Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World And they have an amazing capacity to think they really can change the world.” In that particular sense, perhaps we all should become Americans after all. They have boundless confidence in their ability to solve problems. Now as then, “the vast array of problems to solve and the sheer magnitude of the changes that need to take place are enough to make any global organization give up, any nation back down, any reasonable person curl up in a ball.” We could use a fresh infusion of what Schwartz and Leyden frame as the boom’s key ingredient: American optimism. Yet for all of the 21st-century troubles that few riding the wave of first-dot-com-boom utopianism would have credited, we today run the risk of seeing our world as too dystopian. “A hell of a lot of things could go wrong.” You don’t say. “We’re still on the front edge of the great global boom,” we’re reminded in the piece’s conclusion.
and China a “global climate change that, among other things, disrupts the food supply” a “major rise in crime and terrorism forces the world to pull back in fear” an “uncontrollable plague - a modern-day influenza epidemic or its equivalent”: to one degree or another, every single one of these ten dire developments seems in our time to have come to pass. Schwartz and Leyden do allow for darker possibilities than their things-can-only-get-better rhetoric make it seem. Some of these they enumerate in a sidebar (remember sidebars?) headlined “Ten Scenario Spoilers.” Though not included in the article as archived on Wired‘s web site, it has recently been scanned and posted to social media, with viral results.
But their vision of the 21st century hasn’t proven risible in every aspect: a rising China, hybrid cars, video calls, and online grocery-shopping have become familiar enough hardly to merit comment, as has the internet’s status as “the main medium of the 21st century.” And who among us would describe the cost of university as anything but “absurd”?
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