Age of Revolutions by Fareed Zakaria

Author:Fareed Zakaria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

EVERY MAN A KING

After World War I, a brilliant young economist named John Maynard Keynes described the world of economic and technological advancement that the war had destroyed. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantities as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery on his doorstep.” Pointing to the easy availability of transport, communication, and news, he noted that this was an age when the middle and upper classes had “comforts, conveniences, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.”

Had Keynes lived to see the information revolution, he would have looked around in awe. The average American can now summon just about anything imaginable—a pen, a pomegranate, a Peter Pan costume—to their doorstep within days or even hours. Information and money can move across the planet within seconds. All it takes is the push of a button or a verbal command to a digital servant like Alexa. No wonder over 70 percent of book sales, over 40 percent of clothing sales, and 15 percent of all retail sales in the US now take place online. The effortlessness of listening to any song among millions on Spotify or streaming any movie ever made are advances so large as to defy comparison. No monarch ever had that kind of entertainment at his fingertips.

Despite all the hand-wringing about the digital age, the truth is that for the average person, the everyday good far outweighs the bad. People can work in flexible ways, freeing them from the tyranny of fixed hours and physical offices. Grandparents can FaceTime their grandchildren who live far away. Anyone can pull up a video to learn a new skill. Students can do their homework without having to go to a library and check out a book. We can work, connect, play, read, and watch everywhere and anywhere. We don’t often think about the genuine pleasure our technology brings us, but our actions reveal just how attached we are. We keep using it, every day of our lives.

Yet the easy and instantaneous nature of our online existence also increases angst and impatience with the complexities of civic life. In the face of one-click ordering on Amazon, messy systems like liberal democracy, with its frequent gridlock and inefficient bureaucracy, seem clunky. Consider Donald Trump’s pledge to cut through the Gordian knot of stalled politics. “I alone can fix it,” he declared. His communication style was made for the times. As soon as he had a thought, he simply blasted it to the world on social media. His Twitter feed was a steady stream of shocking statements, frequently unhinged but rarely boring. Trump first became a public figure through tabloid newspapers and reality TV, but it was the internet that catapulted him into the White House. He was able to speak directly to his followers and dominate the ever-shortening news cycle. And his simplistic policy

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