Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have hardly been made folk heroes in the western media. But in the informal world, the world of online conversation, they are metaphors for “what happens”. Challenge unlawful state surveillance, spill the beans on military atrocities in Iraq and you become a candidate for Guantánamo-style torture and mind games. In such a situation “metrics” – on poverty, inequality or trust – are hardly relevant in the prediction of unrest.

Despite this, the analyst group Gartner earlier this year, predicted “a larger-scale version of an Occupy Wall Street–type movement will begin by the end of 2014”. Gartner’s analysts got closer to the reason. Information technology is reducing the labour content of goods and services “in an unprecedented way”. We have doubled the ratio of labour to capital by urbanising the global south and marketising the former communist countries. But there is no clear route to high-wage, high-prosperity lifestyles for a large part of the world’s population. As a result, predicts Gartner, by 2020 this will lead to “a quest for new economic models in several mature societies”.

The networked character of modern society makes country-specific unrest predictions pointless. There is, in reality, one political entity that matters. Right now it is more unequal than it’s ever been; its core economic model is destroyed; the consent of its citizens to be governed is eroded. It is the world.