For organizations and companies, opportunities and challenges will come hand in hand with global connectivity. A new level of accountability, driven by the people, will force these actors to rethink their existing operations and adapt their plans for the future, changing how they do things as well as how they present their activities to the public. They’ll also find new competitors, as widespread technological inclusion levels the playing field for information, and therefore opportunity.
In the future, no person, from the most powerful to the weakest, will be insulated from what in many cases will be historic changes.
We two first met in the fall of 2009, under circumstances that made it easy to form a bond quickly. We were in Baghdad, engaging with Iraqis around the critical question of how technology can be used to help rebuild a society. As we moved around the city meeting with government ministers, military leaders, diplomats and Iraqi entrepreneurs, we encountered a nation whose prospects for recovery and future success appeared to hang by a thread. Eric’s visit marked the first trip to Iraq by the CEO of a Fortune 500 technology company, so there were lots of questions about why Google was there. At the time, even we weren’t entirely sure what Google might encounter or accomplish.
The answer became clear instantly. Everywhere we looked, we saw mobile devices. That surprised us. At the time, Iraq had been a war zone for more than six years, following the fall of Saddam Hussein, who, in his totalitarian paranoia, had banned the use of mobile phones. The war had decimated Iraq’s physical infrastructure, and most people had unreliable access to food, water and electricity. Even basic commodities were prohibitively expensive. In some places, garbage hadn’t been collected in years. And, critically, the security of the population was never guaranteed, either for high-level officials or for everyday shopkeepers. Mobile phones seemed like the last item that would appear on the country’s dauntingly long to-do list. Yet as we came to learn, despite all of the pressing problems in their lives, Iraqis prioritized technology.
Not only did the Iraqis possess and value technology, they also saw its huge potential to improve their lives and the fate of their embattled country. The engineers and entrepreneurs we met expressed great frustration over their inability to help themselves. They already knew what they needed—reliable electricity, enough bandwidth for a fast connection, accessible digital tools and enough access to start-up capital to get their ideas off the ground.
It was Eric’s first trip to a war zone, and Jared’s umpteenth, yet we both came away with a sense that something profound was shifting in the world. If even war-weary Iraqis not only saw the possibilities of technology but knew what they wanted to do with it, how many other millions of people were out there with the drive and basic knowledge but not the access? For Jared, the trip confirmed to him that governments were dangerously behind the curve when it came to anticipating changes (fearful of them, too), and that they did not see the possibilities these new tools presented for tackling what challenges lay ahead. And Eric confirmed his feeling that the technology industry had many more problems to solve, and customers to serve, than anyone realized.
In the months following our trip, it became clear to us that there is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge. Yet the potential for collaboration between the tech industry, the public sector and civil society is enormous. As we thought about the spread of connectivity around the world, we found ourselves captivated by the questions generated by this divide: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age? How will war, diplomacy and revolution change when everyone is connected, and how can we tip the balance in a beneficial way? When broken societies are rebuilt, what will they be able to do with technology?
We collaborated first as writers of a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about lessons learned in Iraq, and thereafter as friends. We share a worldview about the potential of technology platforms, and their inherent power, and this informs all of the work we do, both within Google and outside it. We believe that modern technology platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, are even more powerful than most people realize, and our future world will be profoundly altered by their adoption and successfulness in societies everywhere. These platforms constitute a true paradigm shift, akin to the invention of television, and what gives them their power is their ability to grow—specifically, the speed at which they scale. Almost nothing short of a biological virus can spread as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as these technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control and use them powerful too. Never before have so many people been connected through an instantly responsive network; the possibilities for collective action through communal online platforms (as consumers, creators, contributors, activists and in every other way) are truly game-changing. The scale effects that we’re familiar with today, from a viral music video to an international e-commerce platform, merely hint at what is to come.
Because of digital platform-driven scale effects, things will happen much more quickly in the new digital age, with implications for every part of society, including politics, economics, the media, business and social norms. This acceleration to scale, when paired with the interconnectedness that Internet technology fosters, will usher in a new era of globalization—globalization of products and ideas. As members of the technology sector, it’s our duty to fully and honestly explore the impact our industry’s work has and will have on people’s lives and on society, because, increasingly, governments will have to make rules synergistically with individuals and companies who are moving at an accelerated pace and pushing the boundaries sometimes faster than laws can keep up with. The digital platforms, networks and products they launch now have an outsized effect, on an international scale. So in order to understand the future of politics, business, diplomacy and other important sectors, one must understand how technology is driving major changes in those areas.
By coincidence, just as we began to share ideas about the future, a string of highly visible world events occurred that exemplified the very concepts and problems we were debating. The Chinese government launched sophisticated cyber attacks on Google and dozens of other American companies; WikiLeaks burst onto the scene, making hundreds of thousands of classified digital records universally accessible; major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan devastated cities but generated innovative tech-driven responses; and the revolutions of the Arab Spring shook the world with their speed, strength and contagious mobilization effects. Each turbulent development introduced new angles and possibilities about the future for us to consider.
We spent a great deal of time debating the meaning and consequences of events like these, predicting trends and theorizing possible tech-oriented solutions. This book is the product of those conversations.
In the forthcoming pages, we explore the future as we envision it, full of complex global issues involving citizenship, statecraft, privacy and war, among other issues, with both the challenges and the solutions driven by the rise of global connectivity. Where possible, we describe what can be done to help channel the influx of new technological tools in ways that inform, improve and enrich our world. Technology-driven change is inevitable, but at every stage, we can exert a measure of control over how it plays out. Some of the predictions you’ll read in these pages will be things you’ve long suspected but couldn’t admit—such as the logical conclusions of commercial drone warfare—while others will be wholly new. We hope that our predictions and recommendations will engage you and get you thinking.