These organizing verbs represent the metachanges in our culture for the foreseeable near future. They are broad strokes already operating in the world today. I make no attempt to predict which specific products will prevail next year or the next decade, let alone which companies will triumph. These specifics are decided by fads, fashion, and commerce, and are wholly unpredictable. But the general trends of the products and services in 30 years are currently visible. Their basic forms are rooted in directions generated by emerging technologies now on their way to ubiquity. This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.
While I devote a chapter to each motion, they are not discrete verbs operating in solo. Rather they are highly overlapping forces, each codependent upon and mutually accelerating the others. It becomes difficult to speak of one without referring to the others at the same time. Increased sharing both encourages increased flowing and depends upon it. Cognifying requires tracking. Screening is inseparable from interacting. The verbs themselves are remixed, and all of these actions are variations on the process of becoming. They are a unified field of motion.
These forces are trajectories, not destinies. They offer no predictions of where we end up. They tell us simply that in the near future we are headed inevitably in these directions.
1 BECOMING
It’s taken me 60 years, but I had an epiphany recently: Everything, without exception, requires additional energy and order to maintain itself. I knew this in the abstract as the famous second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything is falling apart slowly. This realization is not just the lament of a person getting older. Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of—stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper—won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.
What has surprised me recently is how unstable even the intangible is. Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keeping a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I can understand why a mechanical device like a pump would break down after a while—moisture rusts metal, or the air oxidizes membranes, or lubricants evaporate, all of which require repair. But I wasn’t thinking that the nonmaterial world of bits would also degrade. What’s to break? Apparently everything.
Brand-new computers will ossify. Apps weaken with use. Code corrodes. Fresh software just released will immediately begin to fray. On their own—nothing you did. The more complex the gear, the more (not less) attention it will require. The natural inclination toward change is inescapable, even for the most abstract entities we know of: bits.
And then there is the assault of the changing digital landscape. When everything around you is upgrading, this puts pressure on your digital system and necessitates maintenance. You may not want to upgrade, but you must because everyone else is. It’s an upgrade arms race.
I used to upgrade my gear begrudgingly (why upgrade if it still works?) and at the last possible moment. You know how it goes: Upgrade this and suddenly you need to upgrade that, which triggers upgrades everywhere. I would put it off for years because I had the experiences of one “tiny” upgrade of a minor part disrupting my entire working life. But as our personal technology is becoming more complex, more codependent upon peripherals, more like a living ecosystem, delaying upgrading is even more disruptive. If you neglect ongoing minor upgrades, the change backs up so much that the eventual big upgrade reaches traumatic proportions. So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy. Continual upgrades are so critical for technological systems that they are now automatic for the major personal computer operating systems and some software apps. Behind the scenes, the machines will upgrade themselves, slowly changing their features over time. This happens gradually, so we don’t notice they are “becoming.”
We take this evolution as normal.
Technological life in the future will be a series of endless upgrades. And the rate of graduations is accelerating. Features shift, defaults disappear, menus morph. I’ll open up a software package I don’t use every day expecting certain choices, and whole menus will have disappeared.
No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of “becoming,” everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.
That bears repeating. All of us—every one of us—will be endless newbies in the future simply trying to keep up. Here’s why: 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. Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience.
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If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the ceaseless upgrades and eternal becoming of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day not too long ago we (all of us) decided that we could not live another day unless we had a smartphone; a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled.
Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continual discontentment. I agree that technology is the source. The momentum of technologies pushes us to chase the newest, which are always disappearing beneath the advent of the next newer thing, so satisfaction continues to recede from our grasp.
But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that technology brings. We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we’ve never had before. This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.
We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart. We are stretching our boundaries and widening the small container that holds our identity. It can be painful. Of course, there will be rips and tears. Late-night infomercials and endless web pages of about-to-be-obsolete gizmos are hardly uplifting techniques, but the path to our enlargement is very prosaic, humdrum, and everyday. When we imagine a better future, we should factor in this constant discomfort.