13 February 2026
The Third Turn, unfolding before our eyes, differs from the revolutions of the past. It is not addressed to the masses or to classes. It is addressed directly to the individual.
Religions and ideologies have always appealed to collective subjects. Christianity addressed the “People of God,” Islam the ummah, Buddhism the sangha, Judaism the covenantal community. Communism addressed the proletariat, liberalism the property-owning citizen, nationalism the nation as a political whole.
Faith could proclaim supranational unity, yet its social fabric remained territorial. The individual belonged to a community, and the community belonged to a place. In the Christian world, this foundation was the parish — a territorial unit within which one was born, baptized, married, and buried. In Islamic civilization — the mosque and madrasa as centers of local life. In Judaism — the kahal, an autonomous diasporic community with its synagogue and internal court. In Buddhism — the monastery around which the region’s social structure formed.
In that era, the individual was rooted in land not only economically, but politically, culturally, spiritually. One’s place of residence defined one’s identity.
Industrialization broke the direct bond between the individual and the land. Millions left villages for cities — for factories and plants. It seemed like liberation: no longer bound to ancestral fields, no longer limited by the horizon of the rural community. Thinkers such as Marx and Engels, and later practitioners like Lenin and Trotsky, saw in this the precondition for humanity’s final emancipation.
But this liberation proved to be only a transition into another dependency.
The land gave way to the factory.
The parish — to the industrial district.
Monastic discipline — to the factory schedule.
If in the religious world a person was tied to land as the economic basis of existence, in industrial society he became tied to the means of production. His fate was determined not by the fertility of soil but by the stability of the enterprise. Not by the cycle of nature but by the rhythm of shifts. Not by tradition but by the production plan.
Public life moved from religious garments into ideological forms — yet space remained decisive. The worker was bound to the factory as firmly as the peasant had been to the land.
Ideologies shaped this new dependency differently.
Liberalism proclaimed freedom and universal human rights — yet this freedom unfolded primarily within the national legal order. The citizen became a subject of rights — but within the boundaries of the state. His freedom remained embedded in the country’s economy and institutions.
Nationalism tightened the bond even further. The nation demanded not merely loyalty, but participation and mobilization — through oath, conscription, readiness to defend the state. Freedom became a form of discipline. The territory of the state became not merely a place of residence, but a territory of obligation.
The communist project appeared to make the most radical universalist leap — the international of the proletariat, global brotherhood of workers, a shared destiny. Yet here universality collided most visibly with administrative control. Human life became stitched into mechanisms restricting movement. The system of residence registration became a near-physical symbol that a person was not free even to choose a city, let alone leave the country. The idea of global liberation in practice turned into the state’s spatial enclosure of the individual.
Thus the industrial era, having detached humanity from land, did not free it from territorial dependence.
Means of Production and Space
Everything began to change with the personal computer — more precisely, with its mass dissemination, alongside mobile communication and the internet. Together, they created fundamentally new means of production.
If industrial production required concentration of capital, machinery, and labor in a specific physical location, the digital age enabled the creation of value through information, code, data, knowledge — categories without rigid geographical attachment. The means of production became not the factory, but computing power. Not the machine tool, but the algorithm. Not the workshop, but the network.
For the first time in history, production began to detach from a specific territory. The workplace ceased to be spatially fixed. It became portable.
Simultaneously, changes in the productive base formed a new social layer — people whose economic activity was no longer tied to land or factory. Jacques Attali metaphorically called them “new nomads.” The image is expressive and partly accurate: these people can move while preserving professional identity and income. Their labor no longer requires physical fixation in a single location.
But how precise is the metaphor of nomadism?
Historical nomads were indeed not attached to a fixed plot of land. Together with herds, families, and dwellings, they moved across steppes without cultivating soil or settling permanently. Compared to farmers, they seemed free.
Yet their freedom was relative. They were not tied to a specific plot, but they were strictly bound to natural cycles: migration routes, seasonal pastures, climate rhythms. Their movement was not arbitrary. It followed the logic of survival. Space remained decisive — albeit differently.
The digital “nomad” is structured differently. His activity unfolds in the cloud — in systems of distributed computing, where data are stored on remote servers across countries and continents. His physical location may be Lisbon; infrastructure may be in Ireland; clients in Asia; company registration in the United States.
Servers, data centers, computing capacities are geographically distributed. The production process is dispersed globally and no longer coincides with the individual’s physical presence. He can move without losing access to the means of production — because they are no longer localized near him.
For the first time in history, distance arises between the individual and the means of production without destroying production itself. Space ceases to be the point where labor and tool must coincide — whether land or machine.
For this reason, the term “person of air” may be more precise.
Programmers, AI developers, marketers, interface designers, data analysts, product managers, consultants, researchers, traders, startup founders — they are united neither by factory nor territory. They work through computers. Their means of production fit inside a laptop they carry with them. Their lives unfold in constant movement. Their working environment is a network of airports, hotels, temporary addresses.
I remember this from personal experience. When I created and developed the Belarus High-Tech Park — and before sanctions, when there was a direct Minsk–London (Gatwick) flight — I was struck that on a flight two-thirds of passengers were programmers heading to a computer game development conference. Even more telling was the Lufthansa Frankfurt–San Francisco flight: dozens of Belarusian developers traveling to an Apple conference. One can only imagine how many specialists from different countries were aboard that enormous Boeing 747 — in some sense a symbol of digital globalization.
With backpacks, sneakers, hoodies — these people can be seen in airports in Singapore, Dubai, London, Lisbon, Seoul. They contrast sharply with the impeccably dressed officials and corporate managers of the industrial era. They share a professional language — a functional form of English saturated with terminology, sometimes incomprehensible even to native speakers outside their milieu.
The people of air have reshaped not only aviation. Global infrastructure has begun adapting to their lifestyle. Coworking spaces and flexible offices proliferated. Serviced apartments emerged. Fintech platforms and digital banks developed. Flexible living services oriented not toward tourists but toward people living “in between” appeared. Even platforms like Booking expanded into medium-term rentals.
Not only their work geography is changing — their culture is transforming. Not in the sense of becoming rootless or post-national, but in that identity is no longer shaped by a single cultural tradition.
Consumer orientation has become less rigidly national. “Made in Germany” once signified reliability; “Made in China” suggested mass production and lower quality. Today, that logic has largely eroded. When buying Adidas, Nike, Armani, or Tommy Hilfiger, people think of brand, not production site. Purchasing an Audi, one rarely asks whether it was assembled near Stuttgart or Bratislava. Global supply chains blur the link between quality and geography.
Their everyday life is equally international. Japanese restaurant today, Mexican tomorrow, Italian the next. Fork or chopsticks — equally natural. Taste is shaped not only by family tradition, but by the global city.
The same applies to sports identity. Manchester City, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Barcelona have supporters far beyond their cities. A fan in Singapore or São Paulo may feel deep emotional belonging to a club without ever visiting Manchester or Madrid. Music, series, media heroes — all form within a single global cultural space.
The individual lives in a global environment, regardless of birthplace.
Territory has ceased to be destiny.
To be continued.
