Connectography
"Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the worlds burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africas fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the worlds ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together."
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2016–2023years
33% recommend33% neutral33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You'll have to be a little more specific about what you're looking for. Are you looking for world history? US history? Philosophy? History in tech?
I can't say much about world history, but I've been reading some books to get a better understanding of American politics:
- "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires": Interesting analysis on the rise and fall of conquering civilizations. Tons of parallels between dead empires and the US empire.
- "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Nations are built on cities, and America's cities are very poorly built. What are we doing wrong, what could we do better?
- "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War": Very dense, lots of data. Suggests that our current political turmoil is due to our economy and society expecting unrealistic growth, and a disconnect between reality and the expectation of citizens.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism: "Slippery slope" gets thrown around a lot w.r.t. suspicious legislation. This book provides context on past societies that slipped, and where we stand on that slope.
- "Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization": Optimistic look at the future of globalism.
- "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed": An analysis of the cascade failure that took out almost all the great bronze-age civilizations around the Mediterranean region in 1177BC.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - I haven't read this, but this is the #1 book that pops up in conversations.
- Some of this was covered in the book Connectography by Parag Khanna https://www.paragkhanna.com/book/connectography-mapping-the-...
I found the book maybe a bit overly optimistic/idealistic about how he thought infrastructure dependencies would impact the world, but a lot of the information was fascinating nonetheless.
Nice Maps of different layers of infrastructure on the globe: https://atlas.developmentseed.org
- It's all based on the same book (Connectography). I highly recommend instead reading The Stack that just came out from MIT Press, which gives a much deeper analysis on the relationship between cities, software and geopolitics: http://thestack.org
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