Care and Attention, Atom by Atom - two predictions from 2009 and a motto.

 When I started this blog back in 2007, this was probably the mental image I had of myself: Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem - a twenty-first century Hunter S. Thompson, keeping painstaking track of the traffic below, blowing knee-caps off a worsening world with his cyber truths - but while the world seems to have kept its side of the bargain, I turn out to have kept my head down a lot more than I anticipated, because what I hadn't predicted is that of course everyone else would have the same idea, and there simply aren't enough perches for the lot of us. Even if there were, we're not stuck in the traffic - as the saying goes - we are the traffic.

 Transmetropolitan was a utopia of sorts, ultimately*. For example, because I'd grown up so simplistically dismissive of Star Trek, Spider's world was my first encounter with the idea of a "maker" - a machine that could produce anything from nothing, including copies of itself - and  therefore my first introduction to the idea of a world without scarcity. A future of abundance. This was also the subject of a superb radio one-off made by James Burke back in December 2017, which I've been meaning to write about for two Decembers, and which you can still listen to here. Burke is an extraordinary speaker. He presented the moon landings on British television in 1969, back when the BBC were choosing Arts graduates to present science shows and Science graduates to present the arts, and his show "Connections", made fifty years ago now, did an extraordinary job of predicting the future whilst also offering a revolutionary idea of the past (for example, it wasn't the invention of printing press that revolutionised literacy, Burke argues, but the invention of disposable linen underwear, whose recycling could finally facilitate the mass production of paper!) He has form, in other words, but his predictions from 2017 are pretty similar to those made fifty-four minutes into this lecture from 2009, which Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley and I were lucky enough to hear an unforgettable version of at the Royal Society in 2012, all of us agreeing it was one of the best live gigs any of us had attended:

 I wonder, though, if Burke's changed any of his predictions in the past two years. Because the one thing he didn't account for, I think, is the one human need no amount of technology can be guaranteed to assuage: attention. In Burke's world of abundance, where no one is now required to interact with each other, no one does. But people do seem to need attention, even more so since the internet has given us such a dangerously unweildy tool for attempting to command it. Which brings me to my second prediction from 2009: an article written by David Mitchell calling into serious question Gordon Brown's assertion that online commenting was "democratising". In it David quotes a superb idea from a mutual friend of ours, Jon Dryden Taylor:

 He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It just goes to show you can't be too careful!" It's perfect; it seems lighthearted without being a joke. It's vaguely pertinent to almost any subject without meaning a thing. It's the ideal oil for the internet's troubled waters.

 Jon's management of online traffic has always been exemplorary. He hardly ever blogs for example, but when he does, my God it's unmissable (there's a link on the right, under "where I get my ideas from"). And I think he's right, as well. This decade has gone to show you can't be too careful, which is something to carry into the new year, along with all the plans we'll make about how to cope with having everything we've always wanted.

*The letters page of Transmetropolitan was responsible for one of my favourite all-time quotes too: "No, you're only entitled to an informed opinion". Good times. People don't like being told off. Fascism thrives on division. Happy Twenty-twenty! X