A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (14 page)

To manage this merchandised time, two industries will dominate (as they already do): insurance and entertainment.

On the one hand (to shield him against risk), the rational response of every player on the market will be (and already is) to insure himself, in other words to protect himself against future uncertainties. Insurance companies (and the risk coverage institutions of the financial markets) will complete social security regimes and will become — if they are not already — the planet’s leading industries, both for their turnover and the profits they reap. For the poorest, microinsurance will be an essential tool in reducing insecurity.

To escape financial insecurity, on the other hand, everyone will want to amuse himself — in other words to protect and to distance himself from the present. Entertainment industries (tourism, movies, television, music, sports, live shows, and shared play space) will become — unless they already are — the planet’s leading industries, judging from the time it takes to consume their products and services. The media will enjoy a greater hold over democracy and over citizen choices.

Both options will also be the pretext for illegal activities: racketeering is the criminal face of insurance; drugs and the sex trade are the criminal versions of entertainment.

Every business and every nation will organize
themselves around these two needs — self-protection and distraction from fear of the world.

Before 2030 everyone but the poorest will everywhere be connected to every high-capacity information grid — both mobile (HSDPA, WiBrow, WiFi, WiMAX) and stationary (optical fiber). Everyone will thus be in a state of nomadic ubiquity. It has already begun: Google recently made available to the citizens of Mountain View (the California city where its headquarters are located) and to those of San Francisco free and universal access to wireless and high-performance Internet. In Korea, whole cities are now equipped with HSDPA mobile phone networks that perform ten times more efficiently than the 3G, as well as access to mobile, high-output Internet (WiBrow). These digital infrastructures will also help communities toward better management of urban security, of chaotic transport, and of disaster prevention.

This network connection of members of the innovative class, dispersed over several sites (and not obliged to meet in the same core), will favor communal long-distance creation of software, services, products, and productions. New languages will make it possible to write programs intelligible to the greater number, and to structure information to give simultaneous access to data and to its meaning.

To make it more convenient to connect with these jointly created nomadic objects (the work of many minds), they will become lighter and simpler: the mobile
phone and the computer will fuse and be reduced to the size of a wristwatch, a ring, a pair of glasses, or a memory card, integrated into clothing better adapted to the demands of movement. A universal nomadic object will function as a phone, calendar, computer, music player, TV, checkbook, identity card, or a keychain. Very low-cost computers, using open technologies (such as Linux), will allow access to these networks at infinitesimal cost. Personalized research engines will evolve more and more alongside cooperative sites, sites offering free exchange of contents, counseling sites, and nomadic radio and television.

Television will become a made-to-measure, differentiated tool. We will watch major networks much more rarely; teenagers already spend three times less than their parents in front of a TV set, and they have already been subscribers to the Internet six times longer. We will watch TV principally on nomadic objects and for live shows. Increasingly specialized, personalized made-to-measure channels will appear.

Content owners (editors, musicians, filmmakers, writers, reporters, actors, data processors, designers, fashion designers) will be unable to maintain the patents on their properties indefinitely, nor will the coded systems aimed at preventing the free circulation of music files and films. Authors will then be remunerated by digital infrastructures, which will receive rental fees and advertising revenue in return.

Before 2030, most paper media, particularly the daily press, will become virtual. They will offer increasingly instantaneous, increasingly cooperative, and increasingly made-to-measure community services,
modeled on America’s MySpace, Korea’s OhMyNews, or France’s Agoravox. Counseled by professional journalists, citizens will bring a new perspective to news and entertainment — more subjective, more passionate, less discreet, often on little-known or neglected themes. Some of these citizen-reporters will acquire a degree of fame. Their incomes will vary according to the popularity of their offerings; some blog creators already earn more than three thousand dollars per month. We shall witness the ultra-personalization of content, depending on the needs and focus of interest of each individual: a blending of texts, audio files, and selected video. Distinctions among press, radio, TV, and “new media” will be less and less relevant. To survive, the media must accept this unavoidable march toward free, participa-tory, and ultrapersonalized media.

Books too will become accessible on low-cost screens as delicate as paper, e-paper, and e-ink — a new nomadic object in the shape of a scroll, at last giving commercial reality to electronic books. They will not replace books but will have other uses, for ephemeral, constantly updated works, and written specially for these new media, such as the Sony Reader and Kindle.

By 2030, new artworks will mingle all media and all means of distribution. It will no longer be possible to distinguish between what is owed to painting, to sculpture, to film, or to literature. Books will tell stories with three-dimensional images. Sculptures will dance with the spectators to new kinds of music. Games will more and more become ways of creating, imagining, informing, teaching, and surveillance, of raising self-esteem and the sense of community awareness. Movies past and
future will be viewable in three dimensions, completed by sensorial simulators and virtual smells. It will also become possible to conduct a long-distance conversation with a three-dimensional interlocutor and to broadcast three-dimensional concerts, plays, sports events, lectures, and classes. Domestic robots (their arrival hailed so long ago) will become universal in daily life. They too will be constantly connected to high-output grids in nomadic ubiquity. They will function as domestic help, as aides for the handicapped or the aged, as workers, and as members of security forces. In particular, they will become “Watchers.” In Korea, for example, the goal is to outfit, sometime between 2015 and 2020, every home with such robots, designed to perform domestic chores.

Again before 2030, nomadic ubiquity will invade all previously industrialized services: packaging of food products, clothing, vehicles, and household goods will also become “communicative.” Sensors will be built into materials, motors, machines, fluids, bridges, buildings, and dams to keep permanent long-distance watch over them. Products, machines, and people will also be equipped with an identity tag on a radio frequency, which will enable businesses to raise the quality of their products and the productivity of their factories and distribution networks. Consumers will know everything about their product’s origins, including its itinerary from raw material to date of sale. They will be informed as soon as a child’s mobile phone goes through the school gate; they will be able to order the gates of a private residence to open from a distance, order household equipment to turn on, or order the purchase of a
product whose lack the shopper’s freezer will already have detected. The most recent vehicles will have builtin error detectors — and will evolve with experience. Everyone will study (from a distance) at some far-off university, or will be the motionless visitor to a museum or a patient in a hospital on another continent.

With each of us connected in space and time, nomadic ubiquity will reverse its course in about 2030 to become, as we shall see, a kind of hypersurveillance. This will turn into a major characteristic of the mercantile order’s next form (see below).

All over the world, commercial growth will favor the prolonging of life. With an intensity that will vary depending on the country, we shall witness (we are already doing so) a lowering of the birth rate and a steady climb in life expectancy, and hence a general aging of the population.

If current trends continue, life expectancy in developed countries should by 2025 — only a generation hence — increase for men by 3.7 years and for women roughly three years, and will then approach the century mark. Furthermore, with the growth of freedom — especially the freedom of women — birth rates will sink to the point where renewal of past generations will no longer be possible in many countries. In Korea, for example, the fertility rate, which was roughly 4.5 percent in the 1950s, dropped to under 1.5 percent in 2000. Birth rates will decline even in the Muslim countries,
where they remain the highest (they still reach the figure of seven children per woman in some regions of the Middle East).

By 2025, more than ten million Americans will be over eighty-five; the number of those over sixty-five will rise from 12 percent today to a staggering 20 percent! That number will reach 25 percent in Japan and 20 percent in China. In France, it now stands at 33 percent, and that nation’s figures for those over eighty-five will have doubled in the next ten years.

In some countries, aging will be so extreme that populations will actually shrink. Compared to 2002, Japan’s population may well have declined by 14 percent by 2050; in Italy, this figure will be roughly 22 percent, and in places such as Bulgaria, Georgia, the Baltic countries, Russia, and the Ukraine, it could be as much as 30 to even 50 percent due to mass emigration and low fertility rates.

With fewer children to care for, women will escape more easily from male domination and discover their place in society. This will help Islam to evolve, just as the other monotheistic religions have evolved — and for the same reasons. Older people will be in the political majority. They will insist on priority for the present, on price stabilization, and on shifting the burden to coming generations. They will consume specific products (cosmetic, dietetic) and user-adapted services (hospitals, medically equipped homes, assistance personnel, retirement homes). All will consume more medication and more hospital care, leading to a massive rise in medical expenses — and therefore in insurance spending — around the world.

For the active population, the burden of financing retirement will be increasingly onerous: in today’s Europe, each working member of the population already foots the bill for a quarter of all retirees. By 2050 he or she will be financing more than half.

To maintain the current ratio of active workers to retirees, we must accept an increase either in taxes, in the birth rate, or in immigration. Countries that refuse to admit foreigners will see a population collapse. Those that accept them will see their population change. In the bosom of the European Union, people coming from Africa and their descendants could represent 20 percent of the population by 2025. By then, 42 percent of Brussels’s population could comprise the descendants of immigrants originally hailing from Islamic lands and Africa.

Such a shift will imply vast population movements, which the United States will doubtless be better prepared than others to face or to accept. Above all, it will imply extraordinary urban growth.

Migrations will be on a vaster scale within countries of the southern hemisphere, from countryside to cities, from rural to urban destitution. No political authority, even in a dictatorship like China’s, will succeed in slowing these movements. Such mutations have a long history: whereas there were eighty-six cities in the world with more than a million inhabitants in 1950, by 2015 there will be 550.

Urban growth will be phenomenal everywhere: in 2008, half of the world’s population lived in cities; twenty-six of which boasted populations of ten million. By 2025, the planet will accommodate thirty cities with more than ten million inhabitants, and four agglomerations with more than twenty million. Tokyo and Bombay will be host to more than
thirty
million. Nine of the world’s twelve most populous cities will be in the southern hemisphere (the only exceptions being Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles). From 2008 to 2025, Chinese cities will have to welcome the equivalent of all Western Europe’s population. By 2035, thirty-six cities (located mainly in the southern hemisphere, they include São Paulo, Mexico City, Bombay, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Calcutta, New Delhi, Seoul, Lagos, and Cairo) will number more than ten million inhabitants, and the urban population in the southern hemisphere will practically have doubled to hit the four billion mark. By 2050, a billion inhabitants will live in fifty Asian cities, each numbering more than twenty million people — and even, in certain cases, more than thirty million.

We will thus need to triple or quadruple urban infrastructures within thirty years — a goal that in most cases will prove practically unattainable. A handful of cities will succeed in becoming livable. New products — cheap cement, for example — and new techniques in construction and the microfinancing of housing will make it possible to transform certain shantytowns into very profitable markets for businesses able to look ahead.

Unless we imagine that such urban transformations are less gigantic than these linear projections indicate,
and unless we hope that we are witnessing a retreat toward middle-rank towns, these great cities will essentially be no more than juxtapositions of flimsy houses without street maintenance, police, or hospitals, surrounding a few wealthy neighborhoods turned into bunkers and guarded by mercenaries. Mafias will control immense zones outside the law (this is already the case) in Rio, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Manila. Formerly rural people, with a few members of the privileged classes, will be the primary organizers of new social and political movements demanding very concrete changes in people’s lives. It is on them, and no longer on the workers, that the great economic, cultural, political, and military upheavals of the future will depend. They will be the engines of history, and in particular of the second and third waves of the future that we shall soon examine.