Buying a new phone to load with the latest, greatest apps is like buying into a vision of the future in which every interaction is personalised via technology. Eventually, following this appealing vision, each of us will live in a hyper-individualized, virtually enhanced bubble. Our devices – in a cybernetic loop with a totality of internet-connected-things – will know what we want before we do.
To get to this future, we have first to go through what’s become known as disruption. ‘The 19th century had evolution,’ wrote Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. ‘The 20th century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption.’1 But this disruption is couched in the realm of emerging possibility. We are drawn to it; possibility projects us into a future in which all our problems – from the mundane to the mortal – are swept away. So we accept that disruption is an inevitable, if occasionally concerning, consequence of the arrival of the perfect future. As Jeff Bezos once put it: ‘Amazon is not happening to book selling. The future is happening to book selling.’2
