The future's five enemies (and how to beat them)

NICK DOUGLAS — Wasn't it sci-fi author William Gibson who said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed among pithy sci-fi authors"? The future is indeed inevitable, but before it brings us a 24/7 carnival of worldwide post-scarcity, cyborg bodies, and Starbucks on Mars, it must fight enemies like the following five: Baby Boomers, the movie industry and music industries, cell providers, the government, and Web 2.0.

Baby Boomers
Hey, in their time, the Boomers did plenty to help the future. They were the first generation raised on TV. They started the sexual revolution and used the first cell phones. They saw the first walk on the moon and one of them is Prince, who is actually from the future.

But the Boomers have turned into their parents, and now they're cramping their children's style. And children are our future, so the Boomers are giving the future cramps. They're putting parental locks on the TV, driving big old inefficient cars, and gumming up the computers of Gen X and Gen Y with e-mail forwards.

They've started diverting all the biotech research money into stuff to make old age last longer and feel better. Which, in fact, is how they might become useful again to the future. We can skip the whole civilizational step of helper robots if the Gen Xers use the Boomers. Get these aging folks on enough meds and they'll turn their social mores back on themselves; it's better than the three laws of robotics. No one gets Social Security payments without seven years of manual labor. Bam! Two problems solved! Next enemy!

The movie industry
Now, the enemy isn't movies themselves. Movies have done a lot for the future, like reminding us that technology can be evil, unless it's used to make expensive special effects. The enemy is the industry that's risen around them, the people who never touch a camera but make all the money from movies.

Why are films literally wasting away in vaults instead of being preserved? Why does it still cost royalties to publicly perform "Happy Birthday"? Why, in fact, is nothing published after 1923 in the public domain? Because the movie industry, desperate to keep its rights over the first appearance of characters like Mickey Mouse (made by Disney, which has pulled in billions by exploiting fairy tales from the public domain), has successfully lobbied Congress to extend copyright terms 11 times in the past 40 years.

But that's not all they've done to stop the future from building on the past. The MPAA has also cracked down on copying of movies (even for one's personal use) and bottlenecked movies through a panel of raters. The hegemony keeps moviemakers from bucking the system without getting shut out.

One solution is to sit back and watch box office returns stagnate. This might make studios try even harder to keep control, but a mob of renegades is beating them back by grabbing, copying and spreading movies (often before they make it to DVD). A last solution is to just watch stuff made outside the system like YouTube videos and indie films. (No, it's not all crap; come to think of it, I'd rather watch the worst blond-girl lip-synch than "Kickin' It Old School.")

Much of what goes for the movies goes for music as well, but here the industry is more definitely losing the digital war. Until Apple goaded them, labels refused to release digital music without "digital rights management" that limited, for example, how many computers a user could load a song onto.

The RIAA also just killed internet radio by lobbying to make it damn near impossible to legally play a good stream of music for listeners without going bankrupt. This was all done in the name of protecting works from unauthorized copying. Earth to the RIAA: the protected streaming audio of legit internet radio was already one of the few things keeping some listeners from just downloading the whole album on Bittorrent and Limewire or just grabbing one song at a time from their favorite music blogs. (Pretty much every rock and indie song, for example, makes it onto the Hype Machine.)

As for how the future kills the RIAA: the constant barrage of piracy and industry pressure from digital distributors will force the old models out; cell phone ringtones and commercial licensing (Moby, for example, sold all but one track of his "Play" album before it hit stores) will provide plenty of new ways to make money from music.

Cell providers
Cellular providers make yet another great industry oxymoron. Device makers can't survive in the U.S. without tying themselves to a service provider, but providers want to lock down all the potential features in phones. Thank providers for GPS being so rare on phones; it's an intensive service that most customers may refuse to pay for, so cell companies would rather not implement it. And, of course, there are the two-year contracts that keep people from quickly shifting to the best service.

Even Apple had to pick a provider to ensure that its iPhone actually gets sold. But in doing so, the company helped pry open the business's reluctance to adopt new technologies. For example, a combination of wifi and cellular service in devices like the iPhone (some Windows Mobile devices already have this) will free up communication from slow cell service while shifting some of the bandwidth burden to the thousands of wifi providers scattered across the country.

Of course, for widespread wifi to truly decentralize wireless communication, we'll need to keep the landline phone/cable/internet providers from double-charging users and content/service providers (like Skype) for any significant use of bandwidth.

The government
Despite what the anarchocapitalists of Silicon Valley might believe, you can't really have progress without a government to keep civilization running smoothly. But damn if the government doesn't try to prove those anarchocapitalists wrong by stepping in the way of the future.

Remember all the nasty things the music and movie industries did to freedom of information and innovative digital delivery? They couldn't have done it without the help of the feds. The most heinous attack on innovation is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which made it illegal to get around a copy protection program, to make a tool to do so, or to even attract attention to such a tool. That's why it's theoretically illegal to even link to this number, a key used to decrypt movies on HD-DVD.

Of course, that's just a fraction of the ways the government gets in the way of the future. There's also the reactionary approach to public health: Under the Bush administration, the federal government has blocked aid to countries that fund abortions, teach safe sex behavior other than abstinence, or help sex workers avoid getting and spreading STDs.

The same government is doing its damnedest to prevent us from even having a future, with an aggressive string of policies that could let industry push the world temperature up until sea levels rise and flood our coastal cities.

Wow, we actually get to try solving this one every couple years. Speaking of the next election, I hear Al Gore plans to finally run. His platform: He'll prevent rising sea levels by fighting global warming and by promising never to plunge his ever-expanding body into the ocean.

Web 2.0
Oh, thought this one was a joke, did you? How could the forefront of the tech industry be anti-future? Well when you think about it, what is Web 2.0 really doing for the future? Sure, we got Flickr and whatever, but now we're wallowing in a sea of consumer-generated crap that goes through "indie" and out the other end. The dot-com money's all back in the hands of Google, News Corp, and Yahoo, and the users are working for them for free.

While hype gets wasted on Web 2.0, the real progress is being made in biotech, nanotechnology, and other businesses that require real money. And as putrid as the phrase "Web 3.0" sounds, it could stand for the salvation of the corporatizing Web 2.0. The next edition of the web could reverse all this user generation through decentralized services like OpenID. With everything decentralized, content stays under the power of users and multiple sites, rather than residing on one service like Facebook or YouTube. Of course, before we can make this future, we'll have to figure out how to make boatloads of money from it.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. He's no Bruce Sterling.

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