Tim O’Reilly

NEWS
FROM THE
FUTURE

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” — William Gibson

In puzzling out the shape of the future, it’s not the stories themselves that matter so much as the pattern. Once you’ve recognized that, the stories jump out at you.

Take this morning’s New York Times. A story on the increasing competition among the paparazzi for celebrity photographs describes the quality of the information at one leading celebrity photo agency:

“He opens a drawer, pulls out a few stacks of paper. Here, he says, are this week’s scheduled movements of every famous passenger of a major limousine company in Los Angeles… Here, too, are … passenger manifests of every coast-to-coast flight on American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport. ‘I get the full printout,’ he says. ‘If they fly any coastal flight, I know. I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours. I guarantee it.’ He says he has law enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a license plate checked in an hour on weekdays, 20 minutes on weekends.”

There’s money in tracking celebrities, and the tracks they leave are bigger than those left by you or me, but don’t be fooled: information about where you are and what you do is also available, increasingly in real time. Porous access to huge electronic databases containing the tracks we all leave in cyberspace — credit card purchases, travel arrangements, what we read, and who we talk to — ensures that those who have the time for a deeper look can find plenty of information.

Here’s where the makers among us come in: rather than just bemoaning the loss of privacy, the fact that big businesses use this data to drive marketing into every aspect of our private lives, or the warning that the police state is coming, makers figure out how to ride the trend and turn it in a positive direction.

So, for example, during last year’s presidential election, maker Michael Frumin of New York technology/arts group Eyebeam built an amazing site called fundrace.org, which mined the public databases of the Federal Election Commission and built visualization tools to show the patterns of contribution for each candidate, right down to the local level. Before Fundrace, this data was theoretically available to the public, but because access was difficult, it was largely the province of political organizations, lobbyists, and other industry insiders. Frumin and his colleagues at Eyebeam struck a blow for democracy, leveling the playing field and giving equal access to all.

What’s interesting is that even when you can see the direction the trends are taking us, there are many variations in the possible shape of the seemingly inevitable future. Police state, maybe. Intrusive commercialization, almost certainly. But you can also frame this pattern as the global small town.

They say that in a small town, there’s no privacy. The blogosphere is today’s town newspaper and town gossip rolled into one, and digital cameras, cellphones, and SMS from the front lines make sure that breaking news gets picked up quickly. Just when pundits were bemoaning the centralization of radio and television by giant companies like Clear Channel, podcasting and vlogging have flung open the doors of competition once again.

And that’s another pattern: this alternation of centralization and decentralization can be seen again and again. A new technology springs up from the edges, breaking the stranglehold of entrenched players and lowering the barriers to innovation. Entrepreneurs capitalize on the new technology; eventually, the winners of the economic competition consolidate their power and shut out newcomers. But then (paraphrasing poet Wallace Stevens), “the story begins again, in the yes of the maker, spoken because he must say yes, because beneath every no lay a yes that had never been broken.”

You can get URLs for the referenced stories (and others) at makezine.com/04/nff.

Tim O’Reilly (tim.oreilly.com) is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. See what’s on the O’Reilly Radar at radar.oreilly.com.