Mark P. Mills is a smart person

His post, American Technologists and Entrepreneurs Re-Set Russian Relations, get the American system. Here he talks about Putin bragging on Russian energy doominance, which went away with the shale revolution:

The United States today is the world’s fastest growing oil and gas producer and is already eroding Russian revenues and influence. With production gushing out of the heartland, America has pushed Russia aside to become number one in global gas production. The prospect of future U.S. LNG exports is now exerting downward pressure on prices of Russian gas exports to Europe. Russia is increasingly being forced to abandon the, once sacred, gas-oil price link to maintain market share. The new state of affairs has visibly emboldened European policymakers. Even the Germans are taking a tougher stance on Russian human rights practices. Europe has finally found the nerve to launch a major antitrust suit against Gazprom. And while much of Europe has reacted querulously to the coming shale boom, those with the most painful experience of Russian energy dominance, Poland and Ukraine, are determined to unlock their own shale reserves. The International Energy Agency’s labeling the U.S. the “new Middle East” underlines the fact that shale can no longer be written off as a marginal fluctuation. North American gas exports to Europe are not a matter of if, but of how soon and how much. The US is already a net exporter of gasoline and diesel fuel, much of it to Europe. There is even the possibility of U.S. crude exports as production there exceeds domestic refinery capacity.

None of this comes from new discoveries – American, indeed global shale fields have existed for millennia – nor just from fracking alone. The game changer is largely the result of information technology. Sub-surface imaging and big data have made finding, drilling and operating wells (both land-side fracked ones, and in deep water) vastly more productive. Such technologies were once available only to majors but are now used by the thousands of small and mid-sized U.S. oil and gas businesses that have driven the boom. Add to all this the uniquely American feature of private ownership of mineral rights. The economic alignment between tens of thousands of small parties – land-owners and producers -- is quite unlike anything else in the world. (We expect some nations will emulate this through creative profit sharing.) In short, we are witnessing an historic shift in world energy production resulting from the unique dynamism and creativity of U.S. style capitalism.

I have italicized the essential passage. We, the global economy, is right now being dominated by the spread of digital technology in areas beyond the web and personal computing. Think of this as web bots getting a whole lot smarter.