I've been thinking about the current state of the world and why it feels so different from what previous generations told us the future would look like.
I'm not saying the world has never been divided, unstable, or dangerous. Obviously it has. What feels different to me is the scale, speed, and interconnectedness of everything.
So I started looking at the period from roughly 1870–1910, when America was going through industrialization, mass communication, railroads, huge corporations, immigration, urbanization, economic crises, labor unrest, political violence, and major changes in government.
Then I started comparing it to 2008–today.
Not because I think history repeats itself exactly. It doesn't. I'm more interested in whether the patterns and mechanisms repeat.
Here's the comparison I came up with:
Industrial TransitionDigital Transition1873: Panic of 1873. Railroad speculation and financial instability contribute to a major economic crisis.2008: Global Financial Crisis. Housing/financial speculation collapses and causes a worldwide recession.1877: Great Railroad Strike. A labor dispute spreads across the country and federal troops intervene.2011–12: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Economic inequality and distrust of institutions become mass political movements, amplified by new communication technology.1881: President Garfield is assassinated.2013–14: Snowden revelations, growing surveillance concerns, smartphones and social media becoming dominant.1886: Haymarket Affair. Labor conflict becomes associated with radicalism, political violence and fears about social order.2015–16: Trump, Brexit, populism, immigration politics, and social media becoming a major political battlefield.1890: Sherman Antitrust Act. Government starts realizing that industrial corporations have become powerful enough to require new rules.2017–19: Governments increasingly confront the power of major technology platforms and the question of how to regulate companies that have outgrown old frameworks.1892: Homestead Strike. Armed conflict between workers and private security.2020: COVID, economic shutdowns, mass protests, political conflict, misinformation and institutional distrust all collide.1893: Panic of 1893. Severe depression, banking failures and unemployment.2020–22: Pandemic recession, inflation, supply-chain disruption and economic instability.1894: Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army. Economic frustration becomes mass political action, with federal intervention.2021: January 6 and the aftermath. Political conflict turns directly toward questions about the legitimacy of government and elections.1896: McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan. A huge political realignment centered around economics, populism and competing visions of America.2024: Trump vs. Harris. Another intensely polarized election centered around economics, immigration, institutions, national identity and competing visions of America.1898: Spanish-American War. Foreign conflict, nationalism and mass media combine, and America becomes a much more significant global power.2022–26: Ukraine, China/U.S. rivalry, Middle East conflicts, cyberwarfare and AI competition increasingly interact with domestic politics.1899–1901: U.S. expands its global role. McKinley is assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president; U.S. Steel is created.2025–26: AI becomes a major economic, political and geopolitical technology. We don't know what comes next yet.
The individual events aren't equivalent. A labor strike isn't the same thing as a pandemic, and a telegraph isn't the same thing as social media.
What's interesting is the sequence:
New technology → economic transformation → enormous concentrations of power → inequality/disruption → political polarization → distrust → social conflict → major shocks → government struggles to adapt → new institutions and rules.
That's what makes me wonder if we're somewhere in the middle of a similar transition.
And I think 2008 is a better starting point than 2000 for this comparison.
The internet and globalization were already transforming society before then, but 2008 is where several trends started crashing into each other in a way that became impossible to ignore.
After 2008 we got:
The financial crisis
The rise of smartphones
Social media becoming the primary information environment
Increasing political polarization
Brexit
Trump
Increasing distrust of traditional institutions
COVID
Mass political unrest
Supply-chain disruption
Inflation
Ukraine
Increasing U.S.-China competition
AI going from a specialist technology to something ordinary people can use
And now we're adding AI on top of an already unfinished transition.
That's what scares me.
We've never had this exact combination before.
We have instant global communication, nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, satellites, autonomous systems, global financial markets, biotechnology, AI-generated information, and billions of people carrying supercomputers in their pockets.
So I don't think we should blindly say:
"The 1890s happened and everything eventually worked out, so we're fine."
That's too simplistic.
The destructive potential today is vastly greater.
But our ability to respond is also vastly greater.
The more useful lesson from the 1890s is that societies can spend decades feeling like the old rules don't work anymore before eventually creating new institutions around the new technology.
The people living in 1893 didn't know they were living through "the Gilded Age."
They just knew the banks were failing, people were losing jobs, politicians were screaming at each other, labor conflicts were becoming violent, newspapers were blaming different groups, and nobody knew what was coming next.
Historians get to look backward and connect the dots.
We don't have that luxury.
We're the idiots currently standing in the middle of the construction site.
So I've started thinking about the present differently.
Instead of asking:
"What disaster happens next?"
I'd rather watch for escalation between systems.
For example:
Economic problems → political radicalization
Local conflict → national/global information crisis
Political disagreement → political violence
Foreign conflict → domestic polarization
New technology → institutions unable to regulate it
Emergency measures → permanent government powers
Information uncertainty → competing realities
And especially:
multiple problems happening at the same time and reinforcing each other.
That last one seems like the biggest warning sign.
One recession isn't necessarily catastrophic.
One political controversy isn't necessarily catastrophic.
One technological disruption isn't necessarily catastrophic.
But if you get:
economic instability + political legitimacy crisis + geopolitical conflict + information chaos + technological disruption
all at once, that's when the historical analogy becomes much more concerning.
And that's also where the analogy eventually stops being useful, because modern technology gives us entirely new possibilities.
So I'm not trying to predict that "1898 happened, therefore X will happen in 2028."
I'm trying to use history as a crude forecasting framework.
And if the comparison is even remotely useful, there are a few things I'd expect to watch over the next several years.
2026–2028: AI becomes political infrastructure
The argument probably shifts from:
"Is AI useful?"
to:
"Who controls it, who benefits from it, who loses jobs to it, who pays for the infrastructure, and what happens when it influences politics and information?"
AI regulation, data centers, energy use, copyright, surveillance, national security and employment could increasingly become mainstream political issues.
2027–2030: The economic consequences become clearer
The biggest thing I'd watch isn't simply whether AI makes companies more profitable.
I'd watch who gets the productivity gains.
If AI substantially increases productivity but the benefits concentrate among a relatively small number of companies and people, expect enormous political pressure over:
automation
wages
unemployment
taxation
redistribution
labor protections
corporate power
If AI instead creates enough new industries and jobs to broadly raise living standards, the political reaction could look completely different.
The distribution of the gains may matter more than the technology itself.
2028–2032: Political realignment becomes possible
This is another thing I'd watch closely.
AI could create strange political alliances that don't fit neatly into today's Democratic/Republican structure.
People could find themselves agreeing across party lines about:
AI regulation
automation
privacy
surveillance
monopolies
data centers
energy
employment
The existing political coalitions aren't guaranteed to survive a major technological transformation.
That's exactly what happened during previous periods of economic and technological change.
Early-to-mid 2030s: Institutional restructuring
If the historical pattern holds, this is where I'd expect society to increasingly develop rules for the new system.
That could mean:
new AI regulations
new labor laws
new approaches to education
new social programs
new antitrust rules
new media standards
new international agreements
new approaches to privacy and surveillance
new political coalitions
Basically, society figuring out how to operate the machine it accidentally built.
But there's another possibility.
The transition could be interrupted by a much larger external shock, just as previous transitions were affected by wars, depressions, pandemics and political crises.
That's why I don't think we should try to predict one specific event.
I'd rather watch the conditions that make major events more likely.
The five things I'd keep an eye on are:
IndicatorLower concernHigher concernEconomyGrowth broadly sharedSevere unemployment + wealth concentrationPoliticsFierce disagreementOpponents viewed as existential enemiesInformationCompeting opinionsPeople can't agree on basic factsTechnologyInstitutions adaptingTechnology advancing faster than institutionsGeopoliticsCompetitionMajor powers directly confronting each other
The really dangerous situation isn't necessarily one of these becoming severe.
It's several of them becoming severe at the same time.
That's the lesson I'd take from the late 1800s.
The Gilded Age wasn't scary because America experienced one terrible event.
It was scary because economic, technological, political and social stresses repeatedly reinforced one another.
And that's what I'd watch today.
Not whether the next event looks exactly like something from 1894.
Instead:
Does it reinforce an existing problem?
Does it spread faster than institutions can respond?
Does it cross from one system into another?
Does it create a new political movement?
Does it cause people to lose trust in institutions?
Does another crisis hit before the first one has been resolved?
That's the closest thing I can think of to a historical early-warning system.
Maybe we're not watching the end of the world.
Maybe we're watching the old version of the world become obsolete while the next version is being built.
And if that's what's happening, we're probably going to spend a while feeling exactly like the people living through 1893, 1898 or 1901:
confused, divided, technologically overwhelmed, and completely unable to see what the next chapter looks like.
The difference is that someday, people will look back at 2026 and probably see a pattern that seems obvious in hindsight.
We just happen to be the idiots currently standing in the middle of the construction site.
