Technology|Architecture + Design

ISSN: 2475-1448 (Print) 2475-143X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utad20

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12

Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

John J. Parman

To cite this article: John J. Parman (2017) The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological
Forces That Will Shape Our Future, Technology|Architecture + Design, 1:1, 114-115

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2017.1292803

Published online: 01 May 2017.

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 114

seems benign and “frictionless,” but risks— Hierarchy’s Dilemma

as critics of Facebook have noted—spoon- The real-time adventure that is Chinese
feeding each audience a tailored viewpoint. national politics hinges in part on whether
The ubiquity of smart devices, another win the ruling party can maintain command-
for democratization, can be hacked and and-control in the face of a networked pop-
sifted to enable unobtrusive social control. ulace and enterprises that need to range
In my view, technology is inherent- free in order to transform its export-based
ly “political.” I put the word in quotes to economy.
emphasize that it is subject both to the The CCP is not the only large, networked
vagaries of human, often hierarchical organization facing this dilemma. Kelly
manipulation and to formal structures notes that global enterprises in general are
that are politically established and admin- shifting from products to platforms, a shift
istered. Tech in a corporate sense is also that requires them to “act more like govern-
closely tied to global capitalism for funding ments … in keeping opportunities ‘flat’ and
and commercial exploitation. As Giovanni equitable” (153). Even a product-focused
Arrighi noted in 2009, global capitalism enterprise can only function in today’s net-
has historically sought to define and oper- worked world “by keeping its hierarchy from
ate within “non-territorial spaces-of-flows” fully taking over,” he adds (153).
that resist local/national regulation.1 “The proper dosage of hierarchy is just
Kelly’s optimism about tech may relate to barely enough to vitalize a very large col-
its origins in engineering, mathematics, and lective,” Kelly says of this dilemma. “We’ve
the sciences—fields that view the world to learned that while top-down is needed, not
The Inevitable: varying degrees as “problems to be solved” much of it is needed” (152–53). While noting
pragmatically and abstractly. Horst Rittel the limits of tech-aided “democratization”
Understanding the skewered this view in 1969, showing that (or “open source”), which he characterizes
12 Technological
TAD 1 : 1

an entire class of “wicked” problems falls as “the brute dumbness of the hive mind”
Forces That Will outside these fields’ provenance. 2 Nas- (153), Kelly still believes that tech can pull us
sim Nicholas Taleb reinforced this in 2001 collectively into a future that has resolved
Shape Our Future with his distinction between moderate and the dilemma:
extreme risk. He argued against the hubris
Kevin Kelly of “quants”—traders in financial instruments The exhilarating frontier is the myriad
Viking, 2016 who believed they could leverage the tools ways in which we can mix out-of-
336 Pages and methods of “fintech,” financial engineer- controlness with small elements of
$28.00 (paperback) ing, to beat the market. 3 Paul Feyerabend, top-down control. Until this era, tech-
Rittel’s rough contemporary, argued con- nology was primarily all control, all top
Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor vincingly that the scientific method itself is down. Now it can contain both control
of the tech magazine, Wired, summarizes his a fiction and that science is political.4 and messiness. Never before have
thoughts and theses about tech’s future in Together, Arrighi, Rittel, Taleb, and Fey- we been able to make systems with
a new book, The Inevitable: Understanding erabend provide a corrective to tech’s opti- as much messy quasi-control in them.
the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape mistic narrative. Arrighi implies that tech is We are rushing into an expanding
Our Future. As he makes his way through just one more manifestation of global capi- possibility space of decentralization
such topics as hyper-interactivity, the end talism. Rittel and Taleb point to the irratio- and sharing that was never accessible
of privacy, the rise of artificial intelligence nality of our species and the randomness before because it was not technically
and robotics, and the scaling effect of data of events that undermine tech’s attempts possible. (152)
agglomeration, Kelly is always cognizant of to “tame” its problems. And Arrighi, Rittel,
tech’s dystopian potential, yet he remains and Feyerabend reject its claims to float In describing global, networked enterpris-
optimistic. Let’s consider this. above politics, even as its disruptions roil es, Kelly uses the word governments, but he
As the book’s title suggests, Kelly the established order. really means governance. These organiza-
believes that resisting tech is futile. More- Tech optimism, like global business’s ani- tions have to cede most of their decision-
over, civilization will temper any untoward mal spirits, reflects perennial confidence making, order-giving power to “nodes” that
consequences. He posits, for example, that that “there’s a fix.” Kelly’s rehearsal of tech are largely autonomous and self-managing.
the democratization of content creation, in trends mostly sticks to this script. Where Governance makes this sharing of power
tandem with platforms for sharing and even the book becomes interesting is when he possible by providing the guardrails that
funding it, will be rescued by the curating gets to the tension between hierarchies keep things humming with minimal static.
function of humans and/or artificial intel- and networks. Looking beyond traditional enterpris-
ligence-driven algorithms. The goal is for es for a model, Kelly picks Wikipedia. The
content to find its perfect audience, which choice speaks of course to his background

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 BOOKS 115

as the editor of a tech publication, but it

points to what he calls “the new collectives” John J. Parman is a lead editor in
(152) that are consciously nonhierarchical, Gensler’s Integrated Communications
yet maintain just enough hierarchy to uphold Studio and an adviser to the Design
their foundational standards and reasons for Innovation Committee of Gensler’s
being. Board of Directors.  He is an editorial
adviser to Architect’s Newspaper and
The Importance of Governance writes for Arcade. In 1983, he cofounded
To me, the argument for networked col- Design Book Review with Elizabeth
lectivities that use tech-enabled flatness (Laurie) Snowden and Richard Ingersoll.
to reset the balance of power is the most
interesting part of Kelly’s book, but achiev- Notes
ing this is far from inevitable. Tech has long 1. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth
been split between open source and auton- Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
omous teams—the aspects that depend on University Press, 2009), 82.
an absolute minimum of hierarchy—and the Arrighi’s “non-territorial spaces-of-
gods of command and control. This split is flows” points to the cloud and digital
not unique to tech, of course. connectivity.
In the last decade of his life, Horst Rittel 2. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M.
worked on IBIS—issue-based information Webber, “Dilemmas in a General
Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences
systems—an initiative that anticipated the 4 (1973): 155–73.
enormous computational power tech now
possesses. IBIS amounted to a collective 3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by
Randomness (New York: Random
Make It New: The
memory bank that, prompted, would inform
House, 2001). History of Silicon
any current debate with a relevant history
Valley Design

RE VIEWS
of the issues and the decisions taken. Rittel 4. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method
(New York: New Left Books, 1975).
argued that the most interesting problems,
the real challenges humanity faces, are Barry M. Katz
only resolvable temporarily or provision- MIT Press, 2015
ally. Along with Buckminster Fuller, he saw 280 Pages
that tech could make information both uni- $29.95 (hardcover)
versally, “instantly” available and germane
to the issues at hand. Rittel and Fuller both In the past decade, “design thinking” has tak-
saw information as fodder for open-ended, en the world by storm, exhorting individuals,
democratic problem solving, not as grist for companies, and academic institutions to bet-
top-down social control. ter teach, learn, and execute its foundational
A social compact unites and activates a activities of observing and noticing, framing
networked enterprise like Wikipedia. Tech and reframing, imagining and creating, and
facilitates its radical flatness, enabling it to prototyping and experimenting. 1 But, it is
achieve the light touch that Kelly argues is from Barry Katz’s wonderfully crafted his-
needed to support and accelerate a net- tory of design in Silicon Valley that a true
work’s creative or productive potential. But picture of the emergence of what we know
governance is key: Wikipedia has the equiv- today as “design thinking” first appears. He
alent of a Constitution and Bill of Rights. opens that history with Hewlett-Packard
Never have we needed that governance and its initial forays into design in the 1950s,
more than now. Tech on its own won’t pro- giving us an early view as to what resulted
vide it, but it could give us faster, more trans- when industrial designers brought a user-
parent ways to model, test, and strengthen centered perspective to the table: “The
new social compacts that let networked [HP-35] design brief ... was framed not by
communities deal collectively and demo- the technical criteria of allowing the user to
cratically with the “wicked” problems we execute transcendental functions using a
perennially face. “Politics,” being human, is pseudo-multiplication algorithm displayed
irrational, and governance is the best we’ve in Reverse Polish Notation; it was, rather,
managed as a species to compensate. Kudos defined by the physical criteria of building ‘a
to Kelly for pointing to it; I hope his next shirt-pocket-sized scientific calculator with
book forgoes the trends and focuses on it. four-hour operation from rechargeable
batteries at a cost any laboratory and many

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