2021: Through the Looking Glass (coming soon, the January edition of the GEAB)

Welcome to 2021, Year One of the world after.

After the year of “reflection” that the long Covid break has provided humanity,[1] Year One of the world after, or the “Digital Age”, takes us on a trip “through the looking glass”.[2]

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass was written as a sequel to Alice in Wonderland in 1871, the year the German Empire was proclaimed. It was Year One in another new era, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, that brought in independence movements in Eastern Europe (Young Czech party, et al.), a popular revolution in France (that was violently repressed – La Commune) and social advances in England and the Netherlands (trade unions and worker status), sowing the seeds of the First and Second World Wars.

It is not surprising that his work strikes such a chord today, with 2021 shaping up to be the opposite of what we knew before. Last month, we were talking about the underworld rising up, but it’s also about the entire world economy and society going through the digital looking glass – the complete shift of economic and cultural developments from West to East, the reversal of the centre of gravity between Europe and the United States in the transatlantic relationship, the switch of humanitarianism to the cyber-sphere, the loss of generations that knew a time before the Internet, etc.

Plenty to sink our teeth into in our long-awaited January Overview of the Year’s Trends.
See you in a few days to see thirty or so for trends, predictions, glimmers, etc. combined into a coherent vision of the year to come.

With our best wishes for this new year!

Summary of the GEAB 151:

• 2021: Welcome to the Brave New World!
• Overview of 2021 Trends
• 2022: Towards a Franco-British Defence of Europe
• Agriculture 3.0: Business and Investment Opportunities
• Investments, Trends and Recommendations

Be ready. Sing in

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[1]      A year we’ve spent “mirroring” ourselves in our screens while hooked up to Zoom sessions.

[2]      Digital technology is certainly not a recent invention, but until 2020, the Internet was a tool that served the material world. Going forward, the material world is nothing more than a framework for a fully digitised society (human society, production, business, discussions, payment methods, work, entertainment, war, and so on).