An interesting Hegelian debate; do men shape history or does history shape men?
I've come down on the latter. I think history is a force and men either ride it or get buried by it. Its easy to believe that IBM and GM and AT&T are creating history if you've never worked at one of those companies. For those of us that have there's no doubt that the Exec's are mostly reacting to market forces, or at best, trying to get in front of them.
Your concern vis-a-vis St. John is also poignant and my questions are; where does it end? does it have to end? or will it begin to unravel just like the empire he was so frightened of?
It is men who drive history, not something outside us. Technology is just the storehouse of men's tools. And men make tools to, first, survive, and then, to get the life they want.
So when I say technology is driving globalization all I mean is that what men want is in the direction of globalization, and men will go through the dissolution of national borders to get what they want, no matter what.
The real interesting question is not "what entity is driving events?" but "what do men want?" This question is nothing more than Aristotle's question of the final cause, or destiny.
The first, the root assertion of the New Testament happens also to be one with which we can empirically agree or disagree, using all the data of human culture. That first assertion is about men: they want things they shouldn't want. The "heart", which is the organ which WANTS, is broken.
If you find the New Testament reliable in an area where you can look around you and either agree or disagree (is the wanting organ in man broken or not?) then you proceed to trust it in further areas where you cannot look around and test it (i.e. God sent His Son to deliver us).
So, what do men want? Answer: They want pleasure. After they have solved the problem of survival, from that moment on they start making tools to get pleasure. Money is a shorthand symbol of convenience for pleasure. A free-market economy is simply the most efficient means to allocate resources to produce maximum efficiency, and efficiency is defined by the end, the final cause, the destiny, which is itself chosen not by economics but by the heart of man: pleasure.
This motive is the force of history. (I don't mean to say that all men are like this, nor that most men seek pleasure at every waking moment, nor that all pleasure is bad. Just that it is strong enough that the general tendency of mankind is governed by it.)
How did we get from a discussion of manufacturing to this theologizing, you ask? Simply because I look around me and see "globalization" as the logical and predictable course derived from the laws of economics, facilitated by technology, which is the tool of men's wants, which cannot be thwarted by any other known force.
Those among us who want to argue about "globalization" as if it is purely a question of economic pragmatism ("is it good economics in the long run?") are amazingly shallow.
"Globalization" is a process predictable by anybody who happens to have the oddity of twin interests in economics and the New Testament.