I haven’t fully read this article myself yet, however, if you look at Carlota Perez similar take, that one is based on the Kondratieff’s waves which have a 60-70 year regularity … each ending with big systemic shocks, 1873, 1929, 2008 … it seems researchers have traced them back to even precapitalist times ….

When I considered these matters in my magnus opus, I did dip into history, but only to support what I had observed about current trends. I saw this period we are living in as being rather unusual because of the concurrence of various cycles, much like the unusual solar event where the planets line up. That is, there are cycles in psycho-social dynamics at different levels of scale, such as one might find in the sea, from tidal surges, oceanic waves, surface waves, ripples, and then they converge with a kind of constructive interference, peaks occur. I was heavily influenced by DeLanda’s “Thousand years of non linear history”, which took me a decade to slowly assimilate.

Essentially, if we are going to talk about waves, then please let’s be more sophisticated. If we wish to relegate it to a “mere metaphor”, then we are denying the deeper metaphoric insights gleaned from comprehending that psycho-social dynamics are more akin to liquid dynamics than they are to solid things, which lends itself to clunky interpretations of cause and effect, and bias to institutional forms and concrete physical inventions. I would be interested in reading material from an academic level comprehension (as compared to my simplistic intuitive formulations), who has managed to ditch the standard “objective science” methodology (ala archaeology based on things, and a historical perspective too biased towards a linear accounting), to a more “subjective science” methodology (synthesising moments in past psycho-social contexts, and being careful to retrospect on history aware of a continguous theory of mind and insight into the present condition).

But I may remain waiting for a while…