Elon Musk and the Future
Freedom’s just another word for everything to gain
It was like a musket shot when Elon Musk pursued a deal to acquire Twitter. (And actually snagged a deal after this story originaly went to press.) But the most striking thing about it, for me, is his use of the word “freedom.”
“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he wrote in a filing. “However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”
Words like “freedom” can be twisted in all kinds of different ways to suit the interest of powerful people. Remember freedom fries? Kind of like “great” in the statement “Make America great again.” Whose version of great?
The power of one particular word can be critical and used for good, needless to say. At least, good in my opinion. For example, did you know that people in Ukraine have actually made up a word to describe what they’re experiencing? Timothy Snyder wrote about it in a New York Times editorial. Using cyrillic characters, it roughly translates into “Russian fascism.”
In Musk’s case, I doubt that “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin wrote and sang. Despite Musk’s moral high ground, his move on Twitter has to do with everything to gain. For him? For us?
Questions about the intentions of people like Musk and their use of certain words will undoubtedly continue to crop up over time, as technology transports us into ever-newer realms.
That’s the sort of thing I write about in my sci-fi novel, THE JUICE. And I also focus on the future of media as a journalist.
This situation, present and future, was driven home for me recently by two articles — one of which I wrote for MediaVillage. Both stories featured futurists who expressed their concerns about what might happen moving forward. And yet at the same time, their excitement about the future is contagious.
Future of Artificial Intelligence
The guy I interviewed for MediaVillage is Dave Meeker. He co-created a dial-up ISP back in the ’90s and rose to become the lead futurist at one of the largest advertising conglomerates in the world, dentsu International. Meeker has worked with clients like Google, HBO, NBCUniversal and Musk’s Tesla. (I’ve written about Meeker before, in this story.)
Meeker believes that the internet hasn’t changed that much in the last few decades — if you compare it to the dramatic transformation up ahead. “We are now looking at fundamental change — how data is stored, how web servers work, serverless websites. [There will be] apps that heal themselves or diagnose problems or write their own code or optimize the experience based on AI. We’re looking at artwork that’s created by machines — people putting headsets on and getting married to people they don’t know in real life, but as avatars.”
Eventually, metaverses won’t just be thought of as closed-off virtual reality realms, but instead, there will be digital elements of it that interact with us in the real world, thanks to spatial computing. For example, imagine a day when you want to cook a certain dish and call up an avatar of the chef Jamie Oliver. The avatar sits across the countertop in your kitchen and offers advice based on what you’re doing, like, “Wait! That’s going to be way too much red pepper.”
Future of Design: Our Appearance
Another take on metaverses comes from Cathy Hackl, CEO and chief metaverse officer of the Futures Intelligence Group, a metaverse consultancy. Hackl recently took part in an episode of the podcast “On the Edge.” (The transcript, which I read, was published by McKinsey Digital.)
Hackl describes how someone in the future might start their day: “I envision that she wakes up and starts her morning routine thanks to her voice adviser. She goes to her closet and looks at her volumetric version of herself, which is like an avatar or hologram of herself, and starts trying on clothes virtually using that volumetric version of herself that has all her measurements, and then selects what she’s going to wear that day.
“And the actual clothing she then puts on her physical self has a digital component to it. She can alter what her outfit looks like depending on who she’s with virtually, or maybe her lipstick has digital haptic nanoparticles embedded in it so she can greet her partner who is traveling in another country and feel his embrace,” Hackl says.
Both Hackl and Meeker have their trepidations about the future. “I worry a lot about data and privacy and challenges that we might not even know yet might happen,” says Hackl.
Meeker recalls that back when he created that ISP, he was really excited about how the web would democratize information, no matter where people lived or their economic status.
We all know how that turned out.
There’s always the possibility that we could “inadvertently design ourselves into dystopian hell. But I’m mostly excited about the newness, the change ahead,” Meeker says.
His conversations with dentsu’s clients revolve around not only commercial possibilities afforded by things like Web3 and NFTs, but how the companies’ uses of technology can impact society.
“We’ve got a war going on. We’ve got real human problems, like people who don’t have access to clean water,” Meeker says. “Can we use our technology to help solve those things, to create more empathy in human beings?”
He offers a slightly different question, as well: “How do we create things with clients that attract consumers and are really good for people — that offer real value and make life more interesting and better, rather than [just] making a buck? It’s our responsibility as leaders in advertising, marketing, and communications to use all these new tools at our disposal, be a little bit skeptical, and focus on what they can be, not what they appear to be.”
Yes, I’m a little bit skeptical. And like Hackl and Meeker, I’m excited, too. There’s the hope that maybe, just maybe, Musk’s intentions with Twitter could really be good for society.
For me, the most significant question is: who’s holding the keys to large companies and governments that shape our behavior, our thoughts? Do we want Musk to be one of them, when it comes to Twitter? And will the people with such power have the foresight to use their tremendous leverage to advantage all of humankind, not just the most elite among us?
