Looking Ahead from 1997

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One of the things I like to do for amusement is read through old magazines and newspapers comparing how things actually turned out with the way they were predicted in the various publications.

Just before the economy started to melt down I discovered a copy of Wired from August 1997 and a wonderful article attempting to look forward into the twenty-first century. If only they had been right!

According to Wired, the world was about to enter an era of unprecedentedÂ progress and prosperity that would last at least forty years. This prosperity was supposed to be driven by four factors:

Biotechnology
Nanotechnology
The internet
A true global economy

Of course, none of this actually happened, and I think a great deal of the reason for this was capitalism unfettered by any semblance of social consciousness.

There has seen great progress in the field of biotech. The human genome has been mapped. Genetic manipulation is giving rise to new organisms, new medical treatments and a much better understanding of how genes work. Unfortunately, the main product of this progress has been court cases where biotech firms are trying to patent genes they discover, and a black market in body parts, many of them stolen from cadavers.

Nanotechnology has remained mostly a pipe dream. Nobody has found a solution to the unit build time problem. Until nanoproducts can be manufactured in large quantities nothing can really be accomplished.

The global economy has resulted in a race to the bottom where wages are concerned. Outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing has driven down wages in North America and devastated whole areas of the US. This is partly because there is a fundamental conflict between nations and the global economy. It would probably be more accurate to say there is a conflict of interest between nations and multi-national corporations.

The only one of the factors mentioned in the article that has even come close to fullfilling the promise they held out is the internet (and the cellular network as well). It has revolutionized many aspects of society in ways which are obvious as well as many ways which are invisible, under the hood, so to speak.

The internet is also under attack from commercial interests, of course. There are attempts underway to give preferential treatment to some traffic over others for example. The thrust is to make the internet into a business organ. The only thing which has allowed the net to develop as fast as it has is the fact that it was designed not to be regulated or interfered with.

One projection the Wired article got obviously wrong had to do with the internet and the global economy combined. The article predicted that we would have a reliable, low-cost online currency by the turn of the century. That certainly would have been nice. Instead we’re stuck with Paypal and the connections to the credit card companies.

I wish we had experienced the golden age the Wired predicted back then. What a different place the world would have been.