Johnson - Future perfect: the case for progress in a networked age

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Future Perfect

The Case for Progress in a Networked Age

Steven Johnson

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2012

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright 2012 by Steven Johnson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnson, Steven, date.

Future perfect : the case for progress in a networked age / Steven Johnson.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59448-820-7

1. Information technologySocial aspects. 2. Progress. 3. Information networks. 4. Social networks. I. Title.

HM851.J63 2012 2012026086

303.48'33dcsd

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Clay, Rowan, and Dean

Contents

Introduction

PROGRESS, ACTUALLY

C ommercial airplane crashes are one of the few events guaranteed a place on the front page of every national newspaper. Somewhat less common on the front page, however, is a story about a commercial airplane crash that didnt happen. But every now and then one of these non-events manages to cross the threshold into newsworthiness. One such unlikely story appeared on page one of the January 12, 2009, edition of USA Today: Airlines Go Two Years with No Fatalities, the headline proclaimed. An analysis by the paper had discovered that the U.S. commercial aviation industry had achieved a milestone unprecedented in the history of modern air travel: despite the dramatic increase in flights compared with earlier decades, not a single person had perished in a commercial air accident during the years 2007 and 2008.

A two-year stretch with zero fatalities was, statistically speaking, a remarkable feat. Only four times since 1958 had the industry managed to make it through one year without a fatal accident. But the safety record was part of a long-term trend: in the post-9/11 period, chances of dying on a commercial flight were nineteen in 1 billion; an almost 100 percent improvement over the already excellent odds of flying in the 1990s. According to MIT professor Arnold Barnett, this meant that an American child was more likely to be elected president of the United States in his or her lifetime than to die in a commercial jet flight.

The story caught my eye in part because I had long maintained that news organizations presented a misleading slant on current eventsnot the conventional slant of the Left-Right political world, but the more subtle bias of being more interested in bad news. If it bleeds, it leads might be a good strategy for selling papers, but it necessarily skews our collective sense of how well we are doing as a society. We hear about every threat or catastrophe, but the stories of genuine progress get relegated to the back pages, if they run at all.

But this USA Today article was bucking that trend of negative bias. And so, inspired by its refreshing story of progress, I decided to write a little essay about it, for a website at which I happened to be a guest contributor that week. I summarized the articles findings, and made the point that we might have fewer people suffering from fear of flying (and thus spending less time on much more dangerous highways) if the media did a better job of reminding us of these genuinely extraordinary achievements.

A more superstitious person might have worried that saying such things in public was tempting fate. In fact, when I had talked about airline safety with friends in the past, Id often been accused of just that, a criticism that I would inevitably laugh off. Surely fate had better things to do than worry about my monologues.

But within a few hours of publishing my little riff about airline safety, while I was sitting in a television studio waiting to do a book promotion, my phone began buzzing with e-mails and text messages from friends who had seen my piece. A US Airways jet had crash-landed in the icy Hudson. Look what you did, my friends said. I had tempted fate, and fate had slapped me back across the face.

By the time I actually managed to get to a television set to see the live report, it was clear that the plane had in fact survived the landing with minimal structural damage, and a significant number of survivors were clearly visible standing on the wings, waiting for the ferries and police boats that would rescue them. I penned a quick, sheepish entry promising to keep mum about air safety for a while, and mothball that piece I was working on about the planets amazing streak of avoiding species-extinguishing asteroid collisions.

Then a funnyand wonderfulthing happened. The world quickly learned that all 155 passengers and crew aboard flight 1549 had survived, with almost no serious injuries. Flight 1549 went from being a devastating rebuke to my optimism about commercial aviation to being a ringing endorsement of it. If you believed in that sort of thing, you might have said that I had tempted fate, and fate had blinked.

Of course, I had nothing to do with the safe landing of US Airways 1549. The question was, Who or what was responsible for that plane managing to lose two engines during takeoff and still keep its cargo secure? The mass media quickly offered up two primary explanations, both of which turned out to be typical interpretations of good news. First there was the hero narrative: Captain Chesley Sully Sullenberger, who had indeed brilliantly navigated his plane into the river with great poise under unthinkable pressure. And then there was the quasi-magical rhetoric that quickly became attached to the event, the Miracle on the Hudson. Those were the two options. That plane floating safely in the Hudson could be explained only by superheroes or miracles.