An excellent summary, Peter. As to why these socio-economic paradigm shifts approximately coincide with fin de siecles may be accidental, but they are undeniable. They also coincide with every second Kondratiev cycle- more analysis needed as to why.

As with all paradigm shifts, as Kuhn noted, there is considerable resistance to change from those who have gained power in the old paradigm. Indeed, after denial,their second reaction is to try to appropriate the basic mechanisms of the new paradigm to shore up the old- giving rise to "neo-"periods- the most recent being "neo-con", or more correctly "neo-Fordist"- where the new information technologies have been used to "improve" the carbon-based society (eg the amount of IT in our cars) and its corresponding hierarchical institutions (eg IT in money management and IT and "The Media"). These efforts are invariably doomed because of their inflexibility, but cause a lot of misery as they play out.

The challenge is to find ways to grow the fledgling new systems so that they can express their democratic potential. The Fordist paradigm needed hierarchies because of the limited number of educated people and the limits of its knowledge distribution systems. These are no longer limitations, but there is still a great gap between ideas in the blogosphere and action in the sphere of everyday matters.

Thus, we can hardly expect the Fordist media (including the ABC) to voluntarily change to embrace networked democratic complexity. As always, we are faced with the dilemma of change through "evolution or revolution". History suggests that decay is more likely, with the new paradigm arising in a new location- maybe China and/or India?

I reckon we'll need to shift to city states to get over the hump.
There are simply too many parasitical forces to start the new economy on the rotting remains of the old.
By treating the overheads (energy, comms, transport) as infrastructure, the city can treat everything else as business and out-compete anyone who is still mucking about competing at sub-infrastructure businesses (ie. profiting from infrastructure).
Singapore is a good example of what can be done in a city that can start (relatively) fresh.
For now we need to stop wasting human capital. Most IT jobs are about *creating* work. Frankly, so long as most work is daycare for adults we are not going anywhere.

“The new century is upon us, and like it not we are in for radical change. If we are smart we can see off the threats and build a better world. If not, it will be a time of great trial, and perhaps the last gasp of the civilisation that got going some one hundred centuries ago”

True enough, but how much is new? We have been re-adjusting the furniture on the planet continuously for, particularly, those ten millennia. Landscape amendment and throwing our rubbish around and into the oceans and atmosphere has been our thing.

We are just another part of, another cog in, the machinery of the earth’s ever-changing overall ecology; as is the situation for rabbits, forests, fungi, bacteria, viruses, algae.

No matter what we do, we can’t prevent ecological change. There is no ideal stasis to which we can adjust and then adhere. We are condemned to live with change.

So, get over it? – if only we could, after 330 of our human generations prodding the change along. If only the last 6 of them had not got out the whip. Now we are comfortably beyond the horse-and-buggy, and are accustomed to the wind of change in our hair – like a dog in the back of a ute.

If we don’t have the nouse to stop accelerating change, remove the digit – technological or otherwise, and quickly - our species, sapiens, will depart and leave the genus Homo bereft. We already have the power of knowledge. It is idle. We need to plug it in and unplug political and social will from power presently generated from perpetual-motion machines and the air-lifts of cargo cult mentality. Our cerebral processes have been sub-prime in relation to the reality of ecology of the planet.