When I first started teaching a module on Globalisation for a course on learning how to think about things happening in the world, the big story was China vs. Google. The Americans had agreed to – and subsequently violated – numerous conditions laid out by the Chinese government for the roll-out of a search bar into the free world (spoiler: conditions included compromising much of the access to free world promised by that search bar, and the young Turks of Google mistook China for a little shed in the forest they could have a laugh in.)
Around that time, David Brooks published something persuasive in NYT about how the “stuff” economy has effectively moved to a “protocol society” as nerds and stock markets became bewitched by invisible tools that lots of people can use at the same time, as opposed to a screwdriver. (That’s when we all learned to put “upgrade” and “OS” into sentences.)
Seems the big, heavy stuff that can only be in one place at a time is back in business.
Thanks to FT’s Big Read of 12 March for the brilliant image – waiting for comments from Fukuyama and Marx.