New technology is invariably disruptive and destabilizing.

Paradigm shifts in science and revolutionary leaps in technology are often coterminous with political and military upheavals. The dust normally requires three centuries to settle. Such seismic waves and tectonic shifts occurred between the 12th and 14th centuries AD, again starting with the 15th and final in the 17th century AD, and, most recently, commencing in the 19th century and even besides still unfolding.

These quakes portend the emergence of fresh organizing average and chronicle threats. Bent shifts from one place of players and agents to another. And the scope and force of the cataclysm increases until it peaks with the at the end vestiges of the cycle.

Thus, in the ongoing round (19th-21st centuries AD), polities shifted from Empires to Nation-states and economies from colonialism-mercantilism to capitalism: a inexperienced disposition founded on advanced systems and principles. Industrialized battle and networked terrorism emerged as the contemporary threats. Ochlocracies and democracies supplanted the edict of assorted elites and crowds of laymen deposit siege to the hitherto unchallenged superiority and rule of experts. Finally, starting in the behind 19th century, globalization replaced localization everywhere.

Why this confluence of scientific-technological period transitions and political-military tumults?

There are three feasible explanations:

(I) Scientific and technological innovations presage political and military realignments, rather as prequakes forewarn of full-fledged earthquakes. Thus, at the genesis of the twentieth century, physical theories, such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics reflected a mass political and military calamity in an more and more uncertain and kaleidoscopic world. Or ...

(II) Scientific and technological innovations determinant political and military realignments

Still, copious technologies - from the GPS to the Internet and from antibiotics to plastics - were hatched in state-owned laboratories and many scientific advances were spurred on and financed by the military-industrial complex. Science and technology in the 20th century seem to be the brainchildren, not the progenitors of the political and martial establishments.

It seems, therefore, that Scientific and technological innovations stir in tandem with political and military realignments. Instability, competition, and clash are the guideline that underlie our political philosophy (liberal democracy), economic worldview (Darwinian capitalism), and personal administer within our anomic societies. It would keep been shocking had they failed to permeate our science and technology as well. As community modify one dimension of their earth (let's say, their political system), all other parameters are instantaneously affected as well. Science, technology, politics, and strife resonate and direction everyone other all the time. Hence the aforementioned synchronicity.

But, what are the transmission mechanisms between science-technology and politics-military? How is a tremor in one universe communicated to the other?

First, we must distinguish between primary and consumer technologies.

Primary technologies are purely military, industrial, commercial, and large-scale. As influential technologies mature, they are invariably converted into consumer technologies. Leading technologies are disempowering, inaccessible, societal (cater to the needs of the homeland in which they were developed and within which they are deployed), concentrated in the hands of the few, self-contained, focused (goal-oriented), and remarkably localized (aim to work and yeild results locally).

Consumer technologies are the exact obverse of their valuable counterparts: by design, they empower the user, are ubiquitous, cater to the needs of individuals, are distributed and redundant, collaborative, charge multitasking, and are global.

Science and technology interact with politics and the military along two pathways:

(I) Established structures are seldom undermined by the mere invention or all the more deployment of a brand-new technology. It is the shift from salient technology to consumer technology that rattles them. Relevant technologies are used by excitement groups and endowment centres to preserve their monopoly of mode and the decision-making processes that actuate their allocation. Essential technologies are always in favour of the existing classification and are, therefore, conservative. In contrast, consumer technologies grant erstwhile outsiders access to these cherished commodities. Consumer technologies are, therefore, by definition, fundamental and transformative.

(II) But, the masses are not always content to await their turn while the elites reap the appreciable rewards of their inceptive mover status and old-boy-network clubbish advantages. Sometimes the mob demands immediate use, or still containment of meaningful technologies. Such revolutionary spasms "compress" historical processes and render important technologies consumer technologies by dint of the mob's faculty to access and shape them.

If so, how come we retain recognized periods of tranquility, prosperity, and flourishing of the arts and sciences? Why hasn't account been reduced to a semipternal dogfight between haves and haves not?

The transmit is: the mitigating part of consumer technologies.

Whichever the pathway, once consumer technology is widespread, it becomes a conservative and stabilizing force. Consumers in possession of (often expensive) consumer technologies accept a vested concern in the established order: belongings rights, personal safety, the correct functioning of institutions and producers, and so on.

Consumers preference to warrantly their access to prospect generations of consumer technologies as great as their unfettered expertise to prize and arrange custom of the in fashion crop of gadgets and knowledge. To end so, liesure clock and fortune formation and accumulation are prerequisites. Both are impossible in a chaotic society. Consumers are "tamed", "domesticated", and "pacified" by their ownership of the correct technologies that they had fought to obtain.

Similarly, developers, creators, inventors, and investors demand a peaceful, predictable, just, fair, and functional sphere to draw out to churn elsewhere technological innovations. Consumers are aware of that. While inclined to "free rider" behaviour in the "Commons", most consumers are avid to commerce firm cash and personal discretion for the imminent availability of their favourite toys and content.

Consumer then cast an alliance with all other stakeholders in sovereign state to guarantee a prolonged space of status quo. Such intermezzos endure centuries until, somehow, the deficiencies and imperfections of the action model to its eventual breakdown and to the eruption of latest ideas, fresh disruptive technologies, cool destruction , and political and military challenges as contemporary players enter the scene and exhausted ones refuse to way out without a fight.

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