Re: Where are we?

Description: Climate change, Mossberg says, is a large issue for everyone.

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: Well I mean look. I’m not a policy person. And not only that. As a journalist I’m not really free to express opinions on a lot of things. But it’s perfectly obvious that climate change is an enormous issue for everyone on the planet; that every kind of personal, and governmental, and commercial, and industrial activity on the planet is gonna have to change so that we don’t destroy the planet. Climate change, environmentalism, the whole green thing in general . . . And you can already see a lot of the same venture capital and investment money that was the lifeblood of high tech, some of that money now going to projects that are an attempt to apply technology to making the world cleaner and being greener. So I think, you know, that’s a huge thing. We obviously still have no idea just what the rise of China and India means. You know they have enormous economic potential, including, by the way, a significant high tech potential. And I’m not just talking about call centers. They have the potential to invent and develop things that we have become accustomed to seeing invented and developed here. And from the point of view of the United States as a country, it would be very interesting to see what happens in those countries. Because while they do have these concentrations of educated people, and middle class, and people who are even wealthy and entrepreneurial, they also still are, in the majority, full of extremely poor, uneducated people who . . . who have a right to a future. And how they distribute their wealth, and how they go about taking care of their whole populations – particularly in the case of China which is, of course, not a free country – is gonna be a fascinating situation. And then I think we have this . . . And here I’m drawing on both my many years covering foreign policy and my more recent history covering technology. But we have this bizarre, I think, counter-intuitive situation in which the following is happening. As I’ve already said twice, I think people now have access to more accurate, real information about the world than they have ever, ever had. You could be sitting in the middle of, you know, Siberia or, you know, Alberta or Patagonia; and if you have a computer connected to the Internet you can know a tremendous amount about what’s going on in the world. And yet at the very same time we have this rise in fundamentalism in all religions – not just Islam – in which people are rejecting science, becoming wedded to conspiracy theories instead of what’s really happening, and I think kind of retreating from the complexity all around them. You know there’s this fire hose of information out there and people . . . some people. Not everyone, but some people’s reaction is to say, “I can’t deal with it. I don’t trust it. It must not be true. I’m going back to believing these . . . whatever this guy who is my follower . . . or leader says.” It could be a religious leader, a political leader or whatever. This is what they’re believing. One aspect of that, Islamic terrorism, is especially dangerous because even though it doesn’t represent most of Islam, it is unlike most of the other fundamentalists. It’s armed. It runs some countries, and it has managed to kill a lot of people, both its own . . . both their own people and people here in our country, and elsewhere in the west. So it’s easy to conceive a situation where you get into chaotic, military, and conflict situations that could kind of put at least a temporary halt to progress in education, and technology and other things. And I worry about that.

Question: Is technology shifting traditional power structures?

Transcript: Yeah. I think that’s . . . I think that’s ridiculous. People have such a short memory of history. First of all the Kremlin, even in Russia’s reduced state, has, the last time I checked, thousands of actual operational nuclear warheads. So when you have the power to push buttons and destroy entire countries and hundreds of millions of people, that’s actually more power than even Sergey and Larry have at Google, I think, by at least some measures. Secondly people forget that there have been business tycoons . . . I mean you know the robber barons, the people that owned the railroads. John D. Rockefeller owned most of the oil in the country at one time. That’s pretty good power. So yeah Bill Gates, and Steve ___________, and the guys that run Microsoft are really powerful. Steve Jobs is really powerful. The Google guys are really powerful, you know? The flavor du jour – whoever is hot on the Internet – is really powerful. The Internet itself is obviously really powerful, although it’s not controlled by anyone. So you know there have always been multiple centers of power. There’s cultural power. There’s military power. There’s economic power. There’s business power. We have all those things today. They’re just different and different names. And I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to cover in one part of my career some of those power centers; and now in another part of my career some others where there’s a lot of innovation. I would say the Kremlin was very innovative. I wouldn’t say the White House was very innovative. I think it’s great fun to talk to people who have fascinating new ideas, and the inclination and resources to try them out. But I don’t think it’s a new thing that we have business figures who have a lot of power.

Question: How is technology changing the political landscape?

Transcript: Well we certainly haven’t seen the full impact of it because, as I said, we’re just in the very beginning of this revolution. I would also point out to you that if you actually do the research, you will find that these kinds of articles have been written, and this kind of belief has been stated emphatically in the last two elections . . . presidential election cycles, maybe the last three. “Oh my god, the Internet is going to be the thing that changes the whole outcome. Oh my god, this is gonna draw everyone under 25 into the voting booth. Oh my god, a complete insurgent could come in and raise the kind of money that could make a real difference in a campaign.” You know it’s been an important factor, something campaigns have to pay attention to in the last two election cycles; and yet it’s hard to say that it had any material impact on the outcome in the end. The best example we all know is Howard Dean, who was almost entirely an Internet phenomenon and raised a lot of money, and then wasn’t able to translate that into votes and workers on the ground. Some of the Republican candidates in the last presidential election also had very effective Internet operations. You’re seeing it again now with Obama, and Hilary Clinton, and Giuliani, and Romney. And so it’s become a part of the mix for these guys. Every campaign has serious web sites, and serious teams of web organizers, web developers, web bloggers, you know web fundraising people. And it’s arrived. It’s here. It’s part of the process. But I think the jury is out on whether it can be game changing. I don’t . . . I imagine someday it’ll be game changing, but I don’t know that it’ll be this election cycle or not.

Question: How is technology changing the way we live?

Transcript: I also think the less you hear the word “Internet”, the more integrated into our lives it will be. I compare the Internet to the electrical grid. The electrical grid is all around you. It’s in your home. It’s in your office. It’s in your hotel room. And there is an uncounted number of things that plug into the electrical grid. The television cameras we’re using to record this interview plug into the electrical grid. So does the toaster oven, and the electric toothbrush, and the hairdryer that you might have used this morning. But you did not think to yourself when you put your toast in your toaster oven, “Hey, I’m using the electrical grid.” Or “I’m going to use the electrical grid.” It would be laughable for you to say that. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Internet. The Internet . . . Instead of being seen, as a lot of people do, as some sort of activity you perform on a device that happens to be called a “personal computer”, the Internet is really an enormous grid or ocean of information – communications services, commerce, marketing, entertainment, all of these things. Information. And there are gonna be innumerable devices that will connect to it, tap into it, and just use enough of it to perform whatever function it is they are good at doing, in whatever context people want to use them in. So for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a pocket-sized device to do the same thing as a device with a larger display. You wouldn’t necessarily be surprised, I think, in 10 years that your microwave oven is plugged into the Internet. I think it will be. On the other hand, it won’t be plugged into the Internet for the purpose of you getting your e-mail on the door of the microwave. It’ll be plugged in so that when you put a package of frozen food in there, the oven will just read the barcode. It will have a connection to the Internet. It will have a database that will be constantly updated, and it will be able to properly heat up the food. That’s the only thing it will need the Internet to do, but it will need the Internet to do it. So the Internet is a grid. Many devices, many kinds of software, many kinds of services running on those devices, all of which take advantage of the grid. And that means that in 10 years . . . Already this is true to some extent, but it’s gonna become universal in 10 years. Whenever you watch television, you’re gonna be on the Internet. Whenever you make a phone call, you’re gonna be on the Internet. And nobody’s gonna say, “I’m gonna go online tonight and look this up.” You know I think in 10 or 15 years when you see movies from today where people say, “I found this online. I’m going on the Web. Let’s go online and check it out,” people are gonna laugh because we’re always gonna be online. And so those are some of the big things that I think are going on.

Question: Is Web 2.0 and social networking over-hyped?

Transcript: Oh, well there’s an overhype. I’ve never seen a time in high tech when there wasn’t an enormous hype machine around it. I think in general, you know, these companies get their funding. They open their office. They hire some engineers, and then they immediately hire some PR people. And so part of my role is to be kind of the anti-hypster if I can do that. But yeah, oh sure. I mean every single web site, every single gadget, every single new model of computer that comes out is grossly overhyped. And I do believe that Wall Street . . . the professional investment analysts on Wall Street are often shockingly badly informed, and have many times declared particular products or technologies to be the world-changer when they’re not. So oh yeah. There’s always . . . There’s always more hype around this stuff than is justified.

Recorded on: 9/13/07