"While small changes in technology can fundamentally alter the balance of power, trying to predict exactly how, decades into the future, is incredibly difficult. Exponential technologies amplify everyone and everything. And that creates seemingly contradictory trends. Power is both concentrated and dispersed. Incumbents are both strengthened and weakened. Nation-states are both more fragile and at greater risk of slipping into abuses of unchecked power.
Recall that growing access to power means everyone’s power will be amplified. In the coming decades, historical patterns will play out once again, new centers will form, new infrastructures develop, new forms of governance and social organization emerge. At the same time, existing loci of power will be amplified in unpredictable ways. Sometimes, when one reads about technology, there is a heady sense that it will sweep away all that has come before, that no older businesses or institutions will survive the whirlwind. I don’t think that’s true; some will be swept away, but many will be augmented. Television can broadcast the revolution, but it can also help erase it. Technologies can reinforce social structures, hierarchies, and regimes of control as well as upend them.
In the resulting turbulence, without a major shift in focus, many open democratic states face a steady decay of their institutional foundations, a withering of legitimacy and authority. This is a circular dynamic of technology spreading and power shifting, which undermines the foundations, dents the capacity to rein it in, and so leads to further spread. At the same time, authoritarian states are given a potent new arsenal of repression.
The nation-state will be subject to massive centrifugal and centripetal forces, centralization and fragmentation. It’s a fast track to chaos, calling into question who makes decisions and how; how those decisions are executed, by whom, when, and where, pressurizing those delicate balances and accommodations toward the breaking point. This recipe for turbulence will create epic new concentrations and dispersals of power, splintering the state from above and below. It will ultimately cast doubt on the viability of some nations altogether."
Trecho retirado de "The Coming Wave" de Mustafa Suleyman e Michael Bhaskar.
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