The headlines are easy to write, and they’re almost always wrong. “Zero Progress,” they blare, describing the latest round of peace talks between Turkey and Armenia. It’s the kind of news that makes you sigh, close the browser tab, and resign yourself to the idea that some things will never change. But that’s because we’re looking in the wrong place. We’re watching the diplomats in stuffy rooms, expecting a grand, top-down solution to a problem that’s been festering for a century.
We’re missing the real story.
The real breakthrough isn’t happening at a negotiating table. It’s happening in the hum of electrical substations and the contrails of commercial airliners. While the official narrative stalls, a different kind of connection is being forged—one built not of words and handshakes, but of copper wire and flight paths. This is the kind of progress I get excited about, because it’s organic, resilient, and almost impossible to stop. It’s a paradigm shift hiding in plain sight, and it tells us a profound truth about how peace is actually built in the 21st century.
The Hardware of Peace
Think about the birth of the internet. It wasn’t a single treaty or a grand declaration. It was a bunch of engineers laying physical cables, linking machines, and creating a raw, tangible network. The protocols, the websites, the communities—all of that came later. First, you had to build the hardware. That’s exactly what I see happening between Turkey and Armenia right now.
Forget the diplomatic language for a moment and look at the physics of the situation. As one recent analysis detailed, From flights to electricity grids, Turkey-Armenia ties slowly advance. These aren’t symbolic gestures; they are physical conduits. They are the foundational layer—the hardware of a new relationship. This is the kind of infrastructure that creates its own momentum, a shared dependency that slowly and quietly rewrites the political equation on the ground. When I first read about the grid connection, I honestly just sat back in my chair, a huge smile on my face. This is it. This is how you start.
This is what we call building a system with positive externalities—in simpler terms, it means creating connections that produce unexpected benefits for everyone involved. A shared power grid doesn't just keep the lights on; it creates a mutual vulnerability and a shared interest in stability. A direct flight doesn't just move people from point A to point B; it moves money, ideas, and family members, weaving a human tapestry that becomes increasingly difficult to tear apart. It’s the speed and tangibility of this that’s just staggering—it means the gap between a theoretical peace and a practical one is closing with every single kilowatt-hour and every single passenger that crosses the sky.
But with this power comes a responsibility. Are these connections being built with resilience in mind, or are they just new levers for old political games? Can we design these systems to be fundamentally democratizing, empowering ordinary people rather than just state-run enterprises?
Debugging a Century-Old Operating System
So if the hardware is being installed, why do the talks keep failing? Why the headlines about “zero progress”? Because they’re trying to run a brand-new application on a century-old operating system. The diplomatic process is the software layer, and it’s riddled with bugs, legacy code, and historical trauma that causes it to crash every time it’s booted up.
The political establishment is "playing hard to get," as reports suggest, because its programming is based on conflict and mistrust. It doesn't know how to process the new data streaming in from the hardware layer. This is the ultimate legacy system, and like any ancient piece of software, it resists updates.
This is where the plan for Turkish and Armenian envoys to use their common land border for a meeting becomes so brilliant. It’s not just a photo-op. In my world, we’d call this a "ping test." It’s a direct, physical query to see if the most fundamental connection works. You can spend years arguing about communication protocols, but at some point, you have to send a single packet of data across the wire and see if it gets there. The image of those two figures, standing on that strip of land that has been a symbol of division, is a powerful act of debugging the system in real time. It’s a live patch being applied to a geopolitical firewall.
This whole situation reminds me of the early days of the ARPANET, the precursor to our internet. It was built by the military for robust communication, but what did its users immediately start doing? They started creating mailing lists, sharing stories, and forming communities. The human impulse to connect will always find a way to route around the damage of a system designed for control. The hardware of connection, once laid, takes on a life of its own.
The question is no longer if these two nations will connect, but what will happen when the network of people, commerce, and energy becomes more powerful than the political apparatus that seeks to control it? What happens when the bandwidth of human interaction simply overwhelms the choke points of official diplomacy?
It's All About the Connections
Let's be clear. The future isn't forged in sterile meeting rooms under fluorescent lights. That’s the old way. The future is built by engineers laying cable, by pilots flying new routes, and by everyday people whose lives become intertwined through the quiet, persistent hum of a shared electrical grid. The political software will eventually catch up—it has to. Because once the hardware is in place, the human network always, always wins.