# Tim O'Reilly - Welcome to the 21st Century (Highlights)  ## Metadata **Cover**:: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/welcome-to-the/9781492089247/ibis_generated_cover_thumbnail.jpg **Source**:: #from/readwise **Zettel**:: #zettel/fleeting **Status**:: #x **Authors**:: [[Tim O'Reilly]] **Full Title**:: Welcome to the 21st Century **Category**:: #books #readwise/books **Category Icon**:: 📚 **Highlighted**:: [[2021-02-06]] **Created**:: [[2022-09-26]] ## Highlights ### 1. Welcome to the 21st Century - The 20th century didn’t really begin in the year 1900, it began in 1914, when the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand triggered long-simmering international tensions and the world slid, seemingly inexorably, into a great world war, followed by a roaring return to seeming normality and then a crash into a decade-long worldwide depression and another catastrophic war. Empires were dissolved, an entire way of life swept away. A new, more prosperous world emerged only through the process of rebuilding a society that had been torn down to its foundations. So too, when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. We are entering the century of being blindsided by things that we have been warned about for decades but never took seriously enough to prepare for, the century of lurching from crisis to crisis until, at last, we shake ourselves from the illusion that our world will go back to the comfortable way it was and begin the process of rebuilding our society from the ground up. - The choices our societies make now can have an enormous impact on the course of the next few decades.