LONDON — Conventional wisdom has it that the future is impossible to predict, or at least to predict with any accuracy.
Yet if ever there was an event that could be, and was, predicted with deadly precision, it was the violent and ugly protest at the recent G8 meeting held in the barricaded and steel-fenced city of Genoa. And if ever there was a dead certainty in the months and years ahead, it is that there will be much more such protest as the new sources of power in the information age collide and struggle.
Why is it possible to be so certain about this? Because the communications revolution has done for governments and the traditional apparatus of the state what the printing press did in Europe for the power of the monasteries and dominance of the clerisy. It has drained power away from the established hierarchies and rendered conventional forms of central authority largely impotent in the face of the world's new needs and complexities.