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The future of technology resides, in large part, in the discovery of new interactions. In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.
As Malthus and Darwin showed, every biological population expands right to the limit of its starvation. Today, in a world made abundant by
the threat to survival is due to an excess of good
stuff. Too much goodness throws our metabolism and psycho...
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Those who figure out how to domesticate tracking, to make it civil and productive, will prosper, while those who try only to prohibit and outlaw it will be left behind.
The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It
Information is accumulating faster than the rate we pour concrete (which is booming at a 7 percent increase annually),
The growth of information has been steadily increasing at an insane rate for at least a century. It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five years ago humanity stored several hundred exabytes of information. That is the equivalent of each person on the planet having 80 Library of Alexandrias. Today we average 320 libraries each.
If we could personify bits, we’d say: Bits want to move.
Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.
Since bits want to duplicate, replicate, and be linked, there’s no stopping the explosion of information and the science fiction levels of tracking.
Or could we construct a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers? The first option is hell, the second tractable.
We tend to be uncomfortable being tracked today because we don’t know much about who is watching us. We don’t know what they know. We have no say in how the information is used. They are not accountable to correct it. They are filming us but we can’t film them. And the benefits for being watched are murky and concealed. The relationship is unbalanced and asymmetrical.
Since we cannot stop the system from tracking, we can only make the relationships more symmetrical.
civilizing cove...
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possible to engineer systems that are powered by mutual vigilance.
to be open and transparent and share my life
If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.
Vanity trumps privacy. For eons
in every system that I have experienced where anonymity becomes common, the system fails.
Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it’s good, even essential for the system. Anonymity enables the occasional whistle-blower and can protect the persecuted fringe and political outcasts. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. That’s why most of the brutal harassment on Twitter, Yik Yak, Reddit, and other sites is delivered anonymously. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.
The full power of data lies in the many ways it can be reordered, restructured, reused, reimagined, remixed. Bits want to be linked; the more relationships a bit of data can join, the more powerful it gets.
Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling.
The next step is to unbundle classifieds, stories, and updates into even more elemental particles that can be rearranged in unexpected and unimaginable ways.
Wikipedia works because it turns out that, with the right tools, it is easier to restore damaged text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damaged text (vandalism), and so the good enough article prospers and continues to slowly improve. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.
The technium—the modern system of culture and technology—is accelerating the creation of new impossibilities by continuing to invent new social organizations.
The “revert log” button on Wikipedia, which made it
easier to restore a vandalized passage than to vandalize it, unleashed a new higher organization of trust, emphasizing one facet of human behavior not enabled at a large scale before.
It is not necessary that we invent some kind of autonomous global consciousness. It is only necessary that we connect everyone to everyone else—and to everything else—all the time and create new things together.
First, there is no invention that cannot be subverted in some way to cause harm. Even the most angelic technology can be weaponized, and will be. Criminals are some of the most creative innovators in the world. And crap constitutes 80 percent of everything.
Both virtue and vice are subject to the same great becoming and flowing forces.
All the ways that startups and corporations need to adjust to ubiquitous sharing and constant screening apply to crime syndicates and hacker squads as well. Even the bad can’t escape these trends.
On each round we gain additional
opportunities and choices that did not exist before. This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness.
We are headed for a trillion times increase. As noted earlier, a shift by a trillion is not merely a change in quantity, but a change in essence.
Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today.
As long as we are online—which is almost all day many days—we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.
I think there is already evidence that this ocean of extraordinariness is inspiring and daring ordinary folks to try something extraordinary.
The good news may be that it cultivates in us an expanded sense of what is possible for humans, and for human life, and so extremism expands us. The bad news may be that this insatiable appetite for super-superlatives leads to dissatisfaction with anything ordinary.
This waking dream we call the internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online.
More important, I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one of the greatest things this new invention has done. Isn’t the whole idea that in a highly evolved advanced society work is over?
Technologies that provided audiences with the ability to interact with stories and news—to time shift, play later, rewind, probe, link, save, clip, cut and paste—enabled long forms as well as short forms.
Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”
A good question is what humans are for.
Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy toward the fluidity of decentralization. It is moving from nouns to verbs, from tangible products to intangible becomings. From fixed media to messy remixed media. From stores to flows. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions.
But the technologies that help generate questions will be valued more. Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.
Braiding nerves out of glass, copper, and airy radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all people, all artifacts, all sensors, all facts and notions into a grand network of hitherto unimagined complexity.
The Beginning is a century-long process,
upsetting the old order. Fierce
At its core 7 billion humans, soon to be 9 billion, are quickly cloaking themselves with an always-on layer of connectivity that comes close to directly linking their brains to each other.
