Visualizing the Future

Visualizing the Future #13: Is the Internet Becoming a Global Brain?

Let's begin today with a backwards glance. We're just over halfway through the 23 part series;  so far we've covered quite bit of ground.  Here's a quick graphic review:

 

Today's topic is a fun one, but before I start, here's BLATANT SCREAMING DISCLAIMER:  (The title of today's post is intended to provoke thought and debate. I am well aware of the fact that this topic is often treated with starry-eyed breathlessness and a lack of scientific rigor.  My intent is to simply to conduct a thought experiment, not to invite you to join the Borg)

First things first, let me explain what may otherwise feel like a jarring segue from Ponzi Schemes and the Financial System to a discussion of the internet as a brain.  In developing this series, I've looked at how societies have developed, how technology has affected how we think about the future and the effect of these technical innovations on media and commerce.  Once I reached yesterday's topic, I was surprised that how fuzzy the line was between a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme and the  international financial system.  I'm not yet sure where I come out with respect to the rage of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but something generationally defining is happening and about a broken economic system with a message spreading at net speed.  

At a fundamental level (jump in here economists), both Ponzi Schemes or Health Finanacial Markets only work insofar as participants trust in the system and have faith that debts will be honored. (I covered this in detail in "The Future of Money") .  I remember in 2008 during the Financial Collapse watching the headlines in the WSJ grow daily to larger and larger typeface.  Running a startup at the time, each days headline made me queasier and queasier so  I wrote a short piece for AdAge called "In Shaky Times, Relax".  Looking back on it 3 years later, it seems both naively hopeful and creepily accurate:

"Financial institutions are repositories of trust, which they accumulate, hold and invest in the form of investors and depositors' money. As soon as the trust placed in them erodes, the funds quickly follow. The  phenomenon  we're witnessing right now is the result panic-amplifying feedback loops that happen in our highly networked world.This is the the societal equivalent of a healthy person who knows he will drop dead if his heart rate exceeds 160 beats per minute.  Everything is good unless he starts thinking about it. And his heart-rate rises. Which worries him. And his heart rate rises and rises and then . . .pow..  . . . .The reality is that nobody will escape unscathed because we are all so fundamentally interconnected. "

No discussion of the web's evolution towards sentience would be complete without Kevin Kelly's epic talk at the 2007 TED Conference entitled "The Next 5000 Days of the Internet".  In it he masterfully chronicles the first 15 years of the web and compares it's quantitative elements to the circuitry and memory of a brain.  I recommend watching the whole thing, but for me the pull quote comes 5 minutes in - despite it's immensity, the Internet (in 2007) was roughly the size of 1 human brain.

 

Visualizing the Future #11: Rolling the Dice and the Power of Chance

Whether it's a roll of the dice, flip of a coin or an ace on the river, the concept of "Chance" is more central to the "Future" than any other.   In Greek mythology, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon divided the Universe with a roll of the dice.  Religions focus on the role an individual plays in determining his fate; so much so that the word "divine" can either refer to holiness or an ability to predict the future.  In some ways, you could argue that chance, whether referred to in literate as Fate or Luck or in philosopy as Free Will or Determinism, is THE central concern of modern society.  And why not?  What could be more important or as interesting as understanding what will happen next?

I've touched on a breadth of large subjects in this series but none of them has proven to be as large, difficult or interesting as Chance.  For this reason, I've decided that it deserves more than a single post.  How many, I don't quite know -- if you have yet realized, I have only a vague roadmap on this trip and when I reach areas requiring more time than my midnight oil will afford, I might as well just extend them. So strap in for an extended, potentially meandering journey.  I've also figured out that these posts are more fun to write when they stem from personal stories. I hope the same is true for you, the readers .

In 2003, I had recently moved from New York to California and gotten married.  My business partners were back East and after a few months of trying to make a startup work remotely I received a stern talking to from my wife.  I needed a job.  My network in San Francisco was fairly lean and as I began to look around, my sister-in-law mentioned that she had a friend who needed someone to build a website for his project.   She put me in touch with her former colleague, Andrew Pascal who had recently been lured back to Las Vegas to help his uncle launch an ambitious new casino on Las Vegas Boulevard.  His uncle's name was Steve Wynn.

Visualizing the Future #10: Betting on the Future: The Earliest VC's

Where do companies that change the Future come from?  These days the answer almost always begins with the seed of an idea, followed soon by an infusion of Venture Capital.  Silicon Valley legend has it that the VC phenomenon is an American concept,  a mid-20th century phenomenon that paired the founders of companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and HP with George Doriot and his proteges. As always, it depends how you look at it, but I'll argue that venture capital is much older and much more interesting.  

As an entrepreneur, I've always thought of starting companies in nautical terms.  It starts with an idea.  (For me, I can usually tell it's decent if I'm still thinking about it weeks or months later).  Once the idea becomes an obsession, all the seafaring metaphors begin.  A voyage must be planned, the ship designed, a crew assembled and finally, when the winds are right, launched.  If you're lucky, fortune smiles and years later, you return from distant shores with the hold laden with exotic treasures.  Or you're never heard of again and people assume that the Davy Jones, the sharks or cannibals got you.  But before any of this is conceivable, someone's got to foot the bill.  To invest.

In yesterday's post, I brought up the Golden Age of Holland; an era marked by an explosion of scientific and economic innovation.  At the heart of this innovation was the Dutch East India Company, the world's second multinational corporation (the British East India Corporation was formed 2 years earlier in 1600).  It was also considered the world's first Megacorporation (just in case you were wondering - it's a real term).  The VOC, as it was known, survived for 200 years and paid an 18% annual dividend to shareholders over that period.  In modern terms, that's the equivalent of extrapolating Warren Buffet's performance at Berkshire Hathaway (current market cap is $198B) for another 150 years.  Not bad.  

Visualizing the Future #8: "To Infinity and Beyond!" Space and the Story of OneCosmos

Yesterday's post ended by concluding that future optimism often overlooks social changes by focusing on technological advances.  Clearly, progress is multifaceted but today I'm going to begin where we left off.  The 1939 World's Fair marked the beginning of 30 years of global mood swings.  From the optimistic uplift of the Fair to the despair of the WWII and Holocaust to the Cold War, the word plowed forward technologically, in large part fueled by the tension bewtween the USSR and the US.  Whether fueled by fear of ideological aggression or by the surplus of the post-war era, the dawn of the space era represents one of our species' finest achievements.

From the earliest of times, space has inspired us - looking up at the stars simply inspires wonder.   But rather than delve into the Space Program, I'd like to begin this with a personal story about a project I was involved in 2000 called OneCosmos.  It's an odd tale that I haven't talked about for a while.  Despite being having happened during the of the Dotcom Boom, (and perhaps because of it) the project shaped my life immensely.

Visualizing the Future #4 : The Present - "Houston, We Have a Problem"

Bad news can be expressed as facts or feelings.  Our current predicament has lots of both.  The Times or WSJ can give you all you need; for the truly masochistic I recommend either Dmitriy Orlov or James Howard Kunsler (the latter is vastly more amusing).  Today let's do a quick inventory - getting your bearings is critical or its easy to panic and sail straight back into the eye of the storm.

THE FUTURE OF MONEY

The November issue of Media Magazine hit newsstands yesterday. Edited by my colleague Brian Monahan, it's called the "Future of Media" and is really quite something.  I'm proud to have a piece in it, called "The Future of Money", which I've included below.  Feedback warmly welcomed.