As 2011 winds to a close, this video montage from Google offers a whirlwind view of news-making and word-changing events from the past 12 months. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Everything, from floods to tsunami and nuclear crisis, from birth of a new nation, South Sudan, to death of American icons Elizabeth Taylor and Steve Jobs, it was a year of dramatic transformation on the one hand, of more-of-the-same stonewalls and stagnation on the other.

Too much happened in the economic realm to capture in this 2.52-minute v-clip—yet little true change occurred. The U.S. Congress and executive branch remained at loggerheads over how to reduce spending or even begin to bring the deficit under control. Eurozone and European Union leaders met and met and met again, each time emerging with a laundry list of fixes for the Euro crisis that buoyed the market for days or hours, only to see investor confidence fall again. A small protest movement, inspired by the revolutionaries of Tunisia and Egypt’s Tahrir Square, occupied Wall Street, then spread to city halls, public parks and university campuses throughout the U.S. Despite the best efforts of labor unions and politicians to piggy-bag on the Occupy brand, as bitter winter weather purged the movement’s ranks, it remains to be seen whether any real social change or economic reform will ensue. As Google, Facebook, Twitter and the ever-tinier machines that host them transform the way we communicate, the way we buy and sell, and the way our very brains work, the global fiat currency system and central banking system continue inexorably along the same tired path, albeit at an ever-accelerating rate of destructive force.

Take a look at the Google clip, or at any of the news-magazine headline reviews playing on any number of TV network and cable channels over the next few days. Watch and ask yourself—is it in there? Am I seeing the final straw on the stack, the first domino in the chain to fall, the event that, we will learn only later, was the final tipping point of human realization, the beginning of the crisis of confidence that will, finally, set into motion a market-based cure for our ailing world economy?