A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (10 page)

Many (myself included) then felt that Tokyo might one day aspire to become a new core. Japan possessed the requisite financial strength, a tradition of state intervention, a healthy fear of want, advanced technology, and industrial power. In fact, however, the country swiftly proves incapable of resolving the structural problems of its banking system, of mastering its looming financial bubble, of avoiding a massive reevaluation of its currency, of raising the productivity of its services and the work of its white-collar workers. Above all, it does not attract the elites of the whole world to its shores, nor does it promise the individualism so necessary to the core, nor can it pull away from the orbit of its American conqueror.

It is at this point that a new technological wave gathers force in America, in California much more than anywhere else. This wave in fact makes possible the massive automation of administrative activities in major corporations — in other words a remedy for precisely those ills that had bedeviled the eighth core. It ushers in an extraordinary leap in productivity.

The economic and geopolitical center of the world continues its westward march. Emerging from China five thousand years ago to reappear in Mesopotamia,
then in the Mediterranean and North seas, then across the Atlantic, here it is once again on the Pacific shore.

For the ninth time — the last until today — the mercantile order reorganizes itself around a place, a culture, and the financial resources required for a innovative class to transform a technical revolution into a mass commercial market. For the ninth time, this mutation enlarges the space of the mercantile order and that of democracy. It raises still higher the number of the world’s market democracies.

This new form, in which we still live today, constitutes the foundation stone of history on the move. We must therefore discuss it in greater detail than its eight predecessors.

Here in California — in this American state roughly the size of Spain geographically, where 36 million people (one American in eight) live, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley — the new core takes up residence. This is not a randomly chosen site. Here in the past, men discovered gold mines, and it was here that the oil industry and movies took their first steps, here that the most adventurous Americans gathered, and here that the electronics and aeronautical industries took hold. Here too some of America’s finest universities are located, as well as some of its greatest research centers and its best vineyards. California is where the talents of the entertainment industry, the best
musicians, and the inventors of all information technologies have flocked. And here too, from its Mexican border to the Canadian frontier, the permanent threat of earthquakes gives rise to an intense, unique vibrancy, a fabulous desire to live, and a passion for the new.

As with all preceding crises of the mercantile order, the technologies needed for the ninth form preexist their use. Because the bureaucratic activities of banks and corporations weigh increasingly heavily on overall productivity, the automation of information and its manipulation become a major factor. First to appear, in the 1920s, are electric machines working with perforated cards. Then, in the forties, the first computers designed for military use rely on the transistor. In 1971, the microprocessor, heir to the transistor, sees the light of day. A tiny chip of silicon piled with thousands, then millions, and then billions of elementary storage and information processing units is put on the market by a new company, Intel, jointly founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. The microprocessor makes it possible to perfect the serial computer, it too the heir of a long succession of innovations launched in the seventeenth century in France by Blaise Pascal.

From 1973 on, the computer begins to replace perforated cards in offices, leading to a massive surge in the productivity of services and industry. This is the beginning of office automation.

New businesses, Californian for the most part, now make it possible to reduce the costs of services and administration. Most importantly, these technologies make possible an industrialization of financial services, allowing banks to exploit, systematically, the market’s smallest
imperfections, and to correlate millions of transactions — thus eliminating all limits to the growth of financial instruments and of risk-coverage mechanisms: finance and insurance become industries.

Once again, it is through the industrialization of services — in this case financial and administrative — that a core takes power. Once again (and it is the opposite of what futurologists once predicted), it is no longer a question of the appearance of a service society, of a postindustrial society, but exactly the opposite — these are the beginnings of the industrialization of services, aimed at transforming them into new industrial products.

Like the others before it, this revolution leads to the marketing of new consumer articles. In the new form they play the same part as that of the automobile and household equipment in the two preceding ones. Nomadic articles (a term I coined in 1985, well before such articles appeared, and which has since been assimilated into many languages), miniaturized machines able to receive, store, process, and transmit information — sounds, images, data — at extremely high speeds.

Why “nomadic objects”? As we have seen, nomads have always transported objects likely to help them stay alive while traveling. The first was probably a carved stone, a talisman; then came fire, clothing, tools, weapons, jewelry, relics, musical instruments, horses, papyri. Then it was the turn of the book, the first mass-produced nomadic article, followed by objects promising to miniaturize “sedentary articles” and make them portable: watch, camera, recorder, zoom lens, cassette player. Finally, other objects appear for the processing of information.

In 1976, a newcomer (and also a Californian) creates Apple I, a personal computer that is usable by everyone, with simple interfaces. In 1970 the Japanese market the first nomadic object to sport a quasi-nomadic name — the Walkman, a cassette player invented by a German named Andreas Pavel.

At the same time, a taste for other nomadic objects is emerging — “companion” animals of every species, offering the sedentary an opportunity to live a life of quasi-shepherds, of similinomads, of quasi-horsemen accompanied by a quasi-herd, with none of the risks normally associated with roving, beside a faithful and loyal companion in an ocean of insecurity and disloyalty.

In 1981, as Minitel (an Internet online service) appears in France, the American giant of industrial cybernetics, IBM, also decides to launch its first portable computer, IBM 5150 — but without too much faith in the product. The machine is equipped with an Intel microprocessor, and MS-DOS software produced by another modest West Coast business, Microsoft. It weighs just over twenty-five pounds and is thirty-two thousand times less powerful and twelve times as expensive as the least sophisticated of the 2008 personal computers. Yet it is a triumph — instead of the expected sale of two thousand, IBM sells a million. Ten years later, Microsoft has become one of the world’s five biggest corporations. By 2008, 271 million microcomputers have been sold and one billion are in service across the world.

At the same time, two more major instruments of the new nomadism make their appearance: the portable phone and the Internet. They enter the scene just as modestly as the personal computer, but win handsomely
as soon as they can interface. For the sedentary, they represent substitutes for traveling; for nomads they are a means of remaining connected among themselves and of connecting with the sedentary. Both offer, for the first time, a nonterritorial address (cell phone number or e-mail address).

The first nonmilitary mobile phone appears in Great Britain at the end of the seventies. At first it requires the allocation of a frequency and a very cumbersome portable battery, until the cellular networks increase their transmission capabilities and the batteries are miniaturized. In thirty years, the cell phone becomes a planetary transmitter of voices and data. Today it is the greatest commercial success of all time. In 2008, more than three billion people — or nearly half of the planet’s population — possessed it!

And at the same time it becomes possible to link two computers by phone. In this case too, the globalization of a new technology will take forty years, resulting in the Internet. Its progress is interesting. In August 1962 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, the prestigious university located near Boston, publishes the first articles describing the interactions possible in a network of computers linked by telephone. In 1965 the first long-distance computer connection is tested between a computer situated in Massachusetts and another in California. In 1969, the U.S. Army’s nerve centers create the Arpanet in order to exchange electronic information in absolute confidentiality. In 1979, American students create the first newsgroups to communicate civilian data through the hundred or so computers connected in research centers and
universities. In 1989, Arpanet arrives in Europe. In the same year, the protocol TCP/IP and the word “Internet” appear. Nineteen eighty-three marks the opening of the first server designed to manage site names. By 1984 more than a thousand computers are connected. In 1989, the Internet opens its doors to the public and the first e-mail addresses are created. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British researcher working in a European nuclear research center (the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN, in Geneva), invents a common language for all the players connected to this network. He organizes the community of its users, calling it the World Wide Web. On August 6, 1991, he puts the first address (
http://info.cern.ch
) online.

Lesson for the future: many major innovations result from the work of researchers paid out of public funds to look into something utterly different.

There now emerge very many applications of linked cybernetics, or automats. They too are devised in order to enhance the productivity of services — software for commercial management, for electronic mail, electronic trading, and for the exchange of financial data. By 1992, one million computers are linked, by 1996 ten million, and by 2008 a billion.

The Internet now seems a kind of new continent — this time virtual — to be explored, populated, organized, with a boundless space for commercial activities. Some software businesses join the ranks of the world’s great corporations — Microsoft, AOL, Oracle, and Google, most of them now Californian. In 1998, the turnover of the Internet economy surpasses that of
telecommunications and of the airline companies. More is to come: the Internet also finds manifold further uses for its portable phone, which progressively becomes video player, camera, television receiver, and blog publisher. In 2004, Apple realizes that profits are built on nomadic objects and not on the data in circulation (usually free of charge) — the iPod replaces the Walkman, once again selling hundreds of millions of copies, just as the iPhone is taking a growing share of the mobile phone market now.

Video games, mingling curiosity and adventure, also evolve, first in the shape of software for solo play, then connected to the Internet to become multiplayer games with an exponential growth rate. In 2008, a hundred million persons play across the network and spend more than a billion dollars on the purchase of virtual property.

In all, by 2008 Internet activity generates more than four trillion dollars throughout the world, in other words 10 percent of global GDP, half of it in the United States.

The Internet also speeds up the development of financial services. As a result, the ratio between financial transactions and the real economy GDP grows enormously, moving in the United States from 2 percent in 1970 to 50 percent in 2008. Also in the United States, international financial transactions represent eighty times the volume of world trade in 2008 — against three and a half times in 1997. This means that the annual volume world trade represents only 4.3 days of transactions on the market for currency, titles, and other financial options.

Thanks to the Internet, the insurance market also grows. It speeds up the growth of financial systems by covering the principal risks on the principal markets. By 2008, insurance on property and people represents around 15 percent of GDP in the United States and 7.5 percent of global GDP — around $3.7 trillion versus $2 trillion for energy in 2005. Risk coverage funds are managing about $2.68 trillion by the third quarter of 2008 — triple the figure for the year 2000. These funds represent a third of all stock market transactions. They are even beginning to participate actively in businesses listed on the stock exchange, managing the assets of private individuals and no longer those of financial actors. They sometimes take boundless risks and make bets on those risks without enjoying the requisite financing!

The economic and demographic center of the United States now shifts from the Northeast to the Southwest. In 2008, California becomes the leading state in terms of GDP (13 percent of the American GDP for 12 percent of the population), and would rank sixth in the world if it were an independent nation. Between 1980 and 1990, 54.3 percent of national population growth occurs in California, Florida, and Texas. As of 1990, America’s South and West account for over half the country’s population.

The GDP of the former core, New York State — henceforth the second in size — represents no more than 60 percent of California’s.

The United States now rediscovers its dynamic of growth, employment, productivity, and enterprise, a rejuvenation of the pioneer spirit. California’s culture of
entertainment, from cinema to music and information, finds radically new outlets for nomadic objects. Prices of using other items of equipment, including the automobile, go down in relative terms, and in 2008 the American economy consumes 100 percent less oil per unit produced than in 1985.

The holdings of middle-class Americans also soar. In 2008 they own more than $12.5 trillion invested in real estate and in stock; in the same year, two-thirds of households own their homes (as against 40 percent in 1939). The increased value realized by real estate represent 60 percent of the totality of their gains over the last twenty years. The search for equity, discussed by the philosopher John Rawls, replaces (at least in speeches) the hunt for equality.