On the night of October 17, 2026, a Palestinian flag went up over the Monument à la République in central Paris. The French flag it replaced came down with a crowd cheering below. A car was already burning nearby. By midday the French authorities had counted around 140 protests across the country and more than 32,000 people in the streets. Hundreds were arrested. The town hall in Marseille was breached. The tourist office in Lyon was set on fire. The protests had started weeks earlier over teacher shortages and crumbling school buildings. Roughly 200 schools had been blockaded by students demanding adequate staffing.

By the night of the 17th, the schools were not what anyone was talking about. They were talking about Palestine.

Something is off with the frame. Start with the most obvious thing. There is no active war in Gaza. The Trump-era twenty-point peace framework was signed. The ceasefire is holding, shakily, into October 2026. If the point of a protest tonight is to stop a war, there are other wars to stop. The one in Ukraine has not stopped. The one in Sudan has displaced more than ten million people and is still accelerating. Neither got a flag on the Monument à la République.

France itself is one of the few Western countries that formally called for a Palestinian state. France has among the most generous social programs in the developed world. If you had walked those streets looking for French flags you would have found very few of them, and no demand that the Fifth Republic do anything about French schools at the scale the night was now operating at. The thing that started the march was the thing nobody still in the street was there to talk about. Something else had taken over.

That something is this piece.

If you are leading anything right now, this is for you. For the board member watching her 24-year-old associate quietly lose interest in the career ladder. For the CEO whose engineering Slack has gone sideways about something nobody is paying the company to care about. For the investor whose consumer-sentiment thesis has decoupled from consumer-spending. The street in Paris and the comment thread inside your company are the same story. The mental model you need to read both correctly is what this piece is for. Get it wrong and you will keep misreading your market, your clients, and your people. Get it right and the operating environment every leader is now in starts to make sense.

A note on the title. Free Paristein is a play on Free Palestine and a nod to Frankenstein. The thing standing in that Paris street is a cause stitched together from borrowed parts, taught to walk on its own, and no longer resembling any of the parts that went into it.

Paris is not an isolated case. The same week, students clashed with police in Brussels and Liège. Italian student marches in Turin and Milan turned into looting on Via Torino, with hundreds detained. Diesel shortages, panic buying, and farmer blockades spread across southern Italy. Belgium’s own interior minister called the violence “organised.”² Spain has a general strike called for November and a snap election on the twenty-ninth. The United States has a lighter version of the same mood, visible in this weeks election cycle whose dominant genre is grievance. Any one of these can be dismissed as local. All of them together rhyme with a very old pattern.

History rhymes

Mark Twain’s line is that history does not repeat, it rhymes. The rhyme of 2026 is loud enough to hear.

The Industrial Revolution did to agrarian life what AI is now doing to knowledge work. Mills and factories pulled in a generation that had spent five hundred years tied to the land. The generation stuck in the middle lost both the identity of the old world and the belonging of the new one. Luddites smashed looms. Revolutions tore through Europe in 1848. The British Chartists demanded political voice for workers the economy had just conjured into existence.

Then came the Spanish flu, the First World War, the Dust Bowl, the Second World War. The flu took 20 million to 50 million lives. The trenches killed an entire generation of young European men and left the survivors with a nothing-matters nihilism we called the Lost Generation. The Dust Bowl erased the farms of the Great Plains in a decade and sent families walking west with everything they owned in a Model T. The Second World War ended one global order and started another, and the men who came home were different men.

The World Wars themselves were Frankenstein-like anger coming together into revolutions across the globe. The themes are the ones showing up today in miniature. Anti-globalism dressed up as anti-imperialism. Racism of every strain, from the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust to the religious wars that followed decolonization. Competing economic ideologies going to war with each other. Each side believed the fight in front of it was the whole fight, and each side was, in part, fighting about everything else that had broken underneath.

In each of these, the economy left people in the dust, sometimes literally. Mass movements grew out of exactly this raw material. Communism rose across Russia and Eastern Europe. Socialism took hold across much of Western Europe, as a softer version of the same answer. The Cold War that followed was a forty-year contest between two answers to the same question, and the side that eventually won over China, Russia, and Vietnam, for good reason, was the one that produced a middle class. Some of these movements promised a future. Some promised to burn one. All of them were built on people who had been promised one future, got a different one, and could not find a seat in the new arrangement.

What those years also eventually produced was a mission. Rebuilding. Infrastructure. The Marshall Plan, which pulled Western Europe back from rubble on American money and American political will. The G.I. Bill. The space program. A sense that the next generation would have more than this one. The mission came late, after enormous damage, and it was always imperfect. It was still a mission, and it worked.

We are standing in the before-the-mission part of our own version.

A generation told they do not matter

The young people in those streets did not come out of nowhere. The last 20 years did real damage.

A generation was told that a four-year degree was the only onramp to a middle-class life. They borrowed accordingly. Universities responded by raising tuition to a sticker price that embarrasses the word tuition. The number of degree-holders doubled. The economic premium on the degree did not. By the time these students graduated, they were carrying a mortgage without a house, against a wage that was somehow smaller than the one their parents had earned without the paper.

Then the mood turned on them. Every headline for a decade told them AI would take their job. Every panel at every conference told them Universal Basic Income was coming, so they would have something to eat when the job disappeared. Every dinner table reminded them that having kids now was financially impossible, buying a house was financially impossible, retiring was financially impossible, and the climate was ending anyway.

I will write a longer piece on education soon, because I think the whole system is about to reset from first principles. The short version is this: the institution that charged these students a quarter of a million dollars for a degree is the same institution that is now explaining to them that the degree does not matter. That contradiction, by itself, is a political earthquake. It is what makes the next part of this story make sense.

If you tell a generation long enough that they do not matter, they will find a way to make the world see them anyway. They will not do it by starting a company or writing a book. Most of them do not have the training for either, and the training they were sold was for a world that has moved on. They are the generation firing thousands of resumes through AI agents and getting no interviews back, swiping through thousands of profiles and getting no dates. The feedback loops that used to tell a young person their effort mattered have been quietly disconnected. They will do what people in this position have always done. They will show up where the cameras are and stand for something.

Which brings us back to Paris.

The cause does not have to make sense

The reason the Paris story feels incoherent to anyone who studies it is that it was never going to be coherent. The protest about teachers became a protest about Palestine because Palestine was the flag available that week. It might have helped that Palestine is not a country yet. The flag was less a specific nation than a vessel for everything the crowd was angry about. Anger at the West. Anger at the government that put them in a half-collapsing school. Anger at a generation that let the ladder up collapse behind it, whether or not that was true. If something else had been in the air that week, something else would have been the flag.

This is not new, and it is not French.

Me Too started with a specific group of women assaulted by specific powerful men, and did real work. Within a year it had been joined by a far larger group with no personal stake, who were in the march because the march was there. By the time the movement was done, the center of it was no longer locatable.

Black Lives Matter started with a specific set of killings and a specific demand to curb police violence against black Americans, which polling at the time showed was a mainstream concern across races. Within a year it had been pulled into a dozen other causes, some adjacent and some invented. The organizations splintered. The polling collapsed. The underlying concern never got addressed.

Free Palestine is the latest version, and it is the one with a difference the earlier movements did not have. This one has real state backing. Qatar has poured money into it directly. Russia and China have been pushing the narrative into Western social feeds for two years as a way to drag the United States into one more fight it does not need. The proof arrived in October 2026, when Ukraine struck the Yandex data centers in Russia. Cloudflare measured bot traffic from the Yandex network falling by more than 99% in two weeks. Pro-Russian narrative volume on X and Facebook collapsed in the same window. The protest architecture pumping Western feeds got noticeably quieter overnight.

Which is how you end up with a group of people calling the war in Gaza a genocide while chanting “from the river to the sea,” which is itself a call for the genocide of a different group. It does not matter that the two chants cannot both be true. It does not matter how incoherent the position sounds to anyone who stops to parse it. What matters is belonging. Mattering. Being heard.

Behind the flag is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. The goal is rage-baiting the people they feel have failed them. That single sentence explains most of what otherwise refuses to add up. The internal contradictions do not matter if the point is to upset the people in charge, which is to say the people who put them in a half-collapsing school and told them to borrow for a degree that no longer buys a seat. Chant anything that reaches those people. The chant is the point.

The pattern is older than any of these specific movements. The serfs and peasants who filled the 1917 Russian Revolution and Mao’s Long March did not understand Marxist dialectics. Most of them could not read. They did not need the theory. They needed to hate the old system badly enough to join the group destroying it. The theory was somebody else’s. The anger was theirs.

People who feel they do not matter will join a cause that lets them matter. The cause does not have to be internally consistent. The cause does not have to be about them. The cause only has to let them stand with other people and feel important for a few hours. The person two slots over in the chant may be there for completely different reasons, and both will tell themselves they are the same.

If you look at the actual data

Point this out and the response is that the Gaza deaths matter. They do. They are also not the only ones. The Syrian civil war killed more than half a million people over its first decade and used chemical weapons on civilians, and drew no Western campus protest at anything approaching this scale. Sudan is now the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world, with Christians and other religious minorities under particular pressure, and gets no flag on the Monument à la République. The Houthi blockade of Red Sea shipping has pushed more people into food insecurity than Gaza has at any point. Hezbollah is being pushed out of Lebanese politics by Lebanon’s own parties, acting to pry Iran out of their own government, and nobody is marching about it. The Iranian regime killed more civilians in a single weekend of massacres earlier this year than Gaza lost in any twelve months of the war.

The specific claim that Gaza was a genocide started on October 8, 2023. That is one day after the attack in which Hamas killed roughly 1,200 civilians and took hundreds more as hostages. One day. The counter-operation had not yet started. The data had not yet existed. The framing was already in place.

I am not arguing the merits of the claim or of the war itself. I am pointing out that the facts, taken together, say one thing. This has nothing to do with caring about the war. If caring about the war were the driver, the march would be a different march. Syria would be the march. Sudan would be the march. Ukraine would be the march. The march is whatever lets the people in it feel their lives count. The specific cause is almost incidental to the function it performs.

The commercial version lives in American politics

The American version of this pattern wears a different outfit. The Democratic Socialists of America has turned the same raw material into an electoral project. Communism was tried at great cost by the Soviet Union, by the People’s Republic of China under Mao, and is still being tried in North Korea. Each experiment ended, or is still ending, in a famine, a labor camp, or both. The DSA treats this history as beside the point and sells young voters a soft reskin of the same idea: free everything, paid for by someone else, with the mechanism to be worked out later.

New York just elected a mayor on this program. Free childcare, free bus service, free city-run grocery stores, rent control extended into perpetuity, free whatever surfaces in the next focus group. He won. He won because the alternative was more years of a system that had told the people voting for him that they would not be able to afford to live in their own city. The policy particulars do not matter to that voter. The signal matters. The signal is: somebody says they see me.

This is not a Republican point. It is not a Democratic point. It is a generational point. If the system cannot sell a plausible version of a decent life to a young person on the current curve, the system will keep electing people who promise to blow the system up, from either side. We see the same pattern in the U.S. backlash against AI data centers, which I covered in The Data Center Is Not the Problem. The headline grievance is almost never what the protest is actually about. If the world will not make room for them, they will make room for themselves.

Kennedy at Rice

To understand why this feels so acute right now, it helps to look at a moment when a political leader did the opposite.

On September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy stood in the football stadium at Rice University in Houston and gave the speech that is now remembered as one of the most consequential sentences in modern American political history.

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Consider the position he was in. The Soviet Union was ahead in space. The Bay of Pigs had been a disaster. The lunar program would cost roughly $22 billion in 1962 dollars, somewhere north of $176 billion today. It would pull resources from the military at the height of the Cold War, and depend on former Nazi scientists rebranded as American rocket engineers. If it failed in public, the United States would lose face to its ideological rival. Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s own predecessor, called the whole thing just nuts. Kennedy made it the mission anyway.

The mechanic in Detroit, the waitress in St. Louis, the welder in Pittsburgh, every person who did not personally build any part of a Saturn V, had a shared future that included going to the Moon. When Apollo 11 landed, every American in that chain owned it. The pride of that moment paid dividends for a generation. It funded the semiconductor industry. It funded the materials sciences that gave us commercial aerospace. It brought a wave of young people into engineering, medicine, computing, and physics who would not otherwise have gone.

A mission at that scale is a shared future. It does not have to be the Moon. It has to be big enough that the person pouring coffee at six in the morning and the person running the company at six in the evening are both working on the same thing in different places.

We do not have one right now.

Where are the leaders laying this out?

Scan the current political class, at any level, in any Western country, and try to find somebody who has articulated a mission on that scale. Try to find one. Macron is not making it. Starmer is not making it. Merz is not making it in Germany. Sánchez is not making it in Spain. The current American political class has nobody at a Rice-speech-scale pulpit either. Each of these leaders has read the Paris protests the way the data-center critics read the AI build-out, as though the protest is really about Gaza the way the backlash is really about transformers and water. It is not. The driver is the pain of not mattering, and no leader is naming the mission that would answer it.

The only Western political movement in the last ten years that correctly identified the raw material under this anger, if not the right prescription, was the Brexit party. For a country now paying heavily for Brexit, that is sobering.

A few voices in the private sector are starting to point at this. Danny Meyer, the founder of Shake Shack and Union Square Hospitality, just released What Could Possibly Go Right? a direct inversion of the business-book title everyone else is writing, and a case for leading with optimism in an uncertain world. We hosted him on CI Forecast on the day this piece went out. The question is why so few political leaders are willing to live the way he describes.

The closest person operating at that register is Elon Musk, and the fact that this is who the comparison lands on tells you how empty the political field has gotten. He set a mission at Tesla and a mission at SpaceX and delivered on both. The reusable booster. The electric car as a mainstream object. These are concrete, finished, done. The problem with him as the mission-setter for a generation is that his frame is still a doomer frame. Humanity might not make it. We might need to move to Mars. The warning sits inside the mission.

Europe is worse. The regulatory impulse there, which I covered in The Death of Humanity, is treated as a mission in itself. It is not. Regulating a competitor out of your market is incumbent protection with a safety label glued on top.

In the absence of alternative narratives, fear sells. Fear sells on cable news. Fear sells in every social media algorithm. Fear sells because it moves faster through the nervous system than hope does. It is the easiest story to tell, which is why it is almost the only story getting told. I covered this reframing problem in We’re Complaining About the Wrong Thing. In each case the actual story was a once-in-a-generation leap in capability arriving, and the dominant coverage had turned the leap into the villain.

Someone needs to tell the other story.

The second renaissance

Shimon Peres said it as well as it has ever been said. Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently.

Here is what nobody with a microphone will tell the kid in that Paris street.

We are standing at the beginning of the most consequential technological decade in human history, and most of what the kid in the street has been told to be afraid of is actually about to make his life dramatically better than any generation before his.

Clean, near-free energy is close. Fusion crossed from physics into engineering during the last twenty-four months. Commercial fusion is now a timeline question, not a feasibility one. Near-free energy means desalinated water for every coastal city that wants it. It means fertilizer at a fraction of today’s cost, which means food security. It means the entire energy argument that has driven two decades of Western politics starts to resolve.

AI is curing diseases at a speed that would have sounded like fantasy five years ago. Casgevy, the gene therapy for sickle cell, has made that illness functionally curable for patients who can access it. Insilico, Isomorphic Labs, and Recursion are pushing drugs through human trials that AI designed. Cancer screening is on the cusp of becoming a routine blood draw. Early detection of what currently kills most of us is close enough to touch. I lay out the full healthcare arc in the upcoming article The Luckiest Decade in Human History, which follows this piece.

At Collective[i] we study economic outcomes for a living. The pattern in our data is clear. Companies that have moved to an AI-first operating model are seeing more revenue growth, happier employees, and more opportunity than companies that have not. People using Intelligence.com are finding the connections that let them navigate the new world faster than their peers. Neither of those observations matches the doom narrative being piped into the Paris street. The reality on the ground is better than the story being told about it, and the gap between the two is itself the opportunity.

Materials science is being rewritten in software. AI is finding alloys and polymers that human researchers would have taken decades to find. The implications for aerospace, construction, batteries, and electronics are enormous and front-loaded.

Housing is next. 3D-printed construction is shipping multi-story residential buildings in days instead of months, at a fraction of traditional cost. The regulatory problem is now bigger than the technology problem, which I made the case for in The American Dream Needs More Permits.

Robotics is pulling the dangerous work out of the economy. Self-driving cars have moved from demonstration to deployment in a dozen cities, and I covered what the economy looks like on the other side of that transition in The End of Car Ownership. Delivery drones work. Flying cars are in commercial pilot programs. The jobs that were worst for the human body are now handled by machines. The jobs the human body was built for, which require judgment, taste, trust, and relationships, are becoming more valuable, not less.

Space is open to everyone. The company I helped build and still sit on the board of, Spire Global, put the shoebox-sized satellite in orbit so cheaply that academic labs now run their own missions. The barriers to building in orbit have fallen by orders of magnitude in a decade. I covered that one in The Shoebox That Changed Space.

Of all the times to be alive, this is the most exciting one. Every prior technological revolution created more jobs than it destroyed, and the new jobs paid better than the ones they replaced. The industrial revolution gave us factories, then the professions. The information revolution gave us a software economy an order of magnitude larger than the one it replaced. This revolution will do the same, and the frontier it opens is wider than any before it. The next generation will live healthier, for longer, with more wonder in their lives and more magic in the ordinary than any generation that came before them. There has never been an easier time to tell them their lives will be better than ours. Not easier to hope. Easier to prove.

Stop handing them the flag

The young people in that Paris street are not the enemy. They are the symptom. The thing that is wrong is that nobody who is supposed to be in charge of their future has told them what the future is.

Groupthink (a term coined here in Fortune) does not study issues. The proof is in the chants themselves. Gays for Gaza marches in support of a government that executes gay men. Women’s rights activists march in support of a movement that beats women in the street for not covering their hair. Protesters chant “stop the genocide” in the same breath as “from the river to the sea.” The contradictions are the giveaway. The position is the vehicle. The need for an outlet is the point.

The U.S. version is quieter so far, because the economy is still absorbing most of the shock. Unemployment is low. The AI buildout is pushing enormous spending into construction, electricians, HVAC, carpentry, and the skilled trades that would otherwise be in bad shape. The pain of displacement is lower here than in Europe, where tech employment is smaller, state spending is heavier, and the generation hitting the dilemma has no comparable release valve. The protests in Paris, Milan, and Brussels are what happens when a population has nowhere to put the anger. The streets you are not seeing on fire in Austin, Phoenix, or Columbus are what happens when the capital is still absorbing it.

The way to break groupthink is not to argue with the specific chant. The way to break it is to show the people chanting that they have a bigger stake somewhere else.

The second renaissance is already being built. In labs, on launch pads, in operating rooms, in server farms, in printing driveways, in self-driving cars, in networks that compound value for every participant who joins. The architecture is in place. The capability is here. The only part missing is the person who will stand in front of a microphone and tell the next generation that this is their mission, that they are needed for it, and that their lives will be better than their parents’ lives because of what they build in this decade.

Someone needs to tell them. Preferably soon. Before the next flag.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. Messer is a retired lawyer, but none of this is legal advice, political advice, or policy advice. These are his opinions, grounded in reading, in forty years of building companies, and in a conviction that the people who grow up in the next twenty years deserve a better story than the one being handed to them.