I was all shout-n-scream politics: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/cyber-war-and-e.html
Interesting, but why we should believe him instead of believing those he says we shouldn't believe, I'm not sure.
I could well be wrong, but...
I am inclined to agree with him tho for two reasons. One is that little more was heard of it, meaning it was just a flash in the pan. two is that the IT community belongs to the so-called elite. they are very competent and intelligent people in the main, although naturally there are exceptions. This is why little happened with the Y2K bug, not because it wasn't a serious problem, but because competent programmers got to work and fixed most of the issues before they became problems.
I felt the same way about the recent stock market crash. this is in the financial sector. For all their hubris, mostly these people are very competent at their jobs. It was shareholders that flipped - esp the mechanical ones.
I know there are instabilities with the intelligent elite in their work areas, but that is a problem of too narrow focus. If we are looking for a tipping point, I expect it less in these areas. Politics also has intelligent people, but they have to sway the ignorant to stay in power. So they will act contrary to their own intelligence.
The two main tipping points I see are still the Islamic countries, and global warming. By Islamic I mean Pakistan - teetering - and the Iraq fallout. Some good commentators on Iraq I have heard recently are now saying that the US change in tactics is way to late - it will fail due to that, and the result is highly unpredictable, with a rush-to-carve-up likely. Turkey wants to wipe out the Kurds, Iran wants to topple Saudi, Pak wants to drop the big one on India. Hopefully the elite in all these countries will talk sense into the politicians, but it is too close to the brink for my liking. i just watch in horrified fascination.
Big business I am not so concerned about. They will destroy for short term gain - wipe out the fish, trees and pollute the unregulated etc. But there are also a lot of intelligent elite in big business, and again, aside from murdering anyone who stands in the way of profit, they will try to save themselves eventually - they have self interest in survival.
Radical religious in ALL countries have no such survival leverage, and politicians are happy to go over the waterfall as long as they are leading. the real menace for the future, the real tipping point, is the dreaming population in all countries, who refuse to awaken to the imminent nightmare. Such is human nature.