Earlier on I linked to an article written by Douglas Adams for Wired Magazine, quoting a section concerning his (utterly accurate) prediction of what the last decade would mean for media and entertainment1. Another part of the article struck me, though: Douglas Adams’ description what, over time, I’ve come to regard as the most incisive way of looking at looking at innovation and technology that has ever been produced:

Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. Sony’s new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a lot of bulk and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, while they’re following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are actually recorded in fast forward mode.) […] A well-made dry martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of leaving out the martini. […] You also get dramatic advances when you spot that you can leave out part of the problem. Algebra, for instance (and hence the whole of computer programming), derives from the realisation that you can leave out all the messy, intractable numbers. […] Almost everything to do with the net involves spotting the things we can now leave out of the problem, and location – or distance – is one of them. Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it.

Douglas Adams died in 2001, and so he was unable to comment on the iPod, which carried on from the Walkmen and removed the need to carry tapes or CDs with you. He didn’t get to pass judgement on the rise of wireless networking, or high-speed cellular data communications, which obviate the requirement that you be sat in front of a computer to access the wealth of information which we have created on the internet.

Worst of all, he never saw the iPhone, which takes the idea of using a computer and removes everything – the mouse, the keyboard, and even the distance – that sits between you and the stuff that’s on the screen. If you want to move an object on the screen of a computer, you move a virtual finger (the cursor) over the top of it by pushing a mouse around, then you click a little button to represent ‘grabbing’ it, then you move the virtual finger to where you want to ‘drop’ it, then let go of the button. To do the same thing on an iPhone you put your finger on the object and move it. That’s a huge and powerful change in the way we interact with computers and information.

Another such innovation is the blog, which has conveniently removed the need for a publisher or a deadline – something I’m certain would have appealed to the notoriously deadline-dodging Douglas2. Or Twitter, which removes the water cooler from an office conversation.

I’ve read Douglas Adams’ collected works, The Salmon of Doubt, a few times. Occasionally I’ll dip back in and read a few articles. The first time I read this one was probably 6 or 7 years ago – but in that time, an amazing thing has occurred: one by one, all of Adams’ predictions and dreams have been coming true.

I’ve gradually come to realise that we’re simply living in the future he wanted – the internet has become everything he wanted it to be: a global channel of many-to-many communication (exemplified by Twitter, despite its detractors); a vast compendium of knowledge; an instant means of sharing news and information across arbitrary distances; a mobile network of sites and services that few of us spend long away from. And the world has got faster with it, more intelligent with it, more cultured.

And it’s not just our technology or our culture which might meet Adams’ approval: when he and Mark Carwardine made the radio programme and book Last Chance To See, they visited six species on the very brink of extinction. Stephen Fry has joined Mark Carwardine to retrace their steps twenty years on for a new TV version of the show, and despite the rather ominous title Last Chance to See, five of the six species3 from the original tour are still extant today and their numbers have been generally increasing. I would say that’s a remarkable achievement.

If there was one good reason to believe in an afterlife, it’s so that Adams could see the world he dreamed of coming to life – and see the influence he had in the way it has been shaped. Of course, since he was even more radically atheist than his close friend Richard Dawkins, I imagine if Adams’ found himself looking on the world from the afterlife, he’d probably have one or two more pressing questions on his mind than what was going on down here.

I think it’s worth taking a moment or two now and again, though, particularly in the face of the financial crisis we’re facing and some inevitably tough times ahead, to be thankful for the simple fact that we live in such exciting times of change. That we live in the world that only a decade ago people like Douglas Adams dreamed of.

We really do live in The Future. Isn’t that great?

  1. I’m not entirely certain why this blog has suddenly gone Adams mad – just lots of thoughts occurring simultaneously about him, really. [↩]
  2. “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.” – Douglas Adams [↩]
  3. The Yangtze river dolphin is thought to be extinct, (unless Stephen Fry can find one). [↩]