Villains and heroes in the fish wars

The start and the end of the documentary The End of The Line, which has now been released on DVD at least in the UK, (and which I blogged about when it was first shown in the cinema), is dominated by traditional ‘National Geographic’ type images. You know the sort of thing; sunlight streams through the water showing the richness and diversity of the sea, illuminating the many different and brightly coloured species below. It’s filmed in one of the few Marine Protected Areas, which together about 1% of the ocean area, where fishing is not allowed. For the rest of it the story was dismal.

‘The Golden Age’ – depending on your lenses

No sooner had I posted earlier this week about the iPad and Carlota Perez’ model of long-term patterns of technology innovation and investment than I opened Strategy + Business to discover that the venture capitalist and technology analyst Mark Stahlman was also using her model to predict that good times are, well, just around the corner. Very good times, to judge from his Bowie-esque title: ‘A New Golden Age’.

There are some good things about his piece in s+b. It’s a very clear description of Perez’ thinking, and the diagram of the Perez’ S-curve is far better designed than the one I used in my post – clean and clear.

And there are some not so good things, especially when he gets to the futures part of his article.

The iPad and the Chevrolet

Now that the froth from the iPad launch has blown past, it’s worth stepping back a bit. For me, the most telling comments were not the ones which talked about functionality, but those which looked at what the iPad proposition told us about the state of the device and app market. Which is this: the computer technology market is now moving out of its technology-led phase.

A moment of theory might help. I’m quite influenced by the work of the economic historian Carlota Perez, who’s tracked five long phases, or surges, of technology innovation, going back to 1771. Each phase runs for 50-60 years and follows a common pattern (there’s more detail in the diagram below). There’s an ‘installation’ phase, in which the new technology platform spreads in visibility and usage (device penetration increases, underlying infrastructure is developed). There’s a bubble and a crash, in which investors get over-excited about the prospects. And then there’s a deployment phase, in which the applications associated with the technology platform deepen and broaden, and the underlying impacts on society become more profound.  The ICT surge started in 1971, with the invention of the microprocessor. We’ve finished the installation phase, we’ve had the crash (dot.com, not global financial crash, though the two may be linked), and now we’re several years into the deployment phase. The iPad launch was another confirming sign of this.

Taking a long view

Eric Hobsbawm is Britain’s most distinguished living radical historian, and part of his life’s work has been a global history in four  volumes, from 1789 to 1991. The last of these, The Age of Extremes, was published in 1994, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War.

The latest edition of New Left Review, which marks the journal’s 50th anniversary, opens a long and reflective interview (subscription required) with Hobsbawm by asking what’s changed since 1991. Some of these points are obvious, some less so. Together, they add up to a picture of significant fragmentation, both at a global level and within states.

Tweeting the next wave

A quick service note to say that the next wave has started tweeting – light traffic, no more than one or two tweets a day, linking to articles or posts that seem to have something current to say on futures or trends. Visitors to the site may have noticed that the most recent tweets can be found among the site furniture to the right hand of the screen.

Alternatively, of course, you can follow the tweets at @nextwavefutures.

And while doing some blog tidying, I’ve also added a provision that lets you sign up to receive an email version of new posts.

Google, China, and ’strategic ethics’

I’ve seen quite a lot of comment, but not much analysis, of Google’s decision to face down China. The comment says (a) it’s a principled stand on human rights; (b) a response to poor business performance; (c) a lack of confidence in the prospects for the Chinese economy; (d) a risk management decision to underline its commitment to the integrity of the ‘internet cloud’ in the face of Chinese hacking. My take is that it’s a belated realisation that international businesses can no longer partition the world – and that oft-cited ethical concerns about its role in China were increasingly likely to damage more compelling business opportunities elsewhere.

The future of sport?

A quick post to pick up the Observer’s piece on ten trends in sport over the next decade. Some are clearly fillers (‘boxing will fight back’? Who cares?) but among the more considered contributions, the two trends that they see as being on the up are about the domination of sport by television, and talent taking control of teams. There’s also an interesting note about sports in long-term decline: skiing, Formula One, and snooker.
I’m prepared to believe that television will increasingly dominate sport; I’m a lot less sure about talent taking control.

The invention of celebrity

We often think of global media celebrity as a modern (late 20th century) invention. Not so, as I was reminded reading Gideon Haigh’s book of cricket articles, Inside Out. The combination of telegraphy and the mass circulation newspaper, together with the the rotary press and the roll film, created the phenomenon in the 1930s, as Daniel Boorstin observed in his book The Image.

Future Savvy

The Futures Company, where I am one of the blog editors, does an annual review by staff of a book, film, exhibition or other cultural experience they’ve found interesting in the past year. My contribution was a short review of Adam Gordon’s book on forecasting, Future Savvy. The link should be here.

Changing the look of the blog

As an experiment over Christmas I’m going to change the look of the site – I’ve been concerned that longer posts are hard to read in the previous design. I’d be pleased to have comments as to whether this new theme is an improvement or not.