The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly – The Rabbit Hole

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly – The Rabbit Hole

Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive. A vigilant, eyes-wide-open embrace works much better. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself. Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. All of us—every one of us—will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up.

First, most of the important technologies that will dominate life 30 years from now have not yet been invented, so naturally you’ll be a newbie to them. Second, because the new technology requires endless upgrades, you will remain in the newbie state. Third, because the cycle of obsolescence is accelerating (the average lifespan of a phone app is a mere 30 days!), you won’t have time to master anything before it is displaced, so you will remain in the newbie mode forever.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, in what he called the “docuverse.” Our job is to make machines that think different—to create alien intelligences.

Today the prime units are flows and streams. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds. A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. Rivers of free copies have undermined the established order. In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication, copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap—free, in fact—that the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy and thus become valuable in this cloud economy. In a real sense, these uncopyable values are things that are “better than free.” Free is good, but these are better since you’ll pay for them. I call these qualities “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated at the time of the transaction. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, stored, and warehoused. A generative cannot be faked or replicated. It is generated uniquely, for that particular exchange, in real time.

What counts are not the number of copies but the number of ways a copy can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, and enlivened by other media. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. What counts is how well the work flows. Almost anything that is solid can be made a little bit fluid, and anything fluid can be embedded into solidness. Fixed. Rare. Free. Ubiquitous. Flowing. Sharing. Opening. Becoming. Ebooks today lack the fungibility of the ur-text of screening: Wikipedia. What those kinds of books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, bookmarked, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked to.

I can extract those highlights (with some effort today) and reread my selection of the most important or memorable parts. More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic. We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. This gives a larger audience access to the precious marginalia of another author’s close reading of a book (with their permission), a boon that previously only rare-book collectors witnessed. Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we’ve read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie.

We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from someone we respect, so we get not only their reading list but their marginalia—highlights, notes, questions, musings. So when a person cites a particular passage, a two-way link connects the comment to the passage and the passage to the comment. Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text. The conventional vision of the book’s future assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on the shelves in your public library. In the new world of ebooks and etexts, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. Much better would be a link to a specific passage in another passage in a work, a technical feat not yet possible. But when we can link deeply into documents at the resolution of a sentence, and have those links go two ways, we’ll have networked books.

This tangle of relationships is precisely what gives Wikipedia—and the web—its immense force. Wikipedia is the first networked book. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present. Once snippets, articles, and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffleable, and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection. The universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts—past and present in all languages—on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do and don’t know. The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. The status of a new creation is determined not by the rating given to it by critics but by the degree to which it is linked to the rest of the world. Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.

For a long time there were two basic ways to organize human work Recently a third way to organize work has emerged: the platform. A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. The platform’s job is to make sure it makes money (and adds value!) whether the parts cooperate or compete. The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Woven together, the bits are made much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. As we increase dematerialization, decentralization, simultaneity, platforms, and the cloud—as we increase all those at once, access will continue to displace ownership.

Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to collectivism. At each step of this socialism, the amount of additional coordination required enlarges. Instead of money, the peer producers who create these products and services gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. The dream of many companies is to graduate from making products to creating a platform. they have to act more like governments than companies in keeping opportunities “flat” and equitable, and hierarchy to a minimum. Anything that can be shared—thoughts, emotions, money, health, time—will be shared in the right conditions, with the right benefits. Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize. At this point in our history, sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest way to increase its value.

You get stuck at a lower than optimal peak because you behave as if you have arrived at the top, ignoring the adjacent environment. The more effective the “more good stuff like this” filter is, the more important it becomes to alloy it with other types of filters. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The maximum potential attention is therefore fixed. Its production is inherently limited while everything else is becoming abundant. Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow. Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources