The future ain’t what it used to be

In 1993, Kevin Kelly founded the magazine Wired, the graphic bible of tech news. During these days, together with the beginning of the presidential administration of bill clintonyour vice president Al Gore He led the government team that articulated the transformation of what was then called “information highway” with the “world Wide Webdesigned in 1989 by British engineer Tim Berners-Lee at the European Institute for Nuclear Research (CERN).

On April 30, 1993, Berners-Lee, together with a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (WITH) and some Stanford Universityenabled free use of the brand new web which until then had been designed and developed for scientists working in universities and institutes around the world to exchange information electronically.

In this way, success was achieved in the worldwide development of the Internet which had begun in 1969 with the creation of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) at the request of the United States Department of Defense. Its main mission was to interconnect four North American universities. In these turbulent days, amid the debacle of the Vietnam War and simultaneously with the arrival of the Apollo XI to the moon, the Republican President Richard Nixon succeeded Democrat Lyndon Johnson as leader of the White House. The Cold War determined the diplomatic and geopolitical agenda, and the world then began to take note of ecology and environmental protection after the publication of the report produced by MIT at the request of the Club of Rome in 1972.

Kelly had been an avid reader of the works of Alvin Töffler (1928-2016), an academic who predicted several radical transformations in technology and its impact on the economic and social sphere of nations. The author of “Future Shock” (1970) stated many years ago that “Advanced technology and information systems will allow much of society’s work to be done from home by means of telecommunications via computer connections.”

Kelly today, and Toffler in his day, spoke out against the risks of “futurologists” predictions. In this sense, Kelly points out that “scenarios have less to do with predicting exactly what will happen than with imagining the range of possible futures so that there are no surprises when the one of them happens. It would allow us to make contingency plans and ask ourselves what we would do if the world was headed in that direction.

Berners-Lee last month publicly called cryptocurrencies “dangerous and akin to gambling,” adding yet another negative definition by comparing them to the dot-com bubble that burst at the turn of the new millennium when companies, mostly venture capital, they inflated their earnings to get big increases in their stock prices.

The recent bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a major California financial institution with a few 200,000 million dollars in assets, has set off alarm bells in the global economy and just reading the news of its collapse takes us back to the subprime mortgage crisis that happened fifteen years ago and led to the disappearance of the historical financial companies run by Lehman Brothers. The bankrupt SVB has provided funding to nearly half of VC-backed U.S. tech and healthcare companies.

The diagnosis of the causes of the 2008 crisis, coinciding with the start of Barack Obama’s first presidential term, is unanimous: very serious failures in the controls of financial institutions. The political consequences are also well known: the judicial convictions of those responsible have been conspicuous by their absence.

After the end of a pandemic that lasted more than two years and caused an estimated 15 million deaths worldwide, added to the invasion of Ukraine ordered by President Vladimir Putin which caused the greatest disruption of the market of energy, it is reasonable to expect that the fourth wave envisioned by Alvin Toffler will be followed by a tsunami in global finance that would plunge millions of people into poverty. An unwanted photograph that would further undermine the weakened belief in capitalist democracy as the fairest system for achieving social development with equity.

Continue reading: