Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the key ingredients that you think indicate we could be headed for a second Renaissance?
Kutarna: In the big picture, we boil it down to three things: new maps, new media, and a new human condition, which are the three very broad parallels that reshaped the European society 500 years ago and are reshaping our world today. Five hundred years ago a man named Johannes Gutenberg brings the printing press to Europe. It suddenly flips the economics of information exchange and knowledge creation, and that had enormous implications — not only to accelerate science and technology, but also to give new power to extremist movements, like the Bonfire of the Vanities that a man named (Girolamo) Savonarola ignited to rip control of Florence from the establishment, the Medici, and put his own populist agenda in power….
