“The best way to predict the future”, the US computer scientist Alan Kay remarked in 1971, “is to invent it.” Pre-emptive description, however, ranks second best. The chief identifying criterion of the future is that it continuously steps back from us, making nothing about it, strictly speaking, true or false.
That malleability constitutes a great attraction to an author. The future’s other broad appeal to a writer, particularly an ambitious one, is that he can actually influence it. Try as they might, historians can’t (responsibly) change what happened. Futurists, however, try all the time to change what might happen. While many “cyberphilosophy” volumes purport to describe how the digital revolution will alter such familiar areas of life as politics, religion, ethics, art, law and romance, one can often spot a finger on the scale attempting to affect the results.
It comes as no surprise, then, that two Professors of Law, Daniel J. Solove (author previously of The Digital Person: Technology and privacy in the information age, 2004) and Jonathan Zittrain, both see storm clouds in the future of the digital revolution, if not a reign of terror, or that both have a dog in this fight of how things should turn out. Both of their new books, excellent and ultimately upbeat in their separate but related missions, will increase our literacy in their complex yet still intelligible fields.