CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Back to the Future—The Ride
CHAPTER 1
Don’t Steal This Book
CHAPTER 2
Google’s System of the World
CHAPTER 3
Google’s Roots and Religions
CHAPTER 4
End of the Free World
CHAPTER 5
Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm
CHAPTER 6
Google’s Datacenter Coup
CHAPTER 7
Dally’s Parallel Paradigm
CHAPTER 8
Markov and Midas
CHAPTER 9
Life 3.0
CHAPTER 10
1517
CHAPTER 11
The Heist
CHAPTER 12
Finding Satoshi
CHAPTER 13
Battle of the Blockchains
CHAPTER 14
Blockstack
CHAPTER 15
Taking Back the Net
CHAPTER 16
Brave Return of Brendan Eich
CHAPTER 17
Yuanfen
CHAPTER 18
The Rise of Sky Computing
CHAPTER 19
A Global Insurrection
CHAPTER 20
Neutering the Network
CHAPTER 21
The Empire Strikes Back
CHAPTER 22
The Bitcoin Flaw
CHAPTER 23
The Great Unbundling
EPILOGUE
The New System of the World
SOME TERMS OF ART AND INFORMATION FOR LIFE AFTER GOOGLE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
To Matt and Louisa Marsh
PROLOGUE
Back to the Future—The Ride
Back in the early 1990s, when I was running a newsletter company in an old warehouse next to the Housatonic River in western Massachusetts, the Future moved in.
At the same time, the past trudged in, too, in the person of the curmudgeonly special-effects virtuoso Douglas Trumbull. In a world rapidly going digital, Trumbull doggedly stuck to analog techniques. That meant building physical models of everything and putting his many-layered images onto high-resolution film.
Trumbull and my friend Nick Kelley had launched a venture called RideFilm to produce a theme-park ride based on Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future series of movies. I invested.
It wasn’t long before a nearly full-sized plastic and papier-mâché Tyrannosaurus Rex was looming over our dusty wooden stairwell, an unofficial mascot of Gilder Publishing. We never quite took him seriously, though he would become a favorite of time-traveling tourists at theme parks in Orlando, Hollywood, and Osaka in a reign lasting some sixteen years.
Trumbull was attempting time-travel himself. Famous for his special effects in the “Star Gate” rebirth sequence at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, he had abandoned Hollywood and exiled himself to a small Massachusetts town, where he nursed suspicions of conspiratorial resistance to his analog genius. After his triumph in 2001, Trumbull provided special effects for several other landmark films, including Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner.
But the world had gone digital, and Trumbull was nearly forgotten. Now in the early 90s he was attempting rebirth as the inventor of an immersive seventy-millimeter, sixty-frames-per-second film process called Showscan and a 3D ride-film. The result was an experience we now call “virtual reality.” Trumbull’s analog 3D achieved full immersion without 3D glasses or VR goggles. Eat your heart out, Silicon Valley.
Michael J. Fox’s original escapade—the hit movie of 1985, grossing some $500 million—was a trivial mind game compared with Trumbull’s ride. Universal’s producer Steven Spielberg speculated that the plot of Back to the Future could inspire a ride-film that would outdo Disneyland’s Star Tours, created by George Lucas and based on his Star Wars movies. Lucas dismissed the possibility of Universal’s matching the spectacle of Star Tours.
“Wanna bet?” Spielberg replied, and he launched the project.
Future and past in play; a Tyrannosaurus rampant; a “futuristic” DeLorean car; the wild-haired, wild-eyed Doctor Brown; the quaint clock-towered town of Hill Valley, California; the bully Biff—you recall them perhaps. They time-traveled into our three-story brick building, along with the Tyrannosaurus, the shell of a DeLorean, and a makeshift theater, for more than a year of filming.
Trumbull underbid Hollywood’s Boss Films to make the four-minute, three-dimensional ride-film, which ended up costing some $40 million. It brought in a multiple of that in revenues over more than a decade and a half and saved the Universal theme park in Orlando from extinction at the hands of Disney World. It was first screened for three of my children and me in the building where we rented our offices. My youngest, Nannina, six at the time, was barred from the ride out of fear she would be unable to distinguish between the harrowing images and reality.
The fact was that none of us could. Belted into the seats of the DeLorean under the dome of an OmniMax screen, senses saturated, we quickly forgot that the car could move only three or four feet in any direction. That was enough to convey the illusion of full jet-propelled motion to our beleaguered brains. From the moment the lights dropped, we were transported. Chasing “Biff” through time, we zoomed out into the model of Hill Valley, shattering the red Texaco sign, zipping down the winding streets, crashing into the clock tower on the town hall and through it into the Ice Age.
From an eerie frozen vista of convincing three-dimensional tundra, we tumbled down an active volcano and over a time cliff into the Cretaceous period. There we found ourselves attempting to evade the flashing teeth of the Tyrannosaurus rex. We failed, and the DeLorean plunged past the dinosaur’s teeth and into its gullet. Mercifully we were vomited out to pursue Biff, bumping into the back of his car at the resonant point of eighty-eight miles per hour, as we had been instructed to do by Doctor Brown. Shazaam, we plunged back into the present. Oh no!—are we going to crash through the panoramic glass window of the Orlando launch facility? Yessss! As thousands of shards fell to the floor, we landed back where we had started and stepped out of the DeLorean onto the dingy warehouse stage, no broken glass anywhere in sight.
The journey took only four minutes, but its virtual-reality intensity dilated time. Our eyes popping, our hearts racing, our lungs swollen, we felt as if we had been in the car for two hours. At least. We had actually undergone a form of time travel.
Like the earth, the Universe is not flat. Meager and deterministic theories that see the universe as shear matter, ruled by physics and chemistry alone, leave no room for human consciousness and creativity. Just as a 3D ride-film transcends a 2D movie, other dimensions of experience are transformative and artistically real. As Harvard mathematician-philosopher C. S. Peirce explained early in the last century, all symbols and their objects, whether in software, language, or art, require the mediation of an interpretive mind.1
From our minds open potential metaverses, infinite dimensions of imaginative reality—counter-factuals, analogies, interpretive emotions, flights of thought and creativity. The novelist Neal Stephenson, who coined the term metaverse,2 and Jaron Lanier, who pioneered “virtual reality,” were right to explore them and value them. Without dimensions beyond the flat universe, our lives and visions wane and wither.
This analogy of the “flat universe” had come to me after reading C. S. Lewis’s essay “Transposition,”3 which posed the question: If you lived in a two-dimensional landscape painting, how would you respond to someone earnestly telling you that the 2D i
mage was just the faintest reflection of a real 3D world? Comfortable in the cave of your 2D mind, you had 2D theories that explained all you experienced in flatland—the pigments of paint, the parallax relationships of near and far objects, the angles and edges. The math all jibed. “Three dimensions?” you might ask. “I have no need for that hypothesis.”
Around the time of Back to the Future: The Ride in the early 1990s, I was prophesying the end of television and the rise of networked computers.4 In the 1994 edition of Life after Television, I explained, “The most common personal computer of the next decade will be a digital cellular phone with an IP address . . . connecting to thousands of databases of all kinds.”5 As I declared in scores of speeches, “it will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet; it will recognize speech and navigate streets; it will collect your mail, your news and your paycheck.” Pregnant pause. “It just may not do Windows. But it will do doors—your front door and your car door and doors of perception.”6
Rupert Murdoch was one of the first people who appreciated this message, flying me to Hayman Island, Australia, to regale his executives in Newscorp and Twentieth Century Fox with visions of a transformation of media for the twenty-first century. At the same time, the Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel proclaimed Life after Television his guide to the digital future. I later learned that long before the iPhone, Steve Jobs read the book and passed it out to colleagues.
Much of Life after Television has come true, but there’s still room to go back to the future. The Internet has not delivered on some of its most important promises. In 1990 I was predicting that in the world of networked computers, no one would have to see an advertisement he didn’t want to see. Under Google’s guidance, the Internet is not only full of unwanted ads but fraught with bots and malware. Instead of putting power in the hands of individuals, it has become a porous cloud where all the money and power rise to the top.
On a deeper level, the world of Google—its interfaces, its images, its videos, its icons, its philosophy—is 2D. Google is not just a company but a system of the world. And the Internet is cracking under the weight of this ideology. Its devotees uphold the flat-universe theory of materialism: the sufficiency of deterministic chemistry and mathematics. They believe the human mind is a suboptimal product of random evolutionary processes. They believe in the possibility of a silicon brain. They believe that machines can “learn” in a way comparable to human learning, that consciousness is a relatively insignificant aspect of humanity, emergent from matter, and that imagination of true novelties is a delusion in a hermetic world of logic. They hold that human beings have no more to discover and may as well retire on a guaranteed pension, while Larry Page and Sergey Brin fly off with Elon Musk and live forever in galactic walled gardens on their own private planets in a winner-take-all cosmos.
Your DeLorean says no. The walls can come down, and a world of many new dimensions can be ours to enrich and explore. Get in and ride.
CHAPTER 1
Don’t Steal This Book
“The economy has arrived at a point where it produces enough in principle for everyone. . . . So this new period we are entering is not so much about production anymore—how much is produced; it is about distribution—how people get a share in what is produced.”
—W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, 20171
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You also might wish to read a number of other books that our algorithm has selected on the basis of the online choices of people like you. These works explain how “software is eating the world,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has observed, and how Google’s search and other software constitute an “artificial intelligence” (AI) that is nothing less than “the biggest event in human history.” Google AI offers uncanny “deep machine learning” algorithms that startled even its then chairman, Eric Schmidt, by outperforming him and other human beings in identifying cats in videos. Such feats of “deep mind” recounted in these books emancipate computers from their dependence on human intelligence and soon will “know you better than you know yourself.”
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According to many prestigious voices, the industry is rapidly approaching a moment of “singularity.” Its supercomputers in the “cloud” are becoming so much more intelligent than you and command such a complete sensorium of multidimensional data streams from your brain and body that you will want these machines to take over most of the decisions in your life. Advanced artificial intelligence and breakthroughs in biological codes are persuading many researchers that organisms such as human beings are simply the product of an algorithm. Inscribed in DNA and neural network logic, this algorithm can be interpreted and controlled through machine learning.
The cloud computing and big data of companies such as Google, with its “Deep Mind” AI, can excel individual human brains in making key life decisions from marriage choices and medical care to the management of the private key for your bitcoin wallet and the use and storage of the passwords for your Macintosh drive
. This self-learning software will also be capable of performing most of your jobs. The new digital world may not need you anymore.
Don’t take offense. In all likelihood, you can retire on an income which we regard as satisfactory for you. Leading Silicon Valley employers, such as Larry Page, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Tim Cook, deem most human beings unemployable because they are intellectually inferior to AI algorithms. Did you know that Google AI defeated the world Go champion in five straight contests? You do not even know what “Go” is? Go is an Asian game of strategy that AI researchers have long regarded as an intellectual challenge far exceeding chess in subtlety, degrees of freedom, and complexity. You do not possess the mental capability to compete with computers in such demanding applications.
Don’t worry, though. For every obsolescent homo sapiens, the leading Silicon Valley magnates recommend a federally guaranteed annual income. That’s right, “free money” every year! In addition, you, a sophisticated cyber-savvy reader, may well be among the exceptional elites who, according to such certifiable geniuses as Larry Page and Aubrey de Grey, might incrementally live unemployed forever.
You may even count yourselves among the big data demiurges who ascend to become near-divinities. How about that?
As Google Search becomes virtually omniscient, commanding powers that previous human tribes ascribed to the gods, you may become a homo deus. A favored speaker on the Google campus, Yuval Noah Harari, used that as the title for his latest book.2
In the past, this kind of talk of human gods, omniscience, and elite supremacy over hoi polloi may have been mostly confined to late-night bibulous blather or to mental institutions. As Silicon Valley passed through the late years of the 2010s with most of its profits devolving to Google, Apple, and Facebook, however, it appeared to be undergoing a nervous breakdown, manifested on one level by delusions of omnipotence and transcendence and on another by twitchy sieges of “security” instructions on consumers’ devices. In what seemed to be arbitrary patterns, programs asked for new passwords, user names, PINs, log-ins, crypto-keys, and registration requirements. With every webpage demanding your special attention, as if it were the Apple of your i, you increasingly found yourself in checkmate as the requirements of different programs and machines conflicted, and as scantily-identified boxes popped up on your screen asking for “your password,” as if you had only one.
Life After Google Page 1
