The New Digital Age

Introduction

The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they don’t truly understand. What began as a means of electronic information transmission—room-sized computer to room-sized computer—has transformed into an omnipresent and endlessly multifaceted outlet for human energy and expression. It is at once intangible and in a constant state of mutation, growing larger and more complex with each passing second. It is a source for tremendous good and potentially dreadful evil, and we’re only just beginning to witness its impact on the world stage.

The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws. This new capacity for free expression and free movement of information has generated the rich virtual landscape we know today. Think of all the websites you’ve ever visited, all the e-mails you’ve sent and stories you’ve read online, all the facts you’ve learned and fictions you’ve encountered and debunked. Think of every relationship forged, every journey planned, every job found and every dream born, nurtured and implemented through this platform. Consider too what the lack of top-down control allows: the online scams, the bullying campaigns, the hate-group websites and the terrorist chat rooms. This is the Internet, the world’s largest ungoverned space.

As this space grows larger, our understanding of nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutiae of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our own security. Through the power of technology, age-old obstacles to human interaction, like geography, language and limited information, are falling and a new wave of human creativity and potential is rising. Mass adoption of the Internet is driving one of the most exciting social, cultural and political transformations in history, and unlike earlier periods of change, this time the effects are fully global. Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips. And while this is hardly the first technology revolution in our history, it is the first that will make it possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content without having to rely on intermediaries.

And we’ve barely left the starting blocks.

The proliferation of communication technologies has advanced at an unprecedented speed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of people connected to the Internet worldwide increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. In the same period, the number of mobile-phone subscribers rose from 750 million to well over 5 billion (it is now over 6 billion). Adoption of these technologies is spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet, and, in some parts of the world, at an accelerating rate.

By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand. If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online.

At every level of society, connectivity will continue to become more affordable and practical in substantial ways. People will have access to ubiquitous wireless Internet networks that are many times cheaper than they are now. We’ll be more efficient, more productive and more creative. In the developing world, public wireless hot spots and high-speed home networks will reinforce each other, extending the online experience to places where people today don’t even have landline phones. Societies will leapfrog an entire generation of technology. Eventually, the accoutrements of technologies we marvel at today will be sold in flea markets as antiques, like rotary phones before them.

And as adoption of these tools increases, so too will their speed and computing power. Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world.

This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

Communication technologies represent opportunities for cultural breakthroughs as well as technical ones. How we interact with others and how we view ourselves will continue to be influenced and driven by the online world around us. Our propensity for selective memory allows us to adopt new habits quickly and forget the ways we did things before. These days, it’s hard to imagine a life without mobile devices. In a time of ubiquitous smart phones, you have insurance against forgetfulness, you have access to an entire world of ideas (even though some governments make it difficult), and you always have something to occupy your attention, although finding a way to do so usefully may still prove difficult and in some cases harder. The smart phone is aptly named.

As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society. The struggles we see today in many businesses, large and small, are examples of the dramatic shift for society that lies ahead. Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without. We will increasingly reach, and relate to, people far beyond our own borders and language groups, sharing ideas, doing business and building genuine relationships.

The vast majority of us will increasingly find ourselves living, working and being governed in two worlds at once. In the virtual world we will all experience some kind of connectivity, quickly and through a variety of means and devices. In the physical world we will still have to contend with geography, randomness of birth (some born as rich people in rich countries, the majority as poor people in poor countries), bad luck and the good and bad sides of human nature. In this book we aim to demonstrate ways in which the virtual world can make the physical world better, worse or just different. Sometimes these worlds will constrain each other; sometimes they will clash; sometimes they will intensify, accelerate and exacerbate phenomena in the other world so that a difference in degree will become a difference in kind.

On the world stage, the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals. Throughout history, the advent of new information technologies has often empowered successive waves of people at the expense of traditional power brokers, whether that meant the king, the church or the elites. Then as now, access to information and to new communication channels meant new opportunities to participate, to hold power to account and to direct the course of one’s life with greater agency.

The spread of connectivity, particularly through Internet-enabled mobile phones, is certainly the most common and perhaps the most profound example of this shift in power, if only because of the scale. Digital empowerment will be, for some, the first experience of empowerment in their lives, enabling them to be heard, counted and taken seriously—all because of an inexpensive device they can carry in their pocket. As a result, authoritarian governments will find their newly connected populations more difficult to control, repress and influence, while democratic states will be forced to include many more voices (individuals, organizations and companies) in their affairs. To be sure, governments will always find ways to use new levels of connectivity to their advantage, but because of the way current network technology is structured, it truly favors the citizens, in ways we will explore later.

So, will this transfer of power to individuals ultimately result in a safer world, or a more dangerous one? We can only wait and see. We have only begun to encounter the realities of a connected world: the good, the bad and the worrisome. The two of us have explored this question from different vantage points—one as a computer scientist and business executive and the other as a foreign-policy and national security expert—and we both know that the answer is not predetermined. The future will be shaped by how states, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities.

In the past, international-relations theorists have debated the ambitions of states—some arguing that states maintain domestic and foreign policies that aim to maximize their power and security, while others suggest that additional factors, such as trade and information exchange, also affect state behavior. States’ ambitions won’t change, but their notions of how to achieve them will. They will have to practice two versions of their domestic and foreign policies—one for the physical, “real” world, and one for the virtual world that exists online. These policies may appear contradictory at times—governments might crack down in one realm while allowing certain behavior in another; they may go to war in cyberspace but maintain the peace in the physical world—but for states, they will represent attempts to deal with the new threats and challenges to their authority that connectivity enables.

For citizens, coming online means coming into possession of multiple identities in the physical and virtual worlds. In many ways, their virtual identities will come to supersede all others, as the trails they leave remain engraved online in perpetuity. And because what we post, e-mail, text and share online shapes the virtual identities of others, new forms of collective responsibility will have to come into effect.

For organizations and companies, opportunities and challenges will come hand in hand with global connectivity. A new level of accountability, driven by the people, will force these actors to rethink their existing operations and adapt their plans for the future, changing how they do things as well as how they present their activities to the public. They’ll also find new competitors, as widespread technological inclusion levels the playing field for information, and therefore opportunity.

In the future, no person, from the most powerful to the weakest, will be insulated from what in many cases will be historic changes.

We two first met in the fall of 2009, under circumstances that made it easy to form a bond quickly. We were in Baghdad, engaging with Iraqis around the critical question of how technology can be used to help rebuild a society. As we moved around the city meeting with government ministers, military leaders, diplomats and Iraqi entrepreneurs, we encountered a nation whose prospects for recovery and future success appeared to hang by a thread. Eric’s visit marked the first trip to Iraq by the CEO of a Fortune 500 technology company, so there were lots of questions about why Google was there. At the time, even we weren’t entirely sure what Google might encounter or accomplish.

The answer became clear instantly. Everywhere we looked, we saw mobile devices. That surprised us. At the time, Iraq had been a war zone for more than six years, following the fall of Saddam Hussein, who, in his totalitarian paranoia, had banned the use of mobile phones. The war had decimated Iraq’s physical infrastructure, and most people had unreliable access to food, water and electricity. Even basic commodities were prohibitively expensive. In some places, garbage hadn’t been collected in years. And, critically, the security of the population was never guaranteed, either for high-level officials or for everyday shopkeepers. Mobile phones seemed like the last item that would appear on the country’s dauntingly long to-do list. Yet as we came to learn, despite all of the pressing problems in their lives, Iraqis prioritized technology.

Not only did the Iraqis possess and value technology, they also saw its huge potential to improve their lives and the fate of their embattled country. The engineers and entrepreneurs we met expressed great frustration over their inability to help themselves. They already knew what they needed—reliable electricity, enough bandwidth for a fast connection, accessible digital tools and enough access to start-up capital to get their ideas off the ground.

It was Eric’s first trip to a war zone, and Jared’s umpteenth, yet we both came away with a sense that something profound was shifting in the world. If even war-weary Iraqis not only saw the possibilities of technology but knew what they wanted to do with it, how many other millions of people were out there with the drive and basic knowledge but not the access? For Jared, the trip confirmed to him that governments were dangerously behind the curve when it came to anticipating changes (fearful of them, too), and that they did not see the possibilities these new tools presented for tackling what challenges lay ahead. And Eric confirmed his feeling that the technology industry had many more problems to solve, and customers to serve, than anyone realized.

In the months following our trip, it became clear to us that there is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world’s toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge. Yet the potential for collaboration between the tech industry, the public sector and civil society is enormous. As we thought about the spread of connectivity around the world, we found ourselves captivated by the questions generated by this divide: Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or harder to carry out? What is the relationship between privacy and security, and how much will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age? How will war, diplomacy and revolution change when everyone is connected, and how can we tip the balance in a beneficial way? When broken societies are rebuilt, what will they be able to do with technology?

We collaborated first as writers of a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about lessons learned in Iraq, and thereafter as friends. We share a worldview about the potential of technology platforms, and their inherent power, and this informs all of the work we do, both within Google and outside it. We believe that modern technology platforms, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, are even more powerful than most people realize, and our future world will be profoundly altered by their adoption and successfulness in societies everywhere. These platforms constitute a true paradigm shift, akin to the invention of television, and what gives them their power is their ability to grow—specifically, the speed at which they scale. Almost nothing short of a biological virus can spread as quickly, efficiently or aggressively as these technology platforms, and this makes the people who build, control and use them powerful too. Never before have so many people been connected through an instantly responsive network; the possibilities for collective action through communal online platforms (as consumers, creators, contributors, activists and in every other way) are truly game-changing. The scale effects that we’re familiar with today, from a viral music video to an international e-commerce platform, merely hint at what is to come.

Because of digital platform-driven scale effects, things will happen much more quickly in the new digital age, with implications for every part of society, including politics, economics, the media, business and social norms. This acceleration to scale, when paired with the interconnectedness that Internet technology fosters, will usher in a new era of globalization—globalization of products and ideas. As members of the technology sector, it’s our duty to fully and honestly explore the impact our industry’s work has and will have on people’s lives and on society, because, increasingly, governments will have to make rules synergistically with individuals and companies who are moving at an accelerated pace and pushing the boundaries sometimes faster than laws can keep up with. The digital platforms, networks and products they launch now have an outsized effect, on an international scale. So in order to understand the future of politics, business, diplomacy and other important sectors, one must understand how technology is driving major changes in those areas.

By coincidence, just as we began to share ideas about the future, a string of highly visible world events occurred that exemplified the very concepts and problems we were debating. The Chinese government launched sophisticated cyber attacks on Google and dozens of other American companies; WikiLeaks burst onto the scene, making hundreds of thousands of classified digital records universally accessible; major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan devastated cities but generated innovative tech-driven responses; and the revolutions of the Arab Spring shook the world with their speed, strength and contagious mobilization effects. Each turbulent development introduced new angles and possibilities about the future for us to consider.

We spent a great deal of time debating the meaning and consequences of events like these, predicting trends and theorizing possible tech-oriented solutions. This book is the product of those conversations.

In the forthcoming pages, we explore the future as we envision it, full of complex global issues involving citizenship, statecraft, privacy and war, among other issues, with both the challenges and the solutions driven by the rise of global connectivity. Where possible, we describe what can be done to help channel the influx of new technological tools in ways that inform, improve and enrich our world. Technology-driven change is inevitable, but at every stage, we can exert a measure of control over how it plays out. Some of the predictions you’ll read in these pages will be things you’ve long suspected but couldn’t admit—such as the logical conclusions of commercial drone warfare—while others will be wholly new. We hope that our predictions and recommendations will engage you and get you thinking.

This is not a book about gadgets, smart-phone apps or artificial intelligence, though each of these subjects will be discussed. This is a book about technology, but even more, it’s a book about humans, and how humans interact with, implement, adapt to and exploit technologies in their environment, now and in the future, throughout the world. Most of all, this is a book about the importance of a guiding human hand in the new digital age. For all the possibilities that communication technologies represent, their use for good or ill depends solely on people. Forget all the talk about machines taking over. What happens in the future is up to us.