Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Advance praise for

The New Digital Age

This is the most importantand fascinatingbook yet written about how the digital age will affect our world. With vivid examples and brilliant analysis, it shows how the internet and other communications technologies will empower individuals and transform the way nations and businesses operate. How will different societies make trade-offs involving privacy, freedom, control, security and the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds? This realistic but deeply optimistic book provides the guideposts. Its both profoundly wise and wondrously readable.

Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

Every day, technological innovations are giving people around the world new opportunities to shape their own destinies. In this fascinating book, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen draw upon their unique experiences to show us a future of rising incomes, growing participation and a genuine sense of communityif we make the right choices today.

Bill Clinton

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced a searching meditation on technology and world order. Even those who disagree with some of their conclusions will learn much from this thought-provoking volume.

Henry A. Kissinger

This is the book I have been waiting for: a concise and persuasive description of technologys impact on war, peace, freedom and diplomacy. The New Digital Age is a guide to the future written by two experts who possess a profound understanding of humanitys altered prospects in a wireless world. There are insights on every page and surprising conclusions (and questions) in every chapter. For experts and casual readers alike, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have produced an indispensable book.

Madeleine Albright

The New Digital Age is must-reading for anyone who wants to truly understand the depths of the digital revolution. Combining the skills of a social scientist and a computer scientist, Schmidt and Cohen blend the technical and the human, the scientific and the political, in ways I rarely saw while in government. They challenge the readers imagination on almost every page.

General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA

This is a book that describes a technological revolution in the making. How we navigate it is a challenge for countries, communities and citizens. There are no two people better equipped to explain what it means than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen.

Tony Blair

Few people in the world are doing more to imagineand buildthe new digital age than Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. With this book, they are looking into their crystal ball and inviting the world to peek in.

Michael R. Bloomberg

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohens thoughtful, well-researched work elucidates the staggering impact of technology on our daily lives, as well as what surprising and incredible developments the future may hold. Readers might be left with more questions than answers, but thats the ideawe are at our best when we ask Whats next?

Elon Musk, cofounder of Tesla Motors and PayPal

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Google Inc. and Jared Cohen

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress

eBook ISBN: 9780307961105

Hardcover ISBN: 9780307957139

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

For Rebecca, to whom we are grateful for her ideas and support, and Aiden, of whom we are envious for the technology he will get to see

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

CHARLES F. KETTERING,

American inventor and businessman

CONTENTS

Advance praise for The New Digital Age

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Our Future Selves

CHAPTER 2 The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting

CHAPTER 3 The Future of States

CHAPTER 4 The Future of Revolution

CHAPTER 5 The Future of Terrorism

CHAPTER 6 The Future oF Conflict, Combat and Intervention

CHAPTER 7 The Future of Reconstruction

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

The Internet is among the few things humans have built that they dont truly understand. What began as a means of electronic information transmissionroom-sized computer to room-sized computerhas transformed into an omnipresent and endlessly multifaceted outlet for human energy and expression. It is at once intangible and in a constant state of mutation, growing larger and more complex with each passing second. It is a source for tremendous good and potentially dreadful evil, and were only just beginning to witness its impact on the world stage.

The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws. This new capacity for free expression and free movement of information has generated the rich virtual landscape we know today. Think of all the websites youve ever visited, all the e-mails youve sent and stories youve read online, all the facts youve learned and fictions youve encountered and debunked. Think of every relationship forged, every journey planned, every job found and every dream born, nurtured and implemented through this platform. Consider too what the lack of top-down control allows: the online scams, the bullying campaigns, the hate-group websites and the terrorist chat rooms. This is the Internet, the worlds largest ungoverned space.

As this space grows larger, our understanding of nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutiae of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our own security. Through the power of technology, age-old obstacles to human interaction, like geography, language and limited information, are falling and a new wave of human creativity and potential is rising. Mass adoption of the Internet is driving one of the most exciting social, cultural and political transformations in history, and unlike earlier periods of change, this time the effects are fully global. Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips. And while this is hardly the first technology revolution in our history, it is the first that will make it possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content without having to rely on intermediaries.

And weve barely left the starting blocks.

The proliferation of communication technologies has advanced at an unprecedented speed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the number of people connected to the Internet worldwide increased from 350 million to more than 2 billion. In the same period, the number of mobile-phone subscribers rose from 750 million to well over 5 billion (it is now over 6 billion). Adoption of these technologies is spreading to the farthest reaches of the planet, and, in some parts of the world, at an accelerating rate.

By 2025, the majority of the worlds population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the worlds information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand. If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online.