While only sheer paranoia would persuade us that Verne's vision of the future was wholly accurate, like many oracles he understood enough to anticipate correctly at least one aspect of the world to come. In a world where capital is the fuel of nearly every endeavor, the job that Michel rejects is held today by thousands of people around the world, under the name of stock analyst, fund manager, investment adviser, strategic consultant and, most auspiciously, futurist. Moreover, as the future hasn't transpired to be as monolithic as Verne envisioned, those employed in these fields aren't nearly the toiling peons Michel Dufrenoy disdained to join. At the end not only of a century but of a millennium, the future is a matter of serious speculation, its trajectory and variables a matter of serious conjecture, the ability to divine its path a valuable skill. The Future, it seems, is big business.
 

And the dominant vision of this future has been dystopic. Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and Vonnegut's Player Piano were among the books outside of sci-fi that have shaped our worst fears about the direction this world might take. As reading has declined, movies have taken over from literature, delivering the nightmarish scenarios of the Alien and Terminator films, and the highly influential Blade Runner. This would hardly be surprising, as the half-century since the Second World War has been dominated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, a threat now joined by new visions of hell on earth as disease and environmental catastrophe are added to the list of wounds we seem to be inflicting on ourselves and the planet. 

But this is only one half of the conventional wisdom. No person or society can live entirely without hope, and so there has always been a market for optimistic scenarios. Indeed, a recent wave of optimism has been sweeping through the business community, inspired by what seem to be remarkable changes in the way we communicate. Fortunes have been made not only by selling new goods in the marketplace, but even by selling the promise of a whole new marketplace. Companies have risen from insignificance to near-monopolistic importance in markets that didn't exist twenty years ago. Our very vocabulary has been changed as new words like software, modem and e-mail have been coined to describe what were once obscure technical concepts. The fetish of all this change is the computer.

Once an intimidating monster that threatened to supplant humanity, the merciless agent of redundancy in Vonnegut's Player Piano, the computer has become a ubiquitous item on desks and in homes. Fiction, though, has become a poor delineator of this "revolution," and instead we have racks of monthly computer magazines, business journals devoting acres of editorial space to the industry's new billionaires and their companies, and a new genre of literature that has sprung from a professional need to keep up with the changes and plot a course into the future. Michel Dufrenoy might not have applied for a position in this new world, either, but he might at least have appreciated the romance with which the "futurists" in these publications depict the coming century. In the work of even the driest of these writers, there is a palpable sense of anticipation, of Utopia finally within our grasp, while in others, there would seem to be nothing in Verne or Wells that isn't on the verge of being fulfilled by a beige-cased business appliance whose potential has been barely tapped.

If only it were so true, or so simple.
 

Twenty years later, the machines Bush had described were in existence, in the service of government, science, and business. Huge and complex, maintained by teams of expensively-trained technicians, they had names like UNIVAC and EDSAC but were generically called computers, a name Bush couldn't have anticipated, much as he couldn't have known about the transistor that made the machines he imagined so much smaller and cheaper to build, thus making them commercially viable, if only for the well-financed. In May of 1964, The Atlantic published another article, by Martin Greenberger, an associate professor at MIT. "The Computers of Tomorrow" acknowledged its debt to Bush, and went on to predict computer-driven money markets, communication networks, and the "information utility". Greenberger's tone was far more rapt: "By 2000 AD man should have a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence yet devised." 

Thirty-one years later, Lou Gerstner, the chairman of IBM, makes the keynote address at Comdex, the computer industry's annual trade show. In the decades since Bush and Greenberger's articles, the computer has become all-pervasive, not only as an "information utility" but in the popular consciousness, spawning aggregate miles and months of massed commentary in the news media, and a parallel publishing industry devoted solely to the burgeoning developments in a technology that is smaller, cheaper, and more accessible than Bush or Greenberger could have imagined. Needless to say, Gerstner feels the powerful momentum behind himself and his industry, and his tone is commensurately inspired: "We will improve the world, and the way we work, the way we communicate, live and learn as people...We have grown, we have innovated, and we have prospered at a rate unsurpassed by any other. It's been an amazing, breathtaking ride. It can continue—and accelerate—if we remember that our future rests on how well we respond to the total needs of society and of our customers all around the world." Flushed with pride, and anticipating the deafening roar of applause, Gerstner lowers his voice and intones, "Thank you, and I hope you have a great day at Comdex."

At the end of the twentieth century, no other product of our age is as synonymous with the prosperous, thriving future as the computer. It has replaced the car, the airplane, the robot, and even the spaceship as our fetish object. As an icon, it's almost universally recognizable: a small screen perched on top of a box, with the rectangular grid of a keyboard in the foreground. And yet, what are these elements but a jumble of parts, bits of pre-existing technologies wired together around a poorly understood package of hardware, animated by an even less-tangible impulse of software? Like the technology itself, the culture that has sprung up around it is a shotgun marriage of ideology and utility, uniquely a product of its age, where discreet elements placed in proximity gain emotional power and persuasiveness. Like the movies that are considered the art of the age, computer culture relies on its speed to overcome the contradictions and inconsistencies that would hobble it.
 

A year later, Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil made much the same argument from the perspective of an apostate technologist: "Perhaps our networked reality isn't a universal doorway to freedom. Might it be a distraction from reality? An ostrich hole to divert our attention and resources from social problems? A misuse of technology that encourages passive rather than active participation?" More recently, an essay by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, "Unstable Networks," questioned the ability of the Internet to transcend mundane physical reality: "Isn't it far more likely that we'll get the Internet that we deserve? Cyberspace isn't a world all its own like Jupiter or Pluto, it's a fun-house mirror of the society that breeds it. Like most mirrors it shows whatever it's given: on any day, that's mostly human banality. Cyberspace is not a fairy realm of magical transformations. It's a realm of transformations all right, but since human beings aren't magical fairies you can pretty much scratch the magic and the fairy parts."

Still, these arguments are hardly about to negate the blare of hype. In the case of Stoll and Birkerts, the arguments rely on sentiment and perspective for their appeal, and on an idea of the past that is hardly persuasive in an age that knows little of history other than what mediated technological art forms like movies choose to depict. They draw on the same liberal humanism as Gerstner's battle-cry to the troops, and only offer the quixotic prospect of opposing "progress" as a solution. Moreover, they are unable to speak to the concepts of "efficiency," "expediency," and "market-driven forces" that demand the technology and fund the computer industry.
 

"Openness" is, of course, the key to all of this: "A positive scenario can inspire us through what will inevitably be traumatic times ahead."

"So suspend your disbelief. Open up to the possibilities."
 

This time, the threats to the Long Boom are denied a seat at the table, and the opinions are no longer offered as speculation but as articles of faith. Change is Good, and Wired is about Change, so Wired is Good: the morality is self-evident. The philosophy beneath it is a fascinating marriage of free-market neo-liberal economics and millennial mysticism, Darwin and Adam Smith, libertarianism and recovered communitarianism, ecological Gaia theory and technofetishism—and it is meant for both apostate and true believer.
 

Nicholas Negroponte, for example, is fond of describing the change as happening on the level of "bits" versus "atoms"; that is, in the digital realm as opposed to the physical. Information, being composed largely of ideas, concepts, and reported facts, is a digital product, and trade in it will, by necessity, overcome borders, laws, tariffs, and even nationalities. It's persuasive rhetoric, especially for those already dealing in information: journalists, politicians, traders, academics, and artists. In the future, it is understood, access to information will be the criterion for determining social classes. With that in mind, we owe it to future generations to make the technology cheap and available. Some money will be made of course, but what a perfect marriage of commerce and social philanthropy!

Even a cogent book like Montreal writer Matthew Friedman's Fuzzy Logic: Dispatches from the Information Revolution relies on the meaning of "information" to be self-evident. Talking to Kenyan systems administrator Crispin Sikuku, they agree that the next century's prime resource is to be scrutinized and quantified: 
 

The idea that "millions of books" will be available to students is frequently invoked in defence of computer-aided education, in spite of the fact that, while many library systems have put their card catalogues on-line, it is both prohibitively expensive and unimaginably time-consuming for whole texts, never mind whole libraries, to be made available for downloading—and this doesn't even begin to address the issue of copyright or even the physical aspect of reading a book off of a computer screen. As Nicholas Negroponte admits: "Even where computers are omnipresent, the current interface is primitive—clumsy at best, and hardly something with which you might wish to curl up in bed." 

Where computers have failed to improve educational standards, it's because the equipment is old, and the interface inadequate, Gates states. The solution is to spend more money on computers in schools. He states emphatically that this will not replace skilled teachers. Never mind that education has been cut back drastically just as a youthful demographic boom is swarming through the system, or that another demographic boom—one that can vote—is about to drain the other end of the public purse in the form of pensions and health care. Never mind that the loudest accusation aimed at the Internet is the range of material it hosts that would hardly be welcome in the classroom. These are minor problems, that can be solved by an industry known for its ingenuity. Never mind that Gates is a leading member of that industry, and stands to enrich himself, along with many of his peers, from the school market. Could this be what he means by "Friction-Free Capitalism"?
 

A huge demographic of children are passing through school systems all over the world. They are "connected," in Schwartz's opinion, through the network of cheap electronics and satellite dishes that make products of the entertainment industry, American or local, in demand everywhere. Schwartz admits that he, like many futurists and planners, learned of the power of demography from their own generation, the baby boom. But this demographic is polyglot and largely poor. While correctly imagining that this may tend to breed desperation and cynicism, even violent resentment against the prosperous, he states: "As a scenario-planner, this type of pessimistic image always inspires the question in me, What would have to take place for this image not to come true?" That goal in mind, he constructs a version of the future based on the best possible outcomes, which include liberalized immigration policies (implemented, of course, by the West), ever cheaper and faster communications technologies available globally (unimpeded by regulation), and the kind of urge to succeed associated with the aspirant middle classes of a generation ago. It's a world of "video-cafes" where teenagers go on teleconference "dates". 

It's easy to make fun of Schwartz's optimal scenario, but it comes from a deep need that is articulated by the book's afterword: an open letter to his newborn son. "Your future will be filled with ample challenges and inspiring goals," he assures the infant. "It will be a good future, a future of good people." 
 

Yet ultimately, Schwartz and Tapscott's vision of the future is as sentimental as Sven Birkerts's and Clifford Stoll's reservations about its direction. It would be just as intolerable for the future to be a
mundane extrapolation from the present as it would be to lead to a nightmarish dystopia. Futurists like Schwartz scold us to use our imaginations, but admit that many scenarios are largely products of what their authors would prefer to see. "Globalization," for example, is often seen as a by-product of the triumphant free market. But no one imagines that we've only seen the beginning of the process of globalization, and that its relation to the free market is in fact that of the proverbial chicken and the egg. One is still nascent and immature, and the other a complete unknown. No amount of imagination can divine a future from either.
 

With the collapse of the markets in Asia at the end of 1997, you might have expected a sort of mea culpa from Thurow. His article, "Asia: The Collapse and the Cure", published in the February 5th issue of the New York Review of Books, was just as careful an analysis of the situation as was The Future of Capitalism. But the gist was that the collapse, when it came, was unforeseeable except to insiders, whose implication guaranteed silence. "What is clear by now is that crashes are not set off by outside speculators who see the internal weaknesses and attack. The first investors who leave the market are always the local investors who have the best information."

The irony is profound: while markets communicate with increasing speed, reacting faster than we could have imagined before, the information that triggered them is already old, a relic of the past. The information is there, but until we wire not only every office, home, and school but, beyond that, every mind and conscience, we will not have access to it at the peak of its value. Information that carries the promise of the future inevitably becomes devalued currency by the time it reaches us, as poor an investment as a collapsed share or a block of baht or won. We would all love to live in the future, provided it is a good and prosperous one, but in spite of it all we still merely inhabit that sharp edge of the past known as the present. We would all love to glimpse the future, but we lack the information.