An authoritarian resurgence may just be signalling the end of a technology cycle

On an unrecorded day in 1938 a Soviet economist was sentenced by his government to life imprisonment in an old monastery town east of Moscow. But in this case the condemned didn’t end up serving much of his sentence because on the same day of the ruling, Nikolai Kondratiev was taken to a park on the outskirts of the city, and executed by firing squad.