The decade we are actually living in

Every decade gets misnamed by the one that comes after it.

The 1990s were named, in retrospect, for an illusion: the end of history, the settled order, the liberal consensus. The people who lived through them knew it was more complicated. But the complications did not become the name until later, when the things that contradicted the illusion had already happened and could no longer be argued with.

The naming always lags, and the lag is not an accident. A decade's name is settled by the events that made the name unavoidable, and those events are usually the arrival of pressures that were visible, to anyone reading the structure, long before. The people living through a decade have the best evidence and the worst vantage.

I believe we are living through a misnamed decade right now, and I want to make the argument for its real name while it can still be argued with.

The names in circulation

The candidate names currently on offer are descriptions of symptoms. Fragmentation. Disorder. The new cold war. The polycrisis, a word I dislike precisely because it concedes defeat: it says there are many crises and gives up on finding the connection between them. Each of these names is accurate at the level of the event. None of them names the structure that is producing the events.

The structural shifts

Three shifts, in my reading, will do the naming.

The first is the distribution of power. The system that managed the movement of power for most of the last century had, whatever its stated ideals, a recognisable centre and a set of institutions for coordinating around it. Weight is now distributed in a way those institutions were not built to handle. This is not a development inside the old arrangement. It is the end of the arrangement, moving slowly enough to look like a development.

The second is the institutions themselves. The bodies that once managed the movement of power were built for a world with one heavy centre and many lighter ones. They are being asked to operate in a world of several heavy centres, and they show the strain the way institutions always show strain: not by failing loudly, but by quietly ceasing to do the thing they were built for while continuing to hold meetings.

The third is the gap between economic weight and political authority. These two moved together for so long that treating them as one thing became an analytical habit. They have come apart. There are economies whose weight the world must account for and whose authority the old system cannot formally allocate, and there are authorities whose formal standing is much larger than what they can actually move. A system in which weight and authority no longer match has a permanent source of pressure built into it. That pressure does not resolve. It accumulates.

These are not developments. They are conclusions. Developments can be reversed by the next news cycle. Conclusions can only be managed, and managed pressures, as I have argued elsewhere on this blog, accumulate until the system tips.

What the decade will be called

My argument is this. The name this decade eventually carries will be about dispersal. Authority, which had been concentrated for long enough that concentration looked like the natural shape of the world, dispersed. Not evenly, not cleanly, and not into anything you could call an order yet. Into a set of overlapping partial systems, each heavy enough to matter and none heavy enough to settle anything.

When the name is settled, I expect it to be the decade of dispersal, or whatever phrase says the same thing in that decade's language. Names are settled by what became unavoidable, and what is already becoming unavoidable is that power stopped being a single system.

I am aware this is a bold claim. The usual defence would be to load the argument with instances, and I have deliberately not done that, because instances date. Structural argument does not. The three shifts above can be tested against any serious account of the period, and that test is the argument.

Why the name matters

Naming is not decoration. The name you give the decade determines which pressures you watch and which you dismiss, and the whole difference between reading the froth and reading the map is knowing which pressures are load-bearing. If this is the decade of dispersal, then the developments that matter are the ones that move weight and authority further apart, or bind them back together. Everything else is weather.

Decades are named in retrospect because naming in retrospect is safe. This piece is my argument that it can be done early, and an account of what I think the name will be. Future readers will know whether the method holds. Present readers are welcome to hold me to it.