Wake Up: The Nine Hashtags of Digital Disruption

2017

INTRODUCTION:

A DIGITAL TALE

IN 2004, JESUS APARICIO WAS an 18-year-old out celebrating the normal teenage rites of passage shared around the planet when disaster threatened his young life. Jesus was on the road, away for the weekend from his Seville home, away from the diet of TV, sport, beer and junk food that somehow sustains young men through their growing years, when his friend Juan ran their car off the road. Juan and the two other passengers suffered broken limbs. Jesus survived, too, but went into a coma that kept him detached from the rest of the world for more than a decade.

All the time, though, his family never gave up hope. In a Seville hospital room, Jesus remained on life support. The Aparicio family’s medical advice was that their son could come out of his coma at any moment. The miracles of modern medicine meant he could be fed through tubes the vitamins and protein he needed to stay alive. What started as a few weeks became a few months, then a few years.

Every day and night Jesus’s mother, Rosaria, would visit and tend her boy. She kept his bedroom intact, waiting for him to re-enter it. This was where he had done his homework, listened to loud music, read books, strummed an out-of-tune guitar, set up the computer which connected him to the internet and the world, and where pride of place was taken by the iPod portable music player that his friends had bought for his birthday.

Rosaria hand-bathed her son, made sure his clothes and bedding were fresh and every night took out her rosary beads to pray for the day when her son would return to her, mentally as well as physically. Every week, a neighbourhood barber would come to shave the still figure of Jesus. Every month, he would trim his hair, too.

But the years passed. Jesus turned 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Every year his family would mark his birthday and include him in their family celebrations. But he remained oblivious, turning 25, 26, 27. Some friends had moved away. Some married and had children of their own. He became an oddity in their lives, a figure from their past sealed in time by a car accident at the end of a night most of them would otherwise have forgotten.

But Rosaria never gave up hope. Her rosary beads and the daily tasks of tending her son kept him permanently in her thoughts. Her prayers and hopes for what increasingly seemed like a miracle were finally realised in August 2015. She was in the bathroom adjoining his hospital room when she heard a cry from the bedroom of her son. ‘Mama,’ the soft voice called. ‘Mama, where are you?’

Rosaria dropped everything to run to her son who had woken as if nothing had happened. Why was he in this bed? He wanted to know. What were all the tubes? Why did his mother look different, aged not just by nature but by the ordeal of caring for a son she thought permanently lost? And, as the minutes of joy became hours, so many more questions. The obvious: What had happened to him? Then what about his family? His friends? The world around him?

On one level, it seemed all too familiar. Jesus returned home to find his room was as he had left it. Computer and 30 centimetre-deep screen in the corner, iPod plugged in to download music, camera on his desk. Photos and posters on the wall. Books and compact discs where he had left them. Brothers, sisters and cousins at first supportive, then taunting him about what he should know but didn’t.

The prosperous Spain he had grown up in was in financial disarray. There was a new pope. More people than he could remember were looking for work, the shadow of terrorism hung over the whole of Europe. As the world looked to the first black American president to show leadership through this time of turmoil some things remained familiar – Jesus’s team, Real Madrid C.F., remained top of the table and one of the great sporting franchises of the world. No surprise really, given its success over decades relied on identifying, recruiting and developing the best players to fill its talent pipeline. But essentially, Jesus had woken up in a world where so much of what he did regularly had changed. And while his plans for his future career needed to be reconsidered, what surprised him most was the small things.

Ten years earlier, if he wanted to talk to someone he would call them on his mobile phone or send messages. For when Jesus went to sleep, there was no social media – no Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or WhatsApp. Previously, he used his computer to send emails and search the internet. He used his camera to take photos and printed the best of them at the Kodak shop in the shopping mall. He read books, magazines and newspapers which he bought from the newsagents. He watched movies at the cinema or hired a DVD from the video shop.

In this new world, his mother, who used to drive to the supermarket weekly to buy groceries, now simply ordered them online and had them delivered. His father, who had monitored physical activity by wearing a pedometer on his hip, now sported a Fitbit on his wrist to help track his exercise, sleep and weight. And if Jesus had wanted to meet a girl, he went to a bar, where he had hoped one day to find love at first sight. Now, his friends suggested he start making a profile and subscribe to dating websites to meet the girl of his dreams.

The tale of Jesus is the tale of a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving’s fictitious character who fell asleep for twenty years while the world changed around him. Rip Van Winkle’s world was pre-revolutionary America. He fell asleep loyal to King George III and awoke finding he needed to be loyal to George Washington.

And there’s another resemblance to Rip Van Winkle. Jesus, even though his story has been reported as real on thousands of websites on every continent of the planet, is a complete fiction. It was reported just once as the truth on an obscure Spanish website and then went viral with no further checking through publications as varied as ESPN, Le Figaro in France, USA Today, The Times of India and the Daily Mirror in London. Plus 34,000 mentions on Twitter.

The preceding description of what happened to him during those years is the original fiction plus my imagination at work. The ensuing description of what happened to the world during those years is not. The story of Jesus is very much a digital phenomenon, a product of a fertile imagination dressed up to look real. By 2016, we were referring to this as ‘fake news’. In 2004, it was just a prank. Yet plenty of people who have lived through this time would envy one aspect of what the fake Jesus experienced – the benefit of being able to watch and wait while others confronted digital disruption and made the mistakes which have wiped out reputations, careers and businesses.

Indeed, every human interaction in almost every corner of the planet was upended while Jesus (and now the truth is out, let’s keep referring to him as real) was asleep. All fuelled by the growth of computing power which came to a head through the widespread availability of portable high-speed computers now carried in the pockets of more than two billion people. As reported on ZME Science (zmescience.com), the smartphone is hundreds if not thousands of times more powerful than the computers that filled a room where they helped land the first man on the moon in 1969.

To understand the unprecedented development/improvement/enhancements of the smartphone, you have to understand Moore’s Law – a proposition advanced by computer engineer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, which by 1970 had progressed from a simple computing term to an unofficial law. It contended the processing power, or speed, of a simple circuit would double every two years, fuelling a generation or two of technological and social change.

Moore thought his initial observation would span into the next ten years but it has now held true for 50. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, engineer and author of the essay titled ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’ likens the growth of technology to the folk tale about the invention of the game of chess which so thrilled a Chinese emperor that he was willing to offer any reward. All the inventor asked for was rice to feed his family – one grain in the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on.

Halfway through the chessboard, the emperor had agreed to hand over about four billion grains of rice. And then the problems began. If the doubling had continued, the emperor would have pledged a mountain of rice higher than Mt Everest, more than his whole empire was worth. The folk tale has it that the emperor kept his rice – and the game – and the inventor lost his head for impudence. (Kurzweil had the story right in meaning but wrong in detail – the emperor was the Indian Emperor Gupta.)

As Kurzweil reflects, this tale is useful for illustrating the power of doubling, particularly in the second half of the metaphorical chessboard, the point the world had reached in December 2004 when Jesus went into his coma. That happened a full two years before Apple took the idea of its iPod and loaded it into the iPhone to create the supercomputer with the power and scale to inspire hundreds of thousands of new uses that simplify so many human interactions, introduce new ones and make our past habits appear quaint and obsolete.

Think of the simple act of friendship. Before 2004, friendship needed to be accompanied by occasional phone calls to share information and gossip, maybe text messages to arrange meetings and coordinate diaries, and the exchange of birthday and Christmas cards to acknowledge special events. But in the world Jesus awoke to, it required both much more and much less.

The need for phone calls had become less frequent, as had text messages. But everyday insights about simple family actions were shared with (sometimes monotonous and fanatical) enthusiasm through Facebook and Instagram. Indeed, the digital photograph had become the most shared object on the planet – five billion photos a day were being shared through social media by 2017, most of them friends sharing with each other their own pictures or others they found interesting.

Thus the very nature of friendship has been redefined for a whole generation of millennials who have never lived without a smartphone. Hanging out in a bar is still as popular as it ever was but is now incomplete for many if the experience is not documented with photos of the group, the bar, the food, the drinks, the entertainment and any other random information which is then shared with a friendship group that sometimes numbers thousands – more the size of a small city than the intimate group Jesus once regarded as his friendship circle.

The presumption about the digital revolution is that we are living through a period of unprecedented change with no end in sight. Every day new uses emerge for digital technology in leisure, health, education, land use, manufacturing, mobility, information management and government. To use the chessboard analogy, we are in the second half of the board and the continual doubling of capacity keeps stacking the odds in favour of a revolution in human affairs like no other. It is certainly true that technology has been responsible for much of the dramatic change and improvements to the economy over centuries.

But perspective matters.

Imagine for a moment that Jesus had entered his ten-year coma in 3500BC Mesopotamia, the place and time most commonly cited as the birthplace of the wheel. He would have temporarily departed a society where men and mules tediously carried heavy loads and woken to a world where mules pulled carts with wheels that moved smoothly across the land. The laws of physics meant the mules could pull a cart load 40 times greater than on their own backs. This was a monumental transformation – first for the humans and mules whose loads were lightened but then for the ability of farmers and merchants to trade across regions and borders.

Or imagine that Jesus had entered his coma in 1440 Strasbourg, the place and time where Gutenberg invented the first printing press. He would have temporarily departed a world where men laboriously transcribed books (mainly the Bible; each one took a year to transcribe) which were then used only by the elite. He would have woken to a world where Bibles were printed at a rate of a dozen per week, an action that opened the door to literacy and education and led to a multitude of further transformations.

Or imagine Jesus entering his coma in 18th century England where James Watt invented the steam engine, stimulating the rise of mass manufacturing and the shift of the rural population to cities, where factories created consumer goods and the jobs associated with the Industrial Revolution. This technology, too, brought an influx of unprecedented change.

The benefit of perspective allows us to reflect on these sweeping movements through history that have brought us to the period we now live in, which has been described as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Indeed, this was the theme at the 2016 World Economic Forum. The steam revolution was the first, mechanisation the second and digitisation the third. The coalition of everything is the fourth. Or, as Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, states in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution: ‘It is characterised by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.’

The questions are: How far have we come into this revolution? Are we really in the second half of the chessboard? And what are the consequences?

Without a doubt, this period has one major difference from the earlier revolutions. And that is visibility. The earlier revolutions happened slowly and with imperfect knowledge. Now we all know every step of what is happening around us, as near as possible to immediately.

We should never be surprised but so often we are.

No doubt Jesus was shocked when he woke from his coma to discover his computer and iPod were redundant, that he could buy almost anything and have it delivered from his bedroom, that he could glean any fact by just asking a chatbot installed in his iPhone, that he might not need to go to a lecture theatre to get a university degree or that he could know what all his friends (and friends he didn’t know) were doing by simply following them on social media.

If he thought about business models, he would be surprised to ponder the oft-quoted truism that the world’s biggest accommodation provider (Airbnb) doesn’t own one hotel room; that the world’s biggest transporter (Uber) doesn’t own one car; or that the world’s biggest news source (Google) doesn’t employ one journalist.

If he worried about his prospects, he would be concerned that statisticians using disruptive machine learning have been able to calculate that close to 50 per cent of all current jobs will be wiped out by technological innovation over the next quarter of a century. These aren’t just traditional process jobs but include white-collar workers such as accountants, lawyers, architects and those working in the medical and health industries.

When he played with his young nephews, he would have been surprised to discover they were more adept on a computer tablet than at most things physical. He might be equally surprised to discover that the cost of data theft is now estimated to exceed the cost of drug crime.

If Jesus really wanted to know more he could go to almost any large city in the world on any day and find a conference on digital disruption – where speakers were able to command $50,000 to $100,000 apiece to make a screen appearance for audiences who want and need to know more about what is happening to their lives and businesses. Once there, he would discover how the technology that threatened a handful of industries has spread its way through government, business and society, giving most of us instant access to what we want to know, buy, read, see or hear when we want it and at lower prices than we used to pay. Along the way, jobs have been wiped out, some new jobs created and we have begun to live more of our lives through devices permanently connected to the internet. Jesus would be right to ponder whether he had woken to a good or bad dream.

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