Growing up, I was firmly in the optimism camp. I’d heard old timers wax and wane about the state of the world and think they were being old fashioned.
“Middle class income has been stagnant”
“Yes but could you watch videos of literally anything you wanted in a small personal information box? Finally things are being democratized.”
It took me years working in Washington watching how the tech companies operate to understand how ridiculous this is.
My big mistake when I was younger was assuming that because we now had something that was impossible in a previous time, it made our world incomparable to the past. Additionally, I naively thought companies providing the new tech had their goals in alignment with the general public (make something good and people will use it right?).
I also feel my distraction with shiny objects and a promise of a better future made me overlook how basic needs like housing, health, and stability were becoming less attainable.
I think when you're younger it's easy to think of consumption and self-expression as the highest things that matter in life. Aging and having a family teaches you that it's a lot more complicated.
Fascinating. These Long Boom Progression guys neither understand nor care about social behavior, or basic economics for that matter. To be sitting smack in the middle of the 2nd Guilded Age and keep a straight face while claiming technology will create such abundance (doubling down after the 1st article crashed and burned!) it will be "too cheap to meter" is rich. And what is it with these Long tech cons? Long Boom, Long Tail, Long Now. Every one a sleight of hand hustle, keep your eye on the ball that's way off in the future, it's gonna be great!
(I'm just linking to the Wikipedia article but please read critically, it's coming from a very pro-US-hegemony perspective and also that old "it only counts as a war if there's boots on the ground" con where sending drones to bomb other nations doesn't qualify)
They're old, and doing the equivalent of hair metal bands from the 80s playing one-off hits at casinos and state fairs. It's how they pay the bills and it's the only thing they know how to do, so they do it. I don't think many of them have their hearts in it anymore, much less their brains.
EmAn extremely interesting and thought-provoking essay.
I'd argue that relentless optimism is not the most significant fault in the "long boom" speculative journalism.
Rather, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature (eg, it's not open, generous, collectively-oriented, or inclusive). We're more often aggressive, territorial, tribal, selfish, and easily manipulated.
Yes, we're capable of significant societal change at inflection points under great leaders: ending slavery, fighting Nazi genocide, backing the New Deal, the Civil Rights agenda, women's rights, gay marriage, and briefly, post George Floyd's agonizingly slow public murder, a recognition of structural racism.
But, like all societies, propaganda works. The myth of the "genius" billionaire, the elevation of money over values, the stagnation of the political class, the backlash to demographic changes, the mainipulation of religion, and the capture of the media should have been factored into any predictions of the future.
Every civilization throughout history has destroyed itself by failing to learn from the past or adapt to circumvent the inherent weakness of human nature.
Basically, naïve and lazy 90s liberalism that assumed that not only did no work need to be done to shore up the achievements of the past but that what technology would really do was reveal that everyone in the world had at heart the same values as a 90s American liberal.
Media nerds in the 90s could have used less Wired and way more National Geographic, for lack of a better symbol. For lack of a better stand-in I don't know of any other publication that walked around the world teaching late 20th century Americans that people and places are genuinely really different. People around the world have different social values, religious values, senses of place, history, and yes, sometimes people around the world want to connect to other people to kill them rather than trade or exchange.
The thing is that the predictions of the Long Boom as you dig into them here in The Long Boom, Taken Seriously, are just based on nothing much in terms of knowledge. You read those and you realize Leyden was just skimming off the surface of press reports, pundit speculation, huffing the vapor of echo chambers--he didn't have the faintest idea what was going on in Russia, he didn't know anything about how plausible 'clean' fossil fuels really were, he wasn't paying the least bit of attention to what deregulation and 'structural adjustment' had already wrought in terms of interstate relationships and 'openness', he wasn't looking at projected tax revenues from anybody who knew anything (plus stupidly assuming tax rates would remain steady in an era when both political parties had embraced tax cuts as a political strategy), he had absolutely no sense of what was brewing in the culture *in the age of Newt Gingrich*. I mean, the reasons to think otherwise on every point he made were *already* known to many experts and already under discussion.
Forget looking back--reading those *at the time*, it was plain that there were really only two ways to understand what was behind these predictions: they were either a cynical move by a courtier intended to flatter the ideologically-driven optimism of several groups of possible patrons, or they were 100% knowledge-free, research-virgin nonsense.
Philip Tetlock has done some interesting work on forecasting and prediction, and I'm pretty convinced by what he's found. First, that a substantial proportion of people doing forecasting are actually *worse* than randomly wrong, e.g., if you give them a list of possible trends or future developments arranged into binaries, they'll often fare worse than 50-50 by a good margin. (This mirrors some other expert systems of evaluation and judgment--some studies have wine experts faring worse than 50-50 in guessing vintages, areas of origins, approximate price and commonly judged quality, and even varietals of wines they blind-taste, for example.) There are a lot of explanations: groupthink, ideology, or simpler forms of information poverty, e.g., forecasters who rely either on a single source too deeply or who just graze carelessly and go with the last thing they heard.
But Tetlock does also find there are 'superforecasters' who are considerably more accurate than random chance, and it turns out they have some distinctive individual characteristics but also that they all tend to combine a *diverse* range of deeply read and known archives of information with a very heterogenous range of types of sources--journalists, hard quantitative data supplied by governments and NGOs, on-the-ground experiential accounts, comparative analyses that bring other countries and situations into view, insider narratives, etc., and the superforecasters are always skeptical and willing to buck not just common wisdom but to revise and question their own previous judgments or inclinations.
Per your second paragraph, it could have been both. The 90s to 10s period were the peak of the most recent culture in America of "just make something up - it might get you rich, and hell, it might save the world". We've run into it before, but economic booms and then low interest rates made the reiteration possible.
All based off of the public looking at maybe six companies that successfully captured the low hanging fruits of entirely new media and a lot of people going "I could do that too"
There is something deeply wrong with their use of 'scenarios' and especially the idea of 'scenario killers'.
Peter Schwartz worked at Shell when they developed the scenario planning method (based on earlier work, of course). I worked for Harry Beckers (former Shell BoD in charge of R&D) in the 1990's. Harry was instrumental in developing the method in the 1970's and he instilled the scenario-methodology into us in he 1990's. Harry, by the way, was not a fan of Peter Schwartz (who wrote the book "The Art of the Long View" based on that Shell work), telling us that Peter had very little to do with the development, but still did become the face of scenario planning at the time.
Now, what is wrong is this. The idea behind scenario planning was that you would look for uncertainties that were both 'believable' and 'impactful'. Then, for every such uncertainty, you have two possible outcomes (it does/doesn't happen), which means that for every key uncertainty you get twice as many possible scenarios ('outcome worlds'). This quickly becomes too much, so you try to group certain outcome choices in a number of 'plots', which are supposed to cover as much as possible of the whole 'scenario space'. These plots are then fleshed out to become stories of potential future worlds. And these you use to gauge your potential strategy choices against.
People started to call these ('combined') plots 'scenarios' and then people started to think of the scenarios as 'predictions'. But they never were, and presenting a plot such as 'the long boom' as a prediction with some uncertainties that can 'kill the plot' is exactly what scenario planning is not about. There are no 'scenario killers' in 'scenario planning'. It is not about predictions, it is about uncertainties.
What is written down as 'scenario killers' apparently are the actual 'key uncertainties' and you need to create about 4 or 6 (there are reasons for these numbers) plots from them (by grouping choices of those uncertainties). Not the prediction (e.g. the long boom), but the *uncertainties* are the actual valuable parts of the story.
I suspect we began producing a lesser class of billionaire right after Leyden's initial prediction of good times. These are one-way guys, who see wealth as a path to power and power as the ultimate aphrodesiac. I wrote about them just the other day https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/a-lesser-class-of-billionaire
It's really just the perfect amalgam of Fukuyama and techno-optimism and about as serious as an 11 year old's drawing of his dream estate. ("Full size basketball court, water slide and a swim up bar because that's what I'll want when I am old enough to drink.") Not to be a gloomer, but how do serious people not realize that things never have worked like this? How did allegedly smart people not see by the late '90s the seriousness of our environmental crises and the rise of right-wing disinformation media?
I think it's hard to actively look back and understand how bright the future looked in the 1990s in the US. Our Cold War adversary was eviscerated and the danger of nuclear war seemed to have disappeared. Crime dropped like a rock through the decade. Middle class people were better off than they'd ever been between the end of the early 90s recession and 2008. The ozone hole was closing, and as a millennial, I was taught about climate change and that it would be a problem we'd begin to deal with when I was old. That the US would be vulnerable to terrorism and pandemics was inconceivable.
There were people who were trying to call attention to environmental and digital crisis but times were good, and people wanted to listen to Pollyannas who told them to do business and make money and let the good times roll. Thus this post.
On the other hand, there was a sense that we might be missing something on the horizon, something big and dangerous. Deep Space Nine and Babylon Five were two science fiction television series from the 1990s that were heavily influenced by the fall of the Soviet Empire. They both started at the end of a war and a sense of victory and possibility, but that optimism quickly evaporated as new challenges were revealed. Something bad was over, but there was still plenty of menace.
(P.S. I had forgotten that both titles end in numbers. Was there a Deep Space Seven or Babylon Three? How about THX 1122? I think I'm getting tired of our sequel culture.)
I guess so, and I'd add to that some parallels with X Files and Coast to Coast (weirdly enough, my dad loved both of those, the latter the Art Bell version, and hated DS9 and Babylon 5 and my mom was the other way around. So I watched/listened to them both).
I think part of the 90s zeitgeist was that media along with Wired/Mondo 2000 hammering huge cracks into the edifice of a US that was much more right-wing and parochial than anything I've ever encountered going even back to my twenties except in southern/midwestern smaller towns. What edifice they were shattering, it depends.
We underestimate the general human ability to f**k things up. We don't need an active adversary to succumb to hubris. And there were other voices warning us like Kuttner that we were outstripping the planet's ability to recover.
Growing up, I was firmly in the optimism camp. I’d heard old timers wax and wane about the state of the world and think they were being old fashioned.
“Middle class income has been stagnant”
“Yes but could you watch videos of literally anything you wanted in a small personal information box? Finally things are being democratized.”
It took me years working in Washington watching how the tech companies operate to understand how ridiculous this is.
My big mistake when I was younger was assuming that because we now had something that was impossible in a previous time, it made our world incomparable to the past. Additionally, I naively thought companies providing the new tech had their goals in alignment with the general public (make something good and people will use it right?).
I also feel my distraction with shiny objects and a promise of a better future made me overlook how basic needs like housing, health, and stability were becoming less attainable.
I think when you're younger it's easy to think of consumption and self-expression as the highest things that matter in life. Aging and having a family teaches you that it's a lot more complicated.
Fascinating. These Long Boom Progression guys neither understand nor care about social behavior, or basic economics for that matter. To be sitting smack in the middle of the 2nd Guilded Age and keep a straight face while claiming technology will create such abundance (doubling down after the 1st article crashed and burned!) it will be "too cheap to meter" is rich. And what is it with these Long tech cons? Long Boom, Long Tail, Long Now. Every one a sleight of hand hustle, keep your eye on the ball that's way off in the future, it's gonna be great!
They're a take on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Peace
(I'm just linking to the Wikipedia article but please read critically, it's coming from a very pro-US-hegemony perspective and also that old "it only counts as a war if there's boots on the ground" con where sending drones to bomb other nations doesn't qualify)
They're old, and doing the equivalent of hair metal bands from the 80s playing one-off hits at casinos and state fairs. It's how they pay the bills and it's the only thing they know how to do, so they do it. I don't think many of them have their hearts in it anymore, much less their brains.
Nailed it
It is the same shtick as the afterlife in religion.
Be nice, follow your leaders, don't be too critical.
In the end (afterlife) everything will be alright.
Keep the rubes calm, while they are being fleeced.
EmAn extremely interesting and thought-provoking essay.
I'd argue that relentless optimism is not the most significant fault in the "long boom" speculative journalism.
Rather, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature (eg, it's not open, generous, collectively-oriented, or inclusive). We're more often aggressive, territorial, tribal, selfish, and easily manipulated.
Yes, we're capable of significant societal change at inflection points under great leaders: ending slavery, fighting Nazi genocide, backing the New Deal, the Civil Rights agenda, women's rights, gay marriage, and briefly, post George Floyd's agonizingly slow public murder, a recognition of structural racism.
But, like all societies, propaganda works. The myth of the "genius" billionaire, the elevation of money over values, the stagnation of the political class, the backlash to demographic changes, the mainipulation of religion, and the capture of the media should have been factored into any predictions of the future.
Every civilization throughout history has destroyed itself by failing to learn from the past or adapt to circumvent the inherent weakness of human nature.
Basically, naïve and lazy 90s liberalism that assumed that not only did no work need to be done to shore up the achievements of the past but that what technology would really do was reveal that everyone in the world had at heart the same values as a 90s American liberal.
Media nerds in the 90s could have used less Wired and way more National Geographic, for lack of a better symbol. For lack of a better stand-in I don't know of any other publication that walked around the world teaching late 20th century Americans that people and places are genuinely really different. People around the world have different social values, religious values, senses of place, history, and yes, sometimes people around the world want to connect to other people to kill them rather than trade or exchange.
The thing is that the predictions of the Long Boom as you dig into them here in The Long Boom, Taken Seriously, are just based on nothing much in terms of knowledge. You read those and you realize Leyden was just skimming off the surface of press reports, pundit speculation, huffing the vapor of echo chambers--he didn't have the faintest idea what was going on in Russia, he didn't know anything about how plausible 'clean' fossil fuels really were, he wasn't paying the least bit of attention to what deregulation and 'structural adjustment' had already wrought in terms of interstate relationships and 'openness', he wasn't looking at projected tax revenues from anybody who knew anything (plus stupidly assuming tax rates would remain steady in an era when both political parties had embraced tax cuts as a political strategy), he had absolutely no sense of what was brewing in the culture *in the age of Newt Gingrich*. I mean, the reasons to think otherwise on every point he made were *already* known to many experts and already under discussion.
Forget looking back--reading those *at the time*, it was plain that there were really only two ways to understand what was behind these predictions: they were either a cynical move by a courtier intended to flatter the ideologically-driven optimism of several groups of possible patrons, or they were 100% knowledge-free, research-virgin nonsense.
Philip Tetlock has done some interesting work on forecasting and prediction, and I'm pretty convinced by what he's found. First, that a substantial proportion of people doing forecasting are actually *worse* than randomly wrong, e.g., if you give them a list of possible trends or future developments arranged into binaries, they'll often fare worse than 50-50 by a good margin. (This mirrors some other expert systems of evaluation and judgment--some studies have wine experts faring worse than 50-50 in guessing vintages, areas of origins, approximate price and commonly judged quality, and even varietals of wines they blind-taste, for example.) There are a lot of explanations: groupthink, ideology, or simpler forms of information poverty, e.g., forecasters who rely either on a single source too deeply or who just graze carelessly and go with the last thing they heard.
But Tetlock does also find there are 'superforecasters' who are considerably more accurate than random chance, and it turns out they have some distinctive individual characteristics but also that they all tend to combine a *diverse* range of deeply read and known archives of information with a very heterogenous range of types of sources--journalists, hard quantitative data supplied by governments and NGOs, on-the-ground experiential accounts, comparative analyses that bring other countries and situations into view, insider narratives, etc., and the superforecasters are always skeptical and willing to buck not just common wisdom but to revise and question their own previous judgments or inclinations.
Per your second paragraph, it could have been both. The 90s to 10s period were the peak of the most recent culture in America of "just make something up - it might get you rich, and hell, it might save the world". We've run into it before, but economic booms and then low interest rates made the reiteration possible.
All based off of the public looking at maybe six companies that successfully captured the low hanging fruits of entirely new media and a lot of people going "I could do that too"
Optimism and pessimism both need to come with skepticism. Thanks for bringing some.
There is something deeply wrong with their use of 'scenarios' and especially the idea of 'scenario killers'.
Peter Schwartz worked at Shell when they developed the scenario planning method (based on earlier work, of course). I worked for Harry Beckers (former Shell BoD in charge of R&D) in the 1990's. Harry was instrumental in developing the method in the 1970's and he instilled the scenario-methodology into us in he 1990's. Harry, by the way, was not a fan of Peter Schwartz (who wrote the book "The Art of the Long View" based on that Shell work), telling us that Peter had very little to do with the development, but still did become the face of scenario planning at the time.
Now, what is wrong is this. The idea behind scenario planning was that you would look for uncertainties that were both 'believable' and 'impactful'. Then, for every such uncertainty, you have two possible outcomes (it does/doesn't happen), which means that for every key uncertainty you get twice as many possible scenarios ('outcome worlds'). This quickly becomes too much, so you try to group certain outcome choices in a number of 'plots', which are supposed to cover as much as possible of the whole 'scenario space'. These plots are then fleshed out to become stories of potential future worlds. And these you use to gauge your potential strategy choices against.
People started to call these ('combined') plots 'scenarios' and then people started to think of the scenarios as 'predictions'. But they never were, and presenting a plot such as 'the long boom' as a prediction with some uncertainties that can 'kill the plot' is exactly what scenario planning is not about. There are no 'scenario killers' in 'scenario planning'. It is not about predictions, it is about uncertainties.
What is written down as 'scenario killers' apparently are the actual 'key uncertainties' and you need to create about 4 or 6 (there are reasons for these numbers) plots from them (by grouping choices of those uncertainties). Not the prediction (e.g. the long boom), but the *uncertainties* are the actual valuable parts of the story.
Fascinating, thanks.
"while signaling that you are the rare type of person who does not find Richard Dawkins offputting." This is gold!
"I had to take a walk and calm myself down." Gold squared!
I suspect we began producing a lesser class of billionaire right after Leyden's initial prediction of good times. These are one-way guys, who see wealth as a path to power and power as the ultimate aphrodesiac. I wrote about them just the other day https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/a-lesser-class-of-billionaire
The new billionaires Leyden loves have screwed up their own utopia to the point they may find themselves drowned in a bathtub
It's really just the perfect amalgam of Fukuyama and techno-optimism and about as serious as an 11 year old's drawing of his dream estate. ("Full size basketball court, water slide and a swim up bar because that's what I'll want when I am old enough to drink.") Not to be a gloomer, but how do serious people not realize that things never have worked like this? How did allegedly smart people not see by the late '90s the seriousness of our environmental crises and the rise of right-wing disinformation media?
I think it's hard to actively look back and understand how bright the future looked in the 1990s in the US. Our Cold War adversary was eviscerated and the danger of nuclear war seemed to have disappeared. Crime dropped like a rock through the decade. Middle class people were better off than they'd ever been between the end of the early 90s recession and 2008. The ozone hole was closing, and as a millennial, I was taught about climate change and that it would be a problem we'd begin to deal with when I was old. That the US would be vulnerable to terrorism and pandemics was inconceivable.
There were people who were trying to call attention to environmental and digital crisis but times were good, and people wanted to listen to Pollyannas who told them to do business and make money and let the good times roll. Thus this post.
On the other hand, there was a sense that we might be missing something on the horizon, something big and dangerous. Deep Space Nine and Babylon Five were two science fiction television series from the 1990s that were heavily influenced by the fall of the Soviet Empire. They both started at the end of a war and a sense of victory and possibility, but that optimism quickly evaporated as new challenges were revealed. Something bad was over, but there was still plenty of menace.
(P.S. I had forgotten that both titles end in numbers. Was there a Deep Space Seven or Babylon Three? How about THX 1122? I think I'm getting tired of our sequel culture.)
I guess so, and I'd add to that some parallels with X Files and Coast to Coast (weirdly enough, my dad loved both of those, the latter the Art Bell version, and hated DS9 and Babylon 5 and my mom was the other way around. So I watched/listened to them both).
I think part of the 90s zeitgeist was that media along with Wired/Mondo 2000 hammering huge cracks into the edifice of a US that was much more right-wing and parochial than anything I've ever encountered going even back to my twenties except in southern/midwestern smaller towns. What edifice they were shattering, it depends.
We underestimate the general human ability to f**k things up. We don't need an active adversary to succumb to hubris. And there were other voices warning us like Kuttner that we were outstripping the planet's ability to recover.