The Curse of the Long Boom

A story in four parts, about predictions and what they’re ultimately good for:

Dan Davies (whose Substack is an excellent read, by the way) wrote a post last week in which he coined Davies’ Law: “If you don’t make predictions, you’ll never know what to be surprised by.”

This seems like the perfect starting point for our story. I love it. I hope very much to see Davies’ Law become A Thing.

I’ve written around the edges of this topic before. Davies has basically just tapped into my intellectual lodestone here. Making predictions and then paying attention to the things I’m surprised by is approximately the One Weird Trick underlying my entire academic career.

Back in February I posted some reflections on what I’m looking for in the WIRED back catalog. Here’s how I phrased it then: “All of my best thinking comes from getting stuff wrong. That’s the angle from which I approach all social science research questions.” The whole point of making predictions, from this perspective, is to help yourself identify the limits of your own knowledge, leading to harder questions that improve your understanding of the world.

Credit to Dan Davies—his coinage is so much pithier.

He also provides a corollary: “If you don’t make recommendations, you won’t know what to be disappointed by.”

Let me offer a second corollary: “If you retrofit your predictions to insist they were right after all, you’ll never learn a single damn thing.”

I mention this because, as you might imagine, I run into a lot of incorrect predictions as I read through the WIRED archive. Back in the ’90s, WIRED was chock-full of a very particular style of futurism—one that has not aged especially well.

In keeping with Davies’ Law, this presents a lovely opportunity. I’m rereading the entire magazine back catalog to understand how emerging technologies looked, take stock of where people thought the world was headed, and draw lessons from the resulting surprises.

The thing that sets me back on my heels, though, is that a lot of those old WIRED techno-optimists are still out there making predictions today. And to hear them tell it, they were right all along.

Huh?

Jason Kottke had a nice item last week,  about revisiting the long boom:

In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle reads: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” As you might expect, the piece makes interesting reading here in the actual future, particularly the sidebar of “10 Scenario Spoilers”:

“The long boom is a scenario, one possible future. It’s built upon the convergence of many big forces and even more little pieces falling into place—all of them with a positive twist. The future of course, could turn out to be very different—particularly if a few of those big pieces go haywire. Here are 10 things that could cut short the long boom.”