The world is making progress – but towards what?

The latest elections in Russia, Egypt and other places have again exposed our brave new world for what it is: a plethora of unsavoury, ruthless and accountable-to-nobody despots who rule medieval-style with unprecedented impunity. Consider Russian tsar Vladimir Putin, who would not look out of place in the Soviet Union of the 1950s. Witness Egypt’s incredible metamorphosis from one dictator (Mubarak) to another (el-Sisi), with a tinge of the now long-forgotten Arab Spring thrown in between, while Egyptians are worse off than ever. (Hint: there is an acute shortage of sugar.) 
One cannot omit from this dubious list Turkey’s latter-day sultan, Erdogan, who feels he can send his army into Iraq and Syria with zero consequences. 
The Filipino strongman Duterte is no doubt one of our century’s weirdest phenomena, with his extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers and users. Syrian tyrant Assad is rising from the ashes and his rule of mass murder is proving successful in bringing him back to power – if only he still had a country to rule. (He can thank the Russian army.) Others who are worthy of this list are China’s Xi, North Korean deity Kim Jong-un, Venezuela’s inept dictator Maduro and the Iranian theocracy’s Khamenei. In all of these countries, in our time and age, the wrong word can land you in jail, a gesture of opposition can easily cost you your life, and the rule of law is on paper only. 
To come full circle: all of these contemporary despots use the very social media which we take for granted in the West to exert their control over their hapless subjects. If anything, the 21st century is full of ominous harbingers for the future of (some) of humanity. This can be said even before one mentions Islamic terror or the horrendous consequences of climate change. Folks, have fun while you can.
Andy Leitner