A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali Page B
Authors: Jacques Attali
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then felt that Tokyo might one day aspire to become a new core. Japan possessed the requisite financial strength, a tradition of state intervention, a healthy fear of want, advanced technology, and industrial power. In fact, however, the country swiftly proves incapable of resolving the structural problems of its banking system, of mastering its looming financial bubble, of avoiding a massive reevaluation of its currency, of raising the productivity of its services and the work of its white-collar workers. Above all, it does not attract the elites of the whole world to its shores, nor does it promise the individualism so necessary to the core, nor can it pull away from the orbit of its American conqueror.
It is at this point that a new technological wave gathers force in America, in California much more than anywhere else. This wave in fact makes possible the massive automation of administrative activities in major corporations — in other words a remedy for precisely those ills that had bedeviled the eighth core. It ushers in an extraordinary leap in productivity.
The economic and geopolitical center of the world continues its westward march. Emerging from China five thousand years ago to reappear in Mesopotamia,then in the Mediterranean and North seas, then across the Atlantic, here it is once again on the Pacific shore.
Los Angeles 1980–?: Californian Nomadism
For the ninth time — the last until today — the mercantile order reorganizes itself around a place, a culture, and the financial resources required for a innovative class to transform a technical revolution into a mass commercial market. For the ninth time, this mutation enlarges the space of the mercantile order and that of democracy. It raises still higher the number of the world’s market democracies.
This new form, in which we still live today, constitutes the foundation stone of history on the move. We must therefore discuss it in greater detail than its eight predecessors.
Here in California — in this American state roughly the size of Spain geographically, where 36 million people (one American in eight) live, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley — the new core takes up residence. This is not a randomly chosen site. Here in the past, men discovered gold mines, and it was here that the oil industry and movies took their first steps, here that the most adventurous Americans gathered, and here that the electronics and aeronautical industries took hold. Here too some of America’s finest universities are located, as well as some of its greatest research centers and its best vineyards. California is where the talents of the entertainment industry, the bestmusicians, and the inventors of all information technologies have flocked. And here too, from its Mexican border to the Canadian frontier, the permanent threat of earthquakes gives rise to an intense, unique vibrancy, a fabulous desire to live, and a passion for the new.
As with all preceding crises of the mercantile order, the technologies needed for the ninth form preexist their use. Because the bureaucratic activities of banks and corporations weigh increasingly heavily on overall productivity, the automation of information and its manipulation become a major factor. First to appear, in the 1920s, are electric machines working with perforated cards. Then, in the forties, the first computers designed for military use rely on the transistor. In 1971, the microprocessor, heir to the transistor, sees the light of day. A tiny chip of silicon piled with thousands, then millions, and then billions of elementary storage and information processing units is put on the market by a new company, Intel, jointly founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. The microprocessor makes it possible to perfect the serial computer, it too the heir of a long succession of innovations launched in the seventeenth century in France by Blaise Pascal.
From 1973 on, the computer begins to
It is at this point that a new technological wave gathers force in America, in California much more than anywhere else. This wave in fact makes possible the massive automation of administrative activities in major corporations — in other words a remedy for precisely those ills that had bedeviled the eighth core. It ushers in an extraordinary leap in productivity.
The economic and geopolitical center of the world continues its westward march. Emerging from China five thousand years ago to reappear in Mesopotamia,then in the Mediterranean and North seas, then across the Atlantic, here it is once again on the Pacific shore.
Los Angeles 1980–?: Californian Nomadism
For the ninth time — the last until today — the mercantile order reorganizes itself around a place, a culture, and the financial resources required for a innovative class to transform a technical revolution into a mass commercial market. For the ninth time, this mutation enlarges the space of the mercantile order and that of democracy. It raises still higher the number of the world’s market democracies.
This new form, in which we still live today, constitutes the foundation stone of history on the move. We must therefore discuss it in greater detail than its eight predecessors.
Here in California — in this American state roughly the size of Spain geographically, where 36 million people (one American in eight) live, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley — the new core takes up residence. This is not a randomly chosen site. Here in the past, men discovered gold mines, and it was here that the oil industry and movies took their first steps, here that the most adventurous Americans gathered, and here that the electronics and aeronautical industries took hold. Here too some of America’s finest universities are located, as well as some of its greatest research centers and its best vineyards. California is where the talents of the entertainment industry, the bestmusicians, and the inventors of all information technologies have flocked. And here too, from its Mexican border to the Canadian frontier, the permanent threat of earthquakes gives rise to an intense, unique vibrancy, a fabulous desire to live, and a passion for the new.
As with all preceding crises of the mercantile order, the technologies needed for the ninth form preexist their use. Because the bureaucratic activities of banks and corporations weigh increasingly heavily on overall productivity, the automation of information and its manipulation become a major factor. First to appear, in the 1920s, are electric machines working with perforated cards. Then, in the forties, the first computers designed for military use rely on the transistor. In 1971, the microprocessor, heir to the transistor, sees the light of day. A tiny chip of silicon piled with thousands, then millions, and then billions of elementary storage and information processing units is put on the market by a new company, Intel, jointly founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. The microprocessor makes it possible to perfect the serial computer, it too the heir of a long succession of innovations launched in the seventeenth century in France by Blaise Pascal.
From 1973 on, the computer begins to
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