Trampled by Unicorns

CHAPTER 8Between Scylla and Charybdis: What Happens If We Do Nothing

Before I start exploring solutions, and what all stakeholders, including each of us, can do to address the crisis, I want to take a moment to consider what will happen if nothing changes and current trends in tech continue. What will our lives—and the world around us—look like ten years from now, if convenience and, yes, our collective apathy mean the issues I've described so far aren't confronted and fixed?

I've heard people in the tech industry, and beyond, claim that there's nothing we can do, that “privacy is already dead,” that the situation won't ever deteriorate to the doomsday scenario envisioned by some commentators, and, anyway, government “meddling” never works and it's surely best to allow Big Tech to course-correct and heal itself. To them, I reply that given the copious evidence we have from the past decade, and the last five years in particular, if we think things are bad today, just wait.…

In his seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), the late academic Neil Postman wrote about the George Orwell versus Aldous Huxley versions of the future.¹ Postman—and I'm paraphrasing here—argued that while Americans were congratulating themselves that Orwell's grim vision of the future, as depicted in his dystopian classic 1984, didn't come to pass, and that “the roots of liberal democracy held,” we had forgotten the other “slightly less well known, equally chilling” version: Aldous Huxley's Brave ...