As always, the major geopolitical change of our time has a negligible presence in public discourse
Bibi and Trump will be recorded in history as two anecdotes for historical trivia enthusiasts. In contrast, two other contemporary leaders will be remembered for generations
What will be considered in retrospect as the important geopolitical change of our time? Will it be migration from the third world, or perhaps the rise of populism, or maybe the disintegration of the Union, terrorism, or rather global warming? Sometimes, due to hollow media noise, we don't hear the heavy footsteps of history, and we can't see the forest for the trees. It's possible that future generations will wonder about the blindness that afflicted people at the beginning of the 21st century who didn't learn any lesson from the processes of the early 20th century: how did half a century of relative peace suffice for them to forget the most basic historical lesson taught by modern times?
One can imagine future historians engaging in heated debates and struggling to explain why so little Western resistance and public awareness was drawn to two enormous and visible processes, albeit slow and gradual, that should have sounded a true alarm and put the international community on its hind legs to exert tremendous pressure to prevent them. Researchers who will find it difficult to believe in Western inaction may once again have to resort to the weapon of banality to justify how little was done to oppose and restrain two processes - which are one - that shaped the continuation of the 21st century more than any other development. This enormous two-headed process can be described simply as the transformation of the two largest and strongest superpowers in the world besides the United States - China and Russia - into dictatorships.
The new dictatorships are being formed before our eyes in a rather similar way, and with almost complete indifference from the West, as in both a strong and forceful leader, more powerful than his predecessors,
changes the constitution and
grants himself unlimited rule in time, takes firm control of media discourse, establishes an effective censorship apparatus, imposes a personality cult, and finally deepens his powers and accumulates power without limitation. This is a classic process of creating a dictatorship, but dictatorship in the 21st century will be fundamentally different in its control power and surveillance capabilities from the dictatorships of the 20th century - thanks to technology. The fascist type of dictatorship, which arose following mass communication technology, will be replaced by a new type of dictatorship - a dictatorship of the information age. But due to the global nature of the information age, such a regime will have a significant impact on the freedom of every person in the world, not just its subjects. Google and Facebook are not the greatest threat to human freedom and personal privacy - but Xi and Putin are.
Despite the bloody historical lesson left by the dictatorships of the 20th century, which could also have been stopped at their beginning relatively easily compared to the final price, the process is taking place without any threat of Western sanctions aimed at making it illegitimate, let alone exacting an economic and diplomatic price, and not even raising a cry from the West that would encourage internal protest and restraints while they still exist. As if it were an internal matter of the superpowers that would have no global impact on the future of every person in the world in the rest of the century.
The silence and paralysis afflicting the West stem from a lack of understanding of the fateful significance of the intersection of two phenomena: one as old as history itself - the aspiration of ruthless and conscienceless psychopaths (as a percentage of the male population) for absolute power, and the other new - the ability to realize this aspiration through cold, technological means, which are more resilient than any human social order. This is in contrast to the hot dictatorships of fascism and communism, which needed a sweeping ideology and the inflaming of the masses for their establishment. What will the new dictatorship enable? Continuous surveillance of every person in the world, including in the Western world, and turning them into subjects of blackmail, annihilation of their privacy, or simply subject to manipulations engineered for them by algorithms more effective than any human manipulator in history.
Is it possible that the Emperor and the Tsar will succeed in creating such deterrence that in the future, Western public figures and corporations will fear action or expression against any interest of the two super-dictatorships? All the technologies we use are reasonably protected from hacking by individuals or even criminal organizations, but they have no reasonable ability to defend against state intelligence. Can I write such an article without fear that Russian intelligence, as a matter of routine, will film me naked via smartphone and anonymously distribute the video, or just send defamatory information about me to my friends? Today, yes. In the future, maybe not. Will it always be possible to write freely about forceful Xi as the greatest danger to world freedom without risking, for example, a breach of genetic data of opponents and engineering a virus that will eliminate them personally without a trace? Today, yes. In the future, the very existence of such capability in the hands of a tyrant that will be exercised from time to time will limit any critical statement and cause every person in the world to have concerns. Global surveillance and suppression of freedom of expression and ideas can create a paranoid atmosphere we have never known in the entire global village. And maybe it's foolish of me to publish such an article - especially in a scenario where it comes true.