We’ve seen all sorts of ways in which people are being empowered, from blogs and multimedia, to home-based manufacturing and other cottage industries, to the longer-term promise of molecular manufacturing and related technologies. So what’s the big picture in a world where the small matters more?
Making predictions is always difficult. And considering the changes that strong technologies like nanotech, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering are likely to make, predicting beyond the next few decades is especially difficult. But here are some thoughts on what it’s all likely to mean, and what we should probably do to help ensure that the changes are mostly beneficial.
eBAY NATION
We’re not all going to wind up working for eBay or Amazon, but as large organizations lose the economies of scope and scale that once made them preferred employers, more people are going to wind up working for themselves or for small businesses. That’s probably a good thing. There doesn’t seem to be a huge wellspring of love for the Dilbert lifestyle though, as I’ve mentioned before, most people wouldn’t mind Dilbert’s big-company benefits package. So eBay, with its health coverage for sellers, may be a prototype for future solutions to this dilemma.
If people are going to be doing more outside the big-organization box, and if most of our current infrastructure of health and retirement benefits and the like is built around the implicit or explicit expectation that most people will work for big businesses, it’s probably time for a change.
On the smaller scale, this would suggest that it’s time to make things like health insurance and retirement benefits more portable, and to make the tax code more friendly to small businesses and the self-employed. There’s always a lot of lip service in that direction, but not so much actual movement. Some people might even go so far as to claim that this is an argument for single-payer national health insurance, which in theory would facilitate entrepreneurship. Given its poor record elsewhere—and the fact that places like Canada, Britain, and Germany aren’t exactly hotbeds of independent entrepreneurial activity—I don’t think I’d endorse that approach. But a mechanism that would let people operate on their own, without the very real problems that a lack of big-employer health insurance creates, would do a lot to facilitate independence. I know quite a few people who stay in their jobs because they need the health benefits; they’d be gone in a shot if they could get these benefits another way.
On a larger scale, though, it’s worth looking at the role of government in general. I mentioned earlier that the big organizations in the twenty-first century will be more likely to flourish if they’re organized so as to help individuals do what they want—to take the place of older, bigger organizations in a more disintermediated way. That’s what eBay, Amazon, and others do. Could a similar approach work for the government? We’re a long way from that right now.
In theory, of course, our government is all about maximizing individual potential and choices. In practice, well, not so much, as Joel Miller notes in his book Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America’s Families, Finances, and Freedom.1 Miller mostly describes the problem rather than solutions. Thoughts on how to reorganize government to further those goals could easily occupy another book, but it strikes me that now is a good time to start trying to figure these things out.2
THE SWARM
In the chapter “Horizontal Knowledge,” I discuss the rapid appearance of the World Wide Web, without any centralized planning effort, as evidence of how important horizontal knowledge and spontaneous organization have become. I’ve made this point before, as long ago as 2003,3 and Kevin Kelly echoes it in a history of the Web published in Wired:
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan. . . . Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above . . . as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible.4
But it happened. As Kelly notes, everyone who pondered the Web, including many very smart people who had been thinking about communications and computers for decades and who had substantial sums of money at stake, nonetheless missed the true story: the power of millions of amateurs doing things because they wanted to do them, not because they were told to. It was an Army of Davids, doing what the Goliaths never could have managed.
Because information is easier to manipulate than matter, the Army of Davids has appeared first in areas where computers and communications are involved. But new technologies will extend the ability of people to cooperate beyond cyberspace, as well as increasing what people can do in the real world. What’s more, this process will feed back upon itself. New technologies will help people cooperate, which will lead to further improvements in technology, which will lead to more efficient cooperation (and individual effort), which will lead to further improvements, and so on. This means that “swarms” of activity will start to happen on all sorts of fronts. I can imagine good swarms (say, lots of people working on developing vaccines or space technology) and bad ones (lots of people working on viruses or missiles). I expect we’ll see more of the good than the bad—just as we’ve seen far more coordinated good activity on the Web than bad— but the changes are likely to surprise the experts just as they have in the past.
HORIZONTAL POLITICS
Political power used to be a pyramid. In the old days, there was a king at the top, with layers of scribes, priests, and aristocrats below. In modern times things were more diffuse, sort of. Ordinary people who wanted to have an impact needed to find an interlocutor— typically an industrialage institution like a labor union, a newspaper, or a political machine. And getting their ear was hard.
Not any more, as this email from a blog-reader illustrates:
I wrote you a few weeks ago about the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) adding rules to stop Catholic schools from winning too many championships. My 15-year-old son came up with his own solution. He put together his own website (www.GoHomeIHSA.com), added a blog section, did a press release, got a bunch of publicity in the newspaper, and now he has been asked to make a brief presentation of his ideas at the IHSA Board meeting tomorrow. He spent under $10 for the domain name and set up the blog for free. Three years ago this never could have happened. Is it any wonder that many of our traditional institutions hate the Internet?
No wonder at all, as you’ve figured out already if you’ve read this far. The Internet makes the middleman much less important.
This poses a real challenge to traditional political institutions. Political parties are obviously in trouble. As a commenter on a blog I read awhile back noted, mass democracy is a thing of the past—the only problem is that it’s nearly the only kind of democracy we’ve ever been able to make work.
Athens, of course, had a more fluid democracy, but the framers of our Constitution didn’t regard its experience as a success; they were trying to prevent its problems, not emulate its excesses. There are lots of reasons to believe that unmediated democracy is a poor decision-making method, which is one reason why, in our constitutional system, democracy has always been mediated. Voters choose decision makers, rather than making decisions themselves.5
But if a fear of unmediated democracy led Americans to choose a system that was mediated, we must now deal with pressures toward disintermediation. The additional transparency added by the Internet is a good thing, limiting insider back scratching and deals done at the expense of constituents. On the other hand, the pressure toward direct democracy, or something very close to it, is likely to build. Is that a good idea? Probably not, unless you think that America would do better if it were run like your condo association.
The challenge in coming decades will be to take advantage of the ability for self-organization and horizontal knowledge that the Internet and other communications technologies provide without letting our entire political system turn into something that looks like an email flamewar on Usenet. I think we’ll be able to do that—most people’s tolerance for flaming is comparatively low, and in a democracy, what most people tolerate matters—but things are likely to get ugly if I’m wrong.
EXPRESS YOURSELF
But it’s not just politics. People are hardwired to express them-selves. Imagine two tribes of cavemen approaching a cave. Which tribe is more likely to survive—the one where someone says, “You know, I think there’s a bear in there,” or the one where nobody talks? I’m pretty sure we’re descended from the talkative ones.
Until pretty recently, self-expression on any sizable scale was the limited province of the rich and powerful, or their clients. Only a few people could publish books, or write screenplays that might be filmed, or see their artwork or photographs widely circulated, or hear their music performed before a crowd. Now, pretty much anyone can do that. You can post an essay (or even an entire book) on the Web, make a film, or circulate your art and photos from anywhere and have them available to the entire world.
Now that more people can do that, more people are doing it, and it seems to make them happy. Naturally, some critics com-plain that much of what results isn’t very good. That’s true, but if you look at books, films, or art from the pre-Internet era, you’ll find that much of that stuff wasn’t very good either. (Heaven’s Gate and Gigli were not Internet productions.) As science fiction writer Ted Sturgeon once said in response to a critic’s claim that 90 percent of science fiction was crap: “Ninety percent of every-thing is crap.”6
And if you doubt this, spend a few minutes channel-surfing or perusing bookstore stacks at random. You may conclude that Sturgeon was being generous, not just to science fiction, but to, well, everything.
On the other hand, “crap” is always a matter of opinion. Many people write books that are very valuable to them as self-expression, regardless of whether they get good reviews or sell mil-lions of copies. (I myself have written two novels and enjoyed the writing process very much, even though neither has ever been published.) And regardless of whether they sell millions or please critics, such books probably please some people and can now sell in smaller quantities thanks to niche publishing markets and improved printing technologies.
Novelist Bill Quick, who has published many books through traditional publishers, tried the Internet publication route with a novel of his own and was pretty happy with the results. A few weeks after placing his novel Inner Circles on the Internet, he reported that despite not having paid for advertising or an agent, selling only via an automated website linked from his weblog, he had made over $4,500. Chicken feed? No. Quick said that his book, if it had been salable at all, would have brought an advance of about $10,000, payable in two installments, which after deducting the agent’s commission would have produced a first check of about $4,250. He concluded, “I have taken in more than that as of now, because I am getting all of the ‘cover price,’ not eight percent of it (the usual author cut on a paperback).”7
Quick isn’t just anyone, of course. He’s a widely read blogger who’s published many novels in the past. He warns his readers of this, but observes, “This outcome is a godsend for those of us professionals who think of ourselves as midlist, and who used to grind out two or three books a year in order to make thirty or forty grand before taxes.” This is an important point. Once you realize how little money books on paper usually pay, Internet publication looks a lot better. More significantly, money or not, I think we’ll see more authors able to earn an income, or at least a second income, as the Web grows.
Before the Industrial Revolution, you couldn’t really make a living as a writer unless you had someone rich funding you. Books just didn’t make enough money. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was possible to do well as a writer, but books and then films were necessarily mass-marketed. You had to be able to sell a lot of them to recoup the substantial cost of producing them. The products had to be somewhat appealing to a large audience because of that—and because it was hard to find a smaller audience and hard for a smaller audience to find its author.
That’s different now. It’s become something of a truism to note that the Web is like a rainforest, full of niches that the well-adapted can flourish in, but like a lot of things, the expression is a truism because it’s, well, true. And it’s getting truer all the time as the number of people on the Web grows, thus expanding the number of potential customers; and as the tools that let people find what they really want, and not some mass market first-approximation thereof, get steadily better. Some people, of course, will always want to read the book, or see the film, or listen to the songs that lots of other people are, so there will always be a kind of mass market. But even that will be a niche of sorts, in place to address people’s preferences rather than because of technological necessity.
Usually, too, when people talk about what “everyone” is reading or watching, they really mean not everyone, but everyone they know. As mass markets fragment, that may mean that people will really define things by their niches, rather than by true mass media. In fact, we’re already seeing a lot of that. Another Internet truism is the replacement of Andy Warhol’s line that in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, with the statement that in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people. (As a so-called “celebrity blogger,” I was once recognized by a gushing waitress in a restaurant while the rest of the staff stood by, uncomprehending. I wasn’t in their niche, and they weren’t in mine.)
At any rate, I think we’re certain to see a future in which many more people think of themselves as writers, filmmakers, musicians, or journalists than in the past. This may feed back into the political equation noted above, but it could go either way. On the one hand, creative people tend to lean leftward, which suggests that if more people see themselves as creators, the country might move left. On the other hand, people have been complaining that the left has disproportionate influence in creative industries, meaning that if more people can get involved, those fields might shift back the other way, and the overrepresentation of leftist view-points might be countered. I suspect we’ll see the latter rather than the former.
THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, futurists write about something they call “The Singularity,” meaning a point in the future where technological change has advanced to the point that present-day predictions are likely to be wide of the mark. By definition, it’s hard to talk about what things will be like then, but the trend of empowered individuals is likely to continue. As the various items we’ve surveyed demonstrate, technology seems to be shifting power downward, from large organizations to individuals and small groups. Newer technologies like nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology will move us much further along the road, but advances in electronics and communications have gotten us started. You can write—heck, I have written— about the wonders to come in the future, but, in fact, we’ve moved a considerable distance in that direction already.
While a world of hugely and vastly empowered souls may lurk in the future, we’re already living in a world in which individuals have far more power than they used to in all sorts of fields. Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality in many ways that we don’t even notice.
That’s not always good. With technology bestowing powers on individuals that were once reserved to nation-states, the already-shrinking planet starts to look very small indeed. That’s one argument for settling outer space, of course, and many will also see it as an argument for reducing the freedom of individuals on Earth. If those latter arguments carry the day, it could lead to global repression. In its most benign form, we might see some-thing like the A.R.M. of Larry Niven’s science fiction future history, a global semisecret police force run by the United Nations that quietly suppresses dangerous scientific knowledge. In less benign forms, we might see harsh global tyranny, justified by the danger of man-made viruses and similar threats. (As I write this, scientists in a lab in Atlanta have resurrected the long-dead 1918 Spanish Flu and published its genome, meaning that people with resources far below those of nation-states will now be able to recreate one of the deadliest disease agents in history.8)
I doubt that even a science-fictional tyranny could stamp out pervasive and inexpensive technology. Worse, it would leave most of the work in underground labs or rogue states and give people an incentive to put it to destructive use. That doesn’t mean that some people won’t be tempted to give tyranny a chance, especially if they can put themselves in the tyrant’s seat.
On the other hand, there are lots of hopeful signs in the present— trends that will probably continue. Today’s revolutionary communications technologies led to a massive mobilization of private efforts in response to disasters like the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and it was text-messaging, websites, and email that broke the Chinese government’s SARS cover-up. The phenomenon of “horizontal knowledge” is likely to result in people organizing, both spontaneously and with forethought, to deal with future crises; and there’s considerable reason to think that those responses will be more effective than top-down govern-mental efforts. Indeed, we may see distributed efforts—modeled on things like SETI@home or NASA’s SpaceGuard asteroid-warning project—that will incorporate empowered individuals to look for and perhaps even respond to new technological threats.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
When I want to know something about big events in India, I tend to look first to blogs like India Uncut, by Indian journalist Amit Varma. When I want to know about military affairs, I look at blogs like The Belmont Club, The Fourth Rail, The Mudville Gazette, or military analyst Austin Bay’s site. When I want to know what’s going on in Iraq, I look at Iraqi blogs and blogs by American soldiers there. When one Iraqi blogger reported war crimes by American troops, I called attention to his post, got an American military blogger in Iraq to point it out to authorities, and the soldiers involved wound up being court-martialed and convicted.
Yeah, so, I read a lot of blogs. I’m a blogger, after all. But so are a lot of people, and the person-to-person contact that blogs and other Internet media promote tends to encourage person-to-person relationships across professional, political, and geographic boundaries. This is just another form of the horizontal knowledge that I wrote about before, but it may play an important role in breaking down barriers and defusing animosities across those same boundaries.
People have been saying for a century, of course, that increased international understanding would prevent war, and yet we’ve seen rather a lot of war over the past century. Still, it may simply be that we haven’t reached the tipping point yet. Certainly there’s a qualitative, as well as a quantitative difference, as more and more people make person-to-person contact on their own. It’s a very different thing from watching other countries’ television programs and movies, or having a few people go on tourist expeditions and attend feel-good conferences of the Pugwash variety. While this isn’t likely to eliminate hostility, it will certainly transform current understanding and cultural definitions. Overall, I think that the effect is more likely to be positive than negative.
THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (I FEEL FINE)
And that’s probably the bottom line regarding all the changes described in this book. Technology is empowering individuals and small groups in all sorts of ways, producing fairly dramatic changes as compared to the previous couple of centuries. Not all of those changes are positive—there’s bitter along with the sweet. But the era of Big Entities wasn’t so great. From the Napoleonic Wars to the Soviet Gulags, the empowerment of huge organizations and bureaucracies wasn’t exactly a blessing to the human spirit. A return to some sort of balance, in which the world looks a bit more like the eighteenth century than the twentieth, is likely to be a good thing.
In some sense, of course, how you view these changes depends a lot on how you view humanity. If you think that people are, more often than not, good rather than bad, then empowering individuals probably seems like a good thing. If, on the other hand, you view the mass of humanity as dark, ignorant, and in need of close supervision by its betters, then the kinds of things I describe probably come across as pretty disturbing.
I fall into the optimistic camp, though I acknowledge that there’s evidence pointing both ways. Those who think I’m taking too rosy a view, however, had better hope that I turn out to be right after all. That’s because the changes I describe aren’t so much inevitable as they are already here, and are just in the process of becoming, as William Gibson would have it, more evenly distributed.
The Army of Davids is coming. Let the Goliaths beware.