Welcome to the Econolypse | Part 1

We face a top-to-bottom paradigm shift reshaping trade, markets, businesses, and how we live and work

The economic forces that shape our world have impacts at all scales: from global markets, to domestic economies, to specific industries and businesses, and finally, down to the individuals that make up society and populate the world. We’ve increasingly interconnected in an immensely complex network of cause and effect, but we seem to be increasingly unable to make sense of what’s going on.

My focus, in the end, is on the technology infrastructure for businesses to get work done in this brave new world, one I call the postnormal: because the new normal is there is no normal.

And this transition we are going through can be thought of as the econolypse, a liminal zone between the third and fourth industrial revolutions, terminology adopted from Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. The first three revolutions form a foundation for the next:

• first (water and steam power to mechanize production),
• second (electric power to create mass production), and
• third (electronics and computers to automate production).

Here’s Schwab outlining the fourth:

There are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

Schwab enumerates the various elements of the technological drivers of the fourth revolution: mobility connecting billions with hand-held supercomputers, along with emergy technologies like AI, robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotech, biotech, quantum computing, materials science, and — not mentioned by Schwab — platform-based ecosystems.

Obviously, the shattering breakthroughs of the fourth technological revolution will reverberate through everything else.