GREAT WAVE

In the 21st century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and grassroots activists are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider - the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, like Donald Trump, and others have provided inspirational leadership, like Volodymyr Zelensky, but all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. This is the era of the outsider in governance, business and the arts, and for better or worse they seem to have understood that this is a hinge moment, when long-standing dynamics in paradigms can be overturned. Kakutani looks at morbid symptoms, cascading crises and looming paradigm shifts, and a tsunami of unintended consequences and most poignantly at America's Love-Hate affair of outsiders. He asks why hackers, politicians and business leaders have embraced decentralisation and how the human race copes with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Writing with a critic's incisive understanding of cultural trends, he outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar turning points in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward. For there is, Kakutani argues, always the promise of transformation in times of turmoil. We can surrender to the waters, give in to the gathering chaos, or we can use the wave's momentum to propel us into a more stable and sustainable future. 238 page paperback, illus. with Hokusai line art.