Ryan Bridge: Why's the world so hectic at the moment?

Everyone keeps asking why the world feels so hectic at the moment. 

If life were a movie, they'd call it One Battle After Another.

Winston Peters, Judith Collins, and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere all agree we’re living in the most dangerous era since the World Wars.

But why?

Yes there’s Trump, he’s unpredictable and a bit nuts, but Trump is really just a symptom of a wider problem, which is basically the decline of America.

The last death rattle of a superpower who knows its time is almost up.  

China’s military spending grew from one sixth to one third of America’s in the past decade.

India is about to overtake Germany as the third largest economy in the world.

The Russians are still hammering Ukraine, four years into a European war.

Now Iran.

But the world has lived through bigger wars before. It's survived bigger battles. It survived the Spanish flu, Covid.

What’s really changed that makes this feel more doomsday is basically two things: globalisation and technology.

It took us thousands of years to invent the wheel, yet in just the past six months we’ve created the most popular open-source technology project humanity has ever seen in OpenClaw; an AI personal assistant that can run your entire life at the click of a button.

We invent new technologies and the technologies now invent things themselves. They reshape labour markets and entire economies. And warfare.

All you need now is a couple of $30k drones and a few speedboats to hold the world to ransom, not nukes and a standing army.

We’ve made global trade and air travel so efficient that we’ve come to rely on it more heavily than ever before.

We close our own oil refineries and import it instead.

So when someone catches a flu in China, or oil gets choked in the Middle East, we’re buggered. 

News travels fast. We know what's happened as soon as it happens.

And so too do we get the effects of crisis and chaos.

Maybe the world only feels so dangerous because we’ve made it such a small one?

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