When an engineer scientist coded up an embryonic world wide web, few people – apart from a few visionaries judged at the time by most as borderline loons – would have guessed it would throw a huge monkey wrench into humanity’s system.
All the madness that seems the hallmark of the age is basically normality plus the accelerant of new technology. That is, of course, nothing new. Before mechanisation, 90 per cent of the population were farming on the land; technology changed that to only 0.5 per cent today. In comparison, digital rage holds nothing to former disruptions.
The march of technological disruption is unstoppable, as one genii after another is released from the technological lamp, and markets love them.
Meanwhile, in the short-term, US politicians have been fighting over their debt ceiling. It was a phony fight, because all politicians are addicted to debt and all modern countries skate up to the limit of fiscal sustainability, as they centralise...