In 1999 this had already happened, just the information about that explosion hadn’t reached your part of the galaxy yet. Metaphorically.

I’m thinking about at least Russia (Putin taking power and the second Chechen War), Israel (repatriation and its political turn and its choice of allies in the changed world, Likud taking power), Armenia (Kocharyan taking power, Sargsyan and Demirchyan being assassinated) and Azerbaijan (starting to boycott negotiations and build up oil industry since that time) having made a clear direction change.

These may not be obviously connected to other things we see, but I think they are part of the same tendency. I think at the same time Microsoft got an anti-monopoly decision saying that documenting Windows interfaces its bundled application use for independent developers is sufficient for it to not be a monopolist, and Netscape died, and dotcoms crashed, and Linux attained the love of corporations, albeit not so notable yet, while FreeBSD didn’t, and Amiga started dying, and DEC, and Sun received a hit, and one can notice many other things.

By the way, it’s the favorite thing to say for journalists mentioning it that The Phantom Menace was a bad movie and hated by fans, and Attack of the Clones an even worse one, and Revenge of the Sith kinda better. But these were all political statements (I’m not imagining it because Lucas said that himself many times), and when we treat them as such, they were very good as that - the predictions came out to be correct.

OK, I might just love Star Wars too much.

What an infodump.

I mean, yes, obviously I agree with Agent Smith on that part.