It is challenging to talk about a single truth at a single place or time.
I think we developers are lucky these days of being able to observe what is coming in world politics / world order from what is going on today in our area of expertise.
For example, lately US elections were won by using each time a novel technique from IT. Obama won by mobilising via social networks, Trump won by abusing social networks. Consequently the Obama era in tech was about the mobile, the Trump era in tech is about privacy / security and their abuse.
Tech drives our life and our entire specie.
I remember one year ago I was talking with friends ― one lawyer, one artist ― about what is going on in tech and I’ve said we see a total fragmentation.
In the previous era you’ve needed a few strong technologies to build a site ― a concept (REST), a framework (Ruby on Rails), a database (MongoDB) and a host (Heroku) ― now we build sites using tens of thousands of Node / Javascript / API-based components and microservices coming from, and deployed to different hosts (CDNs, repositories, web-, application-, integration-, test-servers, etc.).
This fragmentation introduces a new level of chaos. If one of the thousands building components is compromised or hijacked the whole result can be altered.
Or, as Stanislaw Lem explained, in the age of chaos impossible things happen on regular basis. He said, take the 100 best shooters and increase the distance of the targets with a few meters; none of them will shoot a target. Now take 1000 random people, give them the guns, make them shoot, and a target will be shoot.
Now let’s read again Pat Helland’s Consistently Eventual article in ACM Queue, and try to put in non-IT but global context the gems like:
You can’t really know what happened until you’ve heard everything.