When we launched WIRED, we were accused of being Panglossian optimists. I embraced that as a badge of honor. The Digital Revolution was reinventing everything, and that was good. Twenty-five years on, that optimism is no longer justified—it’s necessary. Indeed: militant optimism.
WIRED’s premise was that the most powerful people on the planet weren’t the politicians or generals, priests or pundits, but the people creating and using new technology. The state and politics were obsolete. We no longer needed to subcontract our responsibility for society to distant capitals. By using the new tools now radically empowering individuals, we could, ourselves, work directly on making a better world.
Of course, the entrenched institutions being displaced weren’t giving up. Like the mainstream media. We used to joke that The New York Times would run a weekly variant of the headline “Internet: Threat or Menace” (this despite having the best reporter in the Valley, John Markoff.
In the face of knee-jerk opposition, we developed a knee-jerk rejoinder: Change Is Good. Of course, we knew that all change wasn’t going to be good. But it was likely better than the alternative; so much was obsolete and needed to be swept away. Our position was, as the song went, that the future was so bright we had to wear shades.
And then the dotcom bubble burst.
And then came 9/11. Our model of a decentralized organization using PCs and networks to change the world had spawned a nightmare: the young men of al Qaeda launching asymmetrical war to bring down the last superpower. Our societal response was equivalent to the zoo monkey who, finding the cage door open, peers around, then closes it and retreats to the safety of his cage. In the human ape’s case, retreat to the safety of the state and politics. The subcontractors were back in charge.
And the optimism that had been the foundation of the Digital Revolution went dormant. Replaced by a pessimism so pervasive as to have become conventional wisdom.
I went to a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few years ago thrown by a pioneering academic and her connected wife. The assembled group of brilliant young professors and researchers promised a stimulating evening.
It was anything but. After the opening small talk devolved into the political, the air was full of complaints about inequality and poverty, racism, sexism, fascist Republicans, and how, in general, everything is going to hell. I stifled myself as long as I could, but finally I piped up—that’s not what’s really going on. Have you actually looked at the numbers? For the past 25 years, the world has only been getting better. People are healthier, wealthier, more educated, and living longer, better lives than humans ever have.
Silence. All eyes on me. Who threw the skunk in the room?
Then the shitstorm began. Of course, you’re wrong, things are not better, just look around—and it’s all just going to get worse yadda yadda. Shut me right up.
Later I reflected on how I should have responded.
First, politics—which has now come to infect all aspects of our lives—isn’t a rational response to reality. It’s partially about currying social favor with desired cohorts; but, worse, it’s emotional pathology.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich wrote that politics can be the outward manifestation of personal emotional problems. Instead of working on our own issues, some instead work them out on society at large. (Sound familiar?)
We’re living through a moment when this phenomenon is vivid. The unease among elites of the first world, the palpable emotional distress of our friends, the media’s daily two minutes of hate, the social media flash mobs, the tribalism, the way every aspect of our lives has become political.
Good thing breakthroughs in the human condition happen outside of politics. History is the record of political failure. Progress is the march of science and technology.
Just think of the past 100 years: mass communication, penicillin, refrigerators, computing, commercial air travel, cheap birth control, PCs, the internet, smartphones, gene sequencing, fracking—altogether producing more human freedom and wealth than wars or laws.
And yet today we’re prisoners of unrelenting pessimism. We won the revolution, but it never really ended, and we’re still living with its unfolding consequences. Twenty-five years of disruption have been difficult to digest. Especially when the media practitioners who shape our perceptions live in existential dread of losing their jobs in the digital typhoon inundating their obsolete world.
How do we shed the pessimism that surrounds us?
Start by recognizing we have so much cause for optimism. Even more so than when Jane and I started WIRED to cover the Digital Revolution. Today individuals using new technologies are fomenting no fewer than five revolutions:
1. The neo-biological revolution is already curing, improving, and extending life.
2. The energy revolution—nuclear, fracking, solar—is making the good life possible for more people around the planet.
3. The blockchain allows friction-free transactions between not just financial institutions but all people and devices needing to communicate with one another. Imagine capping the social media monopolies by reclaiming our data.
4. Space. The sci-fi future of working and living in space is happening with each SpaceX and Blue Origin launch.
5. Augmented intelligence. Not “artificial,” but how Doug Engelbart envisioned our relationship with computers: AI doesn’t replace humans. It offers idiot-savant assistants that enable us to become the best humans we can be.
If we want to make a better world for our children, we need to believe that the future will be better. As Noam Chomsky said: “Unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”
Optimism today isn’t only justified—it’s a strategy for living. Change Is Good.
Militant optimism.
Louis Rossetto (@rossetto) was the founder, with Jane Metcalfe, of WIRED, and served as editor in chief until 1998.
This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.
MORE FROM WIRED@25: 1993-1998
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- Jeff Bezos and the 10,000-year clock: Beyond civilization
- Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl: 3 radical paths to equality
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Join us for a four-day celebration of our anniversary in San Francisco, October 12–15. From a robot petting zoo to provocative onstage conversations, you won't want to miss it. More information at www.Wired.com/25.
