Modern Era Society

Everything on the pages before this one was carried by people. Knowledge sat in someone's memory, then in a scribe's hands, then in a printed book, then on a broadcast that reached everyone at the same hour. This page covers the period when knowledge stopped being carried and started being available, at any hour, to anyone with a connection. It runs from the end of the Cold War to the arrival of machines that produce language. It is the shortest period on this site and the one with the least distance to look back from, so read the recent entries as description rather than as conclusion.

1991 CE — The Soviet Union ends. Fifteen states appear where one had been: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The arrangement that had organised world politics for 44 years stops. Two different groups then turn west. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been inside the Soviet Union itself. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany had been separate states under Soviet control rather than parts of it. Most of both groups joined NATO and the European Union over the following fifteen years.
1993 CE — The European Union. The Maastricht Treaty turns an economic community into a political union with shared citizenship, and the euro follows in 1999. It is the largest voluntary pooling of state sovereignty in history, and it has been argued about continuously since.
1990s CE onward — The Information Age. Storing, copying, and sending information becomes so cheap that the cost stops being a factor in decisions. That is the change underneath every entry that follows. The name is used loosely and has no agreed start date, so treat it as a label for a period rather than as an event.
1993 to 1995 CE — The web reaches the public. The first widely used graphical browser appears in 1993, and commercial use of the internet is permitted in the United States in 1995. Within five years the network moves from universities and research centres to homes and businesses.
1998 CE — Search. Google is founded, and its method ranks pages by how many other pages link to them rather than by counting words. This is the point at which having information available stops being enough and finding it becomes the harder problem. Whoever solves the finding controls what most people see.
2000 CE — The dot-com crash. Share prices of internet companies collapse after several years of rapid rise. Many of the businesses disappear. The infrastructure built during the boom, particularly the fibre optic cable laid across oceans and continents, stays in the ground and is used by everything that follows.
2001 CE — Wikipedia. An encyclopedia written and edited by unpaid volunteers, with no editorial board deciding who may contribute. Every expectation at the time was that it would fail. It became the most used general reference work in the world. The knowledge chain that started with scribes controlling access ends here with access controlled by nobody.
2001 CE — China joins the World Trade Organization. China enters the rules-based trading system and becomes the largest manufacturing economy in the world over the following two decades. Hundreds of millions of people move out of poverty. Manufacturing employment falls further in Europe and North America. Both of those are consequences of the same change.
2007 CE — The smartphone. The iPhone is released, combining a phone, a computer, a camera, and a network connection in one object carried in a pocket. Every previous step in the knowledge chain had moved storage further away from the person, into a library, a broadcaster, or a data centre. This step brings access to all of it back to arm's length, permanently, for most of the population of the planet.
2008 CE — The financial crisis. Losses on American mortgage lending spread through the banking system and trigger the deepest recession since the 1930s. Governments rescue banks with public money. Trust in financial institutions and in the people running them falls sharply and does not recover.
2010s CE — Social media. Platforms reach most of the connected population. Anyone can publish to anyone, which removes the last filter between a person and an audience. The same removal takes away the checking that the filter had also been doing. Attention becomes the thing being sold, and systems get built to hold it.
2010s CE — Gig and platform work. Work is distributed by application, task by task, to people classified as self-employed rather than as employees. It offers flexible hours and removes the protections that took the whole of the previous century to establish. Courts and legislatures in several countries are still deciding what this work legally is.
2010s CE — Solar power gets cheap. The cost of electricity from solar panels falls by roughly ninety percent over the decade, faster than almost anyone forecast. In many places it becomes the cheapest way to generate electricity. The energy chain that ran from wood to coal to oil now has an option that does not burn anything.
2010s CE — Religion moves in two directions. The share of people reporting a religious affiliation falls in wealthy countries, particularly in Europe and North America. Worldwide the number of religious people rises, because populations grow fastest in the most religious regions. Both statements are true, and quoting either one alone gives a false picture.
2015 CE — The Paris Agreement. Nearly every country agrees targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The targets are set by each country itself and are not enforceable. Whether the agreement is doing enough is one of the most contested questions in current politics, and this page does not settle it.
2020 CE — COVID. A coronavirus pandemic closes borders, schools, and workplaces across most of the world. Vaccines are developed and deployed faster than for any previous disease. Office work moves into homes within weeks, and a large share of it stays there. A change that had been predicted for thirty years happened in one month because there was no alternative.
2022 CE onward — The AI Era. Large language models are released to the public. Software can now produce text, code, and images to a standard that was recently the work of trained people. It is too early to state what this does to employment, to education, or to how knowledge is held, and anyone stating it confidently is guessing. What can be said is set out below.

The states that appeared when the Soviet Union ended

These are the fifteen countries that replaced the Soviet Union in 1991. Each card below opens that country's page on this site.

Russia

Ukraine

Belarus

Moldova

Estonia

Latvia

Lithuania

Georgia

Armenia

Azerbaijan

Kazakhstan

Uzbekistan

Turkmenistan

Kyrgyzstan

Tajikistan

What actually changed, and what did not

For almost all of human history, knowledge was stored inside people. The elders held it, and a young person who wanted it had to go to them. That arrangement gave age its authority, and it lasted because there was no alternative. Every technology on these pages moved a little more of that storage outside the person. Writing moved the accounts. Printing moved the books. Schooling moved the reading. Broadcasting moved the news. The internet moved everything at once, and the smartphone put it in a pocket. A young person today can get a stated fact without asking anyone.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead described this shift before the internet existed. In Culture and Commitment, published in 1970, she set out three arrangements. In the first, children learn from their elders. In the second, people learn from their peers. In the third, adults learn from the young. Mead argued that the third arrangement was already appearing in the 1960s. That date matters, because it means the cause is not the machine. The cause is the speed of change. When the world a young person grows into is not the world the elder learned, the elder's experience stops transferring, and the direction of teaching reverses regardless of what technology exists.

The complaint about this is older still. In Phaedrus, written around 370 BCE and covered on the first page of this section, Plato has an Egyptian king reject the gift of writing, arguing that it will produce forgetting rather than memory because people will trust marks outside themselves. The same argument has been made about printing, about newspapers, about television, about search engines, and now about language models. Being 2,400 years old does not make it wrong. It does mean that anyone making it today is making an old argument and should say so.

What technology did not replace is the part of knowledge that cannot be written down. The scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi set this out in Personal Knowledge in 1958 and The Tacit Dimension in 1966. His finding is that a person knows more than a person can state. A surgeon's hands, a mechanic's ear for an engine, a teacher's sense of when a room has stopped following, a negotiator's timing: none of these can be put into words completely, which means no medium made of words can carry them. They pass only by working beside someone who already has them. This is why apprenticeship still exists in an age when every stated fact is free.

So the honest version of the claim is narrower than the popular one, and it holds. Technology replaced the elder as a store of stateable facts. Technology did not replace the elder as a source of skill that cannot be stated. A young person no longer needs an older person for information. A young person still needs an older person for judgment, and judgment is learned by watching someone exercise it, which is the one transfer method that has not changed since the band of fifty people.

One more correction is worth making, because the claim is usually made too broadly. It is often said that technology has replaced human capacities. That cannot be measured and probably cannot be defined. What can be measured is tasks. Specific tasks that people were paid to do have been taken over by machines, repeatedly, since 1712, and the process is continuing now at a speed and in occupations that are new. Whether the total amount of human work falls has been predicted many times and has not yet happened. It may this time. Nobody currently knows, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.