An article published in the July 1997 edition of the US monthly Wired, shared on Reddit in recent days and immediately taken up by various sites and by some journalists on social media, is attracting attention for the accuracy of some hypotheses formulated in a paragraph in the margin of the article. Regarding the effects of technological and economic progress in the 1990s, the authors of the article – entitled The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980-2020 – listed ten possible events that could have upset the predictions of prolonged prosperity. “An uncontrollable pandemic – a modern flu epidemic or its equivalent – spreads like wildfire, killing more than 200 million people,” was one of the imagined events, along with others such as a rise in the price of energy and a climate crisis. The list of possible negative scenarios counterbalanced the optimistic picture outlined by the rest of the article, written by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden: “We are facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world,” was written on the cover of that number of Wired.
“The future, of course, could turn out to be very different”, was then written in the introduction to the list contained in the paragraph in the margin of the article.
I remember this magazine cover from back in the day and it's remained lodged in my memory as 90s techno utopian insanity but hoooo boy is the body of the article a helluva punchline pic.twitter.com/sw59e5HsFQ
– ???????????????? Hieronymus Burps ???????? and 68 others (@hieronymus_burp) November 19, 2021
1 – Tensions between the US and China degenerate into a new Cold War – trespassing into a Hot War.
2 – New technologies prove to be a failure. They simply do not bring about the productivity increase or the expected big economic boost.
3 – Russia transforms itself into a mafia-run kleptocracy, or isolates itself in an almost communist nationalism that threatens Europe.
4 – The process of European integration comes to a halt. Eastern and Western Europe do not initiate a reunification and even the process of the European Union fails.
5 – A serious environmental crisis causes a global climate change which, among other things, interrupts the food supply – causing a large rise in prices everywhere and sporadic famines.
6 – A sharp rise in crime and terrorism is forcing the world to retreat in fear. People who constantly feel the risk of ending up in an explosion or being robbed are not in the mood to open a dialogue and be open.
7 – The cumulative increase in pollution causes a dramatic increase cancer, overwhelming the unprepared health system.
8 – Energy prices skyrocket. Demonstrations in the Middle East cut off oil supplies and alternative energy sources fail to materialize.
9 – An uncontrollable pandemic – a modern flu epidemic or its equivalent – spreads like wildfire killing over 200 million people.
10 – A social and cultural backlash stops progress. Human beings have to choose whether to move forward. They just might not …
In the remainder of the article, that is the long prevailing part, Wired hypothesized that two converging trends – a growth in international political and economic cooperation and a sharp acceleration of technological developments, particularly those relating to the Internet – would lead to an era of prosperity without precedents: “they will transform our world into the beginnings of a new world civilization, a civilization of civilizations, which will emerge in the next century”. The authors added that it was not exactly a definitive forecast but rather “informed forecasts”, useful for “shaping a positive vision of the future, that of the long boom”.
As observed by many people and journalists who have commented on the article in recent days, several current events suggest that – almost 25 years after the publication of that article – the most exact part of Schwartz and Leyden's predictions, albeit inaccurate in some proportions, was that contained in the list of negative hypotheses.
In many cases they were rather vague hypotheses, reading which it is easy today to focus only on the parts that have come true while ignoring those denied by the facts. Many things obviously went differently than what Wired predicted, and judging others as “come true” can be in some cases rather forced and due to suggestion, a bit like in horoscopes. But there is no doubt that some formulations were surprisingly foreboding.
The coronavirus pandemic, a reality with which the world has been forced to measure itself for almost two years, has so far caused – according to official data, which are a low estimate – the contagion of over 260 million and the death of 5.2 million of people, a number evidently limited by the spread of vaccines for COVID-19 and fortunately much lower than that imagined by Wired.
Apart from the “uncontrollable pandemic”, other possible negative events imagined by Wired also come very close to the reality of 2021. The worsening of diplomatic relations between the United States and China is one of the most discussed foreign policy topics in the last five years. part, since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Brexit has been interpreted by many as a clear example of the failure of the “European Union process”. Vladimir Putin's management of power in Russia, who at the time of the Wired article was still an unknown government official, has often been accused of fostering corruption for the benefit of the oligarchs and has been characterized by growing recourse. to nationalism as an instrument of political propaganda.
Other predictions have not caught us: health systems have not been overwhelmed by cases of cancer caused by pollution, and crime and crime continue to decline for the most part in Western countries. At the end of the 1990s it was probably not so difficult, then, to imagine that climate change would become increasingly universally recognized as a global crisis, even if today attempts to counter it and slow it down are the subject of much more debates, alarmed conferences and public appeals. than they were 25 years ago.
International terrorism, especially in the early 2000s and then in the middle of the last decade, was effectively one of the main sources of political destabilization around the world, from the West to the Middle East to Africa. A severe shortage of goods and products, only partly linked to the pandemic, is today at the root of a commented and worrying supply chain crisis around the world, and in the same way – but for reasons very different from those hypothesized by Wired – a major increase in energy prices is underway.
Leyden, one of the two authors of the 1997 Wired article, commented on the sudden circulation of the paragraph and the interest aroused by the article, arguing that some essential parts of that economic “boom” foreseen at the time have nevertheless materialized, despite the possible setbacks imagined by him and Schwartz.
This is one of the recent spate of Tweets going around that picks up on how close my co-author and I came in the mid- 1990s to pointing out the 10 main things that could disrupt the world by 2020. Some version of all 10 played out – yet the key parts of The Long Boom kept going. https://t.co/MczCLQssYe
– Peter Leyden (@peteleyden) November 23, 2021
