century, they used the extraordinary range first of artillery and then airpower to target civilians on a massive scale (Glenny, 2013).

The murder and attempted murder of entire civilian populations had already begun in the nineteenth century across the United States and Europe, in preparation for the industrial killings of the twentieth century. In 1914, European nations finally applied their remarkable know-how to extermination. The violence culminated in the atrocities of World War II before the single most destructive act in history, the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki causing the deaths of roughly 200,000 people in an instant. The event took place just 176 years after Watt unveiled his steam engine. It is worth noting that in the next 50 years, two countries in particular, the United States and the Soviet Union, produced enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. On one occasion, the Cuban missile crisis in 1963, we came close to nuclear war. Since the 1950s, the extinction of the human species (not to mention the rest of life on earth) is not just a theoretical but a practical possibility.

The end of World War II confirmed the demise of European primacy as the United States and Russia assumed leadership and domination over the divided continent where the technological and political revolutions had begun four centuries earlier. Just as the twentieth century would have been entirely unrecognizable to the men and women alive during the Renaissance and would doubtless have filled them full of wonder, so would the commanders in the Thirty Years’ War have gawped at the extent of the death and destruction that modernity unleashed. This points to a fundamental difference between the first great rush of modernity, from 1492 to 1648, and the second great rush from the 1760s to 1945: scale.

4 The Collapse of Communism and Information Technology, 1973–2023

The current manifestation of political and technological revolutions followed by polarization, economic transformation, rising inequality, and geopolitical shift has its roots in the 1970s. As the quote from Gramsci in the introduction implies, this process is still far from reaching its conclusion. The speed and nature of technological innovation in the last 50 years means that it is hard to predict how this will conclude, although the primary geopolitical struggle between the United States and China is clearly well underway.

We must begin the examination of this period in 1973 when the United States and Saudi Arabia struck a deal to end the oil crisis that had dominated events that year. This deal resulted in the US banking system becoming awash with so-called petrodollars. Unable to lend to domestic clients battling with stagflation, the banks started lending to foreign states as proposed and facilitated by the then head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. In Eastern Europe, four countries assumed huge dollar-denominated debts: Poland, Hungary, Romania and, outside the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia.

These debts fell due in the early 1980s at a point when US and British interest rates had hit a historic high of over 16%, meaning the payments of these already vulnerable economies became unsustainably onerous. As well as causing a major political crisis in Poland that led to the formation of the independent trades union, Solidarity, and then a military coup in December 1981, it also accentuated Poland’s extreme dependency on energy supplies from the Soviet Union, which it paid for at roughly one-third of the world market price.

The Soviet Union’s ability to subsidize the energy requirements of not just Poland but all East European states was dependent on high world oil prices and the efficient extraction of the Western Siberian oil fields, which it had started to exploit in the late 1970s (Perovic and Kempin, 2014).

As oil prices collapsed in the mid-80s, the Soviet Union sought to import Western technology, notably its advanced micro-processing capacity, to keep its oil industry competitive. The Western Siberian oil fields were among the most difficult in the world to exploit, and Soviet technology suffered constant failures, requiring ever greater investment from an economy that was struggling to survive.

Cold War logic had led the West to place stringent controls on the export of its most advanced technology affecting two sectors in particular—energy and the military.

Western restrictions on technology with military applications also threatened to deliver a knockout blow to Soviet attempts to maintain parity in the Cold War. The United States was now fitting its short-, medium-, and long-range missiles with systems guided by computer and laser technology in place of the previous analogue ones. As early as 1983, during the so-called Euromissiles crisis, leading members of the Soviet military were warning the Communist Party leadership that advances in micro-processing techniques were resulting in an exponential growth in the effectiveness of American weapons over their Soviet equivalent (Miller, 2022).

Such profoundly significant technological breakthroughs in information technology in the United States preceded the revolutionary drama of 1989 just like it had in 1517 and 1789. In March 1986, we reported from the 27th Soviet Party Congress for New Scientist magazine. Mikhail Gorbachev had already launched his new policies of perestroika (reform) and glasnost (transparency). At this extraordinary event, Gorbachev and his prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, made it clear where the Party most urgently needed to inject some perestroika and glasnost—into science, in particular computer technology and robotics for industrial and military applications. By this time, there were some 10,000 computers in the Soviet Union. The United States, by contrast, boasted 1.3 million mainframes and minicomputers. Put simply, they could not maintain parity in technological capacity and innovation (something that the Chinese watched extremely closely at the time, adjusting their research, development, and deployment models accordingly). Especially when combined with a rigid regime of censorship, the statist model was incapable of maintaining parity in an industry in which research was driven not only by the immediate requirements of the military but equally by the voracious desire of consumer markets.

As a consequence, the Soviet Union’s lag in military and industrial capability was already visible and unbridgeable. As if to underline just how serious Soviet technological backwardness was, a month after the 27th Party Congress, a safety test at a plant just south of the Pripyat marshes triggered an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, and Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 exploded.

Soviet socialism was reaching the end as a system that could compete with the West. If mountains of external debt killed communism in Poland and Hungary, tech killed the Soviet Union.

The rapid advance of computer technology since the 1980s not only hastened the end of the Soviet Empire. It has wrought changes unlike any other technological innovation in history because it has insinuated itself into and often created total dependency on almost every aspect of human social and economic interaction. But during the 1990s, few people were willing or interested in questioning the unquestioning embrace of the technology.

That long Decade of Delusion came to an end in 2008.

After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, it took a full 14 months before Austria’s Creditanstalt became the first major casualty of the shenanigans on Wall Street. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, it was just 4 days before almost every major bank around the world was staring into the abyss of global financial meltdown and collapse.

Technology was critical both to the intrinsic financial crisis and the speed with which it spread from New York across the world. The heart of the Crash? Credit Default Swaps and Collateral Mortgage Obligations, the sub-prime securitization vehicles that had enabled banks to leverage debt way beyond their ability to repay it. Banks “had begun to apply pure mathematical theories to evaluate credit risk and estimate credit risk premiums to be required.” The models of such “quants” who have wielded so much influence over modern banking are often “worse than useless” (Murphy, 2008). Quants are financial analysts who use math, coding, and finance skills to help companies make business and investment decisions. For example, some quants work on the buy-side of an investment bank, helping these large companies increase profits with automated trading algorithms.

No single financial institution had the least oversight into exactly how much debt they were carrying. They were unable to tame the monster once unleashed, and money just started flowing automatically out of banks across the world without anyone having to press a button.

As we saw in the previous section, the industrial revolution created a new class structure with the emergence of the industrial proletariat and a capitalist class who derived value from the labor of the proletariat. The digital revolution largely dispenses with that model by replacing value from labor with value from data, often freely handed over by their generators, i.e., consumers. Leviathan corporations, such as Google and Facebook, have grown at astonishing rates over the past two decades. Deriving value from data rather than labor means the capital investment can record returns at a much higher rate. In this fundamental shift in the nature of production driven by technology, the importance of the human is diminished, weakening her leverage in social relations as the digitalization of so much of our life means she has no choice but to continue producing data that is processed and exploited by the corporations.Footnote 3 Combined with the burgeoning influence of AI, this is rapidly posing the question as to what if any labor function humans will have in the near future.

5 Conclusions

A central challenge at the current juncture of the human journey is that many of the technologies rightly credited for our material progress are also based on disintegration and reduction of the individual: breaking us down into data sets of DNA, revealed preferences in digital search histories, biometrics, financial data, etc. The quest for utility, efficiency, and convenience at global scale necessarily reduces us to data points. Trillion-dollar industries are committed to this proposition.

The idea of the individual—literally a being that cannot or should not be divided—is one of integration and wholeness, yet it is the subject of ferocious division and subdivision in the name of progress (the market) and security (the state). In a sense, modernity constantly puts our integrity in jeopardy.

As individuals, we should not be divided, but we also need to be connected beyond ourselves: we need relationships to find meaning and to thrive. What ultimately changes people’s lives are relationships. As sentient beings, we need associative relationships to thrive—in families, as friends, as citizens, and as co-workers—we need the right scale to live as humans in full.

Technology allows us to adapt and extend ourselves beyond the constraints of body and place. Communications technology stretches the realm of our senses globally. This elasticity has been central to progress. Yet the question remains how far beyond the inherent limitations of being human can we meaningfully extend without losing touch with who we are. The answer is certainly not fixed and may vary across individuals and societies and time. However, it does not follow that there are no limits.

But in the past 30 years, our world has become more connected than ever before, and yet we face an epidemic of loneliness, alienation, and stress-related illnesses. Our cluttered, frenetic, upgraded lives feel increasingly out of control. Our machines are supposed to work for us, but often, we appear to be working for our machines. Technological triumphs have created new challenges, pushing some fundamental things out of joint, particularly in the less tangible realms of culture, character, and spirit. Finding our balance and keeping our sanity will become ever more difficult as our lives become “bigger.”

Technological change is full of consequences, intended and unintended, expected and unexpected, good and bad, invidious and insidious, to which humans must adapt. Reflecting on the course of the twentieth century, the Russian poet Pasternak wrote somewhat ominously of “the consequences of consequences.” This insight has never seemed more important and has propelled us to ask some fundamental questions about how we will adapt ourselves and our lifestyles to the effects of our radically new setting, a world defined by promising and powerful technologies—nuclear, genomic, and digital—that are capable of disaggregating, disintegrating, and also reintegrating or remaking many aspects of the world as we know it.

The challenges will proliferate. We are at the beginning of a world in which artificial intelligence in various forms will determine the direction of our lives in an even more profound way. While the positive possibilities in terms of human health and welfare are considerable, the negative consequences are potentially hair-raising. Just as printing, sails, and gunpowder led to greater global wealth, it also encouraged violent polarization; just as the industrial revolution led to an extraordinary increase in longevity and the atomic bomb, so will AI offer the human race great protection and massive destruction simultaneously but at a greatly enhanced scale than during either of the previous two revolutions.

Already AI generative programs like GPT4 are capable of writing sophisticated malware, and increasingly cybersecurity is relying on AI and machine-to-machine learning. Human oversight of complex systems is receding, a fundamental danger in itself. Meanwhile, for those with political influence, the temptation to make use of truly Orwellian surveillance techniques is a dark temptation as China’s Social Credit System and states’ increasingly ubiquitous deployment of invasive spyware have demonstrated all too effectively.

The geopolitical trajectory is already clear. China is striving to displace the United States as the number one power economically and politically. Tech and tech-related industries, such as the extraction and processing of critical raw materials, are at the very heart of this struggle. The United States is fighting hard to maintain its position of supremacy (made more difficult by the polarization in a democratic society that social media have greatly encouraged).

The big question that this pattern that echoes the Reformation and the industrial revolution poses concerns its violent culmination, that is, the precedents of the Thirty Years’ War and the two world wars of the twentieth century. Leaving so-called black swan events aside, political leadership will play a big role in the outcome. Since the turn of the millennium, both China and the United States have increasingly characterized their economic competition as a cultural one. The United States fashions this as a struggle between democratic capitalism against an autocratic version, while China presents its system as better equipped to manage long-term problems than the caprice of American democratic structures. Both arguments have their weaknesses, arguably the most fundamental being that unless these two systems cooperate along with all other countries in the world, then at least one of the several threats to existence (we are no longer just confronted with possible nuclear war but the climate crisis, pandemics, and the uncontrolled spread of AI) is likely to find a way of becoming a reality.

In that respect, the experience of the last two decades does not bode well. But humans have extracted themselves from some sticky situations before. Now, we must wait and see if AI and other technologies will help us, or hinder us.

Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

  1. 1.

    Which innovations across all three examples have proved more important: information technology or engineering?

  2. 2.

    Do technological breakthroughs always trigger political revolution?

  3. 3.

    In terms of technology and its subsequent impact, to what degree is the second example an outlier, and to what degree does it conform to the patterns of the other two?

  4. 4.

    What are the implications of scale for the revolution in information technology?

  5. 5.

    To what degree do the first two examples help us predict the outcome of the unfinished third example?

Learning Resources for Students

  1. 1.

    Tarnoff, B. From Manchester to Barcelona. https://logicmag.io/nature/from-manchester-to-barcelona/

    This key text reveals why the digital economy as it emerged in the United States has led to a concentration of political and economic power around a few corporate entities that is much greater than even during the so-called robber baron period of capital accumulation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Essential reading.

  2. 2.

    Barbier, F. (2016) Gutenberg’s Europe: The Book and the Invention of Western Modernity. Cantab: Polity Press

    Not the greatest stylist, but Barbier’s book is rich in detail about Gutenberg and the printing press’s relationship first with Germany and then France and Italy. It identifies the key areas and the variegated speed with which print impacted on modern European thought.

  3. 3.

    Febvre, L. and Martin H-J. (1976) The Coming of the Book. London: New Left Books.

    This path-breaking work by two French scholars was the first to detail how the printing press and subsequent rise of the book began to reshape the economic landscape of late medieval Europe before preparing the social ground that Luther would later exploit.

  4. 4.

    Roper, L. (2016) Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. London: Bodley Head.

    The most comprehensive biography of Luther is especially useful for understanding the strategic intelligence of Luther, his relationship with Cranach the Elder, and their targeted use of printed material to undermine the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the German lands.

  5. 5.

    Israel, J. (1998) The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806. Oxford: OUP.

    The best single volume history of the Dutch Republic, which explains how technology, economic innovation, and novel political forms combine to enable this very small country to eclipse the trading power of Spain.

  6. 6.

    For a quicker primer on this particular issue, listen to my BBC Podcast, The Invention of the Netherlands: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4gt7l

  7. 7.

    Wilson, P.H. (2009) Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War. London: Allen Lane.

    Wilson’s magnum opus is one of several masterful accounts of this incredibly complex period of European history, but we recommend it because he is particularly good at identifying how technology impacted the nature of warfare and increased its destructive power to levels hitherto never seen.

  8. 8.

    Wooton, D. (2015) The Invention of Science. London: Allen Lane.

    This superb account of the lead up to the steam revolution is especially useful for bridging the period between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution in examining technological change. Essential reading on the interplay between technology and politics.

  9. 9.

    Landes, D. S. (1969) The Unbound Prometheus. Cantab: Cambridge University Press.

    The definitive work on the industrial revolution in Britain and Europe. It is especially strong at documenting the interplay between innovation, politics, and social and economic change in Great Britain.

  10. 10.

    Wheeler, T. From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future. Washington: Brookings Institution Press

    A useful overview of the three revolutions. It is good on the immediate social impact of technological change but less detailed on some issues such as political polarization. Probably the best primer on the subject.