Edwards - Digital Is Destroying Everything

Digital Is Destroying Everything

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edwards, Andrew V., 1956

Digital is destroying everything : what the tech giants wont tell you about how robots, big data, and algorithms are radically remaking your future / Andrew V. Edwards.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-4651-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-4652-2 (electronic)

1. AutomationSocial aspects. 2. TechnologySocial aspects. 3. InternetSocial aspects. 4. Electronic data processingSocial aspects. I. Title.

T14.5.E385 2015

303.48'3dc23

2014048145

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my wife, Luchy,
and my children, Adam and Siena.

There was a cold snap in the winter of 2000, and the New York City sidewalks around Andrews office on John Street were frozen solid and the front doors to his building were buried in what seemed like several feet of snow.

The late 1990s was a time of digital agency rollups, and I had moved to New York to lead a similar effort for a public holding company whose assets included the venerable Harvard Graphics, as well as Renaissance Multimedia, where Andrew was CEO and founder.

I was the executive vice president of the company that just acquired his, and my board had cautioned me to take it easy with this shiny new acquisition and its quirky founder. I had been in technology since the early 1980s and, having just founded and built one of the first web analytic companies (eventually sold to Yahoo), could relate to that advice. Founders can be quirky and touchy. After all, it takes one to know one.

Renaissance was hidden away several floors up a rickety elevator, in a building not far from Wall Street and a block away from the Italianate Federal Reserve. The location was archetypically New York. I met Andrew for the first time in a cold lobby on John Street that winters day.

Andrew is a New Yorkers New Yorker and has a dont mess with me presence at six-foot-four, with black horn-rimmed glasses and a Long Island accent you could cut with a knife. For our first meeting, we crossed the street for lunch to one of those hidden places, down a flight of stairs, and beyond the heavy velvet curtain to a dimly lit restaurant ringed with big guys dressed in tuxedos. This was a place only a New Yorker would know.

We went to a booth behind another curtain, sat down, and ordered a pair of dirty martinis and huge steaks. The waiter closed the curtain. It was like something that Martin Scorsese could have directed.

There I was, seated with this looming guy, having a drink around noon in a part of the city that rarely sees the sun, and wondering where the conversation might go. I remember my caution as I downed a couple of drinks. And I learned that day that Andrew is a Renaissance man somewhat on the order of a digital Kerouac or Dalthat he paints and writes. His paintings are stunning and sarcastic. Overall, he was quite the opposite of the digital guy I thought Id gone to meet.

That was the first chapter.

Andrew believes that life begins where ones comfort zone ends, and he understands that technology breeds disruption. I know that because weve worked together at almost a dozen transformative digital companieslike Webtrends, WebSideStory/Adobe, Unica/IBMand together we co-founded the Digital Analytics Association. We have guided some of the worlds largest brands and youngest, most innovative firms. Weve taken risks on new emerging market sectors and have made some hard calls about picking winners and losers. Mostly we get it right.

He has illuminated this story with a special light of reflection from decades of pioneering digital work, tempered and filtered through the prism of a painters vision and a writers prose. He is able to capture and question the duality of the age. Is digital destroying everything? Or, he suggests, Maybe its all bullshit. With his curious mind, Andrew is at his best when he has a powerful narrative to command.

His book is lyric almost as much as it is a narrative on our digital condition, and the stories and his perceptions are filled with wit and humor fueled by his personal experience.

We have helped shape the digital age. We have helped shape the digital divide. I think the best pages are those where he repeatedly questions the assertion about how wonderful the digital age really is. So, then, is digital destroying everything? The ending has yet to be written.

Andrew shines a bright light on those dark places so that you might decide for yourself.

January 2015

Rand Schulman

Executive-in-Residence for Digital Media and Marketing

University of the Pacific

San Francisco, California

The word digital, in the context typically assigned to it in the current era, has been used more or less as an adjective (digital marketing, digital domain, digital expertise) as a stand-in for descriptives like computerized and information-technology-related. Ive decided to turn the adjective into a noun. Thus, in this book, digital conveys a meaning similar to all disciplines, practices, and products relating to the information-technology industries. Using it thus makes for an encompassing locution that provides clarity and simplicity at once, and also makes for a briefer and more incisive volume.

Digitalthe combined power of Internet Protocolenabled devices, the World Wide Web, cloud computing, cheap storage, algorithms, social media, massive data collection by marketers and governments, mobile apps and wireless connectivityis destroying everything. And yet a new and rather eye-catching garden is sprouting on the blasted heath, often with a suddenness that appalls the unprepared. Much of the culture weve known until recently is already destroyed, and some of whats been toppled has seen us refreshed and reinvigorated by digital, but some has not. And some things we thought would be forever, things weve admired and held dear, are soon, before the march of all things digital, likely to be no more.

When I began working in computers, I regarded the information-technology industry a most amenable way to make a career for myselfindeed, it allowed me to go out on my own, which was fortunate, as I had demonstrated but little skill at working for others. Digital was absorbing, and there was a scent of revolution in the air. It was scrappy, and nobody, including some very large organizations that ought to have known better, thought it would amount to anything, and for several years it seemed as if it might not. I devoted many years to proving the doubters wrong.