В статье рассматривается «китайское пророчество» Джека Лондона, отраженное в его рассказе 1910 года «Беспримерное нашествие» («The Unparalleled Invasion»). Суть предсказания писателя сводится к столкновению в отдаленном будущем США и Китая, в результате которого китайская цивилизация будет полностью уничтожена посредством биологического оружия. Эпидемия коронавируса COVID–19, прокатившаяся во всему миру и начавшаяся в 2020 году в китайском городе Ухань с явным «американским следом», позволяет говорить о том, что «китайское пророчество» Джека Лондона подтвердилось через 110 лет после публикации рассказа. Помимо общей фабулы сюжета, в рассказе имеется целый ряд более мелких и конкретных прогнозов, которые поражают своей точностью. Для объяснения феномена «китайского пророчества» предлагается простая модель футурологического успеха, в основе которой лежит формула, согласно которой успех предсказания определяется лежащим в его основе научным методом и индивидуальной интуицией писателя. На примерах и фактах показано, что Джек Лондон действительно опирался на эти две составляющие творческого успеха. Раскрыты некоторые важные расхождения между «китайским пророчеством» и нынешней реальностью; показана роль исходных экзистенциальных установок писателя, характерных для Западной цивилизации, в характере прогнозов и восприятии будущих событий.

The article considers the process of digitalization of the Russian economy and the penetration of this process into the sphere of higher education. We show that the digitalization of applicants’ admission to Russian universities takes place within the framework of a global trend aimed at introducing the customer centricity approach in the public administration system. In particular, we consider the results of three–year operation of a special electronic service “Admission to the university online”, which is also called the Superservice. The analytical indices introduced into consideration make it possible to identify major technical and organizational issues that emerge in the course of digitalization of Russia’s social space. These issues can be divided into objective and subjective, which equally hinder the final implementation of the new electronic system. The calculations carried out have shown that the peak load on the Superservice system is from 10.2 to 16.9 million simultaneous actions, which entails persistent technical failures in the operation of the platform. We substantiate an opinion, according to which the figures obtained do not go beyond the limits of modern computing capabilities of information services, which in turn indicates administrative miscalculations in making decisions about the smoothness of functioning of the Superservice. We have found the effect of artificial commotion, when the very options of the Superservice provoke increased activity of applicants during the admission campaign, which leads to technical failures of the system. The calculations have shown that the number of applications submitted by applicants through the Superservice is on average more than three times higher than the same indicator for applicants using the traditional application form. We consider the prospects of gradual weakening and even disappearance of the artificial commotion effect as the services provided by the Superservice are becoming a common thing.

The geopolitical turbulence and the implementation of large–scale international sanctions dictate the need to assess the degree of readiness of the states to a longterm civilisational confrontation. The article aims to construct and test a new analytical tool – antifragility index of the national economy. Methodologically, the research is based on the idea that in the presence of several industries, the national economy obtains a functional foundation and a possibility to exist autonomously in conditions of disrupted international trade relations. To put this idea into practice, the article proposes a heuristic algorithm for constructing an antifragility index of the economy taking into account the priority of such industries as agriculture, pharmaceuticals industry, production of means of labour, and mineral extraction. Based on the national statistics of eight states – the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Brazil and Russia – the paper presents pilot calculations of the index. According to the results, only Russia’s index showed an upward trend in 2003–2020, while in the other seven countries it went down. The antifragility index is shown to have an ability to capture the peculiarities of political cycles and event shocks in the world economy. The research provides empirical evidence that the change of the leading country, amongst other things, is associated with the accumulation of structural disproportions in the economy: the weakening of its foundation made up of vital industries and excessive complication of the industrial superstructure in the form of the non–productive sphere. The paper proposes scaling up the constructed index to a broader sample of countries in order to clarify the regional disposition of forces in the global geopolitical space.