6 ms·

The 21st century's "true start" was on New Year's Eve, 2000. Of course, I realize he's talking about defining events that delimit major changes between the pre

The 21st century's "true start" was on New Year's Eve, 2000. Of course, I realize he's talking about defining events that delimit major changes between the previous century and its successor. And more specifically, major changes in what Thiel cares about, like financial markets, start-ups, monopolies, and money in general. But, really, we're only 20% into the century. Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 even within the parameters of what matters to Thiel. You know, like climate change, the second coming, asteroid hitting the Earth, quantum computing, "the singularity", etc... Who the F knows? There's no utility in this kind of thinking. Just take it for it is and what it becomes since starting on Jan 1st, 2000.

stcredzero 6y ago
Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 even within the parameters of what matters to Thiel. Did WWI define the 20th century, or was it WWII? I think WWI demarcates the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events. I suspect Covid-19 could be the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events.
- dougmwne 6y ago
  To me it's quite obviously a preview of the ecological collapses that climate change will bring over the rest of the century. This is a small taste of things to come and the scale of the solutions and sacrifices required to adapt to them. The amount of government intervention, which was met with a lot of skepticism in the West, is going to remain a prominent feature.
- buu700 6y ago
  That's a fair take. Before this year, most of us might have said 9/11 was the defining moment of the start of this century. I'm not going to try to predict what history will look like 80 years from now, or whether 9/11 or covid will be considered more significant by then, but this does raise an interesting question of how people in 1913 perceived the nascent 20th century. Obviously things happened over those 13 years, but whatever they were, history ultimately decided that they were inconsequential enough for the "20th-century events" Wikipedia article to not even mention anything before WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  WWI marks the end of the Concert of Europe system that prevailed over the previous century, and the cost of WWI and its subsequent aftershocks led to the collapse of European global empires and the rise of the American/Soviet century. I'd say that's a pretty good demarcation line.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Historians generally refer to the "long 19th century" as encompassing the time from the French Revolution to WWI (although there is some room to discuss at what exact year you want to place the endpoints). Post-WWI periodization is hard to discuss because it's not necessarily clear until long after what events make more of a difference. WWII isn't really a single war as much as it is a collection of several wars, be they wars of territorial expansion (e.g., Germany, USSR), ideological civil war (e.g., China), non-ideological civil war (e.g., France), or random local conflicts (e.g., Yugoslav coup) which are all occurring in the context of one another. In many places, it's often a three-way war, with all parties equally at odds with one another, instead of the simple Axis v. Allies it's usually presented as. Start including the full context of these conflicts into the timeframe of WWII, and you push its start date back arguably to 1931, only 8 years after the last cleanup war of WWI (the Russian Civil War). Viewed from an international relations perspective, combining WWI and WWII into a single period of flux makes sense. WWI makes the death of great power influence, but the attempted resolution afterwards (League of Nations) was impotent and unable to have any major effect on the international crises that arose, unlike the great power conferences preceding WWI. Instead, the end of WWII ushers in the era of superpower relations, where essentially the USA and USSR drive international relations for the rest of the world.
sheepdestroyer 6y ago
Sorry but no. "It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century
- gumby 6y ago
  Isn't that what crispyambulance said (or perhaps a few hours before)?
  - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
    He said both "New Year's Eve, 2000" and "starting on Jan 1st, 2000". I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
    - crispyambulance 6y ago
      My apologies, I had a brain fart.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  No. We define the centuries as the periods of 100 years beginning with the multiples of 100 in the year numbering system of the contextual calendar. The definition given by your reference is neither authoritative nor popular. If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
  - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
    Why are you counting from 0? What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_start_and_end_of_a_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...
nostromo 6y ago
> Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century. The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.
- ouid 6y ago
  I wonder if there wasn't something else going on in 1918 that perhaps eclipsed it in terms of importance.
  - nwienert 6y ago
    I think that’s the point.
- NineStarPoint 6y ago
  Economic effects of the virus may well be more long reaching though.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Don't conflate the virus with the lockdowns. Knock-on effects of the lockdowns - which were a choice by governments, not some inevitability - are projected to have far worse long-term effects.
    - turing_complete 6y ago
      I agree, but that is also part of what Thiel is talking about.
- spoondan 6y ago
  Maybe. But a possible contributor for the 1918 flu pandemic's relative obscurity is that it overlapped with World War I and was followed within ~20 years by the Great Depression and World War II. It occurred during one of the most turbulent times in modern history. In contrast, the 2020 pandemic is presently not sharing the spotlight. Maybe something of comparable impact will happen. Or maybe it'll be forgotten regardless. But I don't know that the 1918 pandemic's status is all that illustrative.
rmrfstar 6y ago
This article is a marketing submarine. Can you spot the product?
NineStarPoint 6y ago
Even outside of that, 9/11 and the 2007 financial crisis aren’t trivial events that are just going to be skipped over. Especially depending on long term effects of the terrorism wars and how future people consider it’s relation to the growth of heavy surveillance, I could see it being considered the more important event. Of course we don’t know the long term effects Covid is going to have yet, we’re still in the middle of it.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  Definitely agree 9/11 seemed to be the geopolitical event that really kicked off a different tone from the relative quiet of the Clinton years.
badconvincer 6y ago
I doubt anyone is going to talk about covid too much past 2022, based on the efficacy of the vaccine trials.
TrainedMonkey 6y ago
I claim that something will definitely eclipse 2020 (including covid, POTUS, and all other shenanigans). This century we will almost certainly get self driving cars, AGI, unprecedented biology advances, VR, etc... Secondary and tertiary effects of those technologies will have far reaching implications on the human civilization. The only alternative to getting most of those technologies is some kind of global crisis that significantly sets back humanity. So we either have crazy powerful technologies that upend status quo way of life or a catastrophe that destroys everything.
babypuncher 6y ago
I think he's off the mark. The commoditization of computers and proliferation of the internet are way bigger societal and economic shifts and they happened much closer to the year 2000. The pandemic is more immediately disruptive, but I think it's impact will be largely erased within a few years of it "ending", just like previous pandemics.
Balgair 6y ago
If there is one thing you can put good money on it's the UNSECO population data. Specifically, the population growth estimates. The late great Hans Rosling of TED Talk fame had (has?) a fantastic website with a pretty good interface into such data: https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/ The key takeaway for me is that by 2099 Africa is going to get ~3B more people and India ~1B more. And they mostly going to be 'middle class' income earners (not poor anymore). Their consumer preferences are being made as we speak (Coke v Pepsi, Chevy v Ford, etc). The Indian Ocean is going to be as big a trade hub as the Atlantic was and the Pacific is today. The time is ripe to invest in eastern Africa.

stcredzero 6y ago

Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 even within the parameters of what matters to Thiel. Did WWI define the 20th century, or was it WWII? I think WWI demarcates the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events. I suspect Covid-19 could be the 1st of a series of really big, interrelated events.

dougmwne 6y ago
To me it's quite obviously a preview of the ecological collapses that climate change will bring over the rest of the century. This is a small taste of things to come and the scale of the solutions and sacrifices required to adapt to them. The amount of government intervention, which was met with a lot of skepticism in the West, is going to remain a prominent feature.
buu700 6y ago
That's a fair take. Before this year, most of us might have said 9/11 was the defining moment of the start of this century. I'm not going to try to predict what history will look like 80 years from now, or whether 9/11 or covid will be considered more significant by then, but this does raise an interesting question of how people in 1913 perceived the nascent 20th century. Obviously things happened over those 13 years, but whatever they were, history ultimately decided that they were inconsequential enough for the "20th-century events" Wikipedia article to not even mention anything before WWI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th-century_events
magicsmoke 6y ago
WWI marks the end of the Concert of Europe system that prevailed over the previous century, and the cost of WWI and its subsequent aftershocks led to the collapse of European global empires and the rise of the American/Soviet century. I'd say that's a pretty good demarcation line.
jcranmer 6y ago
Historians generally refer to the "long 19th century" as encompassing the time from the French Revolution to WWI (although there is some room to discuss at what exact year you want to place the endpoints). Post-WWI periodization is hard to discuss because it's not necessarily clear until long after what events make more of a difference. WWII isn't really a single war as much as it is a collection of several wars, be they wars of territorial expansion (e.g., Germany, USSR), ideological civil war (e.g., China), non-ideological civil war (e.g., France), or random local conflicts (e.g., Yugoslav coup) which are all occurring in the context of one another. In many places, it's often a three-way war, with all parties equally at odds with one another, instead of the simple Axis v. Allies it's usually presented as. Start including the full context of these conflicts into the timeframe of WWII, and you push its start date back arguably to 1931, only 8 years after the last cleanup war of WWI (the Russian Civil War). Viewed from an international relations perspective, combining WWI and WWII into a single period of flux makes sense. WWI makes the death of great power influence, but the attempted resolution afterwards (League of Nations) was impotent and unable to have any major effect on the international crises that arose, unlike the great power conferences preceding WWI. Instead, the end of WWII ushers in the era of superpower relations, where essentially the USA and USSR drive international relations for the rest of the world.

sheepdestroyer 6y ago

Sorry but no. "It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century

gumby 6y ago
Isn't that what crispyambulance said (or perhaps a few hours before)?
- sheepdestroyer 6y ago
  He said both "New Year's Eve, 2000" and "starting on Jan 1st, 2000". I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    My apologies, I had a brain fart.
rcoveson 6y ago
No. We define the centuries as the periods of 100 years beginning with the multiples of 100 in the year numbering system of the contextual calendar. The definition given by your reference is neither authoritative nor popular. If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
- sheepdestroyer 6y ago
  Why are you counting from 0? What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_start_and_end_of_a_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...

nostromo 6y ago

> Something else could easily eclipse Covid-19 I doubt people will talk about Covid-19 much at all by the end of the century. The 1918 flu was much, much worse in total number of deaths, and even worse when you consider how many fewer people existed at that time, and it killed people in the prime of their lives. And by the year 2000 very few people knew about it at all.

ouid 6y ago
I wonder if there wasn't something else going on in 1918 that perhaps eclipsed it in terms of importance.
- nwienert 6y ago
  I think that’s the point.
NineStarPoint 6y ago
Economic effects of the virus may well be more long reaching though.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Don't conflate the virus with the lockdowns. Knock-on effects of the lockdowns - which were a choice by governments, not some inevitability - are projected to have far worse long-term effects.
  - turing_complete 6y ago
    I agree, but that is also part of what Thiel is talking about.
spoondan 6y ago
Maybe. But a possible contributor for the 1918 flu pandemic's relative obscurity is that it overlapped with World War I and was followed within ~20 years by the Great Depression and World War II. It occurred during one of the most turbulent times in modern history. In contrast, the 2020 pandemic is presently not sharing the spotlight. Maybe something of comparable impact will happen. Or maybe it'll be forgotten regardless. But I don't know that the 1918 pandemic's status is all that illustrative.

rmrfstar 6y ago

This article is a marketing submarine. Can you spot the product?

NineStarPoint 6y ago

Even outside of that, 9/11 and the 2007 financial crisis aren’t trivial events that are just going to be skipped over. Especially depending on long term effects of the terrorism wars and how future people consider it’s relation to the growth of heavy surveillance, I could see it being considered the more important event. Of course we don’t know the long term effects Covid is going to have yet, we’re still in the middle of it.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
Definitely agree 9/11 seemed to be the geopolitical event that really kicked off a different tone from the relative quiet of the Clinton years.

badconvincer 6y ago

I doubt anyone is going to talk about covid too much past 2022, based on the efficacy of the vaccine trials.

TrainedMonkey 6y ago

I claim that something will definitely eclipse 2020 (including covid, POTUS, and all other shenanigans). This century we will almost certainly get self driving cars, AGI, unprecedented biology advances, VR, etc... Secondary and tertiary effects of those technologies will have far reaching implications on the human civilization. The only alternative to getting most of those technologies is some kind of global crisis that significantly sets back humanity. So we either have crazy powerful technologies that upend status quo way of life or a catastrophe that destroys everything.

babypuncher 6y ago

I think he's off the mark. The commoditization of computers and proliferation of the internet are way bigger societal and economic shifts and they happened much closer to the year 2000. The pandemic is more immediately disruptive, but I think it's impact will be largely erased within a few years of it "ending", just like previous pandemics.

Balgair 6y ago

If there is one thing you can put good money on it's the UNSECO population data. Specifically, the population growth estimates. The late great Hans Rosling of TED Talk fame had (has?) a fantastic website with a pretty good interface into such data: https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/ The key takeaway for me is that by 2099 Africa is going to get ~3B more people and India ~1B more. And they mostly going to be 'middle class' income earners (not poor anymore). Their consumer preferences are being made as we speak (Coke v Pepsi, Chevy v Ford, etc). The Indian Ocean is going to be as big a trade hub as the Atlantic was and the Pacific is today. The time is ripe to invest in eastern Africa.