Unexpected future history

Most -- maybe all -- of the interesting changes that happen in history are completely unexpected. Well, maybe not completely, and there will always be people after the fact who will claim they knew such-and-such was coming, but history is only interesting to the degree that it marks events you didn't expect.

Twenty-five years is not such a long time.  The mid-1980s is about 25 years ago, yet think of some stunning ways the world is now different:

• The Soviet Union, Cold War, and all its consequences, not to mention a newly reformed China that was barely alive.
• Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Microsoft were around but who really knew or cared?
• Technology: Internet, mobile phones, personal computers, cordless phones, VCRs, digital cameras, home theatre
• Venture capital, hedge funds, and other forms of finance that now seem routine were much more specialized and rare.

If anything, we'll look back on the early 2010s with just as much amazement over the huge changes.  Here are some examples of things that are nearly certain to happen in the next 25 years:

• End of the Cuban Embargo (and surge in development and tourism).  Same with North Korea.
• A major earthquake significantly incapacitates Tokyo.
• Nuclear terrorism
• A Chinese recession (3+ quarters of negative growth) and resulting political shakeup
• Major disease epidemic kills millions of people worldwide

But even without specific events like the above, imagine a world 25 years from now where the following are true:

• Post-petroleum world that makes the Middle East (and other oil-exporting countries) economically irrelevant
• Developing countries no longer suffer major casualties from common infectious diseases like malaria and AIDS.
• Major news organizations like The New York Times or CNN are no longer significant information sources, either because they're out of business or because they're entirely eclipsed by something new.
• Enrollment in "traditional" colleges and universities plummets as the process of higher education is replaced by something else.
• The United States no longer has military bases in Japan, Korea, Europe, or the Middle East.
• A new type of finance (microloans? e-bartering?) is mainstream and common.

I'm deliberately trying to offer examples that are entirely plausible and would seem inevitable in hindsight.  Can you think of others?

You're fired

In 1841, the Chinese negotiator Qishan was ordered dismissed and executed for agreeing to a treaty that ended hostilities with the British in exchange for Hong Kong and $6 million in indemnities. Ironically, his counterpart, Charles Elliot -- the guy who out-negotiated Qishan -- received the following letter from his boss, the director at the foreign service, Lord Palmerston [Spence, p.156]

“You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions; you have deliberately abstained from employing, as you might have done, the force placed at your disposal; and you have without any sufficient necessity accepted terms which fall far short of those which you were instructed to obtain.”

I find this oddly inspiring, both because of the way two powerful men were humbled by forces beyond their control, and how we in the future look back and calmly smile at what must have been traumatic at the time.

 

Banned in China

I’m not sure most of my non-China friends (whether “real” or “Facebook”) understand what those of us in China must do when we get on the internet. Here is a short list of some things we can’t access from China:

• Facebook, Twitter
• Youtube
• Nearly any blog written by a private individual and hosted on a site like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, SixApart, etc.
• Photos (but not the text) on FlickR
• Photos (but usually not the text) on Wikipedia

If you try to access any of the above, you don’t get a message saying “Sorry, this site is blocked”. Instead, you get something much more sinister: nothing. The first few times you see this you’ll probably just think it’s your computer, or your internet connection. Most other sites appear to work fine – CNN.com, Google.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor—so you might suspect that something’s wrong with just that site. “Is Wikipedia experiencing technical difficulties?”

It’s possible to get around this Chinese interference with the internet, but the solutions are annoying. The most common way is to purchase a subscription to a “virtual private network” or VPN. Essentially, this is a way to connect your computer to another computer someplace else, usually in the US, where internet access is unrestricted. A VPN turns internet access into a two-step process: the web page loads onto an offshore computer, which then feeds it to your computer inside china.

This works, and it’s reliable, but besides the cost (a few dollars a month) and hassle of setting it up, there are a few problems. First, it can be slow, because all the data has to go back and forth across the ocean an extra time (the technical term is “latency”). But worse, it’s not always convenient to install the extra software necessary to get your computer to talk on the VPN. It’s hard to get it to work from an internet café, for example, or on a mobile phone or iPad. It can be done – people like me do it all the time – but it’s a pain and requires some technical expertise.

Some people worry that China may close off VPN access, but I think this is unlikely. It would require somebody in the government to manually track every single VPN provider in the world and turn off the IP addresses. That’s doable – the easiest way would be to allow Chinese internet users to only access “approved” sites – but it would be a serious drag on all businesses, which need VPNs to securely conduct electronic payments, for example. But the bigger reason I think the government won’t bother is because there’s little point. Very, very few people in China care that they can’t access these (mostly) English-language foreign sites. Those who do care can afford the modest access fees and endure the technical difficulties. Like most other inconveniences in China, you just get used to it.

From 2010-07-21 001

Re-reading James Fallows and China

I re-read parts of James Fallows’ short book of China essays Postcards from Tomorrow Square because I was trying to remember his conclusions. I respect Fallows because I liked his thesis from the 1980s, when he concluded that America doesn’t need to copy Japan, but rather should be More Like Us.  But since Postcards was among the first of many books about China that I've blitzkrieged my way through since arriving here two years ago, I like reading it again now with more seasoned eyes.

I would summarize his conclusion like this: China is simply too busy holding itself together as it escapes poverty, too busy for America to worry about as a serious rival. Rather than worry, we (Americans) should view China with confidence, helping them avoid some of the natural problems they’ll face on their long road to modernity.

I agree, though I'm probably more uncomfortable than he is with some of the self-destructive behavior of the American government over the past few years, with its emphasis on tougher homeland security, centralization of decision-making, and even Internet regulation -- all of which makes me think the United States is trying harder to become more like China than the other way around.

Alvin Toffler predicts China's impact on the future

CNReview summarizes the China implications from Alvin Toffler's 40 predictions for the next 40 years.

Prediction No. 2

Nation-state power around the globe will be increasingly ‘multi-polar’ in terms of who wields it and where

• The economies of Brazil, China and India will become less US and EU centric.
• Foreign Direct Investments will shift toward developing economies.

Prediction No. 25

China will continue to position itself as a long-term economic power-player around the globe

• China teams with other emerging countries (Brazil, India and China) to influence currency utilization.
• China partners with other countries (Venezuela and Africa) to meet energy needs and to import a wide range of raw materials.

Prediction No. 37

China’s monopoly control of the world’s rare earth metals market will have a significant impact on US national security and the economy

• The seventeen elements that make up a group known as rare earth metals will remain critical to the performance of hundreds of products and technologies.
• The US will be reliant on China’s metals to produce such things as high-performance weapons components, internal guidance systems, microwave communications systems, radars, the motors and generators that power aircraft and ships, wind turbines, high-performance batteries, hybrid cars, superconductors, computer chips and digital displays.

The last one is a mistake out of Futurism 101: never project a "trend" from something that first appeared in headlines within the past five years.  Rare metals doesn't make the cut. Even something we think of as completely transformational, like Facebook or the iPhone, will change a lot and maybe disappear in forty years.  Already, just a few months after this headline appeared, a bunch of "new discoveries" are being made of new deposits and substitutions. If anything, the brief period rare metals appeared in the news will lessen China's long-term influence, as manufacturers wake up to the problems of being dependent on a single source for their supplies.

More generally, I think Toffler is summarizing too much of the accepted wisdom from the last few years, rather than look at China  -- and some other big trends -- in a longer term context. Sure, China is becoming more influential, and as a result, the relative power of the United States will fade. But one of the consequences of the much bigger globalization trend is that all countries -- in fact the very definition of "country" --  are becoming less relevant.  Neither China nor the US can make an iPhone without the other. There is a complex web of relationships among all the people who know how to make iPhones -- the designers and engineers, parts procurement specialists, factory assemblers, logistics experts, marketing and salespeople -- but none of those relationships is defined by nationality.  In forty years it will be obvious that the web of people not countries matters most.

Kindle Singles and the future of publishing

The print publishing industry thinks a lot has changed in the past 20 years,  but they haven't seen anything yet. The transformation from print to all-digital publishing will happen very quickly.  We are months and years, not decades, from when electronic distribution on Kindles and iPads becomes the mainstream format of choice.  The TED people just announced TEDBooks, available for about $3 each as Kindle Singles, and I can't wait to see many more.

Creating and then publishing to Kindle is  straightforward: create a document in Microsoft Word (though, curiously, they want you to save in the old .doc format, rather than the much more flexible and modern .docx format), test the formatting on Mobipocket Reader, and upload to Amazon.  Besides the odd prohibition against the .docx format, your text also must be free from special fonts or character formats like bullets. You can include .JPEG photos, but you need to be sure they look okay on the Kindle greyscale screen.

Kindle ebooks have several big advantages over internet web sites or blogs:

• The content is final.  It can be referenced later as a single, fixed work. There may be updates or corrections, just like there can be a new edition of a hardcover book, but the original stands as an unchanging point of reference.
• It can be viewed offline.
• Standardized display and viewing conventions.  It can be easily printed when necessary and it "makes sense" when printed because it has an clearly identifiable start and finish.

If the end user cost were 99 cents or lower, or if there were the equivalent of completely free content, then eBook publishing will be open to many more new applications:

• Class notes, published by the instructor or a motivated student note-taker
• Church or other non-profit organizational bulletins and newsletters.
• Company catalogs or detailed product descriptions
• Help and product manuals
• Christmas newsletters, either on behalf of an organization or a family
• Special reports.

In fact, to really take off we need the equivalent to print publishing of what podcasting is to audiobook publishing: free, easily publishable and discoverable content that's as easy to produce as it is to consume. As with audiobooks, there may be a lot of garbage there too, but eventually some quality brands will appear and the publishing world will never be the same.

(photo by John Blyberg)

I like trucks

Steve Jobs is right:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people

But after living with an iPad since it was available last year, I'm thinking I still like trucks.  Most mornings I've been using Flipboard or Reeder to watch my various RSS feeds. But while the iPad is nice for lying in bed, or for spontaneous and quick reads when I have a minute to myself, it just can't beat the power of a truck, er, laptop.

I just outfitted myself with the updated NetNewsWire 3.2.8, the one with the new Instapaper button. I need Instapaper so badly that I considered switching  (to Shrook, the only interesting-looking one in the Mac App Store, but I gave up when I found it doesn't sync to Google Reader), but now that I have it, I'm wondering why I don't stick to Mac for all my serious RSS reading. I also added the NetNewsWire to Evernote Applescript on the Veritrope site; that plus the FastScript utility from Red Sweater Software, and I'm just a command-E away from sending all my interesting clippings immediately to Evernote for safe-keeping.  Try that on your iPad.

Sometimes a truck really is better.