Politics, not tech, makes the world go round

The future, much like the recent past, will be shaped in the public realm.

- Janan Ganesh

A person born on the day that Apple released the first iPhone can now vote. After 18 years, we might expect the newest version - which came out last month - to be unrecognisable from the original. Whatever the cumulative improvements, it isn't. But then, a car made that year wouldn't seem out of place on today's roads either.

Also, look at images of Nicolas Sarkozy's election as president of France and then images of his ride to prison this week. Aside from the greying of the man himself, can you tell the two eras apart? Not as quickly, I wager, as you could distinguish 1989 from 2007, which is the equivalent jump in time.

Now, let us run that comparison again, but this time track political rather than technological change.

When the iPhone debuted, there was relative peace in the world, a strong centre ground in almost all Western democracies, an entwined US and China, and a pro-trade consensus. Now, there is a European land war of primordial viciousness, the hard right is in or near national office across the West, US-China relations veer from tense to hostile and David Ricardo is in the dog house.

Public life, not private innovation, has supplied the drama of our times. You wouldn't always know it from the "discourse".

Perhaps I have attended an excessive number of conferences and dinners this year but I sense that people - even, or especially, clever people - are starting to think too much about tech and too little about politics.