At the end of 2024, I asked a some friends and colleagues a question: "Which topic do you think is the most important to write about next year?" and got some very diverse answers. A friend who is a designer and visual artist suggested to make people aware that no piece of information is neutral. A colleague reflected on the power Musk and his army of satellites. And another friend simply said: "Nothing. I can't do anything with the news." 

The conversations were so interensting that I decided to scale it up. At the end of November I tossed a survey into my network and let it cook there for a couple of weeks. This resulted in a fresh batch of 31 answers to ponder.

Some topics made an expected appearance. Climate, for instance, was mentioned 11 times accross all the answers. However many responses surprised me. And so I have found myself diving into democracy metrics, world population predictions, duck curves and dark data.

While putting all the answers together to share with you, it started turning into a bit of a mammoth piece. So, I decided to split it into multiple parts. In the upcoming weeks I will write multiple posts. In each of them I will unpack several of the responses, divided into categories (more on those below).

In this first part, I will discuss the (simple) analysis I used to organize the responses and share the first, albeit unsurprising, category: world order.

Analysis

While the survey was open, I considered using some of the modern and hyped ways to analyse and visualise the data. Should I use an LLM? While browsing the Hugging Face models, I realized that my data were actually little stories, rather than numbers. And that to make sense of these stories, it was better to approach them with attention and understanding. So, I closed the browser tab full of models and opened the spreadsheet with the responses. Then I spent a few hours — and then a few more — studying them.

Even if not using any fancy statstics, I wanted to introduce some structure. My beautiful organic brain proved to be the perfect tool for this. First I wrote down a few keywords for each response. Then, I looked for overlaps and recurring themes within these keywords and distilled them into broader categories. In practice, I added two columns next to the responses, which looked something like this:

The categories that came up in the end were 🥁: climate & energy, world order, conflict, information, oneness, demographics, housing, human rights, journalism, and trust. Naturally, there is some overlap between them, but I did my best to extract the most prominent theme from each response to highlight larger trends.

Below you will find the responses from the first prominent category: world order. The answers are provided in full, lightly edited, and include some of my own reflections, data and other resources. Enjoy!

World order

The responses in this category focus on the shifting political climate. They highlight concerns abocut the rise of populist leaders, far-right sentiments, and the changing role of the U.S. They question the direction modern democracies are heading.

This observation is simple and straightforward and has some interesting implications. For example, after the Austrian government recently failed to form a coalition, Reuters noted a "growing difficulty of forming stable governments in European countries [...] where the far right is on the rise but many parties are loath to partner with them."

I wanted to verify this claim, but the most recent data analysis I found was from 2015. In the process, I came across wondeful data from ParlGov, though they unfortunately don't seem to offer an easy way to calculate how long coalition formations take.

Curious about how democracy is measured, I fired up Ecosia search and found an impressive overview of the eight leading indexes to measure democracy by Our World in Data. Spending some time exploring their interactive visualisations I began to see that there just might be something to it. See below the Varieties of democracy index for the Netherlands. Similarly, their recent report is not very uplifting: "Almost all components of democracy are getting worse in more countries than they are getting  better, compared to ten years ago."

This response, as I interpret it, suggests focusing on totalitarian trends in Europe to clear the way for discussions about truly pressing issues.

Three other responses focused on the situation in the US, with Trump and Musk at the wheel.

('Broing away' is now my new favorite verb!) On a serious note, what fascinates me most about the U.S. situation is how the ultra-rich are taking over politics. Although this is nothing new.

Chrystia Freeland (then a journalist, now Canada’s former finance minister) wrote a book about rising plutocracy already in 2012: "As the people at the very top become ever richer, they have an ever greater ability to tilt the rules of the game in their favor. That power can be hard to resist." And the trend is not going away either. According to data from Altrata, the population of billionaires in the US went up by nearly 10% (1,111 people) in 2023. Both US and Europe hold 1/3 of worlds billionaires.

Recently I came across a fascinating essay in the MacGuffin magazine. Here, the author reflects on the world perception of the ultra-rich: "My main observation is that for individuals born into extreme wealth, it is almost impossible to grasp anything about material or social reality." He continues: "To inherit a condition of unjustifiable wealth means to never experience cause and effect. All external pressures are alleviated by capital: there are no consequences to missing a deadline, to not finishing a project, to dropping out or giving up. It is terrifically difficult to fail, in any normal sense." Trump and Musk are both second generation ultra-rich. I recommend to read the whole essay. It's terrifying. Let's just hope it's not such a match made in heaven.

The final answer in this category suggests something intriguing: we are doing something right here. 

What exactly is it, and how can we preserve it amidst a shifting world order?

In the next part we will explore topics around climate and conflict. This post came out on my blog as well. If you like this story, please share it with somebody who might like it too!