David Weinberger's Buzz Soup:

"PREDICTIONS, LISTS AND VIOLENCE"

By David Weinberger
Editor, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization

Oh, what a season for predictions we just passed through. Predictions and lists. In fact, we're all thoroughly sick of them already, aren't we. Frankly, given a choice between finishing off last Christmas' eggnog and hearing another set of predictions, I'd go for the eggnog. And I hate eggnog.

I have no problem with our fascination with lists. It started as a fad in the 1970s with The Book of Lists, was enshrined as a post-modern comic technique by David Letterman, and now is a staple form of understanding. In fact, as syllogisms were to the Greeks, lists are to us moderns. Although lists look like a way to give ordinal evaluations to phenomena that often don't lend themselves to this -- is there a moose hair of sense in an argument over who was the greatest composer of the century, Stravinksy or John Lennon? -- in fact, these lists are about remembering, not ranking. And there's nothing wrong with that. They bring back to mind events, ideas, people that swept past our attention and would otherwise not have been recalled.

Predictions are a different matter.

As we all know, predictions look at the present to try to anticipate the future. (This leaves out predictions based on ancient mistakes about the position of the stars and the reading of the entrails of recently dismissed CFOs.) And usually that's a useful guide; the old factoid is that you can beat the prediction rates of the weather forecasters just by predicting that tomorrow will be much like today.

But suppose the climate's changed dramatically so that one day isn't like another. Snow is followed by hail is followed by a tropical heat wave is followed by a rain of frogs. At that point, predictions based on the present are worse than useless. They can serve the purpose of tranquilizing us against the fact of change.

And that, of course, is how matters stand at the turn of the Millennium. We have never experienced a period of such rapid change. And the Web has introduced a fundamental discontinuity. Or maybe it hasn't. But we don't know, and living in a time of change and not knowing if you're living in a time of change work out to be the same thing when it comes to predictions.

Making predictions about the future of the Web in particular is a way of telling ourselves that the changes are still within the realm of the predictable. But they're not. Predictions are a type of denial: tomorrow will be at least pretty much like today. Yeah, you wish!

Worse, predicting the future can be a way of trying to control it. Since the future is what we make, limiting our openness to change, setting our expectations on the level horizon ahead of us, affects the future we are trying to make together.

Here's an example. How do we predict TV and the Web will converge? Will we have separate devices -- one for TV -- one for browsing, or will we have a single device that integrates both? Make your prediction. But the truth is that we don't know and we can't know because the Web is unleashing new forces. TV makes couch potatoes. We're unable to talk back to the broadcasters, and, more important, we in the audience are unable to talk with one another while watching. The Web is a phenomenal medium for enabling huge numbers of people to communicate behind the backs of broadcasters. So, the commercial that's insulting to me and to you now via the Web we can make fun of together. This type of active audience simply has never existed before on this scale. And that changes the nature of broadcasting, and thus of TV, putting power -- mainly the power of laughter and derision -- into the hands of the market, the audience. So, how will TV and the Web converge? Who knows? We can't know because the Web's going to change the nature of broadcast TV to shape it to the will of a new type of active audience that's just beginning to emerge. Make a prediction makes it sound as if it's predictable ... as if nothing fundamental is changing. Predictions support the status quo.

So here's a New Millennium resolution: Let's stop predicting the future. Instead, let's just build it together.

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The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.