Reasons to be cheerful
In almost two decades of covering computing and information technology, admittedly on and off as I have slipped and slid in and out of other areas, a number of things have struck me, and continue to strike me.
Long-suffering readers (and editors) may be surprised to learn that the main one is not, in fact, that I think most technology businesses are rum lots, or even that technology is over-sold. It is simply that what will matter is, in some very real sense, unknowable. This, I think, is worth remembering now, when the most interesting thing about tech (albeit with the obvious Loki figure of generative AI as the exception) seems to be how boring it has become.
Any list of achievements in computing or information technology – say, the Jacquard loom, analogue computers and digital computers from Eniac to Ernie, transistors, semiconductors, the IBM S/360, minicomputers, microcomputers, operating systems, spreadsheets, e-mail, GUIs, and, in some respects, the Internet even in its present degraded state – will be partial. It will also not allow us to predict the future: we catalogue, enumerate and list to make sense of now.
Nevertheless, they do clarify simply by creating order, and any list like the one above needs to include the black oblong vortex.
The development of the modern smartphone, starting with the original iPhone (leaving aside its prehistory for the moment) seemed to slam the brakes on technological development. Or perhaps it is happenstance, but little that happened in the decade following its release was monumental.
Perhaps we all decided to get rich off the back of apps and VC blather. Or perhaps we hit the wall not only in semiconductor development, but in our cultural understanding of what computers do. Many free and open source projects are, if not stalled, at least in abeyance. Others only exist because tech giants have become reliant on them.
Basic
Yes, core technologies improved: batteries, for instance, are better than ever, and that has consequences not just for electric vehicles but energy generation and storage itself. Nevertheless, anything we would understand as actual information technology or computing just got incrementally faster or cheaper.
The great innovations of the past were often unrecognised at the time or emerged from unexpected places. Today, from cloud computing to yet another smartphone, the world of information technology is largely soporific stuff.
And yet, we cannot know what seeds are being planted now that will matter in 20 years. The future remains genuinely unknowable because it has yet to be formed, and developments in technology will be a key force in how the future is fabricated.
It’s true, we will back the wrong horse, too. We often do. It was not a given, for instance, that the World Wide Web would come to dominate what we used to call computer-mediated communication (CMC). An alternative technology, Gopher, pre-dated it, and had a number of interesting characteristics, not least among which is a hierarchical nature. In a possible world – a better one – Gopher would have dominated. It likely would have evolved, possibly even into something akin to the Web, but its hierarchical structure would have created clearer indexing and, therefore, more rational organisation.
This isn’t nostalgia for a mythical past. Technology is multi-faceted, and we can remain open to its possibility while being sceptical of hype. That is harder to achieve than it sounds, particularly when the industry appears to be run by cartoon villains, but it is also more honest than certainty.
Is this sad? More melancholy, really. Perhaps the Web won because chaos enabled surprise. We got the messier, more chaotic technology and, because of that, developments unforeseen. Few predicted that outcome, nor the amount of gaffer tape now required to mash it into something resembling a shape. And nobody knows what’s next either, despite what either Silicon Valley’s self-appointed visionaries, or cynical journalists, may claim.
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