The Future (13 page)

Similarly, most of the data now being collected during the operation of industrial processes by embedded systems, sensors, and tiny devices such as
actuators has been disposed of soon after it is collected. With the plummeting cost of data storage and the growing sophistication of Big Data, some of this information is now being kept and analyzed and is already producing a flood of insights that
promote efficiency in industry and business. To take another example, some commercial vehicles mount a small video camera on the windshield that collects data continuously but only saves twenty seconds at a time; in the event of an accident, the
information collected during the seconds prior to and during the accident is saved for analysis. The same is true of black boxes on
airplanes and most security cameras in buildings. The data collected is
constantly erased to make room for newer information. Soon, most all of this information will be kept, stored, and processed by Big Data algorithms for useful insights.

Plans for gathering—and analyzing—even larger amounts of information are now under way throughout the world. IBM is working with the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy to develop a new generation of computer technology to store and process the data soon to be captured by the Square Kilometre Array, a new radio telescope that will collect each day
twice the amount of information presently generated on the entire World Wide Web.

Virtually all human endeavors that routinely produce large amounts of data will soon be profoundly affected by the use of Big Data techniques. To put it another way, just as psychologists and philosophers search for deeper meanings in the operations of the human subconscious, cutting-edge supercomputers are now divining meaningful patterns in the enormous volumes of data collected on a continuous basis not only on the Internet of Things but also by analyzing patterns in the flood of information exchanged among people—including in the
billions of messages posted each day on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

The U.S. Geological Survey has established a
Twitter Earthquake Detector to gather information on the impact and location of shaking events more quickly, particularly in populated areas with few seismic instruments. And in 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon launched
the Global Pulse program to analyze digital communications in order to detect and understand economic and social shocks more quickly. The pattern with which people add money to their mobile phone accounts is an early warning of job loss. Online food prices can be surveyed to help predict price spikes and food shortages. Searches for terms like “flu” and “cholera” can give warnings of disease outbreaks.

The intelligence community is using the techniques of Big Data analysis to search for patterns in vast flows of communication to
predict social unrest in countries and regions of particular interest. Some new businesses are now using similar techniques to analyze millions of messages or tweets in order to
predict how well Hollywood—and Bollywood—movies will perform at the box office.

As always, the imperatives driving commerce and national security adapt quickly to the emergence of new technologies, but what about democracy in this new age? The rapid and relentless rise of Internet-based communication is surely a hopeful sign for the renewed health of self-governance, largely because the structural characteristics of the Internet are so similar to the world of the printing press: individuals have extremely low entry barriers and ever easier access. As was true in the age of the printing press, the quality of ideas conveyed over the Internet can be at least partially assessed by the number of people with whom they resonate. And as more people find resonance with particular expressions, more still have their attention directed to the expressions whose popularity is rising.

The demand for content on the Internet is also linked to a significant rise in reading—a faint echo of the “big bang” of literacy that accompanied the creation of the Gutenberg Galaxy. In fact, after reading declined following the introduction of television, it has now tripled in just the last thirty years because the overwhelmingly
dominant content on the Internet is printed words.

With democracy having fallen on hard times due to the current dominance over the public interest in so many countries by wealth and corporate power—and in others by the entrenched power of authoritarian dictatorships—many supporters of democratic self-governance are placing their hopes on the revival of robust democratic discourse in the age of the Internet.

Already, revolutionary political movements—from the Tahrir Square protesters in Cairo to Los Indignados in Spain to Occupy Wall Street to the surprisingly
massive crowds of election protesters in Moscow—are predominantly shaped by the Internet. Facebook and Twitter have played a particularly important role in several of these movements, along with email, texting, and instant messaging. Google Earth has also been significant in
spotlighting the excesses of elites, in Bahrain for example—and in the Libyan revolution, Google Earth was actually
used by rebels in Misrata to guide their mortars. (Google Earth also, by the way, triggered a small border dispute and brief armed standoff between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, when it mistakenly attributed a tiny portion of Costa Rica to the national territory of Nicaragua.)

Thus far, however, reformist and revolutionary movements that have begun on the Internet have mostly followed the same pattern: enervation and excitement followed by disappointment and stasis. It is still an open question whether these Internet-inspired reform movements will gain a second wind and, after a period of simmering, reemerge and ultimately reach their goals.

One of the first revolutionary movements in which the Internet played a key igniting role was the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Myanmar. Activists took extreme personal risks to spread their messages urging democratic reforms by using the World Wide Web with false names from Internet cafés and by smuggling thumb drives
across the border to collaborators in the diaspora living in Thailand. Unfortunately, the authoritarian government in Myanmar was able to smother and shut down the Saffron Revolution, but only at the cost of
completely blacking out the Internet inside the country’s borders.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary fires lit before the Internet was shut down continued to smolder in Myanmar and continued to burn brightly in other parts of the world where the forces of conscience had been awakened to the abuses and injustices of the Myanmar dictatorship. (Diasporas, particularly educated and wealthy diasporas in Western countries, have been newly empowered by the Internet to play significant roles in fostering and sustaining reform movements in their countries of origin.) A few years later, the government of Myanmar was pressured to loosen its controls on political dialogue and release the leader of the reform movement,
Aung San Suu Kyi, from her long house arrest, and in March 2012 she was triumphantly elected to the Parliament amidst many signs that the popular movement that had begun on the Internet was reemerging as a force for change that seemed
destined to take control of the government.

In many other authoritarian countries, however, the ferocious resistance to reform has been more effective in snuffing out Internet-based dissent movements. In 2009, Iran’s Green Revolution began as a popular
protest against the fraudulent presidential election. Although Western sympathizers had the impression that Twitter played a key role in igniting and sustaining the protest movement, in actuality social media played a much smaller role inside than outside Iran because the Iranian government was successful in largely
controlling Internet use by the protesters. While it is true that YouTube videos documented government excesses
(most famously,
the tragic death of Neda Agha-Soltan), the more potent social media sites that would have enabled dissenters to build a larger
protest movement were almost completely shut down. Indeed, during the election campaign itself, when the principal opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, began to gain momentum by organizing on Facebook,
the government simply blacked it out.

Worse still, the Iranian security forces gave the world a demonstration of what a malignant authoritarian government can do to its citizens by using the knowledge it gains from their Internet connections and social graphs to identify and track down dissenters, read their private communications, and effectively
stifle any effective resistance to the dictatorship’s authority. The entire episode was a chilling alarm that underscored the extent to which the lack of privacy on the Internet can potentially increase the power of government over the governed more easily than it can empower reform and revolution.

China, in particular, has introduced by far the most sophisticated measures to censor content on the Internet and exercise control over its potential for fostering reformist or revolutionary fervor. The “Great Firewall of China” is the largest effort at Internet control in the world today. (
Iran and the retro-Stalinist dictatorship of Belarus are the other two countries that have attempted such efforts.) China’s connection to the global Internet is monopolized by state-run operators that carefully follow a system of protocols that effectively
turn the Internet within China into a national intranet. In 2010, even an interview with the then premier of China, Wen Jiabao, in which he advocated reforms,
was censored and made unavailable to the people of China.

In 2006 the Chinese plan to control content on the Internet collided with the
open values of the world’s largest search engine, Google. As one who participated in the company’s deliberations at the time, I saw firsthand how limited the options were. After searching for ways to reconcile its commitment to full openness of information with China’s determined effort to block any and all content it found objectionable, Google made the principled decision to withdraw from China and instead route its site through Hong Kong, which still maintains a higher level of freedom, albeit within constraints imposed from Beijing. Facebook, by the way, has never been allowed into China. The cofounder of Google, Sergey Brin, said in 2012 that China had been far more effective in controlling the Internet than he had expected. “I thought there was no way to put the
genie back in the bottle,” Brin noted, “but now it seems
in certain areas the genie
has
been put back in the bottle.”

The much admired Chinese artist Ai Weiwei expressed a different view: “[China] can’t live with the consequences of that.…
It’s hopeless to try to control the Internet.” China now has the largest number of Internet users of any country in the world—
more than 500 million people, 40 percent of its total population. As a result, most observers believe it is only a matter of time before more open debate—even on topics controversial in the eyes of the Communist Party—will become uncontrollable inside China. Already, a number of Chinese leaders have found it necessary
to take to the Internet themselves in order to respond to public controversies. In neighboring Russia, former president
Dmitri Medvedev also felt the pressure to engage personally on the Internet.

As the role played by the Internet and connected computing devices becomes more prominent and pervasive generally, authoritarian governments may find it increasingly difficult to exert the same degree of control. When the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, it was partly due to the fact that
four out of every ten Tunisians were connected to the Internet,
with almost 20 percent of them on Facebook (
80 percent of the Facebook users were under the age of thirty).

So even though Tunisia was one of the countries cited by Reporters Without Borders
as censoring political dissent on the Internet, the largely nonviolent revolution gained momentum with startling speed, and the pervasive access to the Internet within Tunisia made it difficult for the government to control the digital blossoming of public defiance. The man who set himself on fire in protest, Mohamed Bouazizi, was not the first to do so, but he was the first to be
video-recorded
doing so.
It was the downloaded video that ignited the Arab Spring.

In Saudi Arabia, Twitter has facilitated public criticism of the government, and even of the royal family. As the number of tweets grew faster there in 2012 than in any other country, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer, Faisal Abdullah, told
The New York Times
, “Twitter for us is like a parliament, but not the kind of parliament that exists in this region. It’s a true parliament, where people from all political sides meet and talk freely.”

But experts in the region argue that it is important to look carefully at the interplay between the Internet and other significant factors in the Arab Spring—including some that were at least as important as the Internet
in bringing about this sociopolitical explosion. The combination of population growth, the growing percentage of young people, economic stagnation, and rising food prices created the conditions for unrest. When governments in the region first promised economic and political reforms, then appeared to backtrack, the frustrations reached a boiling point.

The change that many analysts believe was most important in sowing the seeds of the Arab Spring was the introduction in 1996 of the
feisty and relatively independent satellite television channel Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was soon followed by approximately 700 other satellite television channels that were easily accessed with small, cheap satellite dishes—
even in countries where they are technically illegal. Several governments attempted to control the proliferation of small dishes, but the result was an incredible outburst of political discussion, including on topics that had not been debated openly before. By the time the Arab Spring erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, both access to satellite television
and
the Internet had spread throughout Egypt and the region. Sociologists and political scientists have had a difficult time parsing the relative influence of these two new electronic media in causing and feeding the Arab Spring, but most believe that
Al Jazeera and its many siblings were the more important factor. In 2004, when then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak paid a visit to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, he said,
“All that trouble from this little matchbox?” Perhaps both were necessary but neither was sufficient.