The Pattern

Some inventions change the world. Most don't.

That is the puzzle. The wheel changed the world. The fork did not. Television changed the world. The Sony Walkman, despite being everywhere for twenty years, mostly did not. The pencil changed the world. The mechanical pencil did not. Why is the line between these things so hard to see in advance?

If you spend long enough digging through the last five hundred years of history, a pattern starts to show up. Not for every kind of invention — there is no pattern for forks. But for one specific kind: the kind that gives humans a new way to move information. A new way to copy ideas. A new way to send messages. A new way to make pictures or sounds reach more people than they ever could before.

These inventions, it turns out, seem to follow the same three steps.

A Hunch

Step one: the invention arrives. Almost nobody understands it. The first people who learn how to use it feel like wizards. They make things possible that, a year earlier, would have sounded like magic.

This is the miracle stage. It is loud and exciting and full of grand predictions about how the new technology will heal the world.

Step two: it spreads. Costs drop. Schools teach it. Grandmothers use it. The magic disappears — not because the technology got worse, but because everyone now expects it to work. It stops being a story. It becomes the air.

This is the ordinary stage. It is quieter. Most of the people inside it stop noticing it.

Step three: somebody figures out how to point the new technology at other people. Not to inform them. To move them. To frighten them. To unite them against an enemy, or to sell them something they did not know they wanted, or to convince them their neighbours are dangerous. The same speed and reach that made the invention a miracle now make it a weapon.

This is the weaponized stage. Often the people who learn how to do this are governments. Sometimes they are businesses. Sometimes they are small groups of angry people. The names change. The shape does not.

Miracle. Ordinary. Weapon.

That is the hunch. It is the spine of this book.

Six Stories

What follows is six stories. In each one, a brand-new way to move information arrives in the world. In each one, you will watch the miracle. You will watch the ordinary. And you will watch the weapon.

The first story takes place in 1517, on a wooden church door in a small German town. The last story is happening right now — in your pocket, in your hand, on the phone you probably looked at this morning.

The technologies will change. Printing press. Telegraph. Radio. Television. Internet. Smartphone. The eras will change. The countries will change. But if the hunch is right, the shape will keep coming back.

By the time you finish all six chapters, you should be able to see the shape on your own. Not just in history. In whatever invention turns out to be next — artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, virtual worlds, something nobody has named yet.