Just like a new medium, the web 2.0 with Twitter and social media, led to a change in how people formed connections, and the Arab spring around 2010, the global spring spanned roughly the years between 2012 and 2018, with Time magazine naming Anonymous one of the "100 most influential people" in the world in 2012, Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden using the web to enforce openness and transparency onto nation-states, and blockchain technology being deployed which as a social consensus mechanism competed with the dominant mechanism, a monopoly on violence. The Ethereum project in 2014, a "technology of trust".

The rise of the network society

Manuel Castells ended The rise of the network society from 1996 with "we may not like what we find", that as society gets increasingly connected, it also forces people to look at themselves through the eyes of people all over the world, the War on Terror, War on Drugs, a global consciousness.