November 2022 is the 33rd birthday of what may be the most important month in recent history, November 1989.
A momentous month.
It saw the fall of the Berlin wall, the beginning of the end of communism and the soviet empire. We met that occasion with such hope, optimism, and a sense of relief that the immediate problems facing a Germany that needed a second reconstruction were pasted over. Slowly the optimism for the future of the now ‘free’ countries that broke away from the USSR has eroded, as the kleptocrats took power, and the spoils of previously state owned enterprises fell into a few select hands. It is the determination to extend the power and hegemony of that group that has led to the war in Ukraine.
The second momentous event that month was the completion by Tim Berners-Lee of the genetics of the web. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the formatting language of the web, and its siblings, URL, the unique web address and HTTP, the process of retrieving linked material from across the web.
These two events generated the drivers of the geopolitical face of the world, the way it communicates, does business, and governs itself. In short, they shaped the world we currently live in.
The commonality between these two momentous events is the simple words ‘democratic capitalism’
The economic battle between states, capitalism winning out over communism, and democracy winning over despotism. Suddenly we had freely available all the information and resulting transparency we could possibly need to live in some semblance of harmony.
Both have been proven to be false gods. The harmony and balance we sought has been comprehensively thrown out.
The power of the web has been weaponised and turned on us in ways inconceivable 33 years ago, and we have yet to develop an antidote. While this has been happening, the kleptocrates have exercised a level of influence and control the Stasi could only dream about, and led us into another war in Europe. As Einstein noted: The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.
Sadly, this is what we continue to do.
Photo credit. The header photo is of a nuclear explosion, one of which France set off on Mururoa Atoll in November 1989. Another event in a long list of what made that month a pivotal point in modern history.
