I’m pleased to present what could be easily thought of as a sequel to I’ll Have What She’s Having because the two books share authors. But with what I’ve learned from The Acceleration of Cultural Change I now know that thinking of the two books as related to each other—just because one has followed the other—is an antiquated way of thinking. For a lot can happen in the six years that have followed their first book, and especially when those years are counted by the standards of Moore’s Law.
More than ten years have passed since the writing of the Laws of Simplicity—the iPhone had not yet been launched when the inaugural book of the Simplicity series had been published in 2006. The number of computer users didn’t number in the billions, and mobile computing meant a laptop that weighed too many pounds and ran for only a few hours on a single charge. Today we live untethered, always-on, and constantly plugged-in to a myriad of machines and other human beings with what Bentley and O’Brien dub as the modern Acheulean hand ax: our always ready and available smartphone. Whereas the hand ax would be used to cut, the smartphone is used to connect.
Our newfound ability to use computing to connect at scales previously unknown to humankind, is what Bentley and O’Brien’s new book attempts to address by looking backward to enable us to see forward. They look way, way backward—as far as 1.7 million years ago to the Pleistocene-age. But you already knew this because I figured you’ve already looked up “Acheulean hand ax,” thinking you might be able to go out and buy it online at the Patagonia store. Sorry. There are so many terms and words in this book that aren’t coming off of a trending TechCrunch article or meme-ified in the latest futuristic TED talk. It’s about a lot of old stuff that no longer has relevance in this new world today where knowledge has moved from being thin and deep in its “traditional” form, to now broad and shallow—what they term as being “shaped like a horizon.”
Staring out at the horizon is something that I know fairly well. I’ve been reaching for it to try and touch it and understand it. Although I had a front-row seat to the rise of computing within the MIT world during the ’80s and ’90s, I could see it leaving the realm of research and the academy, and sensing what Bentley and O’Brien have done in this book—go backward in history to reorient toward the future—similarly, I left MIT to go backward in time to run a classically minded art and design university. And then I went forward again into the future, by heading to Silicon Valley to work in the venture-capital industry as a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—the investment firm that gave birth to companies we know today such as Google and amazon.com. After working with more than a hundred tech startups at all phases of growth, I decided to join one myself at the end of 2016 and now find myself at the tech startup Automattic, which was founded by the cofounder of the WordPress project.
So the approach that Bentley and O’Brien have taken is one that makes complete sense to me, when considering how we got to where we are is the pseudo-sum total of so many technological, social, economic, and political changes that are now all impacted by Moore’s Law. So we need to go broad, really broad, in order to collect enough disparate data points with which to take a good enough stab at figuring out the future. What you will find in this slim, useful volume is so many dots of information scattered through time and space, and across a diverse set of cultures. And, yes, techie culture is a large ingredient in the authors’ analyses, so you’ll have a healthy dosage of knowledge dots that are familiar in 2017 such as the Internet of Things, machine learning, and, of course, Instagram and Snapchat.
In closing, I want you to know that only by my living in Silicon Valley did I come to realize how pervasive the philosophy of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs lives at the heart of tech. It’s clear that his approach to life and the pursuit of knowledge was not unlike the one that the authors have taken in this book, as exemplified by Jobs’s famous commencement speech:
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
—Steve Jobs, from his commencement speech at Stanford University,2005 (http://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505)
Look to the horizon. I leave your Bayesian mind to process the dots that Bentley and O’Brien have curated for us. I’ll be looking to the horizon together with you.
Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion
Automattic, Inc.