In his latest book, 'Life After Google,' futurist
and entrepreneur George Gilder warns that Silicon Valley's big tech companies
will soon be undone by their own arrogance and new technologies such as
blockchain.
George Gilder
is the archetypal disruptive futurist author. Unlike many a denizen of Silicon
Valley, Gilder is a theist who possesses a teleological view of knowledge and
power, championing the idea that the all is not directionless, but is headed
somewhere ultimately meaningful. As such, he’s been a noted proponent of
intelligent design.
In his long
and influential career (he’s 78), Gilder has always been a writer given to
aphorism and oracular pronouncement. Sometimes these nuggets are profound and
suggestive. They make you feel smart, like Neo about to control the Matrix,
just by reading them. But sometimes they leave a reader befuddled as to what
the heck Gilder might even be talking about, much less whether it is true or not.
Nevertheless, in previous
works Gilder has found a way to weave his insights and maxims together into
powerful and coherent arguments. This is most evident in his famous book, “Wealth and Poverty” (1981),
where he argued for the then-new idea of supply side economics, and advanced a
moral case for capitalism.
For an updated take on
Gilder’s wonderful, Zeitgeist-contrarian conception of money, politics,
knowledge, and power, check out “Knowledge and Power” (2013)
and “The Scandal of Money” (2016).
In these, and in his new book “Life After Google:The Fall of
Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy,” Gilder adroitly
incorporates his theistic, techno-triumphalist take on the universe.
The Great Unravelling
Perhaps because
he is attempting to pull together a thesis from observations made on the messy
edge of technological innovation, “Life After Google,” feels a bit more
scattershot than what has come before. Some chapters are excursions into the
weeds that don’t contribute much to the overall direction of the book beyond
serving as ding-dongs of the bell of doom that Gilder is ringing for our Google
and Facebook dominated information culture.
Yet in the
end, Gilder makes a compelling case that the information revolution is moving
into an age of decentralization and greater freedom both for entrepreneurs and
for those of us who just want to use information technology to make our jobs
and lives easier or better. In Gilderian oracular fashion, he calls this
process “The Great Unravelling.”
The problem
with the internet is that it was born without much of an immune system.
According to Gilder, this is because the information revolution has been going
through a difficult adolescent stage embodied in Google and the other net
giants. Like many smart teenagers, Google thinks it knows everything (or, to be
kind, its engineers aspire for their system to know everything, and think they
are getting mighty close). It may seem at times that it does.
That is not
only an illusion, says Gilder, it is an illusion that companies such as Google,
Facebook, and Amazon (to an extent) have bought into to the point of no return.
It is already proving to be their undoing. The process has begun and is
accelerating.
Google’s
philosophy, says Gilder, is to conglomerate everything into itself in a huge
database representation of the known universe, and then to perform operations,
such as search and often more insidious data rifling, on that big lump of
everything it controls.
As Gilder points out, the
attempt was doomed from the start. In fact, we’ve had proof it would be since
1930. In the actual discipline of philosophy, as opposed to the Silicon Valley
version, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to derive the
entirety of logic and mathematical knowledge from a set of self-consistent
propositions back in the 1910s in their enormous work “Principia Mathematica.”
The Halting Problem
Then along
came Kurt Gödel. The Austrian mathematician (who later became an American) blew
it to pieces. Gödel proved in empathic fashion that no mathematical-logical
system can ever be built from a finite set of premises or be derived from only
those principles. It is necessary that every logical system contain premises
from outside the system. Induction, and the informed intuition that produces
it, are as necessary as deduction.
Gödel’s proof
of this truth—and Gödel showed it is true in every case—eventually sent Russell
into despair. Whitehead got over it, and zoomed off into other realms, such as
process philosophy. The Principia Mathematica became a historical curiosity.
In 1936, Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem got
mathematician Alan Turing thinking about the universal computing architecture
he was in the process of discovering. Computer programs were just as
susceptible to incompleteness and unpredictable outcomes when, in the course of
computation, they refer back to themselves. This is called the Halting Problem.
Google’s
worldview is built on the philosophical certainty that algorithms, the
“if-then” logical elements of computer programming, are supreme. Algorithms are
made of numbers and logic. Gödel proved you cannot in principle build a
self-contained system of logic and math. There is always a system encompassing
your system and a system outside your system that necessarily impinges on the
basic rules of your system. We usually call this state of things the real
world.
Encrypted by Biology
The real
world is much more like language than math, but analogies fail and it is really
just like itself. The real world is creative, and this creativity is not
random. It cannot be wholly described by either algorithms or statistics. At
least the real world outside of Palo Alto, California cannot. Out here in
flyover country, the world is full of meaning as well as information.
Modern
cryptography is built on the idea of a subset of computations that are not
reversible. Algorithms are reversible. But for cryptographic “hash,” you have
to invent or discover a separate algorithm, totally unrelated to the first, to
get back to your original conditions. Usually it’s impossible, or highly
improbable within the lifespan of the universe. For those with a philosophy
bounded by logical operands alone, such results may look like the product of
random choices. But they aren’t.
That’s the essence of the mathematical model behind [Google’s]
search engine. You are a random function of Google. But you are not random; you
are a unique genetic entity that cannot be factored back into an egg and a
sperm. You are unbreakably encrypted by biology.
According to
Gilder, The World According to Google is about to be disrupted:
Google and its world are looking in the wrong direction. They are
actually in jeopardy, not from an all-powerful artificial intelligence, but
from a distributed, peer-to-peer revolution supporting human intelligence—the
blockchain and new crypto-efflorescence.
Gilder calls
this brave new world the “cryptocosm.”
Blockchain vs. The Behemoths
This
unraveling might seem unlikely on the face of it. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google
has built an enormous server farm powered by a hydroelectric dam and water
cooled. Amazon and other cloud providers have built similar behemoths. Like old
steel towns such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham that grew up in places where iron
ore, coal , and water were found, these “Siren Servers,” as Gilder terms them
(because they seem to draw all data to them like Rhine bargemen to the
Lorelei), are often located at a cheap, near-inexhaustible power source such as
a hydroelectric dam, and near a remote water supply for cooling a vast amount
of waste heat.
These Sirens
have the role the middleman in their information dealing. They are enormous
warehouses and counting houses for data. But the basic strength of the
cryptocosm is that it gets rid of the middleman. It does this by a special
application of the cryptographic technique called the blockchain. A blockchain
is an encrypted history of data or events, such as a record of transactions. It
can’t be hacked or altered in principle. The most famous application is
bitcoin, that attempt to create the techno equivalent of the Gold Standard.
Gilder has
ambivalent feelings about the ultimate utility of bitcoin. He does, however, go
on at length concerning “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the pseudonymous architect of
bitcoin, whose ultimate identity is a point of endless contention among the
bitcoin-smitten, and of perhaps lesser interest to a reader struggling to get
his or her hands on the more immediately graspable versions of money. Whatever
his doubts about bitcoin, Gilder is convinced that a new day has arrived for
the information economy as a whole with blockchain technology.
Blockchains, hashchains, blockstacks, smart contracts, token
issues, and cryptocurrencies are new ways to address the evils of the Google
Age: porous Internet security, unmoored money, regulatory overreach, network
concentration, officious delays, and diminishing returns of big data. All of
these problems derive from the hypertrophy of trusted third parties that need
to be collapsed into simpler systems controlled by individual agents closer to
the actual point of service.
Gilder cites
a broad array of startups and baby companies that are blockchain-based. One of
these is Goblin, which touts itself as “AirBnB for computers,” with its idea to
harness the unused calculating power of computers distributed throughout the
world with instant agreements between buyer and seller negotiated, produced,
and enforced by “smart contracts” based on blockchain encryption. If this or
similar schemes prove out, Amazon and Google’s immensely lucrative cloud
servers might become obsolete within a few years. Or a few months.
Ideologies, Indulgences, Entitlements,
and Biases
One of the
principle uses for bitcoin and other blockchain currencies (other than
Tulip-Bubble-like speculation and buying drugs on the Dark Web) has been to
skirt the Sarbanes-Oxley law that has nearly killed off initial public
offerings for small tech companies in the last decade and to seek funding via
initial coin offerings, ICOs.
Gilder is
aware that government will not be able to resist regulating and taxing such
trading, but claims that blockchain transactions by their very nature—no
middleman, no government-fiat money changing hands—are difficult to capture.
Gilder’s
golden boy in this regard is Vitalik Buterin, founder of Etherium, and creator
of its blockchain currency, the “ether.” Born in 1994, Buterin has taken his
place among the entrepreneur prodigies of our age. Buterin got his break in
2013 when he was chosen as one of the recipients of a Thiel Fellowship, the
“anti-Rhodes Scholarships” offered by legendary venture capitalist Peter Thiel
for bright kids under twenty to escape the drive-killing nonsense of the
academic credentialing industry. In 2014, Ethereum was founded, Buterin created
a fully formed computer language for creating blockchain tech, and the first ether
was issued. It has since become a major alternative to bitcoin itself.
Gilder, a
long-time Thiel crony, is personally involved as an investor in the 1517
venture firm which invests in Thiel Fellow startups, as well as those by other
high school and college-aged company founders. Gilder spends a portion of the
book shamelessly trumpeting the accomplishments of his 1517 companies and their
youthful founders, but it is his deep involvement with this cutting edge of
entrepreneurs that lends authenticity to his claim that the cryptocosm, and the
distributed, peer-to-peer internet it makes possible, is in the midst of being
born.
Google and
the other Siren’s days are numbered. They will have to compete, but will likely
not be able to overcome their centralizing mindsets derived from elite
university culture, which Gilder adroitly characterizes in the book.
Focusing on stopping progress, barring new power plants,
dismantling chemical facilities, mobilizing against Israel, and other
reactionary pursuits, Ivy institutions are pursuing the fancies of a declining
intellectual and business elite, full of chemophobic nags and luddite
lame-ducks quacking away on their miasmic pools of old money as the world
whirls past them.
Google’s
soft-socialist philosophy that everything should be free as long as Google
controls everything and sees to its just distribution is redolent of the
universities in which so many of its founders and employees were educated:
“Google’s system of the world reverberates with the ideologies, indulgences,
entitlements, and biases of the academy,” says Gilder.
And it’s all
coming down, sooner rather than later, because the nature of the internet and
the information economy is about to undergo a transformative change.
Google, perhaps the world’s leading technology company, should
know this better than anyone. But the mythology suffusing the Google system of
the world is now a serious threat to Google itself as a technology leader. In
the evolving technological economy, shaped by cryptographic innovations, Google
is going to have to compete again. Preening over its avoidance of evil, its
free goods, and its clout in Washington will do no good. It is going to
confront a new world where its center will not hold.
And even at
78, George Gilder is convinced that he’ll be around to see that future happen.
Correction: Gilder is an early
investor in 1517, not a founder.
Tony Daniel is the author of
11 fantasy and science fiction novels, the latest of which is young adult
fantasy, "The Amber Arrow." He’s also an award-winning short story
writer. Daniel has co-written screenplays for monster movies that appear on the
SyFy and Chiller Channels including the films "Beneath" and "Flu
Birds." Daniel is also a senior editor at Baen Books. His website is tonydaniel.com.
