The New Digital Age

The New Digital Age, Reshaping The Future of People, Nations and Business, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Alfred Knopf, 2013 

When Madeleine Albright’s or Bill Clinton's name appears as an endorser, the Mill Girl is unimpressed, but when Walter Isaacson, author of STEVE JOBS, appears at the top of the reviewers list, I’ll buy the book because Isaacson understood how Jobs drove the Digital Age – the source of Jobs’ values and quirks, his unimpedable habits, his stunning brilliance and sad and perhaps unnecessary early death.

Schmidt, one of the creators of Google, and Cohen, author and director of Google Ideas,  re-emphasize how these digital movements, evolutions, are not entirely electronic.  That is, their human, “Wetware” drivers are there all the time, pulling and pushing on the digital idea.  Why could it be, when Bowmar and HP had basically similar calculator offerings, that Bowmar folded and HP took the users and signed them on with more and more devices?  Same question for DEC, Prime, Wang, Data General, IBM, or Yahoo vs. Google vs. Bing vs. Alta Vista – it’s the Wetware, in the end, that will decide where the bits and bytes go.

But let’s look at some of Schmidt and Cohen’s highpoints. 

·         Every two days we create as much digital content as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003 – that’s about five exabytes of information, with only two billion people out of a possible even billion online.  How many new ideas, new perspectives and new creations will truly global technological inclusion produce, and how much more quickly will their impact be felt? Sounds like a repeat of Gutenberg and the angry scribes, the over-reaching Pope and Luther’s Protestant Reformation all over again, and it all started with lead type! 

·         Attempts to contain the spread of connectivity or curtail people’s access will always ail over a long enough period of time – information, like water, will always find a way through.  Hmm, so much for Chinese government control of the internet, US taxation of web sales, private network security?

·         … the virtual world will not overtake or overhaul the existing world order, but it will complicate almost every behavior.  People and states will prefer the worlds where they have more control – virtual for people, physical for states – and this tension will exist as long as the Internet does.

Jared Cohen is the author of Children of Jihad, and an adjunct fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, a group that I watch closely.  He writes about terrorism in the digital age, and it’s especially difficult given the Marathon Bombing in Boston that the FBI is still unraveling, to read what he has seen, and what he projects, at the nexus of digital with terrorism.  For example:

 If an insurgent’s mobile-phone-triggered  IED is now the equivalent of a high school science project, what does that tell us about the future?

Drones, WiFi triggers, drone flocks coordinated by terrorists located hundreds of miles distant - , all these digital tricks are just about here, and it’s all terrifying because when citizens compare this kind of cheap innovation to governmental counter-measures, like Homeland Security’s manual handling of student visa tracking, Wetware seems to lag two or three steps behind, just enough…

This is a book that lays out puzzles for which we do not yet have the answers.  After all, we’re Wetware.  But it’s a great, and brilliant read, as good as Ray Kurzweil’s book with the shiny silver cover, The Age of Spiritual Machines, easier to read then iSteve, organized and optimistic.  It leaves the Mill Girl with the feeling – and hope – that despite the scale and speed of the digital transformations laid out by Schmidt and Cohen, it’s all doable, or at least endurable.  I’d take this book on a plane trip, try to get through it in four sittings.

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