Even those who think that Internet stocks are overvalued must admit that they were a good investment. Under conditions of limited knowledge and radical swings, everything can change at any time and what might have been true for a long time does not need to be helpful any longer. The two central characteristics of the network environment, reflexivity and fallacity, create a condition of extreme flexibility. Everything can change quickly and radically. Everything one knows must be critically reviewed at all times and, if necessary, abandoned.
Nothing is exempt from revision.
Soros, true to his own principle of fallacity, claims that the simple dichotomy between an open and a closed society is no longer adequate. Under the condition of extreme flexibility a society can be too open to sustain the basic democratic institutions which rely on a set of shared values among its citizens. The instability introduced by volatile financial markets threatens the normative foundation of the open society. This leads to the second half of the book entitled The Present Moment in History. We are at a point where the financial markets have spun put of control and now threaten to destroy civic life.