It was the Daily Telegraph's idea of what the world would be like in 1990. Now, amongst the things they failed to predict was the release of Sergeant Pepper three months later. They did, of course, predict the Chinese nuking of Singapore in 1972. Now, I was at university in 1972 and had my mind on other things, but I'm sure I would have spotted that if it had happened. One of the interesting things that their idea of what the fashions of 1990 would be like, let me see if I can find those, are very, very, very unlike anything in 1990, but are terribly like 1967. There we are. It's like 1967 fashions only made of plastic.
They also think we're all going to be living in Doctor Who sets. Well, yes, well, some of us are, I suppose. But amongst the things they fail to say anything about at all are the environment or computers. So it would be very interesting to know, looking back from 25 years to now, we're sitting here busily predicting what the next 25 years are going to be like, there's going to be something fundamental that we're going to miss. Not because all the pieces aren't already here and aren't just waiting to sprout, but because although we've got all the ingredients, we actually don't know what it is we're cooking. There are webs of dependency that tie us all together.
They bind us to each other in what we call society. It is the nature of technology to weave those webs anew. And all the while we think we understand these strange new shapes because we are the masters of technology, because we brought it into being. But then one day we find that we are hopelessly ensnared, that society has vanished and something formless has emerged. As we slip towards the millennium, technology is already tying us in knots.
The computers that connect us through the web we call the internet are carrying information that no one can control. I think the Internet is the most interesting thing that's happened to us yet out of this surge of computation we've seen since the Second World War. I'm actually rather afraid that at some point someone will try to dismantle it simply because it's too crazy and it's too much competition. But I have a certain faith in the fact that it's transnational to prevent that.
It doesn't come from anywhere in particular. It's spread all over the world. And since it was designed initially to survive nuclear war, it might well survive any attempt to dismantle it from the outside. Information has one yearning, a yearning to be released. It will run amok amongst us, reproducing endlessly. It knows no loyalty. It has no moral code. It will serve any master, whoever will set it free. There's this wonderful saying, which is the internet treats censorship as damage and roots around it.
So whenever you put up a banner, it's just like water, it just finds another path. You can do things, you can try and control it in your country, but those little things keep seeping across the borders. And whether it's information leaking in or information leaking out, it's going to leak. Information that can crisscross the planet faster than we can think ignores all national borders. It has no sense of tradition. It obeys no ancient rules. When the White House in Moscow was under siege,
I had a friend who looked outside her window, got a better view than CNN and BBC did, and she sent email, and I and millions of other people saw that. So we now have a way for millions, billions of eyewitnesses around the world to send truth out through the barriers... that used to be controlled by central government. So, yes, there's a dramatic change... because of this many-to-many communication technology... and the control over what people see and hear. There is a very similar pattern that you find... in the structure of societies, in the structure of companies... and in the structure of computers. And all three are moving in the same direction.
That is, away from a top-down structure of a central command system, giving the system instructions about how to behave, towards a system that is parallel, that is flat, which is a web, and which change moves from the bottom up. And this is going to happen across all institutions and technical devices. It's the way they work. Cyber space seems like virgin territory inviting pioneers a place where we can carve ourselves out in new and different shapes no one there can see our race our
our face, our class. So it feels like liberation to escape the material world and to disport on the internet where we are totally anonymous, yet open to view. And when the internet is used as a way to express desire, then we glimpse how technology could one day truly change the way we are. Cybersex is any aspect of sexuality that has to do with technology, and that can be everything from virtual reality to phone sex to CD-ROMs to the adult bulletin boards. Futuresex, as a magazine, really strives to explore the link between sex culture and pop culture, and that can be everything from low down street scenes to the most far out high
technology. It gives you the opportunity to go into a cyberspace and change not just your physical appearance, but your sexual orientation or your gender. And that is such an incredible possibility for people. I don't see how it could be anything less than irresistible. I posed something about buggering my boyfriend, which got some neat response. I got a send from a man who said that he was so excited by reading this and he thought it was such a cool thing and he'd never tried it before that he went home and asked his wife to have anal sex with him
and have her be on top. And she said no, she wouldn't do it. So he went and asked her best friend. That has nothing to do with online ethics. That's strictly earth time. And so he got her best friend to fuck him in the ass. And he just wrote to me saying, thank you very much. You changed my life. I had such a great time. You opened up worlds to me. I'm like, sex forever. And it's sort of exhibitionist, which I really like. It reminds me of the courtships, like if you see Endangerous Liaisons, the courtships and the communications being done by these letters with the foot messengers and all that. It's really the same kind of thing, except it's much more cost-effective and much more convenient. You know, it's immediate. It has sort of confirmed that some of the things that I thought were sort of a little weird and perverse
are actually kind of okay because I've run into people who have the same proclivities that I do. And I don't think of myself as a particularly way out person, but I had a pretty conservative upbringing. So a lot of the things that I've seen where people have discussed things that have been like, you know, like quasi violent things and all kinds of fancy things that I always thought were, oh geez, this is bad, I'm even thinking this as sort of now, it's been really, I think kind of healthy because now you're thinking about it in terms of, well, this is okay because these 20 million other people feel the same There are all these bizarre questions that are coming up now about sex online. And I have friends who have computer sex, even though they're in this monogamous relationship, they have computer sex with other people. And I have friends who don't because that to them is, even though it's just words on
a screen, it's still adultery. Yeah, what's cheating? And what's cheating and what's not? No one's... To me, I think it's great because you can't get that out of the answer. The majority of people are using this technology to build community, and what a better thing to communicate about than sex, which has been, in every other media, has been previously swept under the rug and ignored. And where we're at right now, we're at liberty to discuss these things with people all around the planet, and that is incredibly exciting to me. And I really see it as this technology is primarily being a tool for communication, not isolation. Throughout the Western world, there is a counterculture forming.
Though politics may seem weary and all ideology ended, new technology seems sharp enough to prick the blandness of the future. Technology is not evil. Technology is completely neutral, that's my belief. It's the intent behind the people using it. It's also the amount of information that people have on both sides. I think there's an imbalance right now. There's sort of an information elite right now. A very small strata of people that really know a lot about the information technology, and a very large strata of people that don't. Now, if you don't know anything about the technology, you're going to be manipulated by it, and the people doing it are the people that do know about it.
know about it. So the sensible thing to do is learn how to use it. That's the thing. What you have to remember is anytime there's evolution in a species, it's always 2% of the population that curves first. So what you're looking at here is the 2% of the population that is going to become the new species, hopefully, which will be the new human beings that want to interact with information and create a symbiotic relationship with it, rather than have it come from a mono source and just be funneled at them and all they do is receive it and take it as it is and it kind of turns into a whole paradigm of a way of looking at life it's like I can either interact with it and find out what it's about and dance with it or I can have it grab me with hooks and it
can make me dance for it Cyber hippies believe that the future can be contested and that the weapons of the struggle are the means of its production. They have been touched by the dream of what new technology can offer. It is a vision far more exciting than the real world it supplants. People are starting to question who has authority over them. Who is this person who's saying they can do this or they can't do that? And as people start to question that, things start to change, and people start to actually deciding that they're not prepared to live their lives
under the sort of control that exists. And that's happening on a massive, massive scale, and that is exciting. We're sort of filled with a kind of vision of a future in which individuals are empowered by technology. And, you know, the definition of human is changing really fast. And we're kind of entering this era where the type of animal that a human is is changing. Many of the people who created personal computers did them not because they wanted to become billionaires, but because they wanted to take this power that a few people had
because they had access to big computers and spread that power around to all kinds of people. They wanted to create this intellectual resource that would give ordinary people the kind of power that elites used to have. Now it's 35 years after the revolutions of the 60s. This is really not completely the same kind of political feeling, but I think in a lot of sense, the revolutionary fervor we see in the computer networks today really is rooted in that kind of 60s project. People like us in this country, we're not interested in being citizens of Great Britain or subjects of Her Majesty's government. We're interested in being people and people on the net, which is like a new country. A country without boundaries.
A lot of what we're doing is technology driven. And technology is the force. And we want to use technology for what we see as the evolution of our society. And if we don't take the tools and use it, it's going to be done for us. The first issue is access. And we're not going to like it. No, not at all. There seems something democratic about the power to connect all corners of the globe.
An information revolution appears to promise the chance for all to speak. But the voices that are telling us this are a kind of cyber babble. By talking in a virtual world, they're just talking to themselves. Information gives us knowledge, and knowledge gives us power. But power rarely falls like gentle rain, equally on all of those below. The power to ask new questions is not the power to have them answered. The political possibilities of the internet broadly defined are not what people really think.
They think, oh great, we'll have total democracy, people will vote on everything. You get a mess because it's more anarchy than it is democracy. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority. Anarchy is the tyranny of nobody. tyranny of nobody, but it's not necessarily good. If it is true that technology gives new freedoms, they are the freedoms of the jungle. The power to connect with speed across the globe is also the power to bypass everything on which we would prefer not to dwell. It is a cyber marketplace with all that that entails.
We are building the future on shifting sand, and when the edifice first begins to move, we will think it is the stirring, the excitement of the new. But it might just be that we have finally lost our sense of what binds us to each other, that in the shrill note of change, we have lost the sombre sound of continuity. What people don't realize is what difference this technology is going to make to all the old power structures and authority systems in our society. It's happened before, actually. 500 years ago, the printing press was invented. What happened then was that everybody could read the Bible in their own language, in their own home, whereas before they had to go to a church and listen to a minister of the church, a priest or a bishop,
tell them in Latin what the word of God was. Now they could make up their own minds. As a result, the authority of the church crumbled. The result was individual choice, individual freedom, a lot of liberty, but also a lot of factions and schisms. And the same thing is happening today with this new technology. Everybody can make up their own minds about what is happening in America or Bosnia or wherever. No longer do we have to believe presidents, prime ministers, princes or queens. As a result, the old authority structures no longer hold the same sway over people's minds. Now, in some ways that's wonderful, but in some ways it's very frightening. What is going to hold society together?
We do not need to build homes in space or fight for new ideals to awake one morning and find society made anew. Technology only has to do enough to change our daily routine. And when the comfortable stability of long-established norms begins to falter, the world turns upside down. The future is already in the marketplace where it can flourish and destroy. And the market has a way of changing things without waiting to count the cost. All this change is driven by technology.
But technology has all sorts of effects. Of course it allows people to work in quite different ways. course it allows people to have much more information and much more choice, but it also means that everybody is competing with everybody else in the world. So that puts tremendous pressure on all sorts of organizations and on all sorts of governments. You can't get away with being dozy anymore. Now, that means that you've got to use the technology and all the information it gives wherever you are. And that means that nobody can escape from all these kinds of changes that technology makes possible, but which economics make absolutely essential. We are the way we work.
And by freeing us from our offices and the structures they create, the simplest technology can change the way we live. Mary Maroon could be the future. Mary Maroon could be the model to which we all have to conform in the economy of tomorrow. At seven in the morning she's already at work in her apartment but she's never really started work because she never really stopped. In the global economy day and night are interchangeable. and these online services. The advertising agency for which she works has no rules concerning time or place.
With her computer and her telephone, she can work from anywhere. She said to tell you not to worry, she's going to buy the NFL, but she will buy in-game, regular season only. I'm going to log on to Quickmail now and just check that note that Lorraine sent on Frank Langella. Pick me up at ten past ten. OK, bye. When Mary goes to the office, she does so when it suits her.
No one is watching and no one is counting. They notice only that the job is done. It's a life that has no boundaries. This is communication, information, productivity, and human being in one technology-assisted mix. At Shaiat Dei, they have changed the place of work. They now talk not of offices, but spaces. If cyberspace is where computers talk, this is cyberspace made flesh. Here, no one has a desk or anything much to call their own.
But each employee can always find a computer at which to sit and a mobile phone to hold. Then, as free agents, they roam in a place designed to give them the tools to make work easy, but never the objects to tie them down. They are always online and never off duty. Totally free to fly and totally free to fall. Welcome to the only piece of real estate that I own on this floor. Okay, so this is my locker. And in this new environment, what my locker really represents is, I guess, in the traditional
world, an office, a desk, and all the accoutrements that you need in an office. So when we moved, I had to distill my most prized possessions down to maybe two files that could be housed in this environment. Conceptually, it's kind of cool if you think about it. In theory, nothing out here belongs to me. It's all common area, shared property, and the idea is that you don't need objects, you don't need possessions to define how smart you are and to contribute great ideas. Okay, I have a couple of commercials scheduled for you. This area is what we call the clubhouse, and the whole idea behind the clubhouse is it's a very informal environment where people can come to either engage in conversations with
other team members or people from other groups, other accounts, or in fact they can just come, plug in their power books and do some work again at the tables. But I would like to stress nobody owns the space, nobody has a set table that is designated to them on a daily basis. Have you had any thoughts? Gucci's getting pressure from his dealers. He wants to know where we're getting out. When I think about the future, I'm very motivated and energized and excited because I think the kinds of conversations that I've been hearing about what it's going to be like are incredible. I mean, anything is possible. And to me, that's amazing. I want to get out there and start inventing it and doing it and making it happen.
But having said that, some people just can't adapt to change. And I think we understand that, that there will be a lot of natural attrition. and we may lose some very good, very talented people, but ultimately if they can't adjust to the environment and to this new way of working, then yes, they unfortunately will have to leave. My name's Peter Spalter, and I'm an independent marketing consultant.
Six years ago, I was marketing director for a computer company in Birmingham. We turned over £30 million, and in my division, I had 120 staff. We were taken over by a Finnish company, and the company decided to move to London. I'd actually moved up from London five years previously and at that point decided to not return and decided to work as a teleworker from home. The techno-evangelists insist that with distance the heart grows fonder. By being where we want to be, we'll be more in touch with life. They call it teleworking, the modern way to be. But the freedom to work from a place we love is no guarantee of happiness.
To live a life bathed in material comfort still does not replace those old-fashioned things that once made us feel secure. As a company man, I had more stress. I was a puppet of someone else in many ways. Nowadays I have the flexibility to working for myself, when I want to work almost. I have quality of life, but I work harder and I don't earn as much money. Four years ago I was very optimistic. I'd worked in the computer industry all my life. It seemed fairly easy to take the technology, transpose it to my home and everything would work wonderfully.
What I hadn't realised was that people are important. One of the things that happens from the new technology is the whole way we work changes. That's already happening. And some of that's very good news and some of that's quite excitingly, well, frightening news, really. I mean, part of the good news is that ordinary people like me can go global. I mean, I sit here in the cottage in Norfolk writing books, Norfolk writing books, but we actually sell in 52 countries and reproduce in 15 countries, and it's just me and my wife doing it all, really. And the rest of it is what you might call outsourced, to use the jargon. Now, that's part of the bad news, because organizations are discovering that they actually don't need very many people at the core of their business.
In fact, somebody said once that an organization now is just a box of contracts with lots of different people brought in for particular projects or particular tasks who don't really belong to the organization except for that job. Isolation is a big killer. I miss going to the pub at lunchtime with people and just chatting about things. I miss the decisions around the coffee machine. A lot of ideas are generated around the coffee machine or even in the pub. That doesn't happen. There's no buzz. The only buzz in this office is a hard disk on the computer. That's it. Or the phone, when it rings.
Technology can't compensate for people. I think we've expected to join, most of us, large organisations, either in the public or private sector, and for them to be there, really, for us. These big organisations are in the eye of a hurricane which is whipping through not just Britain but actually throughout the industrialised West. And it's forcing these corporations to, in the jargon, shrink, downsize. They are contracting out parts of what they used to do to other firms or subcontractors. And so when you join a firm, you can't expect to be with it all your life.
you can't even expect it to exist at the end of your life. Now, that's good, that's bad. The good thing about it is that actually that's an opportunity to kind of get out of traps because sometimes people got trapped in these organisations. But the bad thing about it is that for most people, they actually needed that reassurance. Ordinary men and women, actually, I think, needed the boundaries of settled organisations as kind of platforms from which to live the rest of their life. have mortgages to buy houses, parent bring up children, construct friendships. If you're going to construct a network of friends, you have to be in the same place over time. And if places are always changing and work is already changing, you can't even hold your friendships together.
We may be moving into a world in which even notions of friendship change. The apostles of the new world do not preach on the streets. They do not feel the need to touch its crime and dirt and chance. Their vision of the future is formed from far away. The wealthy and the fortunate have always lived above the rest but now they have the means to be still more remote
with a computer and a telephone and an income of which most can only dream they can build a little paradise where technology sets them free They can build a little paradise in the middle of America, in the mountains of Colorado, 9,000 feet above the sea, in a town like Telluride. but though they feel remote from city life and far from city noise they still can feel connected
My name is John Nesbeth. I now describe myself as a globalist. I was born and raised on a tiny sugar beet farm in the south of Utah. I went to Harvard, and Kennedy appointed me assistant secretary of education, and I also worked in the Johnson White House. And then I went to work for IBM, and it was while at IBM that I had an idea for my own company. And today I have a company called Megatrends Limited with 57 joint ventures in 42 countries. And Megatrends Limited has only four employees, including myself. That led me to move from Washington, D.C.,
where I didn't even know who my neighbor was, to Telluride, Colorado, one of the most beautiful places on the planet and where I know all of my neighbors. Indeed, most of the people who live in the town. You can now pretty much do what you do anywhere you want to. So we've turned everything on its head, and we've been able to do that because of the advances in telecommunications mostly. This is the global paradox, where a home can be somewhere small and cosy, though the workplace is the world. When the future can look like this,
it is easy to be entranced. But in Telluride, those cosy homes cost a million dollars and more. It is the nature of every paradise that only the few gain entry. The global paradox is that the new technology is simultaneously creating this huge global economy and at the same time making the parts smaller and smaller and more powerful right down to the individual. As the world becomes larger and larger in the sense that we're all becoming one economy, the focal point is increasingly, and the basic unit is increasingly, the individual.
I operate globally out of Telluride as an individual, and I'm in touch with the world as an individual. So the individual is becoming more important as the state, for example, is becoming less and less important. And our economic connectiveness is really the glue now that's beginning to hold us all together. I don't think this is the preserve of just the wealthier people who have glamorous jobs. For example, there's a woman who edits court records in Los Angeles, doesn't go to Los Angeles, but edits the court records. There's a couple here that designs Hallmark greeting cards. They used to do that in Kansas City at the headquarters, but now they do it exclusively
from Telluride. And that's the whole idea with the new technology, that you can go and seek out really quality of life places and do whatever you do from there. I think we have the technology in place to do that pretty much anywhere in the world. Indeed, the technology is not going to change very much. It's going to become more and more sophisticated. There's going to be an enhancement of the technology, the blending of the technologies, and it'll all be more and more elegant. But basically, we have in place what we need to operate from remote and hopefully beautiful areas. Technology can offer a fantasy future, Not somewhere new, but somewhere old.
A chance to cling to the past in a world that's rushing by. The computer has come to Telluride to make the future in the past. A town of 1,500 souls, it has a network of its very own. In 1985, I and colleagues created a project called the InfoZone that would endow this place with telecommunications infrastructure. The InfoZone went online publicly in July of 1993 and offers a number of community services, from information services such as information about the arts, government services, health care, education, children's activities.
One of the things we've been able to do is place public access telecomputing stations around the community. There is a system at the library, very heavily used. There's a system at the medical center in the high school and here at the Telluride Institute. And there's somebody calling to get on now. I feel excited about the world my grandchildren will live in. And it's really lazy. It's lazy to be pessimistic. I, for my whole adult life, I lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. And I have five children and eight grandchildren. And, you know, I thought about that a lot.
That's been removed. The end of the Cold War, the fall of communism, the spread of democracy, the globalization of our economies, economies, the modernization of Asia, all of the new revolution in telecommunications. How can one not see that the world's changed, that the opportunities are unprecedented? I think that the opportunities for individuals, for institutions, for companies, for families is greater today. The opportunities are greater today than they've ever been in any of our lifetimes. And the global paradox tells us that the opportunities for each of us as individuals today are greater than they've ever been in human history.
The ties that bind us to the past are unravelling. We are free. Freed from the monotony of a job for life. And freed from security. Freed from certainty. free to be cast aside. In a world where we have to look after ourselves no one is looking after us. When we stand and face the future
we turn back and see millions of other people all alone. A host of tiny free agents in a huge global economy. In the technological jungle, not everyone can survive. There's parties booked in. If there's no parties booked in, then they don't need the maximum amount of guides. So I'm last on the list then. So there's... really, there's no job security. Everybody all right? Yeah You follow me we go down the mine
But I did start that or work as a security guard performance But due to the money being Diabolical as a word to pound 35 an hour Terrible My wife also works here at the park But we're on the same money, which is, you know, what can I say? If we had a mortgage then, we wouldn't be able to survive. That's quite simple. That's the bit, the bottom line. We wouldn't be able to survive. What is prophesied about the decline of the industry and the decline of the social part of the valleys is happening, you know? Depressing as it is, that's a fact. OK, people are saying, right, it's nice, it's a better environment, and it is.
It is. You can't eat food, trees and things like that. The great working class communities of the first half of the 20th century, in which literally tens of thousands of men supported through blue-collar work, wives and two or three children, and lived in the same place and supported the same football team and actually had all kinds of shared symbols and means of communicating one with another are shrinking. So we're reinventing a new sense of community and technology is enabling that. We're having these networks of information technology that you can talk to on our own
computers, recreating new kinds of community. It's actually freaky, but the notion of community is the church spire, the village cricket ground, pub and the old maid cycling through the mist of work as Mr Major famously invoked, that's gone and it's never coming back because the structures that supported it are being blown away. The
The promise that technology brings is rarely filled with glamour. It more often spells low paid work, making products for amusing others. Technology is made up from components, and it really doesn't care if those components are made of plastic or if they're human beings. The pit closed, a mess man come out of work, and although he found a job pretty quick, he was on a very, very low wage. age so I had to come out to work full time. 39 hours is you take on 115 pounds. At the moment there's plenty of overtime here it's only been the last few months. We hear all these great stories and Sony is going to build a plant.
Yeah. I hear we're open, don't we? They took on quite a few, but there's nothing actually in the valleys at all. Nothing at all. And when they do open, they're not paying a decent wage, are they? No. Nothing that men can go and have a job at, like. If we appeared to be opposed to progress, we'd look like a bunch of old bloody dinosaurs. There were a group of people many years ago, long before we'd ever thought of, called Luddites. They called them Luddites because they went out to destroy machines. They said, right, we're going to destroy these machines
because they're going to put us out of work. And the same question's been asked now. Machines have got to work, honestly. I believe machines have got to work for people instead of profit. They've never stopped progress. There's huge companies now bringing in new machines. And what happens? A couple of days after that they announce further cutbacks on the shop floor. So all the technology should benefit mankind. Why should we have to fear anything coming in that's going to benefit mankind? But if they, you know, when they put in profits before people, God, that's the big problem. Somebody once said, I think it was John Nasebitt in America, that high tech needs high touch to make it human and livable with. And we've got to find more ways, it seems to me, providing high touch to the people who are going to be pushed out
of the work community because of this technology, which makes life very exciting for some, but very frightening for the people who are, well, out of touch. In the last of the series, next Tuesday at 9 o'clock,
a peek into the future and virtual reality computers. And if you'd like a copy of the booklet that accompanies the series, please send a cheque or post order for £1.50, a payable to Channel 4, to the usual address. Dramatic change is coming about for the poorer people as well as for the richer. The D.I.S. button. It'll take a still shot. The technologists are on a mission to the world to give everyone the benefit of information products. They want us all to be consumers in the market of the future. The largest in-class. The objective needs for a new technology are that technologies have a tendency to justify each other.
So for instance, you have a very fancy computer, and then because you have that, somebody designs software for it that lets you make very fancy documents, but then because of that, you need a nice fancy home printer that can print the documents, then you need the fancy network that can connect to other people to print the documents. But the ultimate question is, when all of this technology is available, are people really doing anything different? And the answer is, they're doing something that might be more fun, more beautiful, but the world is still turning in the same way. There's not a fundamental difference, such as a disease that's been cured or a population that's nourished that was not before, something of that kind. A digital tidal wave is sweeping across the world.
It will soon have left its debris on every foreign shore. And the technologists may then feel their mission is complete, that information is universal, easy to use, and cheap. They will say we now have access to their new kind of world. But though we may be taking part, they will set the rules. I get as excited as everybody else about the visions of the future that are conjured up, that we'll all be united in this sort of global village, which will all work on behalf of greater good. But I think we can look at the past and see what other technology has done for us. I mean, when video first started, it was going to free us from huge media conglomerations
because we were going to make our own films. It was going to be a two-way process. I don't know if people remember all this, but it was going to revolutionise our lives. and we ended up with Jeremy Beadle, we ended up with a machine that just fits into the domestic setup and doesn't really disrupt very much. So I am a bit sceptical about it because it's a question of who owns it and whether they're going to work on behalf of the public, if you like, or work for themselves. I mean, this idea that we all actually own it is a lovely utopian idea, but we don't. Owning a piece of technology does not buy us control of our lives. Though we are told we all can travel on the information highway, the reality is more pedestrian,
more familiar and cold. Most of us will just receive, we will passively consume, because we do not have the power, the knowledge or the means to move into the fast lane, to join the ones who shape the new. When the riots were on in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I was struck by an image of looters running out of a radio shack with Walkman and boom boxes and whatnot. The radio shack was completely trashed. It was next door to a Macintosh dealership. The windows were unbroken and you could see the power bricks in the windows. And I thought, that's kind of worrying. because people don't know what that product is,
or why they would want one. I think the split between the people who have this information technology and those who don't is very worrying if it falls along the traditional lines of have and have not. You have to have literacy skills, you have to have numeracy skills, you have keyboard skills, you've got to have the financial resources, you've got to be able to make these gizmos work, and there's got to be the infrastructure of course in place, sometimes provided by the private sector, sometimes by the state, to actually be able to do the business. I'm afraid I don't see the information superhighway as being something which is going to reintegrate the world.
On balance, I think it's going to tear it apart. Where technology is at work, where it generates new wealth, it will grow and change and flourish and benefit its owners. But where technology is passive, where it is tuned just to receive, Its presence will be blank. It will not set anyone free. This is the new apartheid. Apartheid not just between white and black, the rich and poor, but between those that seize technology and those that it ignores. Today, in Africa, there are less telephone lines than in the only city of Japan.
In Africa, there are 580 million people. In the city of Tokyo, there is only 23 million people. In Tokyo, there are three times more telephone lines than in all Africa. What we are doing now with the telecommunication and new telephones, We're going to invest more and more in Tokyo, more and more to build up new ways of doing telephone, telecommunication in Tokyo, and we don't invest any single penny in Africa, because in Africa there is no solvable market. People say, there's no money, why should I invest in Africa? Because technology is creating more and more poverty, while creating more goods, more services,
the major consequence will be at the global level, the emergence of a cleavage between the world of the integrated, those regions, countries, social groups, who are integrating them between themselves the more and more, and these armies of excluded people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in Europe, in North America, and including Japan. The story of the 20th century has been one of extraordinary
technological change. What's happening at the moment is you've got the technological change superimposed upon massive deregulation of the labour market, the world of work, and actually the world of finance. And it's those three things interacting. The free market in finance, the free market in work is being superimposed upon technological change in in a way that hasn't happened in the 20th century. And it's that, actually, that confluence, which is so bewildering us and transforming the structures in which we live. The market of money, which means market of capital,
market of money, where people can go and buy and take money, is now instantaneously managed through information communication technology. Today, while we are talking together, there are 1,200 billion dollars which can be moved across the world instantaneously, just in a tenth of a second. This fact gives to the financial people an enormous power, far stronger than the power of the national authorities, of the nation states.
London is making alliances with Hamburg. Lyon is making alliances with Barcelona. Los Angeles is making alliances with Osaka. and they don't pass any longer through the national government. This is the emergence of a new power localized in the cities. The world may soon no longer be a group of nation states, of countries with large and rambling edges. It may instead become a host of information centers, of little city-states that are powerful and determined. These city-states would deal in information,
the one resource that requires no space and generates itself. They would be built for those who find comfort in technology's cold embrace. A small band of modern citizens living at arm's length from the poor. If the future looks like anything, it looks like Singapore. This is the technological city-state, the 21st century fortress town. In an age of nation states, Singapore was at best an oddity which somehow survived despite
the odds against it. But the world is changing in a very profound and very dramatic way. And curiously, it harkens back to, let us say, Europe before the age of nation states, when you had many cities and principalities, all linked to one another by a network. But each retaining its own identity and some control over its immediate circumstances. And the world is becoming like that. Singapore calls itself the intelligent island, more committed to the future than any other
country, less than three million people taking on the world. I think technology has been very much at the heart of Singapore's entire strategy for survival as well as development. And we may not be the most technologically advanced country of having nuclear technology or being able to send the man to the moon and so on, but we emphasize technology because it is virtually the only resource we have. And because Singapore is a city-state, we have an opportunity to make this a microcosm for what other cities in the world could become in the future. There are no homeless, there are no poor, there are no unemployed.
The information highway flows right through and everyone has a role. We envisage that within the next ten years we would have an advanced national information infrastructure which will comprise high-speed wired and wireless communication links that will connect up virtually every home, every office, factories, schools, libraries and people on the move. Your attention please. Passengers are reminded that it's an offence to smoke, eat or drink in MRT stations and trains. The offence carries a maximum fine of $500. Please help us to keep the MRT stations and trains safe, clean and comfortable.
Thank you for your cooperation. This is the city as machine, And everything within it, from the people to the hardware, only has one function. To make the engine purr, to keep it racing forward. It's a hymn to automation, a showground for computers, a model of efficiency, a robot without a soul. Singapore is using technology to organise the way people live
in a modern city-state. One example is the area licensing scheme that we have in Singapore, the fact that people are going to be constrained from entering into congested areas, and it's not to be assumed that motorists have free rights to go wherever they want to, that there will be a social cost to this. We're now experimenting with electronic road pricing, which I think will come about very quickly. So it's not just technology, it's the whole idea that when you live in such close quarters to each other, there's got to be constraints on human behavior, and it's not just a simple issue of individual rights. In the societies of the future, in the cities of the future, I do not think it is possible that you can have absolute freedom.
But I think we have to accept in a city of, say, 20 million people, if you want that city to work as an effective machine, which is really what we're talking about, every machine has to operate with the guidelines or a computer has to have a program. I think we're going to have to accept in the future that people will have to be programmed a bit more if society is to be successful. This is a vision of the future where the human bows to the machine. There is no talk here of computers that can free us. The language is more guttural. It is the sound of global business. This is our most advanced factory to do this operation in terms of infrastructure and
equipment, we have satellite links to Europe. To run such a plant like this, a high technology plant, you don't need thousands of operators, you need qualified engineers. You know, in Singapore there is a shortage of labour, so it's no problem to lay off people or not employ people, you know. Actually the government is happy if you don't need too many people. In a country where there is too much work, there is a need for foreign labour. So every day there's a steady flow, carefully controlled, of migrants brought to do menial tasks and then ungraciously sent home.
Well, the greatest advantage in being a city-state is that we are able to maintain some control over the movement of peoples. If you go to most countries in the third world, cities are ballooning in a very nasty and unpleasant way. The urban drift is unstoppable, which means you cannot solve problems of crime, of drug addiction, traffic jams, prostitution and so on. So, by historical accident, we are a city region with a fence around it. Of course, the gates are open, but we control what goes through the gates.
In Singapore, they have embraced the future, but they are not starry-eyed. They have built themselves a high-tech wall to keep the poor at bay and to keep their wealth inside. In the world of city-states, the dividing lines are clear between who is in and who is out, between the ones who taste the future now and those who have to wait their turn. The movement of peoples will be one of the biggest problems in the next century. It will be one of the big themes in the next phase of human history. This new technology, this globalization we're talking about,
means greater difficulty in controlling infections and contaminations from outside. So increasingly, the defenses have to be within. and defenses in depth, and defenses in the very organs of the city itself. Singapore can offer some insights into how these challenges can be responded to in the next century. Not so much Singapore in itself as a unique case, but Singapore as one of many cities in East Asia, all conducting their own social experiments, if you can put it that way, in how to organise society, in how to optimise their economic advantages in the face of these new technologies.
The way to the future is not the past, and I don't think that existing methods of constructing democracy or socialism will serve us well in the years to come. Singapore struck me as a culture in which, as William Burroughs once said about the United States in the 50s, Everyone has the policeman inside. There isn't a big police presence on the street in Singapore, but the populace behaves itself.
It is a future. It's one of those futures that's sort of fallen to earth a bit sooner than everyone else's. It's like Disneyland with death penalties. And I hope that that isn't the future we're headed toward. I don't think the future is about control from the top. I think what we have to worry about is control from within. New citadels are looming out of the haze that is the future.
They form at the intersections where information meets. The information superhighway is a shortcut past the slums, a speedy route to paradise for those already on the move. Globalization is not everywhere. The globalization is a business today of primarily of cities. Globalization does not take care of Africa. Does not take care of the peasants in Latin America. Does not take care of Uzbeks in Uzbekistan.
Globalization takes care, for instance, of the small minority in Sao Paulo, which is as rich as the small minority of city in London. Then globalization takes care also in Sao Paulo, but not of the rest. The greatest test of any future really worth creating is not whether it can give us a computer in every home, a mobile phone of our very own, or free access to the information age.
It is whether it can, in some small way, lift our oldest burden, the crushing force of poverty, the dead weight of exclusion. Well, we are going to see the emergence at global level of a kind of archipelago. Archipelago is the most powerful cities. And this archipelago of the best developed and rich cities will be surrounded by an ocean of poverty, an ocean of excluded people.
The problem is, is technology going to be used to re-inverse the tendency? Is technology to eliminate, reduce the archipelago and make a kind of community at world level? This is a big question for the future. At this moment, when we are telling ourselves technology can bring us together, it is technology that is driving us more hopelessly apart. The
The The So this is a world made for a very fortunate few. The people who are called these days are symbolic analysts, who can work with numbers and ideas and things, who live in a little, leafy, isolated suburb surrounded by high, spiked gates and guards, who sit there with their little computers and their telephones and deal with ideas and information all over the world.
And they don't venture downtown, and they don't use the public transport, and when they do travel, it's in the front parts of international airplanes. And they'll have a nice life, a busy life, but a rich life. and then there'll be the arrest. The rest who don't have access to this technology, who don't know how to use it, who don't know how to make products out of it, who don't know how to find customers. And they live downtown and they use public transport and they'll have a tough time. And this is the underclass. And unless we can raise them to be symbolic analysts, and that's a tough job, we're going to have a very divided society with the rich feeling very rich but not prepared to pay taxes to help the very poor because they don't meet the very poor. They live in two different worlds.
I think the facilities offered by technology in the future is really going to fragment the cohesiveness of society. People won't have to communicate on a face-to-face. They won't have to shake hands. They won't actually have to work together, travel together, be together. Technology will allow them to conduct their business at arm's length. Technology will also allow them, with physical security, to live in an environment which is uncluttered by the outside world, by violence, by crime, by pollution perhaps. and therefore they can live within a cocoon. This is Kensington Green. I'm the estate manager, and this is a new luxury development in Kensington. The idea of Kensington Green is that security is of the most importance.
All the boundary areas are covered by 24-hour surveillance cameras. Each house on the development is fitted with a burger alarm. These alarms are radio controlled. Situated in the car park are a number of sensors, infrared and microwave, which activate a number of cameras. We've got a video entry system. It works on the same principle when somebody rings the doorbell, they get a picture and also can speak to the visitor. Morning. When a resident arrives outside the apartment blocks, they use a swipe card, and they each have their own four-pinned access code number. When the swipe card is put into the reader, back at the security lodge, information is relayed back to the computer. And that basically tells them who the resident is,
what day it is, what time it is, and indeed what apartment block they're at. Now, that seems to be probably the children playing about in the garage as we get from time to time. Well, security is the number one reason why people have decided to live on this development, and it's extremely important. But what we try and do is not make that an overpowering presence. Basically, at the end of the day, residents should feel this is their home, where they chose to live, but there is a very secure environment.
The people who are actually making things happen will become more and more isolated. I mean, if they start to feel that there are areas where they shouldn't go, where they shouldn't work, through which they should not travel, then again that perception grows that they have to keep themselves within an island, they have to keep themselves within their own group, they have to communicate, play, work within a group that they feel comfortable with and there are other groups, other communities that they actually back off from. I think
that is when we're in a really dangerous situation. We have come to this. Technology designed to set us free, to give a window on the world, has erected bars before that window and closed us in on ourselves. The information revolution promised us greater knowledge, but instead it makes us ignorant, insular and scared. People are wanting to live in communities with people just like them. So they get up in the morning and they feel okay because they see somebody just like them. And it's a tiny bit worrisome. There's very little mixing.
It's people like us that people want to hang out with. And I think that's because the world out there is getting shakier and shakier. And kind of the only place that we can be assured where everything is kind of going to go okay is at home. And that's a very dangerous place for society to be, because it's not observing what's happening in the outside world. It's not giving them a broad view. They just go deeper and deeper into that computer. Someone once said to me, how can you go so deep into the computer when that screen is so narrow? In a crowded and confusing world, In this confusing world, we use machines to give us distance, to build a fence around ourselves.
Sometimes that fence is real, a wall of electronic eyes, and sometimes it is virtual, it goes right inside our minds. But it is all a form of hiding. Computers reach their final goal when they totally disconnect us and remove us from what In about the first decade, the new century, we will have a transition from the information society to the experienced society. It will be about being there. Virtual reality will probably become a key technology and it will happen like this. Instead of buying a television set, a camcorder, a computer and a telephone, you will buy a terminal.
And that terminal will integrate all of those capabilities together. And key to that will be a VR ability. Then you will be able to enter a computer-generated world. we will be able to have new experiences and be places we've never been before. When I think about technology affecting us personally, I think about my friends that sit home and play Nintendo and turn that on and their brains go off. And I think about people that are obsessed with virtual reality and spend all their money going to Action Park to do a flight simulator, Air Force ride or whatever. and that kind of stuff, we don't need that, you know?
We need to read. We need to, like, you know, to develop children's imaginations, you know, from their own head, not from CD-Prom, you know? Not from how good the graphics are, but it's about, you know, your mind. And, like, I think that, you know, it's dangerous. It's a fine line because as much as you can, education can advance, it's like it also makes us very, very programmed, you know? My brother is so warped out. I mean, he sits there and he plays Mortal Kombat all day. I mean, he goes outside and stuff, and when he goes outside, he gets into trouble. But when he comes home, I rarely see him pick up a book. I mean, he used to read, but now he just likes to play, you know, ooh, Star Trek Next Generation, and he just sits there all day. And how can I help him? How can I take him away from this when all he wants to do is just play this stuff, you know? It's like an addiction.
Five, six, seven, eight, nine, and take it away. Reference of brain! So when virtual reality comes, people that don't have great lives may do what we're calling cyber suicide. Cyber suicide is where you go in and you decide not to come back. Because in there is a much nicer place than out here, and out here becomes worse and worse, the more that people aren't involved with real life and cyber life becomes so pleasant. After all, it's man-slash-woman-made, and it can be anything we want it to be. We don't get rejected in cyber world. I wonder what my grandfather, or my father,
is no longer living, would make of the world we live in today. today. I think they might see it as a sort of screaming dystopia, really quite a nightmarish place. And people often say, well, look at television. What will virtual reality do to us? And I say, well, we don't know what television has done to us. It's very difficult to imagine a world without it. Technology has made the world small.
It has brought its darkest corners and laid them out before us. But the light that it offers to fill that dark with hope is just the flickering of a screen of no use beyond itself. I like the way things are now a great deal. It's not perfect, but such an alteration in how we meet other people, how we exchange goods. We could lose some of the positive things about today's society. And so I do worry about, will the system be almost too appealing? Will it erode local communities in a way that we might miss something?
On the other hand, I think you've got to be optimistic that if you believe in human potential, that giving people a tool like this just unleashes capabilities that have never been used before. I'm hopeful. Or I'm stupid. Now, I'm very hopeful about the next 20 years because I think that people, the ultimate hope is in people. And I don't believe that people are going to let the machines overrun them.
I think people instinctively know their futures are a little bit flimsy or shaky and are going to take care of it. I think they're going to take care of it by instilling values into their children, by electing the right people, by rising above their prejudices. I think they'll throw the parts of tech that are bad and invasive and destructive and stupid out and take the parts that are good. I still believe that it's our instinctive desire to save our own race and do the best thing. And I think that we will. Technology does not give us what we know we really need. It does not make us feel more human or give us understanding.
It does not ask us to stop and pause when we see those we know are struggling. In the embers of the century, we are drawn to a glow. We crave the white heat of technology while our hearts are growing cold. I think it could be a disaster scenario as this new technology comes to fruition. with fewer people getting richer and more people getting poorer. And I think it could mean the collapse of societies
and indeed the collapse of the world civilization and a new dark age. And the only thing that I think in the end can save that is that the people who master this technology, the new rich, the new intelligentsia, can actually think beyond themselves. If they can realize that the best form of selfishness is unselfishness. that if they don't actually invest in people other than themselves, beyond themselves, they will destroy themselves. .