The idea of computers was not new.* Their development made inevitable the arrival of smartphones and computers facile and small enough to be used by ordinary people, but it took forty years to happen. In 1959, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor invented a single piece – a monolithic integrated circuit, a chip – that made the revolution possible just at the same time as Paul Baran was developing his messaging network to function after a nuclear apocalypse. In 1968, Alan Kay at Xerox predicted a ‘personal, portable information manipulator’ that he called a Dynabook, just as the first active-matrix liquid-crystal display was developed. In 1975 IBM created its first portable device, the same year that a Seattle lawyer’s son, Bill Gates, dropped out of Harvard to develop a system of instruction for computers to use – software – bought by IBM. Five years later, Gates launched a more sophisticated system, Windows.
In 1974, the Pentagon’s ARPA communications, designed to connect the leadership after nuclear war, had been extended into academia by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who called it the inter-network – internet. In 1980 ARPANET was closed, but the European nuclear research organization CERN started to use the system, which in 1989 inspired a thirty-four-year-old mathematics professor there, Tim Berners-Lee: ‘I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain system idea and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web.’ Like Edison or Watt before him, he did not claim to have invented it: ‘Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multi-font text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together.’ He invented a system of addresses – //www – that became so universal the internet almost became a groove of the human brain. ‘I never foresaw how big the Net would become,’ Berners-Lee told this author, ‘but I had designed it to be totally universal. And there was a moment as it grew exponentially that I realized it would change the world.’
In 1984, Jobs, a visionary bundler of ideas, tweaker of inventions and crafter of exquisite designs, launched the Macintosh, a computer that a consumer could use to move between different facilities, adding a hand control that he called a mouse and the ability to choose new fonts, inspired by the course of calligraphy he had once taken. ‘I was lucky,’ he explained. ‘I found what I loved to do early in life.’ But ‘Then I got fired. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.’
When Jobs returned to Apple he devised, starting in 1998, a series of devices beginning with an ‘i’ (standing for ‘internet, individual, instruct, inform and inspire’). In 2007, his iPhone changed human behaviour, creating a fashionable but indispensable machine. By 2020, around 2.2 billion iPhones had been sold, 19 billion smartphones altogether – tiny mechanisms that forever changed human nature and behaviour in ways not yet clear. Smartphones became technologies so essential they became almost membral extensions. By 2005, at least 16 per cent of humans were using smartphones; by 2019, the figure was 53.6 per cent, 86.6 per cent in the west. The internet opened a mass of new knowledge to citizens, and many abandoned more laborious yet more trustworthy sources of information. The internet thickened society, adding new layers of discourse and power to give a dynamic to already pluralistic societies – a further shift from ‘sovereign power’, in Foucault’s analysis, to ‘disciplinary power’.
The new knowledge spread openness; but, like writing, printing and television, it could be controlled and manipulated: even in democracies, its panjandrums exercised vast secret power as despots of data, and there has never been a better tool for tyranny. Its tendency to create sequestered localities of the same-minded meant that it parochialized as many as it globalized. In many countries, mobile phones were used by people who still lived in iPhone and dagger societies, dominated by kin, tribe and sect, that could barely feed or heat their people. In some cases, terrorists were beheading people with swords while chatting via WhatsApp on their iPhones.
Less flashy but as important were the astonishing improvements in public health – reduced child mortality, smallpox vaccinations, chlorinated water. These are the result of interlinked developments high and low: the invention of the lavatory linked to sewers may have saved a billion lives since the 1860s. The doubling of human life expectancy in one century and the reduction of child mortality by a factor of ten are triumphs with no downside – except our own voracious success as a species, our population rising from a billion people in 1800 to eight billion in 2025. The industrial revolution combined with our medical revolution now threatens our own existence.
While the Net was invented by Brits and Americans and developed in Silicon Valley, where the new digital titans worked out how to make it profitable, it was the closed world that would really grasp its potentiaclass="underline" the Chinese security services were quickest to appreciate its power of surveillance. The Russians harnessed its ability to amplify and justify rage and propagate lies in the open world. The autocracies understood quickly that their hackers could poison the delicate political anatomy of the democracies by using their very freedoms against them.
Bush was keen to meet Putin. On 16 June 2001, at a Slovenian summit, the new commande-in-chief of the unipower met the new Russian potentate. ‘I looked the man in the eye,’ said Bush, revealing the naivety of American paramountcy. ‘I found him very straightforward and trustworthy – I was able to get a sense of his soul.’ Putin, fighting an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, warned Bush of the jihadi threat to the American homeland from a new Afghan force, the Taliban. The Communists had not lasted long after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, but a vicious civil war had discredited the warlords. In Kandahar, a coterie of ex-mujahedin Ghilzai talibs (madrassa students), under Omar, a one-eyed expert RPG-7 gunner who had returned to teaching, formed a vigilante band to stop crime and corruption. Adopted and funded by the Pakistani ISI, and backed by Haqqani, the Taliban quickly conquered the country, and invited Osama bin Laden back.
PRINCE OF THE TOWERS
‘Those extremists are all being funded by Saudi Arabia,’ Putin told Bush, ‘and it is only a matter of time before it results in a major catastrophe.’
Bush was astonished. ‘I was taken aback,’ recalled Condoleeza Rice, daughter of a minister from Birmingham, Alabama, descended from slaves, who became a State Department Russianist, Stanford professor and now the first black national security advisor,* ‘by Putin’s alarm and vehemence.’ It was they decided sour grapes after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.
Putin was right. While W had been planning his presidential run, another entitled scion of privilege was planning his own momentous mission. The older Bush’s Iraq war and protection of Saudi Arabia had horrified Osama bin Laden; he demanded an audience with King Fahd, though he was instead received by his brother Prince Sultan. Osama proposed that he reject American troops – present since the Gulf War – and let an Arab legion of mujahedin defend Mecca. Fahd trusted the bin Ladens, but dismissed Osama’s quixotic fanaticism and expelled him. He in turn despised the debauched Saudi kings for whom his father had worked: the Prophet had banned infidels from Arabia; now American troops were stationed there, while the American ally, Israel, had attacked Lebanon. Bin Laden, who received a $7 million annual income from his family, refined both his ideology and his organization, setting up in Sudan, working on his own engineering business while also setting up a network of terrorist cells, fundraisers, bomb makers, undercover operatives and the essential cannon fodder of Islamic terror, young – often teenaged – suicidists.