Looking back at the beginning of the 1900s and now there are a lot of meta level parallels. Too much change is happening too quickly for societies to realistically adapt. This leaves a lot of room for greedy agents to gather other power seeking agents to further destabilize the situation for their own gain. The outcome of things like this is almost always war. Problem is once war starts it tends to spiral out of control and the body counts increase rapidly.

I would also add that the internet is very young and the amount of data and news we get daily is also new and different stressful than 50 years ago.

A real war would disrupt the internet so substantially as to render AI inoperative. Data centers are easy to find on Google Earth, few are really hardened against deliberate attack, and they would be immediate targets.