I spent much of the ‘90s working in a technology-related job, launching an interactive television channel for a cable company in London. One of the side effects of this was that I needed to know about the nascent internet, and to do this you needed to read WIRED magazine. At the time, this was like opening a vein and injecting yourself with Silicon Valley, before it became a vampire.
And, because Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network was more or less the resident futurist of WIRED magazine, I would end up reading a lot about what I now know was a narrow view of what futures did, and why it did it.
Obviously WIRED has long since lost the cachet it had then, when Kevin Kelly edited it and it hadn’t yet been acquired by a global publishing company. All the same, it has been a surprise to find quite a lot of the people I follow pointing to a long post by Dave Karpf about one of Wired’s most notorious futures articles, on its 25th anniversary. The article jarred at the time.
‘A compelling vision’
The cover story, by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, was called ‘The Long Boom’, and it later spawned a book. The article itself is still on the Wired site, but only available to subscribers.
But the book blurb gives you enough of a sense of both the hyperbole and the argument:
In the tradition of such influential and defining books as Future Shock and Megatrends , Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, and Joel Hyatt argue in The Long Boom that we are, in fact, on the verge of a global economic expansion on a scale never before experienced — and that the choices we make as informed individuals, institutions, communities, and nations today will determine whether that vision is realized.
Analyzing economic, political, technological and socio-cultural trends that began to converge in the early 1980s, the authors offer a compelling — and highly plausible — vision of how the next twenty years will unfold. By 2020, we can expect to experience tremendous advances in now-emerging technologies; widespread adoption of alternative energy sources; increased productivity; and, perhaps most important, the creation of a truly global economy.
‘Incorrect predictions’
Anyway, it’s fair to say that looking back at it 25 years on, Dave Karpf hates the article. He takes an axe to it, at least metaphorically. It seems that, for whatever reason, Karpf has been working his way through the 1990s Wired archive. This is his general conclusion:
I mention this because, as you might imagine, I run into a lot of incorrect predictions as I read through the WIRED archive. 90s WIRED was chock full of a very particular style of futurism — one that has, uh, not aged especially well… The thing that sets me back on my heels, though, is that a lot of those old WIRED techno-optimists are still out there making predictions today. And, to hear them tell it, they were right all along.
The Long Boom was a single scenario — and we’ll let it pass for now that the whole point of scenarios is that they travel in sets of three or four, because they are supposed to characterise a range of divergent possible futures.
Other outcomes are possible
The way the article covered this off was by listing ten things that might throw this Elysian future off-course. Karpf includes this page as an image.
It’s not a great image, but about half of these things have happened, perhaps more. America and China are engaged in a Cold War; the technologies haven’t ushered in a new wave of productivity; Russia is a kleptocracy; there is a serious climate crisis; we have had a global pandemic.
And, of course, in a proper set of scenarios, some of these possible future elements would have been included in different ways in the other scenarios in the set. Futurists aren’t supposed to bet it all on black, as it were. By doing that, they have turned it into a prediction or a forecast.
‘Awestruck and appalled’
Part of Karpf’s complaint is just about the politics of this long boom scenario:
The world they are invoking is one where (1) neoliberalism spread everywhere, and works great, (2) its benefits are widely distributed, (3) scientific and technological breakthroughs become easier and faster with time, and (4) on balance, none of those scientific or technological breakthroughs are used for harm. This is… not the world we inhabit today. The neoliberal economic order has not lived up to its billing… I have to imagine that if we could transport the 1997 versions of Peters Leyden and Schwartz to the present-day United States, they would be awestruck reading Twitter on an iPhone and then appalled by the news items they encountered.
A second part of Karpf’s complaint is that in the face of the evidence that things didn’t quite work out like he expected, Peter Leyden has more or less doubled down, in an article published last year, called ‘The Great Progression’. Of those 10 problems, Leyden writes:
All 10 did actually appear in some form over the course of those 25 years (including a global pandemic), but the remarkable thing is that they still did not stop the overarching story.
‘Nailed it’
About which Karpf has this to say:
Most people read those 10 spoilers and say “haha, so cursed. All of these happened. No wonder the world is such a mess.” Long Boom co-author Peter Leyden looks back at his 25-year-old preditions, spoilers and all, and declares (paraphrasing) “Yup. Nailed it. The spoilers didn’t even matter. Nothing could stop the Long Boom.”.. Let me say this again: If you retrofit your predictions to insist they were right after all, you will never learn a single damn thing.
Karpf finishes his piece with a long take, or maybe a take-down, of technological optimism, and I’ll just pull one quote from that which I think sums up the problem with the ‘Long Boom’ as a piece of future work:
This ideological commitment to optimism means the authors don’t begin from the data and trends, then arrive at optimistic conclusions. Instead, they begin with the rose-colored glasses and develop a “scenario” of how everything is poised to turn out great. (Scenarios like this are really just predictions with built-in plausible deniability. This kind of scenario is just a prediction clad in fake mustache and jaunty hat.)
High water mark
I’ll probably borrow the idea of ‘jaunty hat’ futures as a critique of a certain type of futures work. Looking back, ‘The Long Boom’ tells us a couple of things about the history of that whole strand of business futures that Global Business Network came to exemplify in the 1990s. The first is that it had no critique of power, and the way that power plays out in processes of change. I think I knew this at the time.
The second, which I only understood much later, was that ‘The Long Boom’ probably represented the high water mark of that kind of empty business futures. Everything in that particular futures tradition since then has been historical footnotes. That WIRED cover was a marker that it had run out of steam.
the next wave