If You Could See 1914 Coming, What Would You Owe the World?

The case for epistemic responsibility in an age of radical transformation

Imagine standing in the year 1914 with the ability to look five years into the future.

You would see a world war that kills twenty million people. And attached to it, almost inevitably, a second war that kills sixty million more. You would see the end of empires, the dissolution of the Kaiserreich, the entire European order buckling and collapsing under its own weight.

Now ask yourself: what obligations would that foreknowledge create?

This is not a hypothetical about time travel. It’s a question about the ethics of clear-eyed thinking — about what we owe each other when we can see what’s coming, and what it means to stay silent.

The Problem with How We Think About the Future

Most of what passes for “thinking about the future” in public discourse is noise dressed up as signal.

Consider the 24-hour news cycle. Every day brings a fresh outrage, a new scandal, a politician’s statement that seems to demand our immediate attention. And yet, if you apply even a modest filter — asking whether a given story will still matter in two years — almost everything disappears. What remains are the few things that are actually structural, actually fundamental, actually capable of reshaping the world we live in.

The noise isn’t just unimportant. It’s actively obscuring the signal.

This isn’t a problem unique to any particular country or media ecosystem. German media, Ghanaian media, Indonesian media — the same dynamic plays out everywhere. The architecture of attention is designed to surface what’s urgent, not what’s important. And urgency and importance are frequently opposites.

The Historian’s Vantage Point

What would they consider significant? What would they see as the forces that actually shaped the twenty-first century, as opposed to the events that merely dominated the headlines?

From that vantage point, a lot of what we argue about today will seem as irrelevant as the court gossip of 1910 seems to us now. And a few things — probably things we’re currently underestimating — will look enormous.

The question is whether we can train ourselves to see with that historian’s eye *now*, while we still have room to act.

What Norbert Elias Noticed in 1968

The sociologist Norbert Elias published his great work on the civilizing process in the late 1930s. It went largely unnoticed until it was rediscovered in the late 1960s, when it was republished with a new preface — itself a remarkable piece of writing.

In that preface, Elias noticed something troubling about the sociology of his time. The discipline had shifted from describing historical development — the emergence of social structures across centuries — to producing what he called temporal snapshots. Milieu studies. Frozen cross-sections of the present.

He used the image of an arrow in flight. You cannot understand an arrow by describing it hanging motionless in the air. You have to know where it was fired from, what direction it’s traveling, and where it’s going to land.

But sociology, Elias argued, had lost the language to describe arrows in motion. And he traced this back to something like a class-based interest in forgetting: the bourgeoisie, having defeated the aristocracy toward the end of the nineteenth century, had reason to deny its own historical genesis. If you acknowledge that your current order emerged under specific conditions, you implicitly acknowledge that it might, someday, give way to something else. Better to treat the present arrangement as eternal and natural.

The result, by 1968, was a sociology that refused to talk about the past because it didn’t want to talk about the future.

Two Quotations That Change Everything

In the 1980s in Marburg, Germany, a man named Wau Holland was doing something that looked, on the surface, like hacking computers. What he was actually doing was philosophy — radical philosophy about what it means to crack open a society.

He co-founded the Chaos Computer Club and made two remarks that seem, from today’s vantage point, almost prophetic.

The first: in 1981, Holland said, the founders of the CCC were genuinely afraid that computers might be banned. They understood these devices to be so radical — so structurally disruptive — that a state shouldn’t really be able to permit them. (The only reason personal computers were allowed, Holland suspected, was that banks needed Excel to make money on financial markets.)

The second: What is it to crack open a computer, compared to cracking open a society?

He wasn’t talking about technology. He was talking about the fundamental reshaping of social fabric. And he was saying it in 1981.

The Migration No One Wants to Discuss

Here’s a framing that computer scientists will recognize immediately.

Call today’s social order System A. Call whatever emerges from the digitalization process System B. The question everyone focuses on is: what does System B look like? Is it fair? Does it increase human flourishing? Does it distribute power well?

These are important questions. But they’re not the hardest question.

The hardest question is the migration itself.

In networking, we have IPv4 and IPv6. The IPv6 protocol isn’t particularly complicated — you could explain it to a secondary school student. What remains deeply unsolved, decades after the protocol was standardized, is the actual rollout across thousands of heterogeneous systems in the real world. Migration from System A to System B is almost always harder than designing System B.

The same principle applies to social transformation. The birth of the modern nation-state — the territorial state, standing armies, modern finance, bureaucracy, the welfare state — all of this emerged in the nineteenth century, and it emerged through enormous violence. Two world wars were not accidents. They were, in a grim sense, part of the migration cost.

We are not obligated to repeat that cost.

But we will, if we don’t think carefully about the transition itself — not just the destination.

Action Spaces and Problem Spaces

The philosopher Paul Virilio, who lived through the destruction of his hometown in the Second World War, developed a useful principle: whoever invents the airplane also invents the plane crash.

Every innovation expands your space of possible actions. But it expands your space of possible problems right along with it. You gain capabilities you didn’t have before, and simultaneously you acquire vulnerabilities you didn’t have before.

Against this, the poet Hölderlin: But where danger is, there grows what saves as well.

Both are true. But they’re not symmetric, and they’re not linearly coupled. The problem space doesn’t expand at twice the rate when you double the action space. Both evolve according to their own dynamics, and it’s in the differential between them — in that gap — that human agency actually operates.

The problem spaces will develop on their own. We don’t need to worry about that. The action spaces open on their own too, but it falls to us to decide whether we use them. In a digital century, we have to decide whether we’ll fight newly emerged digital problems with analog tools, or whether we’ll act digitally.

The Epistemic Responsibility We’d Rather Avoid

Return to 1914.

If you could see what was coming — not perfectly, not in detail, but in broad structure — what would that create? What would it demand of you?

The answer seems clear. It would create an obligation to say something. To act somehow. To steer, however modestly, toward the less catastrophic path.

This is what I mean by epistemic responsibility. The capacity for anticipation isn’t just an intellectual achievement. It’s a moral one. If you can see what’s coming, you are no longer a bystander. You are an agent.

And the corollary follows: anyone who can see what’s coming and stays silent is complicit.

That’s not a comfortable thought. It’s not meant to be.

Alex Markowetz hosts The Gesamtschau, a podcast on digital transformation and societal change. This essay is adapted from the first episode.