How to Fix the Future

Andrew Keen

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780802189127
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills
• Index: Technology & Engineering

From data breaches to disinformation, a look at the digital revolution's collateral damage with "practical solutions to a wide-range of tech-related woes" ( TechCrunch ). In this book, a Silicon Valley veteran travels around the world and interviews important decision-makers to paint a picture of how tech has changed our lives—for better and for worse—and what steps we might take, as societies and individuals, to make the future something we can once again look forward to. "A truly important book and the most significant work so far in an emerging body of literature in which technology's smartest thinkers are raising alarm bells about the state of the Internet, and laying groundwork for how to fix it."? Fortune "After years of giddiness about the wonders of technology, a new realization is dawning: the future is broken. Andrew Keen was among the first and most insightful to see it. The combination of the digital revolution, global hyperconnectivity, and economic dysfunction has led to a populist backlash and destruction of civil discourse. In this bracing book, Keen offers tools for righting our societies and principles to guide us in the future."?Walter Isaacson, New York Times -bestselling author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci "Comparing our current situation to the Industrial Revolution, he stresses the importance of keeping humanity at the center of technology."? Booklist "Valuable insights on preserving our humanity in a digital world."? Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

CHAPTER ONE

MORE’S LAW

Agency

This nineteenth-century room is full of twenty-first-century things. The room itself—the entire top floor of what was once a Berlin factory—is decrepit, its brick walls shorn of paint, its wooden floors splintered, the pillars holding up its low ceiling chipped and cracked. The four-story brick building, one of Berlin’s few remaining nineteenth-century industrial monuments, is named the Alte Teppichfabrik (the Old Carpet Factory). But, like so much else of old Berlin, this industrial shell is now filled with new people and new technology. This crowd of investors, entrepreneurs, and technologists are all staring at a large electronic screen in front of them. It is broadcasting the image of a bespectacled young man with a pale, unshaven face, staring intently into a camera. Everyone in the room is watching him speak. They are all listening raptly to the most notorious person in cyberspace.

“What we are losing is a sense of agency in our societies,” he tells them. “That’s the existential threat we all face.”

The whole spectacle—the dilapidated room, the mesmerized audience, the pixelated face flickering on the giant screen—recalls for me one of television’s most iconic commercials, the Super Bowl XVIII slot for the Apple Macintosh computer. In this January 1984 advertisement for the machine that launched the personal computer age, a man on a similarly large screen in a similarly decrepit room addresses a crowd of similarly transfixed people. But in the Macintosh commercial the man is a version of Big Brother, the omniscient tyrant from Orwell’s twentieth-century dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The young man on the Berlin screen, in contrast, is an enemy of authoritarianism. He is someone who, at least in his own mind, is a victim rather than a perpetrator of tyranny.

His name is Edward Snowden. A hero to some and a traitorous hacker to others, he is the former CIA contractor who, having leaked classified information about a series of US government surveillance programs, fled to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and now mostly communicates with the outside world through cyberspace.

The Berlin audience has come to the old carpet factory for a tech event titled “Encrypted and Decentralized,” organized by the local venture firm BlueYard Capital. Its purpose—like that of this book—is to figure out how to fix the future. “We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the code and structure of the internet,” the invitation to the event had said. Its goal is to insert our morality into digital technology so that the internet reflects our values.

Snowden’s electronic face on the Berlin screen is certainly a portrait of human defiance. Staring directly at his German audience, he repeats himself. But this time, rather than an observation about our collective powerlessness, his message is more like a call to arms.

“Yes, what we are losing,” he confirms, “is a sense of agency in our society.”

It is perhaps appropriate that he should be offering these thoughts from cyberspace. The word “cyberspace” was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer and was invented to describe a new realm of communication among personal computers such as the Apple Macintosh. Gibson adapted it from the word “cybernetics,” a science of networked communications invented by the mid-twentieth-century Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician Norbert Wiener. And Wiener named his new science of connectivity after the ancient Greek word kybernetes, meaning a steersman or a pilot. It was no coincidence that Wiener—who, along with fellow MIT alumni Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider,¹ is considered a father of the internet—chose to name his new science after kybernetes. Networked technology, Wiener initially believed, could steer or pilot us to a better world. This assumption, which Wiener shared not only with Bush and Licklider, but with many other twentieth-century visionaries—including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the cofounders of Apple—was based on the conviction that this new technology would empower us with agency to change our societies. “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984,’“ promised the iconic Super Bowl XVIII advertisement about the transformative power of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s new desktop computer.

But Edward Snowden’s virtual speech at the Alte Teppichfabrik doesn’t share this optimism. Communicating in cyberspace, presumably from a Russian safe house a couple of thousand miles east of the German capital, Snowden is warning his Berlin audience that contemporary technology—the power of the network, in an age of ubiquitous computing, to snoop on and control everything we do—is undermining our power to govern our own society. Rather than a steersman, it has become a jailor.

“Individual privacy is the right to the self. It’s about power. It’s about the need to protect our reputation and be left alone,” Snowden tells the Berlin audience from cyberspace. In this nineteenth-century room, he is articulating a classic nineteenth-century sensibility about the inviolability of the self.

From somewhere in Putin’s Russia, Edward Snowden poses a question to his Berlin audience to which he knows the answer. “What does it mean,” he asks, “when we are all transparent and have no secrets anymore?”

In Snowden’s mind, at least, it means that we don’t exist anymore. Not in the way that nineteenth-century figures, like William Wordsworth or Henry James, regarded our intrinsic right to privacy.² It’s the same argument that two American lawyers, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, made in their now iconic 1890 Harvard Law Review article, “The Right to Privacy.” Written as a reaction to the then radically disruptive new technology of photography, the Boston-based Warren and Brandeis (who would later become a US Supreme Court justice) argued that “solitude and privacy have been more essential to the individual.” The right to “be let alone,” they thus wrote, was a “general right to the immunity of the person … The right to one’s personality.”³

So how do we restore nineteenth-century values to twenty-first-century life? How can agency be reinvented in the digital age?

At the climax of that 1984 advertisement for the Macintosh, a vigorous blonde in red-and-white workout gear bursts into the decrepit room and, hurling a hammer at the screen, blows up the image of Big Brother. She isn’t a Luddite, of course; the whole point of this one-minute Super Bowl slot, after all, was to convince its millions of viewers to spend $2,500 on a new personal computer. But the Apple commercial does remind us, albeit through Madison Avenue’s Technicolor-tinted lenses, about the central role of human agency in changing the world and in keeping us safe from those who would take away our rights.

The issue the virtual Edward Snowden is raising with his Berlin audience is also the central question in this book. How can we reassert our agency over technology? How do we become like that vigorous blonde in the Macintosh advertisement and once again make ourselves the pilots of our own affairs?

Moore’s Law

Edward Snowden is right. The future isn’t working. There’s a hole in it. Over the last fifty years we’ve invented transformational new technologies—including the personal computer, the internet, the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality—that are transforming our society. But there is one thing that’s missing from this data-rich world. One thing that’s been omitted from the new operating system.

Ourselves. We are forgetting about our place, the human place, in this twenty-first-century networked world. That’s where the hole is. And the future, our future, won’t be fixed until we fill it.

Everything is getting perpetually upgraded except us. The problem is there’s no human version of Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the processing power of silicon chips would double about every eighteen months.⁴ Today, half a century after Gordon Moore described the phenomenon that would later be named Moore’s Law,⁵ it remains the engine driving what the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Friedman calls our “age of acceleration.”⁶ So, yes, that iPhone in your pocket may be unrecognizably faster, and more connected, powerful, and intelligent, than its predecessor, the once-revolutionary Apple Macintosh personal computer, let alone a mid-sixties multimillion-dollar mainframe machine that required its own air-conditioned room to operate. But in spite of promises about the imminent merging of man and computer by prophets of the “Singularity”—such as Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, who still insists that this synthesis will inevitably happen by 2029—we humans, for the moment at least, are no speedier, no smarter, and, really, no more self-aware than we were back in 1965.

What Friedman euphemistically dubs a “mismatch” between technology and humanity is, he says, “at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today … [and] now constitutes probably the most important governance challenge across the globe.”⁷ As Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, warns, when everything is moving quickly except us, the consequence is a social, cultural, and economic “whiplash.”⁸

Few people have given this asymmetry more thought than the philosopher whom Thomas Friedman acknowledges as his “teacher” in these matters, Dov Seidman, author of How and the CEO of LRN, which advises companies on ethical behavior, culture, and leadership.^{9, 10}

Seidman reminds us that “there’s no Moore’s Law for human progress” and that “technology can’t solve moral problems.” Most of all, however, he has taught me in our numerous conversations that the hyperconnected twenty-first-century world hasn’t just changed, but has been totally reshaped. And since this reshaping has occurred faster than we have reshaped ourselves, Seidman says, we now need to play “moral catch-up.”

Seidman describes a computer as a “brain outside of ourselves,” our “second brain.” But, he warns, from an evolutionary standpoint, there’s been what he calls an “exponential leap,” and this new brain has outpaced our heart, our morality, and our beliefs. We have become so preoccupied looking down at our second brains, he warns, that we are forgetting how to look smartly at ourselves. As these devices get faster and faster, we appear to be standing still; as they produce more and more data about us, we aren’t getting any more intelligent; as they become more and more powerful, we might even be losing control of our own lives. Instead of the Singularity, we may actually be on the brink of its antithesis—let’s call it the “Duality”—an ever-deepening chasm between humans and smart machines and also between tech companies and the rest of humanity.

Yes, Dov Seidman is right. Moore’s Law is, indeed, unmooring us. It feels as if we are drifting toward a world that we neither quite understand nor really want. And as this sense of powerlessness increases, so does our lack of trust in our traditional institutions. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, the gold standard for measuring trust around the world, recorded the largest-ever drop in public trust toward public institutions. Trust in media, government, and our leaders all fell precipitously across the world, with trust in media being, for example, at an all-time low in seventeen countries. According to Richard Edelman, the president and CEO of Edelman, the implosion of trust has been triggered by the 2008 Great Recession, as well as by globalization and technological change.¹¹ This trust scarcity is the “great question of our age,” Edelman told me when I visited him at his New York City office.

It seems paradoxical. On the one hand, the digital revolution certainly has the potential to enrich everyone’s life in the future; on the other, it is actually compounding today’s economic inequality, unemployment crisis, and cultural anomie. The World Wide Web was supposed to transform mankind into One Nation, what the twentieth-century Canadian new media guru Marshall McLuhan called, not without irony, a global village. But today’s Duality isn’t just limited to the chasm between humans and computers—it’s also an appropriate epithet for the growing gap between the rich and the poor, between the technologically overburdened and the technologically unemployed, between the analog edge and the digital center.

The Map Is the Message

Just as at other radically disruptive moments in history, we are living simultaneously in the most utopian and dystopian of times. Technophiles promise us an abundant digital future; Luddites, in contrast, warn of an imminent techno-apocalypse. But the real problem lies with ourselves rather than with our new operating system. So the first step in fixing the future is to avoid the trap of either idealizing or demonizing technology. The second step is much trickier. It’s remembering who we are. If we want to control where we are going, we must remember where we’ve come from.

There’s one more paradox. Yes, everything might seem to be changing, but in other ways, nothing has really changed at all. We are told that we are living through an unprecedented revolution—the biggest event in human history, according to some; an existential threat to the species, according to others. Which may be true in some senses, although we’ve heard the same sort of dire warnings in the past. Back in the nineteenth century, for example, similar warnings were made by romantics like the poet William Blake about the catastrophic impact on humanity of what he called the “dark Satanic mills.” The future has, indeed, been both broken and fixed many times before in history. That’s the story of mankind. We break things and then we fix them in the same way that we always have—through the work of legislators, innovators, citizens, consumers, and educators. That’s the human narrative. And the issues that have always been most salient during previous social, political, and economic crises—the exaggerated power and wealth of elites, economic monopolies, excessively weak or strong government, the impact of unregulated markets, mass unemployment, the undermining of individual rights, cultural decay, the disappearance of public space, the existential dilemma of what it means to be human—are the same today as they’ve always been.

History is, indeed, full of such moments. In December 1516, for example, a little book was published in Louvain, today a university town in Belgium, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. This book came into a world that was in the midst of even more economic disruption and existential uncertainty than our own. The assumptions of the traditional feudal world were being challenged from every imaginable angle. Economic inequality, mass unemployment, and a millenarian angst were all endemic. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had just stumbled on the almost unspeakable realization that our planet wasn’t the center of the universe. The democratizing technology of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was undermining the centuries-old authority of the Catholic clergy. Most disorientating of all, populist preachers such as Martin Luther had invented the terrifying new theology of predestination that presented a Christian God of such infinite and absolute power that humans no longer had any free will or agency to determine their own fates. For many sixteenth-century folk, therefore, the future appeared profoundly broken. New cosmology and theology seemed to have transformed them into footnotes. They couldn’t imagine a place for themselves, as masters of their own destiny, in this new world.

That little book might, in part at least, have been intended to fix the future and reestablish man’s confidence in his own agency. It wasn’t much more than a pamphlet, written by a persecutor of heretics and a Christian saint, a worldly lawyer and an aspiring monk, a landown...