To understand 21st century geopolitics, think of the global capitalist system: it is a marketplace, not a monopoly. In this diffuse network of nodes and connections, stronger and weaker ties, interdependencies and feedback loops, bad decisions are punished almost as quickly as the stock market punishes bad business models. We have just lived through the inaugural cycle of this geopolitical marketplace. Two decades ago, president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a "New World Order" at the United Nations General Assembly, yet today's world is multipolar and leaderless.

“The Corner of Rothschild and Tahrir,” reads one of the posters at the site where Israel’s summer of social protests began—on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, which has become the movement’s tent-city HQ. Few of the protest leaders would flinch at acknowledging the inspiration they drew from the Arab Awakening, but it is a new, challenging and often uncomfortable feeling for many Jewish Israelis to consider the surrounding Arab world as providing a spark worth emulating.

Think you've heard it all about the global financial crisis, the Internet distracting us into stupidity, dysfunctional and self-destructive politics, the demise of the nuclear family, and degenerating cities? Well imagine having predicted, written about, and imagined the consequences of all of these postmodern maladies -- before they ever happened. Meet Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the accidental futurists who have lived to see so many of their foresights become our daily reality.

There was a brief moment, in the go-go 1990s, when the world seemed less reliant on politics and politicians. Globalisation, we were told, was on the march. Markets - efficient and calculating and precise - would dictate our future, not politicians - venal, short-sighted and imprecise. As long as nations hopped on the chugging globalisation train, they, too, would benefit and the ride would be smooth.