“The web of digitalization – humanity in upheaval – on the way to a new worldview”. That was the title of my book, which was written in 2017 and published in 2018. Now, in spring 2025, I would like to place the book in its current context.
The occasion is twofold: firstly, MESCONF, the Modeling Embedded Systems Conference, is looking back on ten years of existence. I was asked to contribute a text to my keynote speech from 2019. And secondly, now that Trump has returned to power, it is clear that his first term in office was just a harbinger of what his digital oligarchs like to call the ‘disruptive renewal of the state’. The survival of democracy is at stake.
On February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President Vance invited media representatives to a spectacle that is now being called ‘the scandal in the White House’. The new masters in Washington had wanted to present the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, as the victim of the show, which, as in Trump’s previous TV shows, ended with his ejection. It got out of hand, but presumably roughly as planned.
Since this scandal – the first time in the almost 250-year history of the USA that the invited president of a friendly state has been thrown out of the White House – it has become clear that ‘the West’ has lost its previous leader. Europe suddenly finds itself, albeit with long advance notice, without military and political allies, facing the three great powers of the USA, Russia and China, who are now openly fighting for world domination. And, for the moment, even with an initial fraternization between Putin and Trump.
When I wrote “The Web of Digitalization”, I of course had no idea how deep the emerging rift would run through the world. And that it would have a lot to do with digitalization, but in a much more drastic way than I could have imagined.
I am therefore taking this opportunity to once again place digitalization in the context of the global and socio-political upheaval we are experiencing. Perhaps a rewrite of the entire book would be the right consequence.
“A spectre is haunting us, not only in Europe – the spectre of digitalization.” With this variation of the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, I did not, of course, want to compare digitalization with communism, but rather the way in which digitalization is still seen by many people today, especially in Europe and particularly in Germany: like a threat from offstage that people know and understand just as little about as they did about communism in the 18th century. Like a spectre. But I also had the feeling that digitalization could usher in a new kind of economy and society. Because software and, above all, software as a service could overtake the original hardware product in industry.
Why “web” and not “spectre”? The word “web”, synonymous with cocoon, spider’s web and network, expresses very vividly what is both beautiful and frightening about digitalization, at least since the Internet and smartphones: that it is spreading almost invisibly around the entire earth and connecting all people and increasingly all things with each other, without – as I saw it at the time – it being clear who the spiders are and who their victims are.
What prompted me to write this book was the beginning of the radical change in political and socio-political conditions in the world. Trump was in power for the first time, Brexit had gained approval, right-wing populism was on the rise across Europe and in a number of countries, right-wing populist parties, after gaining government power through elections, began to launch far-reaching attacks on the independence of the judiciary and on the separation of powers, on the freedom of the press and on freedom of expression in general, for example in Hungary and then also in Poland.
My book as hardcover by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, 2018, ISBN 978-3-658-21896-6, as eBook ISBN 978-3-658-21897-3
My thesis was that it could be the fear of some of the consequences of digitalization and the increase in power and the pursuit of power and growing wealth with the help of digitalization among others that led to this obvious and, at first glance, inexplicable worldwide division of human society into supporters of democracy and its opponents.
From today’s perspective, this thesis is no longer tenable. It is not the fear of digitalization that is dividing society, but the unprecedented power and immeasurable wealth of a handful of monopolists who know and know how to use digitalization to their advantage. If you like: the giant spiders mentioned in my book, whose digital businesses have made their masters the richest people the world has ever seen.
The high-tech monopolies and the division of the world
This applies above all to the so-called hyperscalers around Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta (Facebook etc.), Microsoft, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), and a few others in the US with whom Trump has now teamed up. The digital oligarchs.
It applies in a different way to the Chinese rulers under Xi Jinping, whose one-party system has also long relied on the domination of the internet, digital networking and artificial intelligence – and more recently on Jack Ma and his Alibaba again. China is also a technological rival of the US oligarchs.
The third major power that currently poses the greatest threat in and for Europe, Russia and Putin’s imperialism, also relies on the digital possibilities of networking and new media in addition to its military power. However, not on the basis of its own technological strength, but by using existing technology for comprehensive cyberattacks on democracy and opinion-forming. Without digitalization, the success of the Kremlin’s lying propaganda would be inconceivable.
Following Trump’s return to power, now with Musk as an unelected co-dictator who is not subject to any form of control, we are witnessing a return of old, almost absolutist power politics as in the 19th century or the Middle Ages. In the USA, in China, in Russia. While Europe, which is still predominantly democratic, has not (yet) found a unity in terms of content and institutions from which its own strength could emerge.
And while Germany, the economically strongest country in the EU, still has no government that could take on a strong and leading role in the coming years following the break-up of the traffic light coalition. And while divisions are also increasing across Europe and in Germany and extreme political positions are threatening to become the norm.
So it would be a dramatically different book that I would write today, a different keynote speech that I would give today. At least as far as the political classification of digitalization is concerned. Even the “central tasks for regulating the digital society” (Das Gespinst der Digitalisierung, p. 294) that I envisaged in the last chapter of the book, “Mensch oder Maschine?”, seem almost naive to me today. A few more thoughts on this at the end of this text.
But the main part of “Das Gespinst der Digitalisierung” has retained its validity. The global historical classification of the digital transformation, the connection with the industrial revolution of the last 250 years, and the analysis of the first decades of digitalization in society and industry – this is also very helpful for understanding current technical and technological developments.
When serfdom no longer fits
What was important to me was the connection between digitalization and the industrial revolution in Europe in the second half of the 18th century, which ultimately led to Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and his Communist Manifesto.
After all, it was the industrial revolution that reawakened democracy in Europe and the USA – after a break of around 2,500 years since the end of the first democracy in ancient Athens. (See chapter 11 “Democracy – ancient, modern, digital” in the book, p. 223 ff.) Surprisingly, there was and is hardly any literature on this connection and the astonishing simultaneity of industrial capitalism and modern democracy.
Workers at the Heinz food factory in Pittsburg punching can ends in 1908 (Photo Wikimedia Commons)
The context is easy to understand. After many centuries in which society had relied almost entirely on agricultural production for its development, the social and political balance of power and forms of government corresponded above all to the interests of the owners of land, including the churches, who owned a significant proportion of it.
In the industrial age that was now beginning, however, the owners of the industrial means of production, the machines and factories, became the main driving forces of society, supported by wage-earning workers, not serfs, and therefore society needed new forms of political power. Recourse to the Athenian experience proved to be very suitable for this.
After initial attempts, for example in the USA, to make the right to vote and thus power in the state directly dependent on the amount of taxes paid, this restriction was soon dropped. It was better for acceptance that everyone had equal rights – at least when it came to voting. Until a hundred years ago, however, this still only meant: all (white) men.
Only on the basis of this new social order, which finally put an end to serfdom and the rule of landowners in general, could the masses of people be won over to wage-dependent work, which the emerging industry very soon needed.
After the last ice age
As far as we know today, there has only been one such fundamental, global upheaval in human history. This was – according to the scientific knowledge gained only in the last 25 years – the agricultural revolution after the last ice age. It marked the end of the age of hunter-gatherers.
The agricultural revolution began in various parts of the world around 12,000 years ago and took around 4,000 years to spread agriculture and animal husbandry across the globe. Interestingly, this did not take place through understanding and imitation, but in different ways and at very different times in a variety of regions. It is hard for us to imagine today: all these regions in which people spread out did not yet have any kind of network, no connecting routes, not even the means by which people could have set off. In a sense, the wheel had not yet been invented.
The first region of the agricultural revolution – roughly between 13,000 and 10,500 BC – was the Fertile Crescent, an area that today comprises the states of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. What was discovered there in 1994 under a veritable mountain of sand, especially in Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, led one of the archaeologists involved, the researcher Klaus Schmidt, who died young, to title his highly recommended and exciting book “Sie bauten die ersten Tempel” (They built the first temples). (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006)
The buildings, which were presumably filled in again by the inhabitants around 8,000 BC, had served as churches or prayer rooms without roofs for gatherings from a radius of several hundred kilometers. The sculptures in and on the stones and pillars depicted the wild animals that had previously threatened humans and whose hunting, along with the gathering of berries and fruit, had been the only activity of humans to feed themselves for thousands of years.
Many researchers assume that it was the consequences of the agricultural revolution and the transition to agriculture and animal husbandry that made people want and need to communicate with each other. Incidentally, they would not have been able to have the aforementioned “temples” built by the builders and stone artists if they had not already been able to provide such service providers due to the first division of labor and, above all, thanks to a surplus of food from cultivated grain and bred animals.
It took around 10,000 years until the next great human revolution, the birth of industry. It brought the replacement of human labor by machines. In 1769, both the Waterframe textile machine and James Watt’s steam engine were the first machines to start the industrial revolution in Britain. Followed (and diligently pirated) in France, Germany and the USA. With the striking coincidence in time of the first democratic constitution of modern times in the USA in 1787 and the French Revolution in 1789. Thomas Jefferson, one of the fathers of the American constitution, was also involved in the formulation of the French constitution, as he was the US ambassador in Paris at the time.
The forgotten, early calculating machine
As obvious as the engine and heart of the industrial revolution was the machine that replaced physical labour to achieve an unimaginable multiple of productivity and the industrial products now possible; as dramatic as the associated, unchecked consumption of natural resources led to today’s climate catastrophe in just 250 years – it is clear in retrospect that digitalization is not one of many technological developments in industry, but was designed from the outset as the future heart of the industrial revolution.
As the kind of machinery that can also largely replace human brainwork, so to speak. Also with the aim of achieving an unimaginable multiple of productivity.
By the time James Watt’s steam engine was commercially viable for the first time in 1769, it had been 57 years since its invention by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. That was how long it took to develop a means of production to market maturity. And at such a distance, around 60 years after the steam engine, Charles Babbage invented a mechanical calculating machine in England.
The calculating machine reconstructed in the 1990s according to Babbage’s construction documents in the Science Museum in London. (Photo Wikimedia Commons)
According to these inventors, this calculating machine would have been technically superior to Konrad Zuse’s computer and Howard Aiken’s first US computer and would have worked better. The state funding for Babbage had been canceled and all that remained of his life’s work were the design drawings. However, this machine was completed in the 1990s on the basis of these drawings. It has been running flawlessly in the Science Museum in London ever since. The computer pioneers of the 1940s were unaware of Babbage’s calculating machine when they came up with their supposed inventions. It had been completely forgotten for over 100 years.
The four stages of the industrial revolution
In a way, digitalization is the logical final step in the industrialization of human society. The path to this point has been made in leaps and bounds. When German industry, its associations and the German government proclaimed the Industry 4.0 initiative in 2011, they were referring to a fourth industrial revolution. In retrospect, they defined three stages that had already been completed at the time.
According to this interpretation, the first, with the steam engine, was followed by the second industrial revolution at the beginning of the 20th century with electrification, the assembly line and oil. The third was identified as the automation of industrial production with the help of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). This took place from the 1970s onwards, and to such an extent and with such enormous success, particularly in Germany and German-speaking countries.
With automation and the use of computers and software for the core of the factory, production, companies in German-speaking countries instinctively made the right decision with regard to the future of their economy. For in industrial production and in the development of products and means of production, this region has a special asset in the world: a huge mass of medium-sized companies, founded and led mostly by engineers (46,000, every second of which has fewer than 500 employees); millions of people with a background in dual vocational training that is still unique in the world; and thus a pool of inventors and their start-ups, which are a priceless advantage for the further development of industry.
Interestingly enough, at the same time that our industry was focusing on automation in the 1970s, American industry began to abandon its factories and let its manufacturing centers degenerate into the Rust Belt. The absolute focus on the computer and then on software, the internet, the cloud and AI was too tempting. And all this in the then still infinitely large global market for end users all over the world, i.e. for billions of people.
This division of the industrial world into hardware (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and China initially only as an extended workbench) and software (USA, later also China) resulted in the current ranking of economic nations, in which the USA and China occupy the first two places, but Germany is still in third place. Despite all the prophecies of doom, our industry is currently experiencing a downturn, but it still accounts for around 20% of gross domestic product and provides around 20% of jobs.
While the former industrialized countries USA, UK, France, Italy and Spain have long since reported only ten percent or less of both. Hyperscalers and service providers of all kinds are not an industry, and their business model is based on producing nothing.
A ray of hope in the new world disorder?
When I finished the book in 2017, I had the hope that Trump 1 might be bad enough to prevent Trump 2. That the division of the world and of individual societies could be overcome.
I even dreamed that digitalization and the possibility of connecting everything and everyone could be an important tool to improve people’s communication with each other, in addition to many new conveniences and ideas. Perhaps even into politics. And then came the twenties.
The last century saw the “Roaring Twenties”. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin unleashed their brutal power in the thirties.
In this century, the twenties began with the storming of the Capitol and the non-recognition of Biden’s election victory by Trump, with the coronavirus pandemic, and numerous harbingers of a time that is already becoming reality today, in February 2025.
Trump is back in power and is much better prepared this time. He is not only dismantling the democratic state, but is making his lack of empathy and his boundless pursuit of power and unlimited wealth the new world view, adorned with more lies than all the fact-checks put together can even count.
The world order that we could still talk about at the end of the decade no longer exists. Disorder is the new order. And at the top of this world disorder are the hyperscalar oligarchs, headed by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
Germany has lost all the certainties that seemed to be taken for granted during my lifetime, i.e. since the Second World War. That Europe will now find a way to find its own strong position quickly enough against its new opponents – the USA under Musk/Trump, China under Xi Jinping, Russia under Putin – does not seem certain, to say the least.
Whether digitalization can unfold its positive potential, some of which I confidently listed at the end of my book, is by no means a foregone conclusion. Perhaps at some point, but not if the oligarchs are successful in freeing their power from the few shackles that have been placed on them here in Europe.
I don’t want to ignore one ray of hope, which also has to do with digitalization: For a few years now, German industry has been in the process of making open Linux the standard operating system for platforms that take industrial automation to a whole new level. As far as I know, these are currently only platforms from German and Austrian providers. 13 are currently represented in my Smart Automation market overview. A very innovative market is developing here that could once again put the industry in German-speaking countries at the forefront of the world. Also as a counterweight to the hyperscalers.