Vol. II, No. 53
Covering 16 December - 29 December 2024
Monday, December 30, 2024
Late edition · A Relentless publication
The Relentless Dispatch
All the fortnight that mattered, in technology and in the world, read next to what we were building at the time.
THE YEAR

2024: half the world voted, the machines learned to talk, and the strongmen rose and fell

The largest election year in history ended with incumbents punished everywhere and a convicted felon returned to the White House. AI became infrastructure. And entrenched power, from Dhaka to Damascus, proved more fragile than anyone believed.

The year that ends tomorrow was, above all, the greatest year of elections in human history: more than half the planet's population lived in a country that went to the polls, from India's billion-voter marathon to the American rematch, from Britain and France to South Africa, Mexico, Indonesia and dozens more. And the verdict, across almost all of them, was the same: a punishment of incumbents, a rebuke to those in power, an electorate angry about prices and immigration and disorder that threw out or humbled governing parties on nearly every continent. India cut Modi down to a coalition; Britain evicted the Conservatives; South Africa's ANC lost its majority; and America, most consequentially, returned Donald Trump to power in a decisive victory that scrambled every assumption about its politics. The global mood was thrown, and it was thrown against whoever happened to be holding the wheel.

It was also the year artificial intelligence stopped being a novelty and became infrastructure: the assistants learned to see and speak in real time, the models became a commodity input woven through the products of daily life, the money and the power flowed to whoever owned the compute, and a single faulty software update took down a chunk of the world for a day, a preview of the fragility that concentration breeds. And it was the year entrenched power revealed its hidden brittleness: a strongwoman fell in Bangladesh in weeks, a dynasty collapsed in Syria in days, a president's midnight coup died by dawn in South Korea. The powerful spent the year discovering, over and over, that the ground beneath them was less solid than it looked, that borrowed strength fails suddenly, and that the consent, or the fear, or the props that held them up could vanish faster than anyone imagined. It was a year of the mighty humbled, the machines ascendant, and the old order cracking, and if it had a single lesson, it was the one this paper has spent two years documenting: that the things that look permanent rarely are, and that the warnings of their fragility were, as ever, written down in advance and mostly unread.

THE WORLD

A run of catastrophes closes a hard year

The year's final fortnight delivered a grim cascade. A passenger jet crashed at Muan in South Korea on December 29, killing 179 of the 181 aboard in the country's worst-ever air disaster, deepening a nation already in political crisis. An Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed on December 25, most aboard killed, with evidence pointing to Russian air defences having struck it. A car ploughed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, on December 20, killing several. And South Korea's crisis spiralled further as lawmakers impeached even the acting president, leaving one of Asia's key democracies leaderless as the year closed.

IN BRIEF

Markets soar again; a transition of threats; a great life ends

Wall Street closed a second consecutive year of gains above 20 percent, the S&P 500 up around 23 percent, driven once more by the AI-fuelled ascent of a handful of giant technology companies. Donald Trump, named Time's Person of the Year, spent the fortnight before his inauguration issuing expansionist threats that would once have seemed unthinkable, musing about acquiring Greenland, retaking the Panama Canal, and making Canada a state, unsettling allies before he had even taken office. And Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died on December 29 at 100.

The Column

What the year taught us, and what we keep refusing to learn

The Dispatch closes its second year. The news was relentless, but the patterns beneath it were remarkably consistent, and worth naming before the calendar turns.

By The Dispatch

Two years ago this paper began with a wager: that setting each fortnight's headline news beside the unglamorous work of building and running the systems a modern world depends on would reveal patterns that neither the news nor the trade press sees alone. A second year confirms the wager, and confirms, a little wearily, that the patterns are stubborn, that we document the same lessons over and over precisely because they are the lessons humanity is worst at learning. So let us name what 2024 taught, and what it taught us we keep refusing to learn.

The first lesson is fragility, the hidden kind. This was the year the permanent-looking proved brittle: a fifteen-year government fell in Bangladesh in weeks, a fifty-year dynasty in Syria in days, a midnight coup in South Korea in hours. And it was the year a single software update crashed the world for an afternoon, and a chokepoint or a bad file or a propped regime reminded us, again and again, that the structures we treat as solid, political, financial, technological, are held up by supports we cannot see and do not maintain, and that they fail not gradually but all at once, in the week the support is pulled. We wrote this about banks and dams in our first year. We wrote it about bridges and regimes and software in our second. It is the same lesson, and the world keeps not learning it, because the fragility is invisible until the collapse, and invisible dangers do not get funded.

The second lesson is legitimacy, and its loss. This was the year half the world voted and punished its incumbents, the year an argument about the survival of democracy lost to the price of groceries, the year a murdered executive was cheered by people who had lost all faith in the institution he ran. Underneath the political churn was a deeper erosion: of the belief, everywhere, that the institutions ruling and serving people are fair, are earned, deserve to exist. That belief is the thing that actually holds a society together, more than any law or army, and it is draining away across the democratic world, and the vacuum it leaves is where the strongmen and the cheers for murder and the refusal to accept any verdict all grow. We have no easy prescription for rebuilding it. We only observe that its loss is the master trend beneath a hundred smaller stories, and that no institution, however powerful, survives its complete disappearance.

And the third lesson is the oldest one, the one this paper was founded on: that the warnings are almost always written down in advance, and almost never read in time. The exit polls that missed India, the intelligence that warned Moscow, the reports on the dams and the bridges and the grids, the officials who saw the software risk, the scientists who marked the hottest year and the breached threshold, all of it foreseen, documented, filed, and mostly ignored, because the warning is abstract and the cost of heeding it is concrete and present, and human beings and their institutions discount the future almost to zero when the present is loud. That is the deepest pattern, the one under all the others, and it is the one we will spend a third year documenting, because it is the one the species seems least able to change.

We do not know what 2025 holds. A new administration promising disruption, wars unresolved, a technology accelerating faster than our capacity to govern it, a climate past a line it was never supposed to cross. We know only that we will keep doing this, fortnight by fortnight, the headline and the work beneath it, on the wager that seeing the pattern is worth something even when we cannot make the world act on it. Thank you for reading the second year of it. The warnings for 2025 are already written. As ever, we intend to keep reading them out loud, whether or not anyone with the power to act is listening.

The Ledger
AI
The year's arc: from real-time talking assistants to a global outage caused by one bad update. AI became infrastructure, with all the fragility that word implies. 2025's question, unchanged: whether the vast spending finally produces the profits, and the power, to justify itself.
Data centers & power
Promoted this year from footnote to front-page constraint. The AI build-out's energy hunger, colliding with a climate past 1.5 degrees and a new US administration favouring fossil fuels, is the physical story that will shape the digital one for years.
Rates
The year of the pivot: the Fed began cutting after the great tightening, declaring the soft landing achieved. 2025 opens with that easing complicated by an incoming administration whose tariffs and deficits point back toward inflation.
Real estate
US 30-year mortgage closes 2024 near 6.85 percent, well off the 8 percent peak but far above the pandemic lows, in a market still frozen by the gap between old cheap mortgages and new dear ones.
India tech
India's year: Modi humbled but returned, the economy and the technology sector growing regardless, the country navigating a Trump administration that offers both threat (immigration, visas) and opportunity (as a counterweight to China). The bargaining begins in 2025.
What we called wrong
The volume's honest ledger: we treated the US election as a coin-flip to the end, and it was not close; we shared, perhaps, the establishment's blind spot about how little the democracy argument would weigh against the price of eggs. We log it, as we log them all, and carry the humility into the new year.
The Back Page

The best ex-president

Jimmy Carter died this fortnight at 100, having lived longer after his presidency than any president in history, and having spent those four decades proving a quietly radical proposition: that what you do with power is less important than what you do without it. His presidency is mostly remembered as a failure, a single term undone by inflation, an energy crisis, and 444 days of hostages in Tehran, a good and decent man who seemed, at the time, overwhelmed by the office. And then he left it, at 56, and began the longest and most luminous second act any American leader has ever had. He built houses for the poor with his own hands into his nineties. He eradicated a disease, or nearly, guinea worm, from millions to a handful, through patient decades of unglamorous work in places the powerful never visit. He monitored elections, brokered peace, wrote books, taught Sunday school in the same small Georgia town he never really left, and lived, with his wife of 77 years, a life of such visible modesty and purpose that it slowly, over forty years, transformed his reputation from failed president to national conscience. He teaches a lesson this paper, obsessed with power and its fragility, is glad to end its year on: that a life is not measured by the height of the office you hold but by what you do with the long ordinary years, that decency practised patiently over decades outlasts and outshines almost any exercise of power, and that the best thing a powerful man can do, sometimes, is to become, gracefully, a good one. He was 100. He used every year, and the best of them came after the power was gone.