“The notion that vast historical forces could be tipped by the right individuals exerting pressure in the right spots has always offered an attractive antidote to fatalism.”

-Robert D. Kaplan

Things used to be a whole lot simpler. Back in the day – before camera-phones, twenty-four hour Breaking News coverage of the fate of blonde white women, You-Tube, sound-bites, emails from desperate Nigerian princes, and viral ads – life was much easier to interpret and digest.

As it’s been widely argued before, modern society is best distinguished from ancient ones by the fecundity of mass communication. Alexander’s empire was limited by the speed of communication. The inventions that have most altered the scope of modern human society have been those of communication. First Gutenberg’s printing press. Then the telegraph, allowing the hasty industrialization of the American heartland, conquering a wilderness at an unprecedented rate, and serving as the foundation for the next-generation technologies that evolved in a natural and inexorable progression.

The telephone, fax machine, and the internet – the most current incarnation of conductive wire carrying an electrical impulse. When, not so much an invention as a conglomeration of scores of already established technologies, the world agreed that the Internet has been born sometime in the 1990s, humanity would be tied together by emails and by web pages to an extent never before seen. And when the television was brought into the average American home during the brunt of the 20th century, everything from Presidential debates to war crimes was given new meaning – and a new face.

The arguments of Pulitzer Prize-winner Jared Diamond have brought to the discussion of invention and necessity an element of the chicken-egg argument – do we truly invent what we need, or is it that we grow dependant on our inventions? This has created competition for the conventional wisdom on the matter of whether invention begets necessity or vice-versa.

Regardless, the complexity of human societies has certainly increased exponentially in the past thousand years in terms of the technologies that wire us all together. And “the more wired a society, the more likely for a single tragedy to keep multiplying its impact.”¹ All the same, bureaucracies still function under many of the same laws. The figures in power still hold court, only in different, more modern robes. And the established has a way of forgetting about just how effective an inventive angry minority can be. The net has grown wider and become woven together by different parts, the email instead of the penned missive, and the qualitative nature of the laws which govern it have begun to change. But what’s changed the most is how most of us see our place in it.

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A few thousand years ago, for the most part your religion was your political affiliation. And that affiliation couldn’t possibly be the matter of discussion, debate, or a book – because all it really meant was a sort of glorified tribal loyalty. There was no ideological or personal moral conflict in politics, they were simply a matter of serving the one discrete individual who happened to hold power at the time.