Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Future

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

Your host has a chance encounter with the supposed inspiration for a cult TV show that predicted the future of tech and media. Plus the end of Moore’s law?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Future. The dystopian British television show Black Mirror has brought writer and comedian Charlie Brooker international fame. But Black Mirror is not his first sally into techno-futurism. In 2005, Brooker wrote and produced a six-episode TV series with Chris Morris called Nathan Barley. Oh, fuck sticks. It's fun. Keep it livid.

Keep it dense, yeah? On the surface, Nathan Barley is a show about tech bros, social media, and online hucksters. But it was made before all that stuff even existed. Trashbag.co. My website. But it was made before all that stuff even existed. Remember, back in 2005, there was no Twitter. There wasn't even a YouTube. That's why I like to say that Nathan Barley was really a show about the future. The main character of the show, Nathan Barley, is a content creator. He rides around on a tricycle with a Bluetooth device in each ear,

and he's always brandishing this ridiculous thing that we now call a smartphone. But all he really wants is for you to check out his website. Nathan Barley, aka his trash bag. Trash bag. Dot cock. It's an online urban culture dispatch. What have you got at the facility's house? I'm a self-facilitating media node.

In that scene, our self-facilitating media node is trying to pick up Claire Ashcroft, sister of Dan Ashcroft, the other main character in the show. Dan is a journalist who can't stand the Nathan Barleys of the world. He calls them idiots. And the TV series opens with a reading from Dan's cover story for Sugar Rape magazine. The Rise of the Idiots by Dan Ashcroft. Once the idiots were just the fools gawking in through the windows. Now they've entered the building.

You can hear them everywhere. They use the word cool. It is their favourite word. The idiot doesn't think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish, and rubbish isn't cool. Stuff and shit is cool. Oh, Ashcroft. Ashcroft. The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves,

oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bombed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He's an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity.

Hail the rise of the idiots. Jan Ashcroft! Rise of the Idiots. Awesome fucking opinions, dude. Yeah, well plastic. Yeah. Players, keep it foolish. When I first saw Nathan Barley back in 2006,

this character, Dan Ashcroft, really spoke to me. For like Dan, I felt that I too could see the future, our idiotic future. In 2006, I could see the seeds of the coming infopocalypse. I could see that oversharing was on a collision course with mass surveillance. And I could see how everything was going to get monetized and weaponized. So it was extremely sobering to witness what happens to Dan over the course of this series. You see, Dan is unable to beat Nathan. In fact, the series ends with Dan Ashcroft in a hospital bed and Nathan Barley with his own TV show.

But the most chilling moment in the series, at least for me, is when Dan Ashcroft is forced to wear a preacher man costume and support Nathan on stage and when he rains down insults on the crowd, they just scream and cheer him on. You just, you retards! There's something wrong! Shut up! Now, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this scene and what it means. Over the years, Dan Ashcroft has made it very difficult for me to do stories about technology or internet culture. Every time I try to say something about Facebook or Uber or other online platforms,

I just feel ridiculous and futile. So imagine how mind-blowing it was when I meet this guy, Danny O'Brien, who tells me that he was the model for Charlie Brooker's Dan Ashcroft. So if I can remember rightly, and there was a lot of drinking involved, we were both at kind of a futurist conference.

It was like the future of news. It was another future of news conference. Right. So we were both there as sort of, you know, future seeing pundits. I remember you walked into a session that I was in and you're like, oh, I like to make zines. And I was like, oh, I want to meet this guy. We don't have to talk about the internet. Right, right, right.

And we were both sort of like blundering around on the outsides of it. And then we went to this bar that had been taken over by the bar staff. I don't know whether you remember this, but like the proprietor had gone home and like his bar staff had like brought in their friends to run the bar, one of whom had a monkey.

And we didn't believe them. But then they showed us photos of the monkey. Wearing her underpants. Yeah, I don't recall that. Anyway, we somehow, because I think I was British, you got on to talking about Nathan Barley and Chris Morris and a bunch of, you know, really great sort of, but not well-known comedians and satirists. And I said, oh, actually, I'm kind of tangentially linked to them because the zine, the email zine that I did in the late 90s was where Nathan Barley came from.

No, no, no. You said my website, Need to Know, hosted the original Nathan Barley character, and when it was made into a TV show, you realize that Charlie Brooker stole your identity and based Dan Ashcroft on you. That is not what I said. And that may have been the drink smoking. So I think the way that this played out was that I got caught in a lie.

This is Danny O'Brien. Today, he's the international director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, where he's been living ever since he fled London in the late 90s. The real context of this was, yes, I was around at that time and I was doing this kind of thing. I wrote a thing called Need to Know, which was an email newsletter. And it was supposed to be this sort of scathing indictment in some ways of carpetbaggers. You were writing The Rise of the Idiots.

The Idiots, right? The idiots that were taking over the tech and the web world. I kicked around writing zines and writing articles in magazines. And then I went to the US because I became very disillusioned about those things. And then five years later, Nathan Barley got made into this TV series. And when I started watching it, of course, this disillusioned journalist in the middle of it that made it unbearable because I felt I was Dan Ashcroft, right? That being trapped in that horrible milieu in the late 90s with Charlie Brooker,

I must have been one of those people he watched being a depressive journalist, writing angrily about this whole thing and then being ritually humiliated. And you looked at me and went, wait, you are Dan Ashcroft, aren't you? So if it's okay, I have a couple of things I want to ask you. You know, what's so interesting to me about Nathan Barley is that it was made before Twitter, before YouTube, and in many ways predicts how the whole thing, how social media will play out.

But what I want to know is why Dan, who can see all this, is like just so powerless to do anything about it. ended up being so sort of superior and smug was that there was a period from about 1999 to 2005, 2006, where we had like this easy prediction to make, right? Like we could sit there going, you know, computers are going to get twice as fast in the next 18 months and it would just keep happening, right? It would like clockwork and no one else would know that. And then you go, oh, you know, the number of people on the internet will double every 18 months and that completely happened. And so you were just able to predict stuff. The nice thing is that, you know,

we all got 10 years of going, oh my God, I'm so smart. I was talking about Nathan Barley and how horrible he was in 1999. That was brilliant of me. And then you go 15 years later and you're going, well, it was super clever of me to recognize that there was this horrible person, but I didn't do anything to stop him. And now he runs everything. I think this gets at why this show is so disorienting for me, because as a show that could see the future,

the problem isn't just the idiots. It's more that Dan is unable to get anyone to take seriously the idea that these are exactly the idiots who should not be empowered and entrusted with our future. And, you know, at the at a metal level, the show as a piece of satirical art also seems to fall on deaf ears. I mean, today, sure, it gets some credit for being so spot on about social media and stuff. But I mean, let's face face it it gets more credit for having like two scenes with benedict cumberbatch in it well so of course the the the bit the bit that's sort of interesting is when you're using satire as a predictive weapon right there's one thing to satire people

who are in power right now and there's quite another to satirize people who you see as being the future. Because you're always, you know, if you're right, you're always going to describe them perfectly in a way that will seem shockingly appropriate, right? Like the reason why people in the 80s and 90s like targeted donald trump was because he was this sort of self-parodying embodiment of power and a particular kind of power well if that power doesn't go away the world's just going to become more more trump like um and that's that was the weird thing that was playing out with Nathan Barley is that had, you had like these two roles, right? You had like the horrible, the horrible trust fund person who can wield power because he, he's a self-actualizing media node, right? He has like an editing suite and he has a bunch of laptops and he can give you all of these things. And then you have the media that can't help but

write about Nathan who's, and that's Dan Ashcroft, right? He can't look away. He has to write about how idiotic these people are. But the problem is, is that the only weapon that Dan Ashcroft has is some sort of sense of moral superiority over these people. And the people themselves love it because he's promoting them. He's promoting it for them, right? He's actually creating the environment for them to grow. Yeah, perhaps the real problem is just that I've got this deluded belief that satire has power. The famous saying – just give me a moment to actually think who said this.

I'm going to Google it. Okay, I've got it. So, um, whenever you're talking about sort of the horror or the seeing your satire come true, right? Um, I mean, the best quote about this is Peter Cook, who always said like, yeah, you know, the peak of satire was the Berlin cabarets. And they, you know, they did so muchire was the Berlin cabarets. And they, you know,

they did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler, didn't they? And it's totally true. And you sort of have to sit there going, did the people who were in those Berlin cabarets ever, ever sit there going, God, like maybe we shouldn't have just been making these songs and funny skits about it. Maybe we should have actually done something a bit more concrete to protect people or warn people right did we did we by satirizing this did we by constantly poking fun at it actually kind of weaken people's response to it or just make people miss out on it i mean i'm not saying that like nathanley is Hitler, but there's, it is the Dan Ashcroft problem, right? It is that Dan is sitting there and he knows what this is like. And every time he tries to write about how bad it is, it just makes the whole thing bigger and more powerful. so danny o'brien i know that you escaped uh london before you ended up on stage wearing a preacher man costume but how did things turn out for you you being the real dan ashcroft just to be clear

benjamin i'm not dan ashcroft but here's the the true bit about me um that that that is sort of such a dashcraft thing to happen but i think probably defines my experience much more so around about that period of time i i gave a talk um about productivity um and i'm a hugely unproductive person but i gave this talk on productivity and I was like, okay, come on, catchy name, exciting nature of this. And so I titled it Life Hacks. And that was in that period, right?

And like, so there was this predictive moment where as soon as I wrote that and spoke that, I went, oh God, this is going to be really big. And I have, this is probably my chance, right? This is my chance to be part of this big thing that I see coming. I could be the life hack guru and, and it played out, right? Like the, like, like hacker came out and there were all of these things. And I went, wow, I've predicted, I've done that thing. I'm being, I can predict the future.

This is like a huge thing. I can't, I can't do it, Benjamin. I can't actually sign off on being the life hacking coach for the world. Being able to predict the future doesn't necessarily give you the power to change it. And your power fades as the future becomes more real. Wait, so you didn't go for the life hacking gig and then you lost your power to see the future? I don't know about you, but I can no longer really see the future.

I don't have that skill anymore. And, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. And like this is true of a lot of of Internet punditry. Right. Is we've transitioned from this thing where we could see the future. And so we would talk about, wow, what's it going to be like in the future? It'd be really exciting to looking back on 15 years of our mistakes. I think that part of the reason why we don't pay attention to the exciting future is because all of the kind of goalposts, all of the goals that we had,

and we thought would fix things like being able to everybody having internet access or internet access being really pervasive, everybody having a conversation online, computers being so cheap and easy that you could throw them in your pocket, that kind of stuff. Well, that all happened, right? That all played out, and, you know, it wasn't all jetpacks. You know, you can't get past the goals that you set yourself all that time ago, right? You had these dreams and aspirations, and then you got them. The dreams came true, and it didn't really play out as the utopia that you imagined. I'm glad the real Dan Ashcroft didn't end up plying his eyes out

or trying to take his own life like the one from Nathan Barley did. And after talking with Danny O'Brien, I think I've come to some peace with the satirist's inability to get his or her vision of the future across. But that thing he said about losing his power to see the future, he's not the first person to say this to me.

It's been happening a lot over the last few months. And since most of these folks were born around the same time, it's tempting just to attribute it to the obvious, age. But Danny got me thinking, what if it's something else, also sort of obvious? What if it's more that we're just losing our faith in the future? Because we've actually come to the end of Moore's Law. When people talk about Moore's Law, they're really just talking about

the improvement in technology. The idea that if they break their smartphone, they can go out and get a new one that's better than the one they had. So that's usually what people think of when they think of Moore's Law. When electrical engineers and device engineers, the people who actually make chips, talk about Moore's Law, they're talking about something a little more specific, which is the idea that transistors get smaller and that chips get more dense every couple of years or so.

That's science journalist Rachel Cortland. She recently spearheaded a whole slew of articles to commemorate 50 years of Moore's Law for IEEE's journal Spectrum. It was in 1965 when Gordon Moore posited that the number of components that could fit on a chip would double. Well, in 1965, he said this would happen annually. And then around 1975, he revised himself to say every couple of years. And that is exactly what happened and kept on happening for half a century. And while Rachel laughed out loud at a joke I recently read, that the number of people predicting the end of Moore's law also doubles every couple of years, she told me that if we are going to stick to the scientific specifics of Moore's law, then yeah, the end is nigh.

There have definitely been what seem to be Moore's law ending kinds of struggles before, technological hurdles that people were not sure that they could get around. But I think at the end of the day, people can see that there is an end of the road for this. I mean, you can't get smaller than an atom. Now, as Rachel Cortland just said, Moore's Law is specifically about electronic components on chips. But the end of Moore's Law will totally change our relationship with the future. Moore's Law is and has been for a long time synonymous with progress. All of us in our lives have experienced the benefit of Moore's Law in pretty much everything.

So the idea of it coming to an end is, I mean, that is an alarming idea. I mean, the stakes are high. No one wants to see progress end. For her report on Moore's Law, Rachel Cortland went to Hawaii and interviewed Gordon Moore himself. Gordon Moore is very modest. So he basically didn't go much further than to just say he never expected it to last this long. She also interviewed Carver Mead. He was a colleague of Moore's and the man who gave us the term Moore's Law. According to Mead, this Moore's Law thing has always been much bigger than tiny chips. When I asked Carver Mead about Moore's Law and what it means, he basically said that the Moore's Law thing is really about people's belief in the

future and their willingness to put energy into causing that thing to come about. It's a marvelous statement about humanity. I think that's perfectly valid. I wouldn't necessarily call that the definition of Moore's Law, but it is certainly an enabling thing. Perhaps all these satirist pundits and critics and podcasters i know haven't lost their ability to see the future but rather their faith in it and perhaps this is due to the end of moore's law but well let's not forget it is the scientists and the engineers who are the ones actually making the future. And for now, they still believe.

It's not like people are looking at the end of the road and they're just thinking they're going to give up. There are a lot of ideas for how we can keep things going and keep Moore's Law going, at least in spirit. And for a lot of engineers, the spirit of Moore's Law is this idea that technology will continue to get better, and computers will continue to get better. And they have a laundry list of ideas for how to make that happen. There's basically no way that you

could continue to make computer chips better every year, especially spending as much as chip makers spend now, which is billions of dollars on new chip fabrication facilities, without having some faith in the future that things are going to get better and continue to do so. I mean, what we hold in our hands is the culmination of an enormous amount of faith. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called The Future. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker,

and it featured Danny O'Brien and Rachel Cortland. On the TOE website, you can find links to Danny O'Brien's old Need to Know site and IEEE Spectrum's Moore's Law coverage. We had support this time around from ParachuteHome.com and from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance. More information on Sloan at Sloan.org. Radiotopia from PRX