Archives: Expert Predictions

Countries that have offshore money laundries are gonna have offshore data laundries. Countries that now have lousy oppressive governments and smart, determined terrorist revolutionaries are gonna have lousy oppressive governments and smart determined terrorist revolutionaries with computers. Not too long after that, they’re going to have tyrannical revolutionary governments run by zealots with computers; then we’re likely to see just how close to Big Brother a government can really get. Dealing with these people is going to be a big problem for us.

Computers will probably help people manage better in those countries where people can manage. In countries that are falling apart, overcrowded countries with degraded environments and deep social problems, computers might well make things fall apart even faster.

Any culture or nation that does not come to grips with the technologies changing our lives is, quite literally, living in the past. While the French argue over the culture of communications, they inevitably discourage investment. Who is going to invest in building an “information superhighway” if they do not know what traffic it will be allowed to carry? … If Europe falls even further behind on that highway, it will no longer have to worry about its cultures, for it will have effectively put them all in a museum. As Molire once said: “Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.”

Will the French take defense of their language to the point of jamming German-language stations broadcast from shared satellites? … The enforcement of cultural quotas on the explosive growth of new technologies could succeed only through authoritarian supervisors – “thought police” – tuned to every satellite dish, monitoring every signal plucked from the air or whizzed down an optic fiber.

France’s patriarchs are outraged. Europeans’ love affair with Europe is threatened by this cultural flirtation with the Americans, and they are determined to put a stop to it … The hype over interactive television, video-on-demand, and music delivered over the Internet, only strengthens the French resolve. If they do not take a stand now, they reckon, it will soon be too late. But, on the contrary, it’s too late already for the sorts of measures the French have in mind. In an age of interactive media, cultural quotas will prove at least as self-defeating – and if anything, useless – as the Maginot Line, France’s last great attempt to wall itself off from invaders.