(Roughly) Daily

Professor and author Dave Karpf is re-reading the entire WIRED back catalog chronologically (for the second time) for a book project on the “history of the digital future.” A consideration of a 2000 issue devoted to the future has led him to a fascinating insight…

The January 2000 issue is themed around predictions. The magazine did the same thing in January 1999. They ask a ton of experts and celebrities to talk about what the future is going to be like. Some take it seriously, others make jokes. Some are prescient, others notsomuch. It’s a window into what the future looked like back then.

[Karpf reviews a number of the predictions, concluding with…]

…And then there’s this perfect Nathan Myrvhold quote “There won’t be TV per se in three decades. There will be video service over the Internet, but it will be as different from TV today as, say, MTV from the Milton Berle show of the 1950s or from radio plays of the 1940s.”

This is art. I want to frame Myrvhold’s quote and put it in a museum of lopsided tech futurist predictions.

The part that he gets right is the technological development curve. There he is, at the turn of the millennium, five years before the inception of YouTube, telling us that the future of television is going to be video service over the Internet. Yes, absolutely right!

But the part he gets wrong is the industrial, social, and economic impacts of this technological development. We’re seeing this right now, in 2023, as the various streaming services add advertising and strike content-sharing partnership deals with each other. We have these revolutionary new technological developments, and, for about a decade, they were supported by a stock market bonanza. But now that the stocks are no longer ridiculously overvalued, the companies driving these technological developments have settled on a vision of replacing old cable tv with new cable tv. (I wrote about this in July 2022, btw, back when this Substack had a much smaller readership. I think the piece holds up well.)

Technologically, it didn’t have to be this way. But, given all the existing incentive structures established by 21st century capitalism, it was all-but-certain that we would end up here.

I see this time and time again when reading predictions of social transformation from 90s- and 00s-era technologists [cough NicholasNegropontewasconstantlywrong cough]. And I see the same thing today, every time an artificial general intelligence true believer starts opining on the glorious future of education/entertainment/science/manufacturing/art.

I wrote about this phenomenon last year in The Atlantic, where I argued that we won’t be able to tell what the future of AI looks like until we have a sense of where the revenue streams come from. The trajectory of any emerging technology bends towards money.

…

I’m writing a whole book about the lopsided ways in which tech futurists always get their predictions wrong. And one major reason why is that they focus on what the technology could do, given time and mass adoption, rather than considering what capitalism will surely do to those technologies, unless we alter the incentives through regulations.

The trajectory of every emerging technology bends toward revenue streams. If you want to build a better future, you cannot ignore the shaping force of money…

A peek back at some tech predictions from January 2000: “From the WIRED archives: The trajectory of any emerging technology bends toward money,” by @davekarpf (referral account)

See also “The frantic battle over OpenAI shows that money triumphs in the end” (in which Robert Reich argues that, though the revenue streams aren’t yet obvious, protecting their emergence was at the core of the recent battle for control of what was, ostensibly, a not-for-profit) and the oddly apposite “Nerd culture is murdering intellectuals.”

And for more on Karpf’s march through WIRED’s history and what it can tell us about the ways that tech and our culture have changed, see “Notes from #WIRED30.”

* Deep Throat (as portrayed the film adaptation of All the President’s Men)

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As we pay attention to the profit motive, we might recall that this is an important date in broadcast history.  On this date in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi introduced “radio”: he amazed a group at Toynbee Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room.  Every time Marconi hit a key beside him at the podium, a bell would ring from a box being carried around the room by William Henry Preece.

Then exactly five years later, on this date in 1901, Marconi confounded those who believed that the curvature of the earth would limit the effective range of radio waves when he broadcast a signal from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland, Canada– over 2,100 miles– and in so doing, demonstrated the viability of worldwide wireless communication.

In the earliest days of radio, when it was essentially a wireless telegraph, there were myriad predictions of what the technology might become– from an internet-like decentralized community of communicators to a provider of education, telemedicine, and other special services… in the event, of course, it followed the money.