State and Technological Revolution

December 16, 2019 08:39 am

LONDON – The following account should sound familiar. Over the course of decades, feats of innovation re-engineer society, diffuse across countries and regions, and fundamentally alter every facet of life. Politicians, slow to respond to new challenges, centralize power and pursue older, more familiar forms of control, be it traditional statism, aggressive nationalism, or both. But technology continues to force change, and inevitably re-orders the political, economic, and social settlement.