Abstract

This lecture argues that the deeper problem is one the End of History thesis never took seriously: technological change generates new social problems, and those problems demand new institutions.

Anyone born after 1991 grew up in a world built on three assumptions. There were no enemies: with the Soviet Union gone, liberal democracy and capitalism appeared to have won permanently. There were no borders: goods, capital, people, and data moved as though the map were a formality. And there were no brakes: technology spread without security constraints, and private companies took ownership of the infrastructure our societies now run on. All three assumptions are now failing at once. Enemies, borders, and brakes are back, and the technology that once flattened the world is beginning to break it apart into rival techno-ideological blocs. The single connected Digital Pangea is fracturing.

Speaker

Paul Verhagen (1991) is a Dutch-American-Chinese Senior Fellow at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies on technology and geopolitics. He is the author of The Techtonic Shift, which argues that technological change has rendered our political institutions anachronistic, and that the return of geopolitics leaves little time to rebuild them. He comments regularly in Dutch and international media. His background is interdisciplinary, spanning theoretical physics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics. Most importantly, he is an alumnus of AUC, class of 2015!