Young people, as a rule of thumb, engage in some serious eye-rolling when older generations/annoying parents talk about what it was like “when I was your age”. Yeah yeah yeah, we’ve heard it all before. You played outside all day and no one kidnapped you. You watched and apparently enjoyed something called Bugs Bunny. OK Boomer.
Don’t be hard on them. It’s just the wheel of life. That’s what I did when I was a kid too. Well, maybe a bit of an eye roll but nothing more because slaps on the head were considered good parenting. But I do recognize that look whenever I launch into a soliloquy about olden-days hardships.
It’s what we do as we age, as we toss the torch to the younger generation and pick up a pickleball racket and then complain about our knees. Or much much worse.
But I’m going to do it anyway; just asking for a little patience from the millennials. It’s worth the effort to go back in time and examine the trajectory of data.
Young people know all about data, it is their entire life, but I think lose scope of what it takes to make it all happen, and the sheer quantity of it.
Think back a few hundred years and all data was either in people’s minds (and subject to all the impurities up there) or written on paper, and not all that many people could actually read and write. Books were treasured items, and often all we know (or think we know) about old information comes from those. I remember doing a project in middle school about Bolivia. All I could ever know about Bolivia without visiting was found in the encyclopedia, a four-foot-wide swath of books that, at the time, provided everything there was to know about the world. Bolivia to me, after that project, was nothing more than a handful of statistics about how many people, what they grew, and about three pictures that carved forever in my memory the following truth: I will never visit Bolivia.
We don’t have to visit every point along the road to see where we are now. The amount of data at our fingertips is incalculable. Today, I can go on Google Maps and get a street view of the local market at Mercado 16 De Julio, Yotau, Bolivia, and see that it has a rating of 4.1/5 with 30 reviews. And I can discover another truth: I will never visit Yotau.
You would think with all that data, or actually not just data but information, that we would be acutely aware of life and challenges around the globe. Even if one chooses not to go to Mercado 16 De Julio in person, we can, with a few clicks, have an actual look, and see what earns a 4.1/5 rating in other parts of the world (Spoiler alert: It’s not much).
This is the part of the data story that it would be great to focus on a bit more. It’s no TikTok, but it’s a big world out there, and it is worth utilizing the endless resources at our fingertips to see that which is not presented to us daily.
It turns out that our endless wealth and consumer products and entertainment complex make us turn ever more inward, looking out only if something is to be mocked or if it has some oddly beautiful scenery. Mea culpa, even; I don’t know a single thing about Yotau except those few pictures. And we tend not to care about any of it unless planning a holiday there, because we’re so wrapped up in a thick soup of cultural flotsam.
Just so you know: The Bolivian economy is ranked 93rd in the world GDP wise (Worldometer), and second poorest in South America. No surprise I guess that the local supermarket is no Walmart (I’m not sure if that is a backhanded compliment or insult…). But watch closely what’s happening here. While we may assume such places would be exactly us if they could afford it, that is not necessarily the reality. It will surprise many to find that such nations sometimes look specifically towards that which is not us.
Bolivia is growing rapidly, and it wants to join…BRICS, the affiliation of nations looking to form a future somewhat independent of the west. India, a prominent member, puts it well, describing BRICS as not ‘anti-western’ but ‘non-western’.
BRICS gets little interest in western media; it seems to be largely a curiosity that has at its core several countries that the west wants to diminish however it can (Russia and China). There are many reasons for wanting to sideline particularly Russia, but that is a discussion for a whole other group of people. Suffice it to say that India’s Prime Minister put out a press release announcing his trip to the current BRICS Summit, saying, “Building upon the Annual Summit held in July 2024 in Moscow, my visit to Kazan will further reinforce the Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership between India and Russia.”
In the west, voicing outright hatred of Putin is the bare minimum. I’m not saying what he is doing to Ukraine is right; I’m saying that most of the world’s population is focused on other things and no longer plays the game that we think still dominates the world.
The point here is that BRICS exists, it is growing, and it is, whether we like it or not, controlling the very cornerstones of western development policy. Take batteries, for example, a product that western governments see as the missing link in renewable energy and EV dreams that they will not be swayed from.
Per the excellent Visual Capitalist website, Chinese companies currently dominate global battery capacity, and by 2030 are expected to account for nearly 70 percent of capacity. On top of that, China dominates processing capability of may minerals required for battery manufacturing (cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel).
Yet the west has chosen a development path built around reducing emissions towards net zero 2050 targets, is strangling energy reliability and supply, and attempting to build the very finished-product items that China now dominates in and controls the raw materials for (batteries, and see Canada’s wildly expensive commitment to try to outdo the Chinese at a game that they own from one end to the other).
BRICS most definitely understands energy though. That’s what happens when life is lived close to the edge, without vast widespread wealth that allows people to forget about where everything comes from (compare the 4.1/5 market at Merced 16 De Julio with pretty much any grocery store in North America).
Maybe the youth of today are not as out of touch as we think; maybe their TikTok-fuelled cynicism is a reflection of a dissatisfaction with the way many of our institutions are behaving that the Bolivians see as well. Maybe it’s the middle generations that are confused via having lived a life of global dominance whereby everyone sought to emulate the west, the west controlled everything, and most economic/political power was centred in the west. Winning the Cold War decisively will do that to the ego.
At the same time, we’ve spent decades now of having absolutely everything we want available whenever we want, in copious quantities and at reasonable prices (Covid-era toilet paper notwithstanding).
As a hangover from Covid, we also saw what happens when we run short of certain types of computer chips – brand new Ford half ton trucks, worth $80,000 apiece, sitting in storage yards unable to get to customers while waiting for single, tiny chips that controlled some singular aspect of operation (and some of those chips’ functions were not even critical, some related to interior controls, infotainment systems, etc.).
It seems that it is a human tendency to take things for granted, and there’s no reason to think we won’t think of fresh bananas in the store any differently, or heated buildings, or electricity in the wall socket, or new tires, or Advil… It’s all just always there.
The BRICS crowd doesn’t think that way. Their people by and large are accustomed to living without and they don’t want to do that anymore.
They value things like electricity and fuel and refrigerators, and there are many billions of them, and they are forming their own associations to deal with other nations that have a more common view, or at minimum a view different than that of the west. They want the same quality of life as the west, but maybe they don’t want to go through the stage of self-immolation the west is, for example, watching us take a perfectly reliable electrical grid that they would kill for and make it unreliable. On purpose.
On top of that, look at what we consider news: the ludicrous bunfights of politics, what Taylor Swift wears and whether her bum is unacceptably flat (I kid you not, such world-class pondering sprang forth from analysis of photos of her mega-tour)…we don’t really take seriously what the rest of the world is up to unless it impacts us directly.
I Google-searched BRICS the other day to see what the west was saying about the group; there recently has been a major BRICS summit where, among other things, discussions included how another 30 nations want to join and not only hang out with western pariahs like Russia but trade with them.
The Google search brought up the west’s view of what was relevant at BRICS. Google’s Top Stories did mention BRICS, Reuters and The Guardian, but coverage focused on the fact that Brazil’s Lula cancelled his BRICS trip after a minor brain hemorrhage from a fall. Not a word about substance. The first few pages of Google’s results yielded almost no information at all about the summit or its outcomes, only a single CNBC story paid any attention to what happened at the summit. By contrast, utterly relevant and meaningful coverage was provided by independent analysts such as the excellent Velina Tchakarova on X, who provided significant depth and insight into, of all things, Putin’s meeting with media representatives (“Putin underscored the uniqueness and depth of Russia’s relationship with China, describing it as “very trusting.” He stressed that the ties between the two countries are built on mutual respect and equality, without any sense of hierarchy..” Whatever you think of Putin and/or China, it remains a fact that this relationship is undermining everything the west is doing in its attempts to combat both Chinese and Russian strategies, and it is also of major significance that so many of the world’s countries are saying “We’ll go with those guys.”)
Javier Blas notes the “Kafkaesque interdependence” between Europe and Russia in a Bloomberg article saying it “Must rank among the most preposterous examples of realpolitik.” Europe continues to rely on Russian natural gas despite doing everything it’s power to fight Russia, and that gas reliance has actually increased since the start of the Ukraine war. He notes with incredulity how, in the middle of the war, Ukraine sends Russia an invoice for the gas that passes through Ukraine, and Russia duly pays it.
And we wonder why BRICS is on the ascendancy.
The kids aren’t all right, we like to say, they’re all warped after spending their entire lives on their electronic devices. The middle-aged citizens making this claim don’t seem to realize that they’re exactly the same (when Calgary’s commuter train extended west some 12-15 years ago, I remember being amazed at how many people were doing nothing but staring at their devices. It was then about one in four people, and I couldn’t believe it. Today it is about 19 out of 20 looking at devices. The train could glide past a stegosaurus and no one would have a clue. Probably myself included. The difference is that I don’t think kids are all that f*cked up. I think they are doing at least as well mentally as the ‘leaders’ currently seeking to run the most powerful nation on earth.). Maybe those kids can read as well as I can, and are questioning whether there are any adults in charge at all.
Some worthwhile homework for all: Find corners of the media that tell you about what’s happening in the world. We’re sleepwalking into something big, still imagining that the world hangs on our every utterance and social trend.
They can see us too, these days. It’s not the rich people observing the poor as though they were in a zoo. Just as we can see Yotau, they too can see downtown San Francisco or Vancouver. Maybe if we offered the average rural Bolivian a chance to visit either, after having scanned street view for a few minutes, they would say, “You know what, I’ll stick with Yotau.”
Five years old, and the future painted within is turning out pretty much exactly as expected (ok, I missed the nuclear renaissance, sue me). Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, where energy is actually entertaining. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.