May 12, 2026 May 12, 2026 2026-05-12

In late 2018 I wrote that the next revolution would be technological, not ideological. The argument was that the far-right authoritarian wave sweeping Europe and the Americas wasn’t really ideological at its core — it was a symptom of technology adoption gaps. People who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change were turning toward paternal, protective regimes because that felt safer than navigating a world they didn’t understand. The deeper force reshaping society wasn’t nationalism or populism. It was the speed of technology, and who was being left behind by it.

Eight years have passed. AI has gone from research curiosity to daily infrastructure. Bitcoin has had several complete life cycles. The authoritarian wave I observed in 2018 is still cresting. Time to check my work.

What I Got Right

The adoption gap thesis held up. If anything, it’s more true now than it was in 2018. The gap between people who can use AI tools effectively and people who can’t is already reshaping economic outcomes, and it widened faster than almost anyone predicted. The cognitive pressure the 2018 post described — the overwhelming effort to understand, let alone use, technologies that didn’t exist five years ago — is now felt across professions that thought they were insulated. Lawyers. Doctors. Journalists. Software engineers.

The political response has also followed the pattern. Societies struggling to adapt have leaned harder into familiar symbols and strongman figures. The countries I named in 2018 — Hungary, Romania, Brazil — have continued in the direction they were heading. New ones have joined the list. The mechanism the post described still seems correct: when people feel they can’t control what’s happening, they look for someone who claims they can.

What I Got Wrong

The implicit assumption underneath the 2018 post was that technology would be a decentralizing force — that it would naturally erode the concentrated power of authoritarian regimes by distributing capabilities to individuals. That was too optimistic, and it was wrong in an important direction.

Authoritarian governments adopt technology too. Often faster, because they have fewer ethical constraints on deployment. China’s surveillance infrastructure — facial recognition at scale, social scoring, AI-assisted content filtering — is itself a product of advanced technology. AI didn’t weaken that system. It made it significantly more capable. The 2018 post assumed the technology would flow toward freedom. The actual distribution has been more ambiguous: it flows toward whoever moves fastest, regardless of their values.

The Bitcoin Question

In 2018 I cited Bitcoin as evidence of the decentralizing force of technology — a system that could restructure power without requiring permission from existing power structures. What actually happened since then is complicated.

Bitcoin survived. It went through a full boom-bust-recovery cycle, reached institutional adoption with ETF approvals, and is now taken seriously by financial infrastructure that dismissed it completely in 2018. The survival itself is evidence for the thesis — it’s genuinely hard to kill a decentralized system. But governments moved in parallel: Central Bank Digital Currencies appeared, crypto regulation tightened in the US and EU, China banned it outright. The “technology restructures power” story didn’t produce the clean decentralization I imagined. It produced a contested space where both sides — states and individuals — gained capabilities simultaneously.

The Pace Problem

The 2018 post said the pace of technological change was insane. That was written before GPT-3, before the pandemic, before generative AI became a household topic. The pace since then has made 2018 look slow.

No political ideology has a coherent response to what AI is doing right now. The EU produced the AI Act. The US produced executive orders. Neither is keeping pace with the rate of deployment. This is the condition the original post was pointing at — ideology lags technology — and it’s now visible in real time rather than as a prediction. The gap between what’s technically possible and what our political frameworks can handle has never been wider in my lifetime.

Whether that’s a good problem or a bad problem depends on who gets to fill the gap. Right now the answer is: mostly the people who build the technology and the governments willing to deploy it without asking too many questions first.

What I’d Revise

The core thesis stands: the primary force reshaping society is technological, not ideological. Ideology is the language people use to make sense of disruptions they can’t fully understand. That still seems right.

What I’d revise is the direction I assumed that force would take. In 2018 I was implicitly rooting for decentralization — the individual against the institution, the open network against the closed state. Eight years later I’d say the technology is neutral about that contest. It amplifies whoever uses it best. Right now that includes authoritarian states, large corporations, and a relatively small number of technically fluent individuals.

The revolution is still technological. I just wouldn’t assume anymore that it’s pointing anywhere in particular. Freedom or lack of it, that’s fluid now, and no one knows where it’s really heading.