It All Started In 2007

Thomas Friedman: “Steve Jobs and Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, starting the smartphone revolution that is now putting an internet-connected computer in the palm of everyone on the planet. In late 2006, Facebook, which had been confined to universities and high schools, opened itself to anyone with an email address and exploded globally. Twitter was created in 2006, but took off in 2007… 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.”