We are in the Beginning of that process, right at the cusp of that discontinuity. In this new regime, old cultural forces, such as centralized authority and uniformity, diminish while new cultural forces, such as the ones I describe in this book—sharing, accessing, tracking—come to dominate our institutions and personal lives. As the new phase congeals, these forces will continue to intensify. Sharing, though excessive to some now, is just beginning. The switch from ownership to access has barely begun. Flows and streams are still trickles. While it seems as if we are tracked too much already, we’ll be tracking a thousand times as much in the coming decades. Each one of these functions will be accelerated by high-quality cognification, just now being born, making the smartest things we do today seem very dumb. None of this is final. These transitions are but the first step in a process, a process of becoming. It is a Beginning.
• • •
Look at a satellite photograph of the earth at night to get a glimpse of this very large organism. Brilliant clusters of throbbing city lights trace out organic patterns on the dark land. The cities gradually dim at their edges to form thin long lighted highways connecting other distant city clusters. The routes of lights outward are dendritic, treelike patterns. The image is deeply familiar. The cities are ganglions of nerve cells; the lighted highways are the axons of nerves, reaching to a synaptic connection. Cities are the neurons of the holos. We live inside this thing.
This embryonic very large thing has been running continuously for at least 30 years. I am aware of no other machine—of any type—that has run that long with zero downtime. While portions of it will probably spin down temporarily one day due to power outages or cascading infections, the entire thing is unlikely to go quiet in the coming decades. It has been and will likely remain the most reliable artifact we have.
This picture of an emerging superorganism reminds some scientists of the concept of “the singularity.” A “singularity” is a term borrowed from physics to describe a frontier beyond which nothing can be known. There are two versions in pop culture: a hard singularity and a soft singularity. The hard version is a future brought about by the triumph of a superintelligence. When we create an AI that is capable of making an intelligence smarter than itself, it can in theory make generations of ever smarter AIs. In effect, AI would bootstrap itself in an infinite accelerating cascade so that each smarter generation is completed faster than the previous generation until AIs very suddenly get so smart that they solve all existing problems in godlike wisdom and leave us humans behind. It is called a singularity because it is beyond what we can perceive. Some call that our “last invention.” For various reasons, I think that scenario is unlikely.
A soft singularity is more likely. In this future scenario AIs don’t get so smart that they enslave us (like evil versions of smart humans); rather AI and robots and filtering and tracking and all the technologies I outline in this book converge—humans plus machines—and together we move to a complex interdependence. At this level many phenomenon occur at scales greater than our current lives, and greater than we can perceive—which is the mark of a singularity. It’s a new regime wherein our creations makes us better humans, but also one where we can’t live without what we’ve made. If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid—a new phase state.
This phase change has already begun. We are marching inexorably toward firmly connecting all humans and all machines into a global matrix. This matrix is not an artifact, but a process. Our new supernetwork is a standing wave of change that steadily spills forward new arrangements of our needs and desires. The particular products, brands, and companies that will surround us in 30 years are entirely unpredictable. The specifics at that time hinge on the crosswinds of individual chance and fortune. But the overall direction of this large-scale vibrant process is clear and unmistakable. In the next 30 years the holos will continue to lean in the same direction it has for the last 30 years: toward increased flowing, sharing, tracking, accessing, interacting, screening, remixing, filtering, cognifying, questioning, and becoming. We stand at this moment at the Beginning.
The Beginning, of course, is just beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Paul Slovak, my editor at Viking, who has long supported my efforts to make sense of technology, and to my agent John Brockman, who suggested this book. For editorial guidance on the first draft I relied on Jay Schaefer, master book coach based in San Francisco. Librarian Camille Hartsell did most of the factual research and provided the extensive endnotes. Claudia Lamar assisted in research, fact-checking, and formatting help. Two of my former colleagues at Wired, Russ Mitchell and Gary Wolf, waded through an early rough draft and made important suggestions that I incorporated. Over the span of years that I wrote this material I benefited from the precious time of many interviewees. Among them were John Battelle, Michael Naimark, Jaron Lanier, Gary Wolf, Rodney Brooks, Brewster Kahle, Alan Greene, Hal Varian, George Dyson, and Ethan Zuckerman. Thanks to the editors of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, who were instrumental in shaping initial versions of portions of this book.
Most important, this book is dedicated to my family—Giamin, Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen—who keep me grounded and pointed forward. Thank you.
NOTES
1: BECOMING
average lifespan of a phone app: Erick Schonfeld, “Pinch Media Data Shows the Average Shelf Life of an iPhone App Is Less Than 30 Days,” TechCrunch, February 19, 2009.
sea pirates two centuries ago: Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
graphic Netscape browser: Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).
not designed for doing commerce: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Battle for the Soul of the Internet,” Time, July 25, 1994.
“The Internet? Bah!”: Clifford Stoll, “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995 (original title: “The Internet? Bah!”).
“CB radio of the ’90s”: William Webb, “The Internet: CB Radio of the 90s?,” Editor & Publisher, July 8, 1995.
Bush outlined the web’s core idea: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.
Nelson, who envisioned his own scheme: Theodor H. Nelson, “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate,” in ACM ’65: Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference (New York: ACM, 1965), 84–100.
“transclusion”: Theodor H. Nelson, Literary Machines (South Bend, IN: Mindful Press, 1980).