I CAN SEE FOR MILES AND MILES

The memory of the Who’s 1967 hit fills the head of any futurologist who wants prove their infallibility. But it isn’t really like that. Look at those economists who thought the US property boom would last forever.

Justin King who used to run Sainsbury’s once said derisively that the High Street was over and out-of-town was the future.  Everyone from Lord Beeching onwards was wrong in predicting the demise of trains.  And the book (a paper David to the Kindle Goliath) is making a remarkable recovery from the literary morgue.  Even records in their own small way are on the way back.

From learning Latin in school to the seeming forever price decline of oil, nothing is any longer impossible. No trend is irreversible. The future is opaque and turbulent.

Which brings me to the internet.

I was phoned by a very senior guy from a big multinational last week to say he’d been to a talk by someone from the Harvard Business School about the future of technology. He laughed and said I was so out of touch - all quill ink and parchment - but that even he and probably his 15 year old son were off the pace too. It could have been Dave Eggers that was talking as  in his book “The Circle”, a fantasy of the future of the web and the end of privacy.

I mildly said this was probably wrong, that technology had a curious tendency to self- consume and that irreversible, bet-your-house-on-it trends had a nasty habit of leaving you homeless.  The internet is obviously wonderful and has changed a lot of lives for the better. Yes, it has served its original purpose of sharing knowledge generally to great benefit but its frailties are equally obvious - a force for evil as well as good as ISIS is showing.

Andrew Keen has written a book entitled “The Internet is not the Answer”. In his most recent blog he says “Be afraid, be very afraid.”   Be afraid that the internet is a winner-takes-all market leading to monopolies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

 Be afraid that usually the nastiest people in business seem to be the owners of the space

Be afraid of Wikipedia as a knowledge source.

Be afraid of the virtually unchallengeable assumption that this is the only future there is so we naysayers had better shut up because they’re right and we’re wrong.

Well not necessarily.

Here’s another scenario.

A perfect storm erupting of persistent cyber terrorism, of critical systems failures and of the internet equivalent of a virus that’s a cross between Ebola and bubonic plague. All simultaneously.
Imagine in short it’s time for the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, megalomaniac geeks without any good on their minds.

Then the internet might prove not to be the answer at all just a messy problem; like 2008 but worse.
And the problem and the answer would, ironically, be the same thing.

COULD WE END UP LIKE THIS?

A good friend, adventurer and guru of the human soul, John Scott, sent me a book he thought I’d like, the sort of question-asking book that has you exasperated, excited and being turned into a compulsive liar.
“Sorry….my diary is packed today …maybe tomorrow” Well it was packed, packed with the story of Mae and the Circle.

Let’s talk about the author Dave Eggers. He wrote “A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius” aged 21 and with the proceeds set up a non-profit writing and tutoring centre for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco. He set it up as a pirate shop selling pieces of eight, peg legs, and pirate impedimenta. Already you have to love this guy.

And so to “The Circle” which is a remorselessly involving story of a dystopian world. Think Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” meets Facebook. I’m not, I think, alone in speculating about growing older in a society where not being an inveterate Tweeter and user of Tumblr is to make one as socially inept as not having a phone.

Judged out of touch and incompetent, we’re a generation of two fingered typists who haven’t heard of One Direction let alone Pitbull and DJSnake.

Mae gets a prized job at the Circle, a multifaceted corporation that’s a cross between Amazon, Google, Facebook and Enron.  Life on the campus is a re-enactment of the best of university life added to living in the heart of downtown San Francisco (a nearby city) with the best chefs and music groups in constant, suppliant attendance so influential has the Circle become.

Her journey is one from a newbie in customer service, where she excels, to becoming the voice of the organisation. Life is busy on-line and offline but mostly the book deals with and dramatizes the claustrophobia that a perfectly engineered social existence would become.
The importance of the book described as follows by the critics:

”Prescient, important and very funny” (The Guardian),
“Witty and troubling” (The Washington Post),
“A timely warning of of the perils of the internet age” (The Sunday Telegraph),
“Prescient and scary” (The Times).

Take an idea and apply the principle of “reductio ad absurdam” and you create the Circle. But the scary bit is Eggers manages to get the reader from time to time to agree with deluded Mae. It also seemed weirdly true to life.

Unlike “The Hunger Games “which depicts another more violent vision of the future this has the protagonist not a victim, for once, but in control of her destiny. She applies teenage logic to the complexities of life. The results are populist and chilling.

By the way if you want a great send up of HR read it now. It’s compelling satire.

We could end up like this but not if we’re thoughtful and critical about technology. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean that it’s right. And just because progress seems seductive it doesn’t follow that the end justifies the means.

Still…read it and worry.