The Nature of the Future: Dispatches From the Socialstructed World by Marina Gorbis
Near the end of the
South by Southwest Festival
(SXSW) held this past March, I read this tweet: “Somewhere between Musk
and Morozov is where the rest of us will find our futures.”
Those few words say a lot about where the boundaries of enthusiasm
lie when it comes to all things futuristic. Elon Musk—founder of PayPal,
Tesla Motors, and SpaceX—is an unabashed proponent of the power of
technology to better the human condition. He spoke at SXSW about the
potential for building human colonies on Mars. Evgeny Morozov inhabits
the other end of the futurist spectrum. An Open Society Foundation
Fellow, he has established himself as the reigning curmudgeon of Twitter
and a debunker of cyber-utopianism, “solutionism,” and
Internet-centrism in every form. As the tweet noted, somewhere between
Musk’s utopia and Morozov’s dystopia, the rest of us are trying to find
our way forward.
In
The Nature of the Future: Dispatches From the Socialstructed World,
Marina Gorbis offers one such path. Morozov, no doubt, would find much
to dislike about the book; Musk, for his part, would probably question
its relatively measured tone. Gorbis runs the Palo Alto, Calif.-based
Institute for the Future,
where she spends her days helping people think about what lies ahead.
That work requires enthusiasm about the future, of course, but Gorbis
also brings to it a personal respect for the past. Amid her exposure to
the shiniest new gadgets that Silicon Valley has to offer, Gorbis has
honed her ability to spot patterns across disciplines while also weeding
out (some of) the hype.
The key to understanding this book is that it appears to be about
technology, but it is actually about people. The unfortunate neologism
“socialstructed” refers to the role that social relationships play in
economic and community life. Gorbis starts from a model that has nothing
to do with high technology—her mother’s shrewd use of personal
relationships to provide for her family when they lived in the Soviet
Union. (Gorbis grew up in Odessa, Ukraine.) Bartering, service
exchanges, mutual aid: These are age-old human practices that depend on
no particular technology.
Gorbis argues that we have entered a transitional period in which
those pre-modern practices are returning to prominence—and are doing so
in larger, faster, and more inclusive forms. She notes that we are
“living simultaneously in two worlds, one in which almost everything is
still done through formal institutions, be they corporations, large
R&D labs, banks, universities, or governments, and another in which
people are joining up to create something new outside of traditional
boundaries, in the process displacing these decades-old institutions.”
This is not a new observation. And Gorbis’s explanations for why it
is happening (global connectivity) and why now (expansion of broadband
and Wi-Fi) are neither surprising nor, in my opinion, complete. There
are other factors—from regulatory structures and corporate protectionism
to demographic shifts and wealth inequality—that help to explain why we
use technology in the ways that we do. But Gorbis is less interested in
“How did we get here?” than in “What does it mean now that we are
here?”
And in that regard, she does a solid job of describing the huge
middle ground that lies between Musk and Morozov—even as her dispatches
are all positive and her description skews toward utopianism. When she
extols citizen science, crowdfunding, and more-participatory government,
Gorbis comes across as similar to many other futurists. A few stories
become “data,” three examples make a trend, and countervailing evidence
rarely makes an appearance. Even at her most exuberant, however, Gorbis
focuses on the human behaviors enabled by technology. She is careful to
point out that new forms of inclusivity are not universal. She notes
that gift exchanges, reputational economies, and voluntary behavior are
not new, and they certainly did not spring forth from the Internet. (In
fact, the writer David Bollier and others have argued convincingly that
these practices are the mother of Internet culture, not the other way
around.)
For social entrepreneurs and philanthropists, the book will be most
relevant when it addresses the issue of scale. Gorbis, for example,
notes the tension between big investors and crowdfunded startups. But in
place of the usual binary choice between “too big” and “too small,” she
presents a three-tiered
approach to thinking about institutional size and scope. Think of it as
the Goldilocks analysis. Some problems are simply too small for
established institutional structures to solve; others are too big for
those structures to handle. The emerging networks of a “socialstructed”
world, therefore, might be
“just right.” Gorbis doesn’t focus on the challenges inherent in this
framework— such as out-of-sync regulatory systems and the power of
incumbents—but neither does she imply that those challenges do not
exist.
Gorbis’s modulated approach gives her room to explore stories that
have a bit more nuance than the cherry-picked-to-make-a-point examples
that often figure in books of this kind. In addition to her experiences
as a futurist, Gorbis draws lightly on anthropology, sociology, and
political science to help explain her observations. Ironically, the
book’s greatest shortcoming (other than its clumsy title) may be the
fact that it’s a book. Although Gorbis presents several examples from
the future, the innately static quality of the book medium leads her to
oversell the positive and to underplay the negative, and it leaves no
room for engaging in a conversation about all that lies in between those
poles.
