It's not about being stable but the pressure on everyone to keep the fully connected network stable that matters. Wrote up a longer comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271594
What you seem to be describing is geopolitics. Honestly, not much has ever really changed.
I mean if I were to give a metaphor for how I see geopolitics has changed in the last 150 years I would say:
Imagine we are a group of kids going on a camp. First there is the argument over whether we should go on a camp at all. Next is the argument over where we should go. The last thousand years equates to fighting all the way there in the car. WWI and WWII were arguing over who got which bed after we arrived in the room. The first night came and went and followed by the first full day of camp. The first day of camp was going fine until it wasn't. That was brexit + Trump. A minor hiccup here and there but everyone lives in such close quarters at the moment we are all starting to get on each other's nerves. But mum and dad (The UN) tell us not to fight. One could break out but we try to keep the peace otherwise we know it's going to be miserable for everyone. Full scale warfare is a food fight away.
Human nature never changes but scale which it was never designed for tends to expose the very rough edges.
I am going to remember your going camping metaphor :) Minus mum and dad. This is the period where everyone figures out how to get along. Fingers crossed!
Sadly I think we hit peak getting along about 2 years back.
As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm. If you think about even the difficulty of maintaining stable relationships with the handful of people you know it's actually really damn challenging. Occasionally you have fights and disagreements and sometimes you think fuck it I just can't deal with you anymore or right now. If it's like that for everyone on Earth in their personal lives then that's what Earth is going to be like in aggregate roughly speaking.
I don't mean to be a downer about it. I just think we have a very rosy view of "the world gets better and progress gets made and that's the natural state of things". I've come to realize that that doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when you look at the history of the world over the last 12 to 13 thousand years.
As it stands this is mostly a happy accident. Scariest thing is it can all go back the other way.
This is true in the sense that there is no nice safe straight path up a hard to climb mountain.
There are going to be ups and downs. And yes we are fucking things up right now, because exploiting each other is easier than helping each other climb. But its all part of learning. The more we fuck up the more we learn how not to fuck up. And have learnt a lot. About human behavior thanks to trump and brexit. If tech and psychology can mislead entire populations by pushing a couple buttons, it can also do the opposite. Those buttons are being cooked up as we speak.
I don't think we are going to have any more great world wars (people around the world aren't as desperate to enroll in the military as they once were for employment) but we are going to have huge shocks to the system that will force us each time to learn from our fuck ups. It's not going to be a nice pleasant stroll up the mountain. But human nature is to climb nonetheless.
What you seem to be describing is geopolitics. Honestly, not much has ever really changed.
I mean if I were to give a metaphor for how I see geopolitics has changed in the last 150 years I would say:
Imagine we are a group of kids going on a camp. First there is the argument over whether we should go on a camp at all. Next is the argument over where we should go. The last thousand years equates to fighting all the way there in the car. WWI and WWII were arguing over who got which bed after we arrived in the room. The first night came and went and followed by the first full day of camp. The first day of camp was going fine until it wasn't. That was brexit + Trump. A minor hiccup here and there but everyone lives in such close quarters at the moment we are all starting to get on each other's nerves. But mum and dad (The UN) tell us not to fight. One could break out but we try to keep the peace otherwise we know it's going to be miserable for everyone. Full scale warfare is a food fight away.
Human nature never changes but scale which it was never designed for tends to expose the very rough edges.