Folds of History

This essay wagers that reading some of the great ruptures of the twentieth century together may help illuminate those of our own time, in a register the daily news rarely reaches.

It grows from an old intuition of mine: that history sometimes folds in on itself, producing moments when different spheres of life seem to bend at once and open passage to another world. I take the liberty of bringing Lenin close to Schoenberg, Einstein to Mondrian, and, later on, CRISPR to artificial intelligence and Big Tech to new forms of barbarian invasions.

My second wager is that, while the changes now underway unfold, collective will may still find some margin of maneuver among us. 

This is not exactly a sunny essay. But it may help explore why our time combines technological vertigo, political regression, and the loss of common ground–and whether there is still something to be done. 

AN OLD INTUITION

There was a moment, during my university years, when I realized that four great ruptures had altered, almost simultaneously, humanity’s relationship to the world. Concentrated in the opening decades of the twentieth century, they seemed to strike at the very foundations of human existence.

Taken together, these revolutions–in politics, science, and the arts–formed one of the densest moments in modern history. In less than two decades, socialism, relativity, abstractionism, and atonalism destabilized, each in its own field, reference points once thought immovable.

The Russian Revolution emerged just as Schoenberg was pushing the crisis of tonality to its furthest consequence, opening the way to a kind of egalitarianism among the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Kandinsky and Mondrian broke with figurative representation. Einstein redefined the relationship between time and space, unsettling one of the most stable foundations of human cognition.

Across distinct fronts, organizing references collapsed. Private property, absolute time and space, the figure as the axis of representation, tonal centrality–all ceased to appear natural or necessary.

These transformations were not confined to intellectual life or to the interior of societies: they also helped reshape the geopolitical horizon of the century, unsettling the very foundations on which an international order had been imagined.

That youthful epiphany was perhaps no more than an unformed intuition–but it had the persistence of ideas that stay.

What these ruptures produced, beyond what they promised, and what our own ongoing ruptures may yet leave open, is the subject of this essay.

THE FALL OF ORGANIZING CENTERS

At first glance, the simultaneity of these upheavals might seem accidental. But something more precise was at work: a homology. In every case, an organizing center–regarded as natural, eternal, or indisputable–was called into question.

In politics, that center was private property; in science, absolute time and space; in painting, the figure; in music, tonality. Each field possessed its own silent hierarchy.

Then, almost all at once, the hierarchy gave way. Einstein showed that time was not absolute. Lenin transformed Marx’s critique of property–as a historically constructed privilege, not a natural fact–into revolution. Kandinsky and Mondrian liberated painting from representation. Schoenberg emancipated the twelve notes from tonal gravitation.

They did not need to know one another in order to ask the same radical question within their respective domains: what happens when no element enjoys a natural privilege over the others? What is a composition without a tonic, a society without owners, a conception of time without a universal clock?

The Zeitgeist had a face, and revolutionaries across distinct fields breathed the same air. Nietzsche had proclaimed the death of God; Bergson questioned lived time; Freud revealed the unconscious erupting at the heart of the modern subject. The nineteenth century’s confidence in a rational and stable order was beginning to fracture.

Every revolution collides, sooner or later, with the resistance of reality: entrenched interests, institutional inertia, cognitive limits, unintended consequences. The ruptures of the early twentieth century were no exception.

Socialism and the Problem of Power

The Russian Revolution promised equality and emancipation. Instead, it produced new forms of domination. Constructing a planned economy on a continental scale required increasing centralization; centralization produced bureaucracy; bureaucracy produced opacity; opacity produced repression. What failed was not merely moral virtue, but institutional architecture: transparency, decentralized circulation of information, limits on power. The egalitarian utopia collided with the difficulty of coordinating complex societies without mechanisms capable of processing dispersed knowledge, reading market signals and correcting error.

Physics and the Atomic Age

Modern physics produced a different contradiction. Einstein’s theories transformed humanity’s understanding of the universe while also opening the path to the atomic bomb. The same scientific revolution that shattered old cosmologies produced the most destructive weapon in history. Yet the story did not end there. Quantum mechanics also gave rise, indirectly, to the transistor and the infrastructure of the digital age.

Abstraction and the Reorganization of Perception

Abstractionism transformed not only painting but the built environment itself. The Bauhaus democratized design and reimagined the relationship between art and daily life. But the same rationalist impulse also generated urban environments conceived more for automobiles than for shared human existence. Jane Jacobs later documented how modernist urbanism often destroyed the organic life of neighborhoods in the name of order and efficiency.

Schoenberg and the Loss of the Musical Map

The revolution in music perhaps reveals most clearly the tension between intellectual innovation and human cognition. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system liberated music from tonal hierarchy, but it also dissolved the cognitive map that had structured Western listening for centuries. Within the world of concert music, the achievement was immense: Berg, Webern, Boulez, Nono, and Ligeti built on that rupture a repertoire that redefined the horizon of art music for the rest of the century. Yet mass culture preserved tonality. Jazz, rock, and popular songs continued to rely on forms of musical orientation that ordinary listeners could inhabit emotionally and intuitively.

This bifurcation between vanguard and mass was not exclusive to music. In different ways, all four revolutions of the early twentieth century opened a radically new terrain for those who could follow–and left behind the far larger space of common experience.

THE COGNITIVE LIMITS OF REVOLUTION

This raises an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps there are limits–biological, cognitive, even anthropological–to how radically human beings can reorganize experience.

Perhaps social justice is achievable while total equality remains an abstraction. Perhaps the human ear is not naturally equipped to process twelve tones without hierarchy. Perhaps complex societies cannot coordinate production and distribution without some form of market signaling. Perhaps space-time, however accurate as a description of the universe, has no direct equivalent within ordinary perception.

None of this invalidates the ruptures. But it does suggest a persistent gap between what the mind can conceive and what institutions and human affections are capable of inhabiting.

The question becomes more urgent when one remembers the historical frame surrounding those transformations. The avant-gardes and the trenches were contemporaneous. The collapse of symbolic references–tonality, figurative representation, absolute time, traditional political order–occurred alongside the collapse of Europe’s geopolitical order.

This does not mean intellectual revolutions caused the wars. But symbolic disorientation and political disorientation reinforced one another. When symbolic ground disappears, political ground begins to give way as well. Collective disorientation manufactures leaders who promise certainty, nostalgia for lost orders, enemies capable of explaining chaos, and violence as a shortcut to recovered meaning.

Nazism was, among other things, a delirious attempt to restore hierarchies that modernity had sought to dissolve. The Führer became the fundamental note of a society that had lost its tonic.

THE PATTERN RETURNS

A century later, the structure reappears.

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has generated its own constellation of ruptures: artificial intelligence, genomic editing, synthetic imagery, the fragmentation of authorship, and the erosion of liberal democracy. If the twentieth century destabilized humanity’s relationship to property, perception, time, and space, the present destabilizes its relationship to intelligence, identity, reality, and the very possibility of representation.

If that earlier century could still be read in four movements, ours arrives denser: AI, the genome, politics, and artistic creation are now intertwined. There is a mirror between the two centuries, distorted and magnified: socialism echoes, by inversion, in the decline of liberal democracy; physics, in CRISPR; abstractionism, in the synthetic image; twelve-tone music, in AI and the dissolution of authorship.

AI and the New Mediation of Reality

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most difficult rupture to overestimate because it dissolves a boundary modern humanism assumed to be stable: the boundary between author and tool.

For centuries, tools were passive. The brush did not paint; the violin did not play. Generative AI unsettles that distinction. What is authorship when creation can be delegated, simulated, or statistically generated? What becomes of originality when systems trained on nearly the entirety of human production can generate infinite variation?

AI unfolds across several dimensions simultaneously. 

Robotics and Machine Agency

In robotics, it extends machine agency into physical space. Surgical robots and autonomous systems already operate with extraordinary precision. Yet the same logic governs autonomous drones and systems capable of identifying and eliminating targets. The question is no longer merely technical. Who decides when a machine may kill?

Hyperreality and the Collapse of Representation

At the same time, generative AI dissolves the ontology of the image itself. For a century and a half, photography functioned as an implicit guarantee that something had existed before the lens. Synthetic imagery abolishes that assumption. Faces, scenes, and voices that never existed become indistinguishable from reality.

There is an inverted echo here of abstractionism. The abstract painters openly abandoned representation; synthetic imagery continues to promise representation while quietly severing its bond to the real. I would realize only later that literary modernism–in Pound–had already intuited something similar: the fracture between language and world. Today that fracture is no longer merely formal. Words and images now circulate without reliable grounding in reality yet retain the appearance of truth, giving misinformation a corrosive power previously impossible at scale.

Algorithmic Societies

The consequences are political as much as aesthetic. Falsehood acquires the face of evidence. Trust in what one sees begins to erode. Social networks amplify the process by transforming collective moods into programmable terrain. Recommendation algorithms discovered long ago that outrage is more effective than curiosity at maintaining engagement. The result is not merely polarization but the fragmentation of shared reality itself.

Digital platforms now operate above and across national sovereignties, influencing elections, shaping public discourse, and modulating collective emotions on a global scale. The social contract is no longer negotiated solely between governments and citizens; it is mediated by infrastructures no individual state fully controls. 

Editing Life

Another rupture emerges in biology. CRISPR-Cas9 transformed the genome from inheritance into editable material. Genetic diseases once regarded as permanent may become curable. But the deeper rupture is anthropological. If the genome can be redesigned, the boundary between what we are by nature and what we choose to become begins to dissolve.

Democracy Without Ground

In politics, meanwhile, the twenty-first century presents an inverted echo of 1917. The Russian Revolution attempted to suppress markets in the name of equality. Contemporary illiberalism reflects the erosion of the institutions liberal democracy once created to contain both markets and concentrated power.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled that this erosion had reached the historical core of Western democracy. Similar movements spread across Brazil, Europe, and beyond. What they share is a common grammar: hostility toward institutional mediation, personalization of power, the fabrication of enemies, the delegitimization of the press and judiciary.

Liberal democracy now confronts a contradiction similar to the one that haunted socialism. It promised freedom and prosperity while producing inequalities corrosive enough to undermine belief in the system itself. When every voice appears equally valid and epistemic authority collapses entirely, democratization risks degenerating into cognitive chaos–the ideal environment for authoritarianism.

The Fragmentation of Art and the Self

The arts reflect the same fragmentation. The work loses stability and becomes meme, remix, circulation. Authorship becomes fluid, collective, sometimes anonymous. The democratization of creative tools is real, but so is the risk that creation dissolves into endless flow without resistance, memory, or form.

Two contrary responses have emerged: the market attempted–and so far failed–to restore scarcity and authorship technologically, via NFTs and blockchain certification; collaborative creation practices have moved in the opposite direction, dissolving the author into collective and anonymous processes. The choice between them is not merely aesthetic. It is the choice between insisting on the fiction of the sovereign author or learning to create–and to answer for creation–collectively.

THE OLIGARCHIC CAPTURE OF THE NEW

Taken together, these developments constitute an accelerated dissolution of the references upon which the twentieth century built, at enormous cost, a minimally habitable order.

The parallel with the early twentieth century is not exact. History never repeats mechanically. Yet the structural resemblance is difficult to ignore.

Once again, technological transformation, symbolic disorientation, and geopolitical instability unfold simultaneously. The world is witnessing the return of structural rivalry between great powers–this time between the United States and China–replaying, in a different register, the logic of the East-West confrontation. 

The war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, and the risk of escalation across the Middle East are being absorbed as proxy wars within that larger competition. To this must be added global rearmament and the rise of leaders who build power precisely by dismantling the institutional fabric. Once again, collective uncertainty creates fertile ground for authoritarian responses.

The question, then, is not whether rupture itself is good or bad. The question is who conducts it, with what intentions, and in whose service.
There is a constant running through modern history: the oligarchic tendency of power. Lenin abolished private property but produced the nomenklatura. Digital platforms promised to democratize information and instead generated new forms of plutocracy. Again and again, promises of emancipation are captured by new elites.

Artificial intelligence crystallizes that tension. The same technology that could redistribute knowledge and make institutions more legible to citizens is being developed by a handful of corporations concentrating unprecedented computational power.

Keeping the terrain open, before capture becomes irreversible, is itself a political act – and it falls to governance to make that act possible. Open-source systems, independent auditing, and regulatory frameworks such as Europe’s AI Act may help preserve that openness long enough for societies and democratic institutions to learn how to inhabit it. 

MARGINS OF MANEUVER?

Perhaps there are limits, as suggested earlier, to how radically institutions can be remade. But the ruptures that matter most are not always the most total ones – and the gravest obstacle is not technical. It is political. 

No national regulation can adequately govern global platforms without multilateral cooperation. No containment of destructive technologies is possible without states willing to cede some sovereignty in the name of common security.

The decisive question is not only how to regulate AI, but whether AI can be made to decolonize the political. For now, the movement runs in the opposite direction: the same instruments that could disperse knowledge and make power legible are being deployed to concentrate it further. The question is whether that direction is a law or a choice.

Responsibility therefore falls most heavily on those willing to act before structural permission arrives: scientists prepared to answer for the consequences of what they discover; technologists capable of building alternatives; legislators defending the public interest; citizens demanding transparency; cities relearning how to function as spaces of visible coexistence and dissent; intellectuals willing to name what power prefers to leave unnamed.

The youthful fascination I once felt before the homology linking Schoenberg, Lenin, Mondrian, and Einstein was ultimately fascination with humanity’s capacity to rupture what once appeared eternal.

That capacity has not diminished.

The challenge of our time cannot be limited to slowing capture. It must produce another kind of rupture: open, distributed, capable of dispersing power and restoring society’s ability to understand, contest, and reform the structures that govern it.

The task is not merely to manage the damage. It is to reopen the possibility of a democratizing and de-oligarchizing future in which power once again becomes visible, contestable, and transformable. 

* This article is an abridged and translated version of an essay originally published by Ilustríssima, Folha de São Paulo.

Submitted: May 8, 2026

Accepted for publication: May 8, 2026

Copyright © 2026 CEBRI-Journal. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited.