The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

by Kevin Kelly

Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards, and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink.

One can spend hours reading on the web and never encounter this literature space. One gets fragments, threads, glimpses. That is the web’s great attraction: miscellaneous pieces loosely joined. But without some kind of containment, these loosely joined pieces spin away, nudging a reader’s attention outward, wandering from the central narrative or argument.

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking.

Screens provoke action instead of persuasion. Propaganda is less effective in a world of screens, because while misinformation travels as fast as electrons, corrections do too.

A reporter for TechCrunch recently observed, “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” Indeed, digital media exhibits a similar absence. Netflix, the world’s largest video hub, allows me to watch a movie without owning it. Spotify, the largest music streaming company, lets me listen to whatever music I want without owning any of it. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited enables me to read any book in its 800,000-volume library without owning books, and PlayStation Now lets me play games without purchasing them. Every year I own less of what I use. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning and few of its disadvantages. You have no responsibility to clean, to repair, to store, to sort, to insure, to upgrade, to maintain.

The switch from “ownership that you purchase” to “access that you subscribe to” overturns many conventions. Ownership is casual, fickle. If something better comes along, grab it. A subscription, on the other hand, gushes a never-ending stream of updates, issues, and versions that force a constant interaction between the producer and the consumer. It is not a onetime event; it’s an ongoing relationship. To access a service, a customer is often committing to it in a far stronger way than when he or she purchases an item. You often get locked into a subscription (think of your mobile phone carrier or cable provider) that is difficult to switch out of. The longer you are with the service, the better it gets to know you; and the better it knows you, the harder it is to leave and start over again. It’s almost like being married. Naturally, the producer cherishes this kind of loyalty, but the customer gets (or should get) many advantages for continuing as well: uninterrupted quality, continuous improvements, attentive personalization—assuming it’s a good service.

Access mode brings consumers closer to the producer, and in fact the consumer often acts as the producer, or what futurist Alvin Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer.” If instead of owning software, you access software, then you can share in its improvement. But it also means you have been recruited. You, the new prosumer, are encouraged to identify bugs and report them (replacing a company’s expensive QA department), to seek technical help from other customers in forums (reducing a company’s expensive help desk), and to develop your own add-ons and improvements (replacing a company’s expensive development team). Access amplifies the interactions we have with all parts of a service.

Take transportation as an example. How do you get from point A to point B? Today you can do it in one of eight ways with a vehicle: 1. Buy a car, drive yourself (the default today). 2. Hire a company to drive you to your destination (taxi). 3. Rent a company-owned car, drive yourself (Hertz rental). 4. Hire a peer to drive you to your destination (Uber). 5. Rent a car from a peer, drive yourself (RelayRides). 6. Hire a company to drive you with shared passengers along a fixed route (bus). 7. Hire a peer to drive you with shared passengers to your destination (Lyft Line). 8. Hire a peer to drive you with shared passengers going to a fixed destination (BlaBlaCar).

For better or worse, our lives are accelerating, and the only speed fast enough is instant. The speed of electrons will be the speed of the future. Deliberate vacations from this speed will remain a choice, but on average communication technology is biased toward moving everything to on demand. And on demand is biased toward access over ownership.

The consequence of moving away from centralized organization to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything—both tangible and intangible—must flow faster to keep the whole going together. Flows are hard to own; possession seems to just slip through your fingers. Access is a more appropriate stance for the fluid relations that govern a decentralized apparatus.

But what if you could decentralize money as well? What if you created a distributed currency that was secure, accurate, and trustworthy without centralization? Because if money could be decentralized, then anything can be decentralized. But even if you could, why would you? Turns out you can decentralize money, and the technology to do this may be instrumental in decentralizing many other centralized institutions. The story of how the most centralized aspect of modern life is being decentralized holds lessons for many other unrelated industries.

A number of startups and venture capitalists are dreaming up ways to use blockchain technology as a general purpose trust mechanism beyond money.

The decentralized web/internet is now the central public commons. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it, yet I need to do very little to maintain it. I can summon it anytime, with the snap of a finger. I enjoy the full benefits of its amazing work—answering questions like a genius, navigating like a wizard, entertaining like a pro—without the burdens of ownership, simply by accessing it. (I pay its taxes with my subscriptions for internet access.) The more our society decentralizes, the more important accessing becomes.

The movies, music, books, and games that you access all live on clouds. A cloud is a colony of millions of computers that are braided together seamlessly to act as a single large computer. The bulk of what you do on the web and phone today is done on cloud computing. Though invisible, clouds run our digital lives.

A central advantage of a cloud is that the bigger it gets, the smaller and thinner our devices can be. The cloud does all the work, while the device we hold is just the window into the cloud’s work. When I look into my phone screen and see a live video stream, I am looking into the cloud. When I flick through book pages on my tablet, I am surfing the cloud. When the face of my smartwatch lights up with a message, it is coming from the cloud. When I flip open my cloudbook laptop, everything that I work on is actually somewhere else, in a cloud.

We know a decentralized cloud can work, because one did during the student protests in Hong Kong in 2014. To escape the obsessive surveillance the Chinese government pours on its citizens’ communications, the Hong Kong students devised a way to communicate without sending their messages to a central cell phone tower or through the company servers of Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) or WeChat (their Facebook) or email. Instead they loaded a tiny app onto their phones called FireChat. Two FireChat-enabled phones could speak to each other directly, via wifi radio, without jumping up to a cell tower. More important, either of the two phones could forward a message to a third FireChat-enabled phone. Keep adding FireChat’d phones and you soon have a full network of phones without towers.

Yet only in a science fiction world would a person own nothing at all. Most people will own some things while accessing others; the mix will differ by person. Yet the extreme scenario of a person who accesses all without any ownership is worth exploring because it reveals the stark direction technology is headed.

My father sometimes asks me if I feel untethered and irresponsible not owning anything. I tell him I feel the opposite: I feel a deep connection to the primeval. I feel like an ancient hunter-gatherer who owns nothing as he wends his way through the complexities of nature, conjuring up a tool just in time for its use and then leaving it behind as he moves on. It is the farmer who needs a barn for his accumulation. The digital native is free to race ahead and explore the unknown. Accessing rather than owning keeps me agile and fresh, ready for whatever is next.

Bill Gates once derided advocates for free software with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks demanding that software should be free, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong on several points: For one, free and open source software zealots are more likely to be political libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone all the time is quietly giving rise to a revised technological version of socialism.

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s political socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school political socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptions, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered. Socialistic command economies and centralized communistic regimes were left behind. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet, via network communications, generating intangible services throughout a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal,” “communitarian,” and “collective.” I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power. We call social media “social” for this same reason: It is a species of social action. Broadly speaking, social action is what websites and net-connected apps generate when they harness input from very large networks of consumers, or participants, or users, or what we once called the audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organizations under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available in this realm of sharing, so we might as well redeem this most direct one: social, social action, social media, socialism. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism.

The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

One might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to paid labor. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don’t think of themselves as revolutionaries. The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.” One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): “The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.” Basically, overt politics is not practical enough. The internet is less a creation dictated by economics than one dictated by sharing gifts.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day someone asked: What can markets do better? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. For instance, governments traditionally managed communications, particularly scarce radio airways. But auctioning off the communication spectrum in a marketplace radically increased the optimization of bandwidth and accelerated innovation and new businesses. Instead of a government monopoly distributing mail, let market players like DHL, FedEx, and UPS try it as well. In many cases, a modified market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Second, even though a purely decentralized power won’t take us all the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control. The barriers to start a new crowd-powered service are low and getting lower. A hive mind scales up wonderfully smoothly. That is why there were 9,000 startups in 2015 trying to exploit the sharing power of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. It does not matter if they morph over time. Perhaps a hundred years from now these shared processes, such as Wikipedia, will be layered up with so much management that they’ll resemble the old-school centralized businesses. Even so, the bottom up was still the best way to start.

Ditto

The technologies of recommendation and search have made it super easy to locate the most obscure work. If you want 6,000-year-old Babylonian chants accompanied by the lyre, there they are.

While the self-made bestsellers get all the headlines, the real news lies in the other direction. The digital age is the age of non-bestsellers—the underappreciated, the forgotten. Because of sharing technologies, the most obscure interest is no longer obscure; it is one click away. The fast-flowing penetration of the internet into all households, and recently into all pockets via a phone, has put an end to the domination of the mass audience. Most of the time, for most creations, it’s a world of niche fulfillment. Left-handed tattoo artists can find each other and share stories and esoteric techniques. People who find whispering sexy (and it turns out many do) can watch whispering videos produced and shared by like-minded whispering folks.

Today the audience is king. But what about the creators? Who will pay them in this sharing economy? How will their creative acts be financed if the middle is gone? The surprising answer is: another new sharing technology. No method has been as beneficial to creators as crowdfunding. In crowdfunding the audience funds the work. The fans collectively finance their favorites. The technology of sharing enables the power of one fan who is willing to prepay an artist or author to be aggregated (with little effort) together with hundreds of other fans into a significant pool of money.

Each of the 450 or so fan-funding platforms tweak their rules to cater to different groups of creatives or to emphasize different results. Crowdfunding sites can optimize for musicians (PledgeMusic, SellaBand), nonprofits (Fundly, FundRazr), medical emergencies (GoFundMe, Rally), and even science (Petridish, Experiment). A few sites (Patreon, Subbable) are engineered to supply continuous support to an ongoing project like a magazine or video channel. A couple platforms (Flattr, Unglue) use fans to fund work that has already been released.

Why stop there? Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans shared from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Several decades ago international banks discovered they had better repayment rates when they lent small amounts to the poor than when they lent big amounts to rich state governments. It was safer to lend money to the peasants in Bolivia than to the government of Bolivia. This microfinancing of a few hundred dollars applied many tens of thousands of times would also jump-start a developing economy from the bottom. Loan a poor woman $95 to buy supplies to launch a street food cart and the benefits of her stable income would ripple up through her children, the local economy, and quickly build a base for more complex startups. It was the most efficient development strategy invented yet. Kiva took the next step in sharing and turned microfinancing into peer-to-peer lending by enabling anyone, anywhere to make a microfinance loan. So you, sitting at Starbucks, could now lend $120 to a specific individual Bolivian woman who plans to buy wool to start a weaving business. You could follow her progress until she paid you back, at which time you could relend the money to someone else. Since Kiva’s launch in 2005, over 2 million people have lent more than $725 million in microfinance loans via its sharing platform. The payback rate is about 99 percent. That is a strong encour...

Innovation itself can be crowdsourced. The Fortune 500 company General Electric was concerned that its own engineers could not keep up with the rapid pace of invention around them, so it launched the platform Quirky. Anyone could submit online an idea for a great new GE product. Once a week, the GE staff voted on the best idea that week and would set to work making it real. If an idea became a product, it would earn money for the idea maker. To date GE has launched over 400 new products from this crowdsourced method. One example is the Egg Minder, an egg holder in your refrigerator that sends you a text when it’s time to reorder your eggs.

According to the most recent count I could find, the total number of songs that have been recorded on the planet is 180 million. Using standard MP3 compression, the total volume of recorded music for humans would fit into 720 terabytes. Today 720 terabytes sells for $72,000 and fills a closet. In ten years it will sell for $700 and fit into your pocket. Very soon you’ll be able to carry around all the music of humankind in your pants. On the other hand, if this library is so minuscule, why even bother to carry it around when you could get all music of the world in the cloud streamed to you on demand?

None of these methods disappear in the rising superabundance. But to deal with the escalation of options in the coming decades, we’ll invent many more types of filtering.

The danger of being rewarded with only what you already like, however, is that you can spin into an egotistical spiral, becoming blind to anything slightly different, even if you’d love it. This is called a filter bubble. The technical term is “overfitting.” You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment.

Second in the ideal approach, I’d like to know what my friends like that I don’t know about.

A third component in the ideal filter would be a stream that suggested stuff that I don’t like but would like to like.

In the next 30 years the entire cloud will be filtered, elevating the degree of personalization. Yet every filter throws something good away. Filtering is a type of censoring, and vice versa. Governments can implement nationwide filters to remove unwanted political ideas and restrict speech. Like Facebook or Google, they usually don’t disclose what they are filtering.

From the human point of view, a filter focuses content. But seen in reverse, from the content point of view, a filter focuses human attention. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become. Way back in 1971 Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning social scientist, observed, “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

A couple of companies have experimented with limited versions of user-created ads. Doritos solicited customer-generated video commercials to be aired on the 2006 Super Bowl. It received 2,000 video ads and more than 2 million people voted on the best, which was aired. Every year since then it has received on average 5,000 user-made submissions. Doritos now awards $1 million to the winner, which is far less than what professional ads cost.

Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained. The number of factors and possibilities we have to attend to rises each year almost exponentially. Thus our seemingly permanently distracted state and our endless flitting from one thing to another is not a sign of disaster, but is a necessary adaptation to this current environment. Google is not making us dumber. Rather we need to web surf to be agile, to remain alert to the next new thing. Our brains were not evolved to deal with zillions. This realm is beyond our natural capabilities, and so we have to rely on our machines to interface with it. We need a real-time system of filters upon filters in order to operate in the explosion of options we have created.

Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable.

Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed.

We are in a period of productive remixing.

For instance, behind every bestselling book are legions of fans who write their own sequels using their favorite author’s characters in slightly altered worlds. These extremely imaginative extended narratives are called fan fiction, or fanfic. They are unofficial—without the original authors’ cooperation or approval—and may mix elements from more than one book or author. Their chief audience is other avid fans. One fanfic archive lists 1.5 million fan-created works to date.

All these inventions (and more) permit any literate person to cut and paste ideas, annotate them with her own thoughts, link them to related ideas, search through vast libraries of work, browse subjects quickly, resequence texts, refind material, remix ideas, quote experts, and sample bits of beloved artists. These tools, more than just reading, are the foundations of literacy.

The rewindability of film is what makes 120-hour movies such as Lost, or The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica possible, and enjoyable. They brim with too many details ingeniously molded into them to be apparent on initial viewing; scrolling back at any point is essential.

Games now have scroll-back functions that allow replays, redos, or extra lives, a related concept. One can rewind the experience and try again, with slightly different variations, again and again, until one masters that level. On the newest racing games, one can rewind to any previous point by literally running the action backward. All major software packages have an undo button that lets you rewind. The best apps enable unlimited undos, so you can scroll back as far as you want. The most complex pieces of consumer software in existence, such as Photoshop or Illustrator, employ what is called nondestructive editing, which means you can rewind to any particular previous point you want at any time and restart from there, no matter how many changes you’ve made. The genius of Wikipedia is that it also employs nondestructive editing—all previous versions of an article are kept forever, so any reader can in fact rewind the changes back in time. This “redo” function encourages creativity.