 Now, the long decade ends with the renunciation of papal authority and Roman Catholicism in 1534 by three North European countries, England, Denmark and Sweden. Now most contemporaries regarded all three of them as second tier in the great power hierarchy of the time although doubtless Henry VIII blind self belief had already engendered tales of English exceptionalism. But whatever league those three countries were in, never before had recognized and broadly coherent states wedded themselves to heresy. This was the first time that religious dissenters had access to real structures of political power. And along with those three northern states, there was another group of political dissenters. That was the princes, dukes and counts whose territories elected the Holy Roman Emperor, the secular guarantor of papal supremacy. Princes, dukes and counts who lived in what is now Germany, but was once the naughtiest part of the messy tangle of peculiar entities known as the Holy Roman Empire. But none of this does justice to the story of the long decade, those 17 years marked the beginning of the ascent of Europe at a moment when Christendom had actually never been closer to extinction. This was highlighted most dramatically by two events that took place in 1521 within just a few days of each other. One represented Europe superiority in the exercise of raw power. The other, it's inferiority in the exercise of raw power. So first on August the 13 1521, after three months of siege, and then Cortez captured tenosh titlan and brought the Aztec Empire to a close, six and a half thousand miles away, another siege had begun. The Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, along with an estimated 30,000 soldiers was encamped in Zemun to the west of Belgrade, the most southerly fortress of the Hungarian kingdom but people largely of course by Serbs. Suleiman's forces besieged the white city as Belgrade was known and duly conquered it on August the 28th. So that is just two weeks apart that we see the collapse of the Aztec Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent's victory in Belgrade. Cortez's victory was a turning point in the extraction of minimal mineral and vegetable resources from Central and South America, which would flood Spain, Portugal and by extension other European countries in unprecedented wealth over the next two centuries. There was also the starting gun for a race to compete for global commodities among European nations that would last almost five centuries, and would also systematize genocide and plunder as never before. But all that was still to come. People had certainly fantasized about what the Americas held, but the gold, the silver, the Brazilward sugar, rubber and everything else had not yet arrived in significant quantities by 1521. Now this future bonanza certainly hadn't entered into Suleiman the Magnificent's calculations. The Ottomans believe they were knocking at a European door made rotten by ill discipline and moral corruption, which to be fair is more or less what Luther was saying as well. After their success in Belgrade, the Ottoman forces were not minded to finish their campaign. There was a quick diversion south to mop up the strategic island bastion of roads, and then on to Mohatch in 1526, where they crushed the forces of the sickening kingdom of Hungary, leaving the path to Budapest wide open. Now, if ever you have the occasion, the opportunity to drink beer with Hungarians, you will notice they refuse to clink glasses when saying Ege Sigebre or cheers your health. They ascribe the defeat at Mohatch to their Magyar warriors getting blind drunk the night before that particular battle, and all two credible scenario, my experiences in Hungary are anything to go by. The Ottoman perceptions of the decadence of their Western opponents were confirmed a year later. In 1527, the two greats temporal and spiritual defenders of Christendom came to blows when the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and forced the pope to flee. For the emerging doctrine of Lutheranism in the north, this was powerful evidence of God's displeasure at the status quo. The Ottomans certainly believed that Christendom was close to its final decline. From Budapest, their terrifying army accompanied by the ominous nasal half tones of the woodwind Zorna and the cursed drums beat its relentless path towards Vienna, one of the two imperial seats of the Habsburg Emperor Charles. With the city all but surrounded, these events rather took the shine off the successes which Charles s other great territory, Spain, had been notching up in the previous 30 years, culminating in the final defeat of Moorish power in the controversially named Reconquista. Having ebbed in Granada, the tidal wave of Islam was now making its way up the Danube towards Vienna. Now, aside from his disputes with France and its allies, a whole other story which we don't have time to go into here, Charles was also facing huge turmoil in the very heart of his Holy Roman Empire, the German principalities and city states. The conclusion which the Church and Charles drew from the Ottoman advance was that if Christendom were to survive, it needed to concentrate its energies on the threat from the east, the Islamic threat, and project the same unity of purpose amongst Christians which made the Church look so threatening. And in order to do that, and to further his own domestic ambitions, Charles was convinced that the heresy of Lutheranism must be eradicated. Why wouldn't he succeed? After all, heresies had emerged regularly over the previous 300 years, occasionally aspiring to and assuming the functions of state. That had certainly been the case with the great predecessor of Lutheranism, the Hussite rebellion and subsequent wars which stretched across two decades at the beginning of the 15th century. Now, Jan Huss was burnt at the stake after being pronounced guilty of heresy at the Council of Constance in 1415. But far from carrying his huge following of dissenters in his native Bohemia and Moravia, it fired them up to take arms and mount a stupendous challenge to both papal authority and Habsburg power. The Hussite movement, which began as religious dissent, was pregnant with modernity and even nationalism. Jan Huss's support for the reform and use of vernacular Czech gave the movement a distinct national character. And this was certainly built upon by the great military leader who led the Bohemian forces after Huss's death, Jan Žiška, who was immortalized in the Prague district of Žiškov. But the revolt failed to spring the boundaries of Bohemia and Moravia. The Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and their allies knew that failure to crush heresy was not just a doctrinal imperative, it was a political one too. So a century later, Suleiman's assault on Vienna in 1529 helped Charles V conclude that Lutheranism needed to be nipped in the bud before it assumed a military capability as Huss's teachings had done. Now this was not the last time the Ottoman Empire would place Vienna, the Habsburgs Eastern capital under siege, but this was their best shot. Were it not for truly atrocious weather conditions, the Ottomans may well have conquered Vienna in 1529. More clement weather and Europe, not to mention its demographics, would probably look very, very different today. But as it turned out, this siege was the last serious challenge to Christendom coming from the east, right at the very moment when Europe appeared close to collapse as Christians turned in on themselves in doctrinal mayhem. During the next 120 years, those internal religious divisions in Europe, which solidified once Protestantism succeeded in marrying the state in northern Europe resulted in an immense accretion of European power that would in a broad sense determine the course of global history over the next 500 years. So the question is, why did this all happen in the long 1520s. Why did Lutheranism succeed where Hussite endeavors had failed. Why did the outwardly stagnant economy of Europe started its transformation into the engine of global dominance. Why were the Turks never able to offer an existential threat to Europe again. Well, a large part of the answer to all three questions lies in developments in technology that had taken place in 80 years, the 80 years prior to Luther's publication of his theses in 1517. Gutenberg and friends invented the printing press around 1440, just half a decade after the Hussite wars had wound down. But in the next 60 years after this invention books went berserk. By the end of the 15th century some 35,000 editions amounting to 15 to 20 million copies that the very lowest estimate was circulating around Europe. These figures were dwarfed in the first 50 years of the 16th century. Until the printing press, the church was able to exert extensive control over the content and distribution of books, compellingly described in Umberto Echo's masterpiece, The Name of the Rose. By the time Luther's printing press friends were churning out translations of the theses and his other works in Latin and German, a book could become a bestseller across Europe within two months. Erasmus had already sent a copy of the theses and Luther's other writings to Thomas Moore, some three months after the German had attached them to the church door. Distribution of information at a speed hitherto unknown. Germany was also central to the second great technological breakthrough, the matchlock archibus first fired in anger in Europe in 1475. All along being distributed around the towns and cities of the continent with the same happy abandon you might experience today at an exhibition of rapid fire weapons held by the National Rifle Association in the US. Erasmus and printing presses were partly concentrated in central and southern Germany, because of the rich iron ore deposits in the region. Indeed, before he became a monk, Luther was an inspector of minds. Who knew. And finally, the Portuguese and then the Spanish adapted the sale technology of their Mediterranean neighbors, so that the Caravelle no longer had to hug the shore when on trading or exploration missions. Now, cross the oceans and cross the Atlantic. So, there we have it accelerated information exchange portable firearms and vast natural resources from the Americas, set Europe on an extraordinary path to modernity, in which the struggle between the old and the new. Protestant and the Catholic, the north and the south would alternately trigger remarkable cultural and economic progress and pre apocalyptic bouts of violence. Among the startling events which characterized the wars of religion during the 16th and 17th century, one occupies a special place. The defenestration of Prague in May 1618. The Czech estates rebelled when the Habsburgs rescinded their right granted nine years earlier to choose their religion. The country after Luther had nailed his theses to the door, and two centuries after the first and defenestration of Prague, by no means the last, a key moment in the Hussite rebellion members of the Czech estates hold the king's representatives out of a window in Prague castle. The fall was broken when they landed on a huge pile of shit, an appropriate metaphor for everything that was about to happen, because this event triggered the 30 years war, detonating a series of conflicts, which came to be known collectively by that name. At the time it had ended with the series of agreements collected together as the Treaty of West failure in 1648. The central locus of economic and political power had largely completed its migration from the south to the north. Now concentrated on the Netherlands and Sweden with England quickly moving quickly up on the rails. And the continent was now divided into three zones of Christian influence, orthodox to the east, Catholic to the south, and Protestant to the north, with the north side divide, running through a still highly fractured and deeply traumatized Germany, which had lost over 50% of its population to the war that West failure brought to an end. Now, it may have been an episode which the rest of Europe was quick to forget, but to the continents later regret, the Germans certainly did not. Sure, religious divisions and conflict continued after the 30 years war, but West failure confirmed the triumph of the interests of absolutist and republican states over the concerns of religious hierarchy. The modern had finally triumph over the late Middle Ages, but it had taken 130 years and cataclysmic violence to do it. The model of fundamental technological breakthroughs, followed by astonishing social and economic advances in parallel with unimaginable violence and destruction was repeated from the second half of the 18th century, right up until 1945. It is in this period in the second great thrust of modernity, when nationalism breaks through in the 19th century, that human longevity suddenly shoots upwards in 1870, as late as 1870, the mean life expectancy around the world was 32 years old. In the region with the longest average lifespan Europe, it was still under 40 years old. Now these figures had been broadly consistent for several centuries, but just 100 years later in 1970, the figure for Europe, the Americas and Asia was over 70 years old. It was challenged region Africa, it was already over 50. On the downside of course the scientific leaps begun in the late 18th century, also ushered in the era of industrial practices in the perpetration of genocide. And in 1945, just two explosive devices had killed somewhere in the region of 200,000 souls in Japan. Now these are figures that the commanders in the 30 years war could only go pat. And this points to a fundamental difference between the first great rush of modernity from 1492 1648, and the second great rush from 1760s to 1945. And that difference is scale. So before I consider the issue of scale, let me return to some of its origins briefly, the late 14th century early 15th century. Now the one place I didn't mention in my survey of the long 1520s was perhaps the most important Italy, home of the Renaissance from which so much of modernity arose. And I wish here to talk about a specific type of scale, human scale. The concept of human scale relates to the archetype of a life in full, the individual as a whole that combines self realization with a community of relationships. The idea of relationship and proportion has a fine pedigree in the March of civilization. According to the Gospel of John of course in the beginning was the word significantly the word or logos from Greek also means ratio. The web of relationships of both quantity and quality. As the classic scholar HDF Kitto observe the Greeks notably Plato and Aristotle had quote, a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the very first time, what the human mind was. The Renaissance humanism revised this revived this classical ideal of a life, lived to its highest purpose and potential. The archetypal image of the Renaissance man, and of human scale is the Vinci's rendition of Vitruvian man. The full title of Da Vinci's Vitruvian man is scheme of the proportions of the human body, according to Vitruvius. The drawing addresses a conundrum posed by the Roman architect Vitruvius regarding how one might square a circle using the human body as a guideline. In Vitruvius, Leonardo was fascinated by how closely humans fashion their environment, consciously and unconsciously, according to the dictates of human scale. The Renaissance as it merged emerged out of scholastic humanism shook the central ideological support of the Catholic Church to its foundations. Perhaps the most important philosophical model to which much of the church clung was the great chain of being, the idea that humans stood in the very middle of this immutable hierarchy between God on high and base minerals on low. But those three technical technological shifts that I meant mentioned earlier in printing sale technology and weapons left God's omnipotence looking much less certain. Humans now questioned whether that order was quite so stable and whether indeed God had not furnished us with the tools needed to climb the hierarchy. This enabled thinkers to break free of the straight jacket of the church's monopoly on intellectual inquiry, especially where in parts of Italy Germany Scandinavia and England, local politics allowed, or even encouraged it. The Renaissance served as the foundation for the age of reason and what came to be known as enlightenment values, perhaps the most elegant elaboration of this humanist ideal is found in Kant's concept of individual autonomy and its moral corollary in the categorical imperative. Kant put a sophisticated modern gloss on the ancient golden rule of reciprocity and mutuality, or doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves. The categorical imperative requires us to universalize rules of contact, conduct, I beg your pardon, and to treat others as ends and never only as means. So, the, despite all this talk about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, let me be clear, there has never been a golden age there is no Halcyon time of wholeness to which we can return as individuals, or a society, yet the archetype of three dimensional wholeness inspired by the Renaissance, and especially as conceived by Da Vinci, still calls out to us. So let me address the recent past and present within this context. 1989, the fall of communism, which I reported on as the, the BBC Central Europe correspondent was the greatest rupture in global politics, since the end of the Second World War, every bit as significant as Luther's theses, or the French Revolution. The regime after regime crumbled and with it the iron curtain few if anyone doubt now doubted the superiority of the Western model to deliver prosperity, an unparalled technological advance. The West had won the Cold War. The West was understandably claiming a decisive ideological victory embodied in the title of Francis Fukuyama's famous essay, then elaborated into a book, the end of history. The events from the revolutions of 1989 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 appeared as the day new month to a drama of conflict, which indeed had its origins in reformation Europe. The recent manifestation of those conflicts the ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism was fast withering as 1989 promised a new epoch. Fukuyama's belief that liberal democracy could not be improved upon and represented the end of the great Hegelian dialectical struggle seemed to be indicated. And around the world previously iron clad dictatorships on both sides of the Cold War divide were discarding their armor to reveal softer, more colorful clothing. If they did not hold multi party elections, although many former dictatorships and on the authoritarian states did reforming states adopted some of the central tenets of the so called Washington consensus, an agreement hammered out between the Western governments and financial institutions, which have firmed the belief in the spread of interoperable financial and trade markets, which have become, which have come to be known as globalization. This idea even found favor among the tigers Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, even Ireland, China, India and Brazil were reimagining them, reimagining themselves as emerging markets, ready to embrace the outside world after decades of introversion, if not complete hibernation. These countries had long viewed Western markets with suspicion. The relaxation of barriers to external investment with the first signs of a profound shift in the way the world economy operated. So tempting was the prospect of integration that the ruling white minority in South Africa decided it was worth giving up all their political privilege to join in. They committed a small minority of black South Africans to share in their economic privilege, cheap but the price. Those countries who declined to partake of the feast like Cuba, North Korea or Turkmenistan were regarded as quaint anachronisms, so small as to be dispensable, even though they did have a certain contribution to make as adventurous tourist destinations. So you went against the grain such as Yugoslavia where a ferocious civil war broke out soon after the collapse of communism was slow learners who doubtless would quickly adjust to the new possibilities of post enlightenment prosperity and stability. The ecstasy was intense. It was a time of great hope. It was also short lived to we all took part in street parties. We all embraced the new touchy feely world of the people's princess cool Britannia celebrating with Clinton and Blair how the West had won from now on, from now on, the whole world could be friends together. In this facade, however, the financial capitalism, which had fundamentally changed the post Second World War compact when thatcher and Reagan introduced it in the 1980s was roaring ahead quietly in the background. Anything went during the decade of delusion as I call the 1990s. President Reagan presidents Reagan and Bush senior had condemned the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989, but no sooner had Eastern Europe's communist regime started to crumble. Americans led by a crusading bank Goldman Sachs and encouraged by China hit on the great idea to turn China into the manufacturing heartland of the United States. But less than two decades before the financial system crashed in 2008, triggering the worst economic trauma since black Thursday the Wall Street crash of 1929, whose impact acted as redoubtable handmade into the rise of Hitler and its attendant calamities. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Obama and their colleagues in Europe and in Asia, Asia succeeded in applying some emergency sticking plasters onto the world economy. Less than eight years after the crash, malign autocracies were incubating in several parts of the world, nourished by the distress and inequality that the folly of the banks had served to emphasize, not to mention the subsequent policies of austerity, which threw us further down the abyss. The decade which preceded both the first and the second World Wars, the alarm's of nationalists and conspiracy theories soaked in emotive appeals began to drown out more rational voices, many of whom had in fact been discredited by their role in the decade of delusion. As in 1517 and 1789, a profoundly significant technological development had preceded the drama of 1989. And I take you back to an event that I covered in March 1986 I was reporting from the 27th Soviet Party Congress, but of all things new scientist magazine. I had a wonderful relationship with new scientists. They knew nothing about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and I knew science and knew nothing about science, and we got along absolutely famously as a consequence. But this was really interesting, because at this Congress Michael, Michelle Gorbachev had already launched his new policies of perestroika reform and glass nost transparency. An extraordinary event, Gorbachev and his Prime Minister, Nikolai Ruzkov, made it clear that the Communist Party, most urgently needed to inject some perestroika and glass nos into science, and in particular, computer technology and robotics for industrial and military applications. That's really all the theme of this party Congress was science and technology. And why was that, because by this time, the United States already boasted 1.3 million mainframes and mini computers. The Soviets, by contrast, had just 10,000 to their name. Put simply, the Soviets could not maintain parity in technological capacity and innovation, something incidentally that the Chinese were watching extremely closely at the time, and they adjusted their research their deployment models accordingly. Now, especially when combined with a rigid regime of censorship, a status model like the Soviet one was incapable of maintaining parity in an industry in which research was driven, not only by the immediate requirements of the military, but equally by the voracious desire of consumers, which is what was happening in the United States. In consequence, the Soviet Union's lag in military and industrial capability was already visible and unbridgeable. Oil extraction in the Soviet Union was triplingly expensive, because it relied on obsolete equipment. Without Western technology, Siberian oil could not compete on price with that coming out of the Middle East. The video had already started cutting back subsidies, subsidized supplies of oil to its Warsaw Pact allies, who were having to pay for the shortfall at world prices and that was something they could ill afford to do and so they started racking up huge amounts of debt in dollars, which they couldn't pay back. And that debt led directly to the revolutions, particularly in Poland and Hungary. And to underline just how serious the situation in the Soviet Union was, a month after the 27th Party Congress, a safety test at a plant just south of the Pripyat marches triggered an uncontrolled nuclear reaction and Chernobyl's reactor four exploded. Soviet socialism was reaching the end as a system that could compete with the West. If mountains of external debt killed communism in Poland and Hungary, technology killed the Soviet Union. The balance of computer technology since the 1980s, not only hastened the end of the Soviet Empire. It has ruled changes, unlike any other technological innovation in history, because it has insinuated itself, and often created total dependency in almost every aspect of human social and economic interaction. But during the 1990s, the decade of delusion, few people were willing or interested in questioning the unquestioning embrace of this technology. But that delusion came to an end in 2008. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, it took a full 14 months before Austria's Kreditan Stalt became the first major casualty of the shenanigans on Wall Street. That's 14 months. In 2008, it was just four days before almost every major bank around the world was staring into the abyss of global economic meltdown and collapse. Technology was critical both to the intrinsic financial crisis and the speed with which it spread from New York across the world. And part of that crash, well of course it was the credit default swaps and collateral mortgage obligations, the subprime securitization vehicles that had enabled banks to leverage debt way beyond their ability to repay it. These vehicles were managed by algorithms. There was not a single financial institution around the world that had the least oversight into exactly how much debt they were carrying. They were unable to tame the monster once unleashed and money just started flowing automatically out of banks across the world without anyone even having to press a button. Now on this occasion, government intervention often improvised narrowly saved us from economic and social Armageddon we were literally hours away from a complete breakdown of human society. So as we sought to emulate God with our new technological toys, we suddenly found ourselves loitering outside the gates of hell disoriented and frightened. We were rapidly losing our relationship to proportion and human scale. A central challenge at the current jucture of the human journey is that many of the technologies rightly credited for our material progress are also based on disintegration and reduction of the individual, making us down into data sets of DNA revealed preferences in digital search histories biometrics, financial data, etc. The quest for utility efficiency and convenience at global scale necessarily reduces us to data points trillion dollar industries are committed to this proposition. The nature of the individual, literally a being that cannot or should not be divided is one of integration and wholeness, yet it is the subject of ferocious division and subdivision in the name of progress, the market and security, the state. In a sense, modernity constantly puts our integrity in jeopardy. As individuals, we should not be divided, but we also need to be connected beyond ourselves we need relationships to find meaning and to thrive. What ultimately changes people's lives are relationships as sentient beings we need associative relationships to thrive in families as friends as citizens and co workers, we need the right scale to live as humans in full. We didn't know that before, we have obviously learned to understand that during the pandemic. Technology allows us to adapt and extend ourselves beyond the constraints of body and place communications technology stretches the realm of our senses globally. And this elasticity has been central to our progress, yet the question remains, how far beyond the inherent limitations of being human, can we meaningfully extend without losing touch with who we are. I don't think is fixed and it may vary across individual societies and time. However, it does not follow that there are no limits. But in the past 30 years, technological advances and changes to the way we live have taken place at a speed never before experienced in human history. Our world has never been more connected and yet we face an epidemic of loneliness, alienation and stress related illnesses are cluttered frenetic, frenetic upgraded lives, feel increasingly out of control. Our machines are supposed to work for us, but often working for our machines. The technological triumphs have created new challenges pushing some fundamental things out of joint, particularly in the less tangible realms of, of culture, character and spirit. Finding our balance and keeping our sanity will become ever more difficult as our lives become bigger. The technological changes full of consequences intended and unintended, expected and unexpected, good and bad, invidious and insidious to which humans must adapt, reflecting on the course of the 20th century. The Russian poet Pasternak wrote somewhat ominously of the consequences of consequences. The insight has propelled us all to ask some fundamental questions about how we will adapt ourselves and our lifestyles to the effects of our radical new setting, a world defined by promising and powerful technologies nuclear, genomic and digital that are capable of disaggregating disintegrating, and also reintegrating or remaking many aspects of the world, as we know it. And just at this moment, we face four crises, which I call the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse, each capable of extinguishing our species, not to mention most others. Top of the list is the climate crisis. Second, our weapons of mass destruction. Third, well we're all well acquainted with that one pandemics. And the final one is precisely our over dependency on networked computer systems and artificial intelligence. The deepest misfortune is that these threats coincide with a crisis in politics that has helped some of the most venal incompetent and malevolent characters to ascend the most powerful positions in the world. Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin and she are not the cause of our problems they are a symptom, which indicates just how deeply those problems run. We're still processing the depth and rapidity of changes that we are continuing to witness in our lifetimes. In the 1520s in the 1530s, Europe saw a proliferation of individuals and groups who were predicting the end of the world. They based those predictions on superstitions and misreadings of religious texts. And placing us by contrast, our evidence based. It. It took 120 years after 1517 and 1789 for a technology driven changing of the imperial guard to reach peak violence. The nature of the technological shifts, which were an important underlying cause of the events of 1989 are by their very nature accelerating history. And if we are to meet the profound challenges we face, then we have to make sure that we remain in control of technology, and that technology does not assume control over us. This is the core issue affecting governance over the next 20 years of both democracies and autocracies. Thank you very much. Welcome back, Misha. I have a number of questions from our audience here. There's a few themes that come through. And one of them obviously you mentioned capitalism one, the West one. And will Nelson is asking, would you characterize capitalism itself as a main driver of your four horsemen of the modern apocalypse. And Cameron Shepard related note suggests that capitalism may be responsible for at least three of them. Is there an alternative or can capitalism be controlled. Well, I, very interesting, obviously, I'm interested to know which one that capitalism is not responsible for, although I suspect it is for the pandemics. I would say that the acceleration of global pandemics that we've seen really since the 1980s, starting with HIV is a consequence of declining habitat for animals. And so deforestation is absolutely huge in the, in the emergence of pandemics, and also of course globalization itself, which is essentially a sort of you know capitalist mechanism a stage of capitalism. However, before I go too hard on capitalism I think it's worth pointing out that there are different variants of packet but capitalism rather like there are different variants of COVID-19. The, the big break comes in the late 70s and early 80s with the introduction of this, the reforms and the regulatory bonfire of that tourism and Reagan of Reaganism. And if you look at the relationship between capital and workers in the United States in particular from the 1940s to the late 1970s. There is a real equilibrium and a real balancing of interests of the managerial the capitalist and the working classes. This all becomes disrupted during the 1970s, and Reagan is persuaded primarily by Milton Friedman by other people to go for a strategy which was sold to the American people and the rest of the world as a way of empowering small people. But in fact it was not empowering it was disempowering small people, and this I believe is where the damage that we experienced in in the first decade of this millennium had its major had its major roots. And I would say that the capitalism that existed prior to that was much more benign that the, that the decision and they were conscious decisions to introduce Kenzianism and the welfare state after the Second World War. I mean, the beverage reforms were in the United Kingdom were actually being worked out in the relatively early stages of the Second World War because even Churchill understood that there was going to be a huge backlash. So capitalism itself is not necessarily destructive but it has to be a cat a capitalism that is constrained by human requirements and is not given that where capital does not have the unfettered access to power structures that it has at the moment. But it clearly is a major driver of a lot of the problems we're dealing with. Okay, thank you. And Tony asks, this is from the other side of it, you know, the whole world is maybe not all the capitalists yet. So the challenges that we face need long term stable planning, or given that they need stable planning, are the democracies at a disadvantage, compared to regimes such as China, for example, where there is a command economy or there is at least central planning. Well, the, I think China was doing something very interesting until Xi Jinping started consolidating his power. Now he's returning to, he's returning China to fairly extreme authoritarian model. I think that will damage China, I think it will damage China because it won't have the flexibility to react to the challenges it's facing. One of the reasons why I mentioned the Soviet, the 27th Party Congress in the Soviet Union is is that if you are going to be flexible about dealing with major challenges, you have to allow people to discuss them openly. And freely. And if you shut down intellectual debate, the critical discourse, as Xi Jinping is doing, then yes with an economy the size of China, and with its shift to consumer manufacturing base. Yes, you can of course guarantee a degree of prosperity for your population and an expanding influence across the world, but you cannot guarantee that you're going to do the right thing, because you will not broke criticism. And, you know, one of the, one of the interesting things about what's happened in the West is, is that we have failed how to integrate, we have, we have lost the ability to integrate criticism, the way that we used to have. So, which is part of the process of polarization, which we've all been experiencing, primarily since 2008 but in extremis since 2015 2016 so that not only to the Chinese lack the ability to maintain a domestic critical discourse. But we have lost it as well and this is why I highlight the damage of the coincidence of the accelerating threats with weak divisive political leadership Xi Jinping is strong as a strong man, but he is weak in terms of what Chinese real strategic interests are going to be. Okay, and in terms of staying on that side of the world where we have an author or also perhaps a very powerful politicians who aren't prepared to tolerate criticism. Does this mean that there's no chance of people power in Ukraine and Russia, or do you see change likely in in these areas. It varies from country to country. Putin is under very serious pressure at the moment. Not just because of Navalny, but because he presides over a group of malcontents who are his power base, but they're in different parts of the economy and the administration, and they fight amongst themselves all the time underneath the surface but it can sometimes get quite nasty. And this he is trying to manage in an economy, which is tiny relative to his competitors. So it's a 10th of the size of the American economy. It's even just half the size of, you know, post Brexit the Draggle Britain. And the only reason why Putin can sustain his great power status which he does and he does with great skill in the short term in the tactical sense is because of the thousands of nuclear warheads, which Russia has retained from the Cold War period. Without those nuclear warheads, then Putin and Russia would not be able to project its power the way that it does beyond its beyond its borders, and because he has fundamentally mismanaged the economy of Russia by failing to diversify out of hydrocarbons at a time hydrocarbons are a losing their value and be look as though they're heading for the rubbish heap of history certainly we're going to survive climate crisis. This means that he has very little wiggle room in terms of keeping the Russian, the Russian people on board. As we've seen with with Navalny. The middle classes of the urban areas of Russia have largely had it with Putin. And this is not the Soviet Union. It is not a planned economy. This is what one might call market authoritarianism with strong tools of authoritarianism to control elements of the economy, but Russia is now integrated into the global economy. This is not the case during the Soviet Union and so the sort of Stalinist solution that some Russians might prefer Putin to choose is not really available to him inside Ukraine. I've sustained a democracy of sorts. I'm talking about Ukraine outside of that area, de facto occupied by Russia and Crimea, Kiev and the center in the west and so on. Look, they have been profoundly corrupt before the events of 2014 and after the events of 2014 and most political leaders in Ukraine have either been completely dependent on extremely unpleasant oligarchs or indeed have been extremely unpleasant oligarchs themselves. And so, whilst the Democratic norms in Ukraine are undoubtedly in advance of those in in Russia. It is still the oligarchs who are calling the calling the tune there. And one of the difficulties that the West has had since 2014, particularly after President Poroshenko took power in Kiev was that we were arguing for our usual, you know, human rights, European values, transparency, blah, blah, blah. And we were supporting somebody in Kiev, who was demonstrably flouting all of those all of those principles. So it's really, really hard trying to sort of see how this is going to play out long term but I do believe that the Putin is not going to last as long as he would like to his motivation for lasting apart from staying in power apart from the fact that people get used to ordering everyone about psychologically. Ala Mugabe Zimbabwe or whatever. His real motivation is is that he can't really afford to leave. Because once he's left power, he's no longer protected. Sure, he's got about $50 billion to to give himself a certain amount of security. He will be vulnerable and he knows that the once he's gone. He's open to all manner of attacks and so he's staying there really for purposes of survival. Okay, there are a couple of questions about, again, related to people power and technology. So Mark is asking, do you think there's room for more optimistic uses of technology and politics. So saying Taiwan is interesting how it's been developing. On the other hand, there's also a question here about Egypt and Neil saying that at the height of the Arab Spring. I remember there's people saying that mobile phones and social media would mean Arab governments wouldn't be able to prevent revolutions. Why were they wrong. These are these are really good questions brought together. One of the things I was trying to get across in the talk that I gave is about the permanent presence of duality, particularly in technology, you know, technology in itself is morally morally neutral. So we, and how we use that technology, which imposes moral categories on it, although one of the things I'm worried about with, with the type of technology we're dealing with now is is that it does have the capability to start exerting an agency which technology has never has never done before. But those two examples of Egypt and Taiwan are very very good. It's a very good situation. Taiwan, of course, had experience of SARS it had experience of bird flu, it knew what was coming down the road. President was an epidemiologist is an epidemiologist which is really handy. And you have a cultural cultural consensus about when society should buckle down and when and when not. One of those things play when COVID broke out, it was incredibly efficient and technology was central to Taiwan being able to seal itself off from the virus not from the outside world because it had people coming in there was a quarantine regime everything very strict and so on. It wasn't sealing itself from the outside world it was sealing itself off from the virus. The same, however, happened in New Zealand. And New Zealand does not have those cultural traits that Taiwan has, it did deploy technology although it wasn't as successful and quick in doing so as the Taiwanese were. I think the South Korea Ditto you can throw you can throw into this look. I would say that one of the striking things about those people who did well in the first round and continue to do well is is that their heads of government were female rather than male. So, and China did very well as well after the initial outbreak. So you had authoritarian undemocratic undemocratic governments and democratic governments, both using technology and using the, the, the really significant skills of political leadership to create a consensus which enabled the virus to stay away. And of course we in the United Kingdom, we know what the opposite of that. The opposite of that is the whole sort of, you know, bluffing know it's not going to happen here basically. And the whole fast of the way that we've handled the pandemic from beginning to beginning to end, particularly on the issue of how you, how you keep it out of the country but technology was then was used in the Taiwanese case in a positive way controlled by the government, the citizenry bought into it. And they bought into it because they understand why they were being asked to do this, not an arbitrary on high this you're going to do and don't question it. There was a civil buy in by civil society in Egypt. Everyone thought that what was happening was that technology was facilitating the revolution, and it certainly facilitated its initial spread, which is why very early on in the, in the Arab spring and in Egypt in the Egyptian government shut down the internet for four days. Now while it was shutting down the internet, one of the things it was doing was beefing up the relationship it had with several Western companies who sold the Egyptian government and many other authoritarian governments around the world software, which is basically hyper surveillance software. And here we come to the essence of the duality of this technology. You know when this technology started in the 1990s. It was driven. It was actually invented by the American military. It's worth remembering, but it's, it's spread was driven by an enthusiasm of West Coast digital evangelists who believed that the internet was a space where governments where government where capitalism would not be welcome and would not be able to enter. And that was a kind of, you know that was a pipe dream of delightful pipe dream, but one which lasted for about three or four years before people realize they could make money out of the internet but it remains. It remains a domain of human activity that is in permanent conflict and struggle there is a strong dialectic here. The internet does wonderful things for us. The fact that during a pandemic we can have any type of communication is thanks to the internet. But do not underestimate the power of the internet in malign in malign hands to control, not I'm not just talking about authoritarian governments but the whole thesis of surveillance capitalism is as articulated by Shoshana Zuboff in her in her eponymous book. You know, these Google, Apple, Facebook, et al are monsters of hyper capitalism. And this is one of the issues that I'm talking about. We have to control them. We cannot allow Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, et al, dominate our ideational ideological landscape. Yeah, I mean, spreading ideas, obviously, is key. You know, you talked about how Gutenberg and his press sparks the Renaissance. A couple of questions. One from Leonard is the influence of media barons to, you know, the forums of our current problems. And Pat is asking, can we harness a new connectivity of communications to give us a more global and informed citizenship, or is a scale more than humans can cope with. And I think this maybe ties into the social media, the fact that we are amplifying some stories, we're choosing what bubbles were in. Do you think that's something that can be contained or is it something that's now out of control. I know, I think it will, I think it probably will be contained and and I mean social media has changed the very nature of how we communicate in the public space, i. Journalism and public discourse. So my industry, when I was working in the 80s and the 90s for the BBC, you know, this was the very top of the bell jar for this, for this industry. There we were, if you manage to get a staff job, you were relatively well paid. You know, when I was broadcasting from Yugoslavia, I would always top the bulletins for the World Service and the domestic service and what I said was really important about how the world perceived what was happening in Yugoslavia, but it was always also being listened to by the highest political instances in Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo, not to mention the UN and so on and so forth. It's very hard to reproduce that now because people's attentions are so dispersed and they get there. They increasingly don't get their information from centralized media organizations, and they have all sorts of alternatives. When I was working for the BBC, we had a strict rule of two sources, you don't run a story, unless you have two story sources, who you trust and whose, whose word you can, you can guarantee before you run that story. Nowadays, people run stories at the top of the hat whether it's true or not, it gets taken up by social media. Having said that, if you take Trump, yes, Twitter was very, very important for his communicating directly with his followers, so no mediation. But he also had a tame, televisual outlet in Fox News. So the idea that somehow Rupert Murdoch is no longer important is obviously hogwash. Rupert Murdoch is still very important. What you're going to see is I think you will see the wings of Twitter and Google Google in particular and Facebook in particular, being curved by legislation, or by agreement on on their part because people are beginning to boil up about what they, what what social media and what uncorroborated information is doing to the world so I think a regulation is coming down the coming down the road. And I think Google and Facebook will accommodate that whilst making sure that they continue to bring in the dollars. And John's asking that, you know, we've demonstrated over the years the ability to engineer solutions to problems, you know, medicine engineering science and culture and the like. And for the for horsemen, the one apocalypse, we're going to rely on coordination, we're going to try on organization and, you know, collective for working for this. Do you think our current political structures can rise to this challenge, or do you think there are deficiencies at the moment. I certainly think there are deficiencies but we have to, you know, play the cards we have in our hands. We're playing with a weak hand. You know, nonetheless, I think events are important. Trump's defeat is very important. Because the greatest of most immediate emergency facing us is the is the climate crisis. And without Chinese and American cooperation. That cannot. We can't defeat it essentially, much as we'd like to but we can't even with corporate buy ins, even with city buy ins cities are very, very important in terms of the, the climate crisis but we also still have Bolsonaro in the Amazon and that is little short of catastrophic because he is allowing an unprecedented rate of deforestation in Brazil. And so we are going to have to hope that the Brazilians have the wherewithal to vote him out into 2022, which is when the Brazilian presidential election is. So, multi lateralism the United Nations and all the other bodies which the, the post Second World War arrangement was built upon, they are all disintegrating before our eyes. So, single issue, but really profound things like, like Paris like cop 26 in Glasgow and so on, are going to be incredibly important but even here we have to keep, we have to be really vigilant. And Boris Johnson was touting at the end of last year how the British government is going to no longer support fossil fuel extraction in terms of its the UK export guarantees it has and so on and so forth. And just in the last week or so people have uncovered that actually the government slipped into in an amendment to the bill that actually various projects to do with oil and gas in extraction in Brazil and one or two other places would go ahead. And then we saw the business with Cumbria recently and the, the, the, the coal mining Cumbria. So, we need vigilance we need people to be scrutinizing what government is doing, and also encouraging multi lateral solutions on those issues, where the world stands or falls without with or without cooperation. Thank you very much. I think that's all the time we have questions tonight but you've given us an absolutely brilliant talk here, and a brilliantly historical perspective on where we are now. And, you know, from your answers these questions here I think people can see maybe the beginnings of where we need to start fixing things and those issues we need to be addressing with our, you know, the tech giants who are taking control that the lack of political control may be some of us feel at times. Thank you very much for an absolutely brilliant talk. And thank you very much for joining us. You're welcome Geraint and thank you everyone who came along to hear it I appreciate it.