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Bruce Sterling's Letter from 2035
Bob Kopp writes: "Bruce Sterling has an interesting futurist piece in the current issue of Fortune , titled 'Hard Times: A Letter from 2035.' An excerpt: 'Helpfully, we tend to shoot all our lawyers, unless they are "intellectual-property lawyers," in which case they basically behave like Mafia dons.'"
NEW YORK -- The Internet's biggest bull just turned into a big bear. Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget became one of Wall Street's best-known analysts by making outlandish predictions about Internet stocks.
For example, Blodget forecast that Amazon.com's stock could hit a price of $400 at a time when it was only trading for only $240 per share.
But yesterday, Blodget changed his tune, predicting that the vast majority of Internet companies will be bankrupt within five years.
Of all Internet companies, "75 percent will disappear within five years, and 75 percent will never make money, or sell themselves," Blodget said at the Silicon Alley 2000 Internet conference.
He declined, however, to predict which companies would survive and which would die.
For investors, Blodget advised a scattershot approach to investing in the Internet sector, in hopes that one or two "home runs" would provide enough gains to offset losses from the other holdings.
But he also warned that newcomers to Internet investing may be too late, comparing the phenomenon to the Gold Rush of the 1800s.
"Ultimately, the real latecomers find they are buying piles of dirt," he said.
He said that since 1995, the industry has grown from one Internet company, America Online, with a total market value of $1 billion, to more than 300 companies with market capitalization of $1 trillion. But looking into the next five to 10 years, Blodget expects the flow of capital to slow.
Those bearish comments were taken to heart by shareholders in Internet stocks, most of which moved lower yesterday.
The Nasdaq composite index, where many Internet stocks trade, fell 29.57 to 4,754.51, its first down day this week.
But Blodget reserved some of his speech to make bullish comments on a select handful of Internet stocks, which responded by rallying in a big way.
Blodget said, for example, that there's good value in wireless, business-to-business and Internet infrastructure stocks such as Ariba Inc., which rocketed $19.81 to $299.69, and Infospace.com, which traded up $23.06 to $261.06. All stock quotes are as of the 4 p.m. close.
As for Doubleclick, which has experienced a selloff in recent weeks on worries that it improperly gathered information about its customers, Blodget thinks it's undervalued.
"I think the privacy concerns will pass at Doubleclick," he said.
Doubleclick gained $2.88 to $83.44 yesterday.
We have more leisure that people did in 1900. I'm not claiming nothing has changed. I am claiming that the luxury each generation imagines will follow on the heels of "the next big thing" always turns out to be a mirage.
We have slightly more income equality than they did. At least 3/4 of the people in the bottom quitile of American income remain there for at least 20 years. No one has done longer range studies than that for lack of data. The study you are refering to discussed the bottom 20% of income tax payers, and even it seriously massaged the data to get that result. Class mobility is less than it was in 1950. It wasn't a BLS study, it was a conservative think tank - I can't remember which - that paid for it.
Today's poor own cars, and in 1900 the poor owned hundreds of acres of farmland. They had razors and ovens, which they didn't have in 1800. They were still poor, and so are today's poor. Poverty is measured in avoidable misery, not misery against an absolute standard.
There hasn't been any significant increase in public health in the US since 1980. There has been since 1900, but since the vaccination era, we have also failed to kill off polio (which we could have done), started to see a resurgence of TB, discovered whole new classes of bugs never known to exist and for which we have no treatment. A utopia of health is still in the future. As late as 1960, many people imagined that by 2000, we would be winning against the bugs.
No, misery ain't what it used to be, but the optimists of 1900 were way off the mark. We still live in a world of avoidable misery. That is the failure of the technological utopianism of 1900, and it shows every sign of becoming the failure of technological utopianists today.
This sounds like the result of what Chesterson talked about. A sort of cult of progress.
<br>
I guess life sux if all you live for is the next innovation and have no internal ability to fufill the human desire of a meaningful life.<br>
Creed
who has to blow up one of those 'inflatable cities' - an air mattress is bad enough.
I guess pins are illegal in there, too.
C'ya!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Other people have already commented on just about every other aspect of this story (some rather well, some not quite so), so I'll restrict myself to the technological aspect.
:)
Basically, I think Bruce is being naive. He's seriously and dangerously underestimating the impact that dirt-cheap molecular nanotechnology may have in the future society. Quite honestly, I just don't understand why - I mean, I understand the skepticism (it's very fashionable nowadays), but this is the kind of thing that just changes everything - everything - and it is coming, hopefully within 20 years. Just as people from the 16th century would be overwhelmed at the rate at which things happen in the 20th century, the nanotech revolution is likely to knock at the 20th century man's door before he even knew what happened. And then Bruce will kick himself for having been pessimistic about technology (which is definitely a rookie mistake, as Mr Clarke will tell you). And then I'll have my revenge. MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Well, that's all the ranting I have for now
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
In the afterword to Earth, David Brin talks at length about how difficult it is to predict the medium-term future --- it has to be both plausible and surprising (who in 1960 would not have been surprised by the world of 2000?). This is a hard thing to do; the two requirements almost contradict one another. That said, Sterling's piece isn't a bad job of it. No, of course the world won't be exactly as he describes it --- but there are elements of it which could happen, more easily than we think. The bit about fatigue, in particular, is believable; just as increased knowledge about all of the truly horrible things that happen in the world led us, as a culture, to be tired of trying to fix them (there's a large set of literature on what social scientists describe as "compassion fatigue"), constantly chasing after the cool, new technology will lead us to "technology fatigue": the excitement will dwindle. More importantly, he's asking a very relevant question: in a world where the value of everything is defined by marketing, and everyone knows it, how is it possible for anything to have value or be intrinsically important at all? If everything is marketing, what matters? Unlike Sterling, I think that society as a whole will react by retreating into religion. But there will be some sectors that don't --- and while Sterling essentially points to despair as the solution that will emerge, it might be interesting to speculate about what, eventually, would replace such despair.
Yes, brevity and consise expression have their place. But so to detail, metaphor, and simile.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Not many data entry personel get their hands accidently ripped off by their machines.
That was pretty damn common around, say, 1830 or so. Early industrial revolution factories were very dangerous places.
You can certainly point to sweatshop like conditions in some areas of high tech, but none of them have the some lethality. I suspect that's what he meant.
The cake is a pie
I suspect Sterling knows this. There are certainly reams of "predictions" in SF that are laughable now. But as you say, it is a mistake to assume that true prediction is the point of SF. Really, there are three sorts of SF "predictions".
- Descriptions of things that the author thinks will happen.
- Descriptions of things that the author worries might happen if things don't change, or change in a bad way.
- Descriptions of ideas that the author thinks are interesting, but not necessarily at all likely.
And of course most stories are mostly a melding of the three. It might be interesting the speculate on which this essay is.I suspect that it isn't meant to describe "what will happen" so much as it is meant simply to say "what goes up must come down" in regards to the economy.
The cake is a pie
OK, it's damn hard to predict the future. In fact, its pretty much impossible, anyone who predicts anything correctly has a lot of luck on their side.
So Bruce seems to be extrapolating our current cultural makeup: a cynical and increasingly hopeless and pessemistic society. And as such, while the world sucks and is boring, as he puts in a more elegant fashion, there isn't anything we can do about it.
I like his comments on the business cycle, but he seems to beleive that there isn't a "cultural cycle" as well. I haven't read any of his books (I will soon though, everyone bugs me about reading his books), but my limited studies of history have shown me that there is a cultural cycle as well.
By cultural cycle I refer to the lower class citizens (or whatever they were referred to at any point in time) coming out of the shadows to smack around the powerful every 30 or 40 years. In the early 1900's there was the labor movement, in the 50's and 60's we had civil and social movements. In general these things lead to a better society, even if it wasn't revolutionary. The time may be coming again soon.
Everytime the powerful try to roll back people's rights, things reach a breaking point where these movements seem to happen. People never lose all hope as Bruce seems to suggest. You can't have something without it's opposite being present as well. It's cyclical just like anything else.
That being said I'd have to label Bruce's article as "trendy" more than "insighful". Still, it was a good read.
I think he's harking back to the cultural malaise and its effect on the economy in a way. For instance, everyone is taught that there is no breakout stock, there are no great companies, there are no achievements. if this was not just something you read or were told but actually believed and everyone followed this as well, how would the economy get picked up once it fell exactly?
Well, it wouldn't. He's ignoring something that people absolutely love to ignore by doing this. it's not the megacorps that break the market and do fantabulous things (altho if IBm releases half the stuff they've been claiming to be doing, they'll be really close, but even then it's not the company doing it), its individuals. If everyone in the world believes there are no breakout products except for one guy and that guy's even moderately sharp, he's going to turn the world on its head.
There will always be geniuses, and they will always be the ones moving the world.
Esperandi
(please do not rebut with things like "But everyone is special, nobody is any better than anyone else")
I think we can more or less take it as a given that whatever the world is like in 2035, it won't be much like this story, for the same reason the 1990s weren't like any of the old SF stories that tried to imagine them. I re-read some old Larry Niven stories recently; he speculated (probably not too seriously) that the '90s would have manned visits to Pluto and cheap commercial teleportation, but computers don't figure much more into his 1960s vision of the '90s than they did in the real life of the '60s. (Which is precisely the point, I guess; writers tend to imagine the future as being sort of like today except for one or two specific, isolated changes, which isn't how the real world works.)
In a way, what a lot of SF is really about isn't the future, but more how these isolated changes that writers imagine might affect us if we had them today. This story, though, is more like a satire on the present (the joke about companies lasting only 18 months reminded me of Netscape, which lasted somewhat longer than that but was so clearly doomed from the beginning that I never saw the point of its existence other than as a typical Jim Clark get-richer-quick stock scam). As such it's mildly amusing, but it doesn't really say anything new.
I'm supprised he didn't mention the copyright wars, perhaps it's because he's in denial considering that he just wrote a copyrighted work. Mp3, DVD are only going to escalate. They've spent over a trillion dollars betting that copyrights are a basic right, and noone's going to take it lying down when it turns out that they're not. Of course no one thought they would be willing to suffer and make so much violence over slavery as a false property right a century or so before that. Poor souls, I guess they didn't realise that people were willing to be violent in the name of protecting copyrights.
Mr. Sterling seems to misunderstand why fluctuations in the market exist. His analysis seems to imply that flucuations are present only because we don't understand the market. This is not true. While it is the case that buying behavior in the market is controlled to a certain extent by people's perception of the economy, that perception is rooted fundamentally in performance of corporations. If companies are doing well, making good decisions, and producing efficiently, the economy is strong. On the other hand, if companies make bad decisions and subpar products, the economy does poorly. We can analyze the market all we want, but just because we might understand how it works does not mean that all companies will perform equally well all the time. Some companies perform well, some poorly, and the sum total of performance is the single biggest control on market behavior.
I can whine in general unspecific terms about capitalism too. If I go several pages will "Fortune" publish me? I can whine about people smoking and drinking and having unprotected sex too. Like Mr. Sterling I'm not having enough sex (unprotected or otherwise) and I resent those who appear to be enjoying life more than I am.
The environmental rants were nice too. Think about this: environmentalism is all about eliminating waste, buisness profitability is also about eliminating waste. Capitalism does not == environmental havoc. The problem is that companies and individuals are shielded from having to bear the cost of their inneficiency thanks to the government subsidizing polluting activities.
Enough of this, I'm off to eliminate some waste. (unlike Mr. Sterling I do this in the restroom instead of a magazine article)
--Shoeboy
> Sure, we can pile super-giga computers on the market, analyzing it over and over again, but the main fluctuations will always be there, because of one fact: no matter how powerful the computers, there will always be stupid people running them
A second fact -- or so I suppose it to be -- is that some kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle must surely apply. If you find a scheme that predicts the market perfectly, you start winning consistently. But if you win consistently, someone else has to lose consistently. Ergo, you have changed the market. The other players will either change their strategy or else quit playing. On the other hand, if everyone adopts your scheme, the result would be the ad absurdum situation where everyone wins all the time; surely the market cannot function in such a fashion.
I suppose one possible result is the highly predictible and well behaved market he describes, but I rather suspect that the actual result would be a market that always slipped from under your thumb just as you thought you had it pinned down, leaving the appearance of being even more erratic than before.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If I remember correctly from my class on the Environment and the Human Impact, we are adding 1 billion more people to the planet roughly every 12 years at the current rate.
That means by 2035, if growth continues at its current rate, there will be about 8.92 billion people on Earth.
Wow. All I can say is "good luck" to humanity.
Interesting, but my reaction to the author's description of the market in the future seems suspect. Sure, we can pile super-giga computers on the market, analyzing it over and over again, but the main fluctuations will always be there, because of one fact: no matter how powerful the computers, there will always be stupid people running them. GIGO. You can't compensate for human stupidity in any system. There will always be that the market will behave in unpredictable ways - completely chaotically.
"The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..."