The Laws of Hype

• Future Hype
• Bob Seidensticker
• Berrett-Koehler (2005)
• Bookstore Finder

A year ago, Wired "senior maverick" Kevin Kelly wrote a piece poking fun at how misguided his magazine's predictions about the Internet were in the early 1990s. The supposed leading experts on technology at the time foresaw a future World Wide Web that was basically just a 5,000-channel television with e-mail. Wired's writers fretted that only large corporations with huge pockets would be able to afford to fill the Internet with content. They never predicted eBay, Kelly admitted. They were as surprised as anyone by Wikipedia. And they certainly never expected anything like the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon.

So, the one magazine we're all supposed to turn to for advice on the future -- our own monthly cyber-Nostradamus -- totally dropped the ball. But here's the kicker. In the same article explaining how wrong his staff's predictions were 10 years ago -- including his own -- Kelly has the nerve to make more predictions for the next 10 years, declaring the Internet to be a kind of technological messiah. He never says why we should believe him this time.

I remember reading this issue of Wired and making my own prediction after finishing Kelly's article: that I will never buy another issue of the magazine.

The lingering foul aftertaste of Kelly's story drew me to Bob Seidensticker's book Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. Seidensticker dissects the hyperbolic predictions, inflated claims and outright techno-worship that pervade magazines like Wired and that have infected the rest of North America's media and culture.

As a 25-year-veteran of the technology industry who's worked for IBM and Microsoft, Seidensticker's insider knowledge gives him a lot of credibility. The following tips from his book are worth remembering whenever you're reading about the next amazing technological breakthrough that's going to eradicate all of the problems that have plagued the human race since time began.

Remember, what goes up must come down

Too many technology articles read like an outline for The Jetsons, foretelling a time when new inventions cater to our every need. In his Wired piece Kelly describes the Internet like it's some kind of Swiss Army knife for the world's problems. ("Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real.") Confronted with any situation, the Internet will provide the solution.

This cartoonish utopia needs a little Blade Runner thrown in. Nowhere does Kelly admit that his wonderful network may also -- gasp -- cause problems. Sure, we get blogging, online auctions and do-it-yourself travel planning, but we also get globally disseminated child pornography, rampant identity theft, and spam. The Internet has not simply transformed the world into a better place. It's just as easy to buy a "Save the Whites" T-shirt from a Ku Klux Klan website as it is a "Save the Whales" one from Greenpeace.org.

In Future Hype, Seidensticker reminds us that technology always carries costs as well as benefits. The Industrial Revolution increased productivity but made working conditions awful. DDT has saved millions of lives but destroys the environment. Digital storage media allow information to travel faster and further but have a short shelf life -- a problem people writing on stone tablets never had.

If you see the phrase "Moore's Law," run for it

Moore's Law is named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore and refers to his prediction that computer processor speed will double every two years. Moore's Law has been accurate for nearly three decades and many technophiles now believe it applies to the rate of modern technological change in general.

Seidensticker takes on Moore's Law from two directions. First, he debunks the idea that such exponential growth will continue without end. People in the early 20th century believed skyscraper heights would continue to grow exponentially after doubling every few years. Guess what? They didn't. At a certain point, progress came to a near halt. The same scenario occurred for bridge lengths, dam sizes, ship capacities and airspeeds in the 20th century. A flurry of record growth was followed by an abrupt levelling off. Technological development only looks exponential in its early stages, Seidensticker argues, because that's when most of the innovation and investment takes place.

In addition, Seidensticker questions whether Moore's Law even matters. On a daily basis, do we really benefit from the computer processor's exponential growth in speed? We don't need a state-of-the-art PC for word processing and e-mail. If anything, we're usually given far more technology than we actually need. Technological advances become marketing gimmicks rather than indispensable functions, urging us to upgrade before we need to. So, even if Moore's Law applies to the way technologies grow, the question is: do we care?

Look back for perspective

Seidensticker quotes economist Kenneth Boulding, who said in 1970: "The world of today...is as different from the world in which I was born as that world was from Julius Caesar's." A 1998 Forbes article states, "new inventions now arrive at a bewildering rate -- as many in a year as once appeared in a millennium." We love to believe that technology is progressing faster in our time than in any other. But, Seidensticker says, we only have to look to the past to see that our period of technological progress may not actually be that impressive.

The past, Seidensticker argues, has a far greater catalogue of innovations than we usually give it credit for. For example, the period between 1810 and 1860 alone gave us a worldwide telegraph network, steamships, reapers that replaced manual agriculture, sewing machines, steam-driven printing presses that replaced manual ones, photography, rifles, revolvers, postage stamps, pasteurization, canning and anesthesia. And the foundations were laid in this period for future technology including early versions of fuel cells, fax machines, typewriters, light bulbs, refrigerators, elevators, microphones and bicycles.

That's still an incomplete list, but you see the point. Writers are being disingenuous or naïve by pretending we've invented everything that's important during our lifetimes. One trick they use, Seidensticker warns, is to overwhelm us with the quantity of recent inventions without taking their quality into account. Sure, the past gave us the wheel and the printing press, they'll say, but the modern age has given us Slurpees, spandex, DVDs, mechanical pencils, iPods, videogames, Segways and electric coasters that keep your coffee hot.

You can decide which list looks more impressive.

Ask if we're inventing or just improving

Finally, Seidensticker says we need to separate the genuine innovations from those that are just improvements to previously invented technologies. The techno-hypers have a tendency to forget about all the steps it took to arrive at the newest bit of gadgetry they're salivating over at the moment. HDTV is a good example. It's really just an upgrade to regular television, which was an example of a genuine innovation when it was introduced. The question we should ask of every new technology is whether it's different in kind from anything before or just different in degree. The last 50 years, Seidensticker says, have seen less genuinely new inventions than upgrades to previous ones.

We're used to reading how the Internet has changed everything, for example, when really it has mostly been a place where people just convert old ideas into a new medium. In order to truly appreciate its importance, we need to isolate the things the Internet allows us to do differently, rather than just the things we can do faster or more efficiently.

Many technology writers also demonstrate selective memory when it comes to innovations like HDTV. They say it's new when it's actually been around since the early 1980s. The press often confuses the time of a technology's popularity as being the time of its invention, making it seem like new inventions are popping up all the time rather than slowly gestating from prototype to mainstream acceptance. As a result, Seidensticker warns, we now have an exaggerated sense of how fast new technology will appear to solve our problems. Don't worry about gas prices, we're told, someone will invent a more efficient fuel source in no time.

It's exactly this kind of overconfidence that Seidensticker deflates with Future Hype. His rational myth-busting may not be as exciting as Wired's visions of a technology-induced utopia, but you can bet it's closer to reality. Too often technology writers give us the good news instead of the whole story. Seidensticker's skepticism is a welcome change.

Chris LaVigne last piece for Tyee Books explored What Activists Must Learn.

Related links and Tyee stories: For an excerpt from Future Hype, click here. For a Tyee story on the effect of technology on privacy, click here. For a look at technology's legacy of waste, click here. For an examination of the Internet's effect on B.C. aboriginal communities, click here.