Behind the Curtain: The Great Upheaval
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Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Chip Somodevilla and Apu Gomes via Getty Images
Governance, media, business and global geopolitics are all being reordered at breakneck speed — all simultaneously.
- It's the Great Upheaval.
Why it matters: We're witnessing more change ... across more parts of life ... at more speed ... than ever before.
This means opportunity — and new threats or surprising shifts — pop up faster and faster. Anticipating change is tougher than ever, CEOs tell us.
- There are several causes: a global populist surge, an AI arms race, shifting political alliances globally and domestically, and radical changes in how people worldwide get and share information.
President-elect Trump's governing plans are designed to exploit this emerging phenomenon — and speed it up, his advisers tell us. Elon Musk routinely tells Trump this will be the most dramatic transformation of business, governance and culture since the nation's founding. It's classic Musk salesmanship, as we've seen with cars: Promise vast, immediate change — regardless of feasibility.
- Musk, newly appointed White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, and many others see explosive change hitting energy, space, new technologies, crypto and tangential businesses.
The new Trump team believes government needs to be an accelerant, not a deterrent. This means making agencies leaner, at least in decision-making, and more biased toward pro-business action.
- The risk: The shifts benefit the architects more than the general public. Musk, Sacks, the Trumps and many incoming leaders are super-wealthy, and deeply invested in the areas set to take flight.
- This upheaval benefited Trump, but it very much transcends him and the coming four years of governance. The forces set in motion are bigger than one moment, or one man, or one nation.
Eric Schmidt, the former chairman and CEO of Google, told us: "I think the most important thing people don't know is that tech is now working at mega scale — 'everything everywhere all at once.'"
- Schmidt, who just released a book on AI, "Genesis," with Craig Mundie and the late Henry Kissinger, added: "This is largely due to scale computing (huge computational and network resources) and the application of AI to everything."
- For instance, Schmidt is the lead investor in Samaya AI, which is building a financial AI platform designed to leverage AI agents for complex, high-value tasks. "Businesses will make more money and be more efficient if they move quickly to adopt these AI agents," he said.
The big picture: This is a global phenomenon and intensifies — and raises — the stakes of the U.S. vs. China cold war for international dominance.
- "China and the United States are winners," says geopolitical strategist Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, "since they're the countries most dominating the new technologies and relevant supply chains."
But there's broad agreement the Great Upheaval is hitting everyone, everywhere. This is just a small snapshot of the tectonic plates shifting at once:
- AI arms race. This is the fixation of the most powerful people at the most powerful companies in the most powerful nations. The sheer magnitude of intellectual and financial investment guarantees massive disruption, even if it never meets the epic expectations. Bremmer tells us this is making tech leaders "geopolitical actors in their own right."
- AI-adjacent surge. These technologies eat up unfathomable energy and data, driving everyone from Musk to Meta to invest billions in new sources of both. Much of this is U.S. investment, which will impact state economies and politics. "We need much more electricity in the U.S. to power these data centers," Schmidt says. "We can use foreign data centers but they are less secure."
- Space war. Another AI adjacent boom. The future of warfare is robots, drones and satellites — not boots on the ground. The nearly trillion-dollar defense budget will shift in this direction. Think about the consequences: Oceans will no longer protect against invasion. A nation's tech will matter more than its conventional military might.
- Information wars. We used to get most of our information from "the news." Now, the information in our life pours in from a host of random inputs: a podcast ... someone tweeting ... a Substack ... a snippet of video — the sum of all the noise in our day and on our phone.
What to watch: Pay attention to the info flows to particular populations. Our new information cascade is easier to manipulate than the traditional sources of rigorous reporting we all grew up on.
- Our information diet is blowing up before our eyes, as attention shatters into scores of pieces based on location, job, wealth and politics. This dynamic is true around the globe, and is enhancing the power of authoritarian regimes.
