Excellent article by Tom Friedman about 2007, the year that witnessed the causes of what happened in 2016 (those who read his 1999-ish "The Olive Tree and the Lexus" will recognize his brilliant grasp of recent history). Excerpt:

In time, 2007 may be seen as one of the greatest technological inflection points in history. And we completely missed it.


Why? 2008.


Yes, right when our physical technologies leapt ahead, many of what the Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker calls our “social technologies” — all of the rules, regulations, institutions and social tools people needed to get the most out of this technological acceleration and cushion the worst — froze or lagged. In the best of times social technologies have a hard time keeping up with physical technologies, but with the Great Recession of 2008 and the political paralysis it engendered, this gap turned into a chasm. A lot of people got dislocated in the process.


How could they not? What happened around 2007 was that connectivity and computing got so fast, cheap, ubiquitous and leveraged that they changed three forms of power — in really differentiated ways — all at once: the power of one, the power of machines and the power of ideas.

One of the examples he gives:

I recently met with economic and climate refugees in West Africa who made it clear to me they didn’t want aid from a rock concert in Europe. They want to come to the Europe they see on their cellphones — and they are using WhatsApp to organize vast illicit migration networks to get there.