The future is where people are having the most fun, says Steven Johnson

Talking to American thinker Steven Johnson is like being able to talk about almost any topic — from the 19th century cholera epidemic to bitcoin, to attempts at extraterrestrial contact.

For him, anyone who wants to know where the future is heading should look at what people are having fun with.

“One of the things that makes something fun and enjoyable is novelty,” he says. “It has no purpose, but it’s interesting. And to keep surprising people you have to keep developing new things, defying expectations. And that leads to other ideas that are more serious, useful, or practical.”

In his last publication, the writer decided to make a foray into scientific advances that have allowed people to live longer. “Longevity”, released in Brazil by publisher Zahar in 2021, was motivated by the pandemic and the attacks on science during the health crisis.

“Any school-age child in the United States has at least heard about the moon landing in 1969. But how many of them know about the smallpox eradication, which was happening at the same time?” asks Johnson.

The researcher is one of this year’s guests of the Fronteiras do Pensamento lecture series. In addition to an online lecture on September 23, he will perform in person in São Paulo on September 12 and in Porto Alegre on September 14.

You founded one of the first online magazines, Feed Magazine, in 1995. Was the internet better back then? No, it was not. In 1995 it really wasn’t because, in the first place, few people were online. There was still a lot to do to simply explain what the web was. And the tools were very limited. It was very text-based, we pretty much just had the hypertext. We wanted to make communities, interact with readers, and it was very difficult to do that back then. I would say the golden age was a little later. In the early days of blogging, in the late 1990s, early 2000s. The post-internet bubble period was very productive, many new ideas emerged.

And now, what do you think of the internet? It’s a mix of things. I remain a big fan of Twitter, for example. I follow musicians, architects, writers, politicians, technologists and see everyday what they are thinking, sharing and commenting on. It is an incredible source of inspiration and surprise. I just don’t get a lot of these troubling issues with social media — which are legitimate. The way I use it, it doesn’t affect me. So I still see the positive side of it all.

The big problem is that, in the beginning, the internet did not have an open standard for recording identity and relationships. The web was designed to formally record relationships between documents, through hyperlinks, and that was incredibly powerful. But there was no way to create identity. As this feature was not built on open standards, it was defined by private companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The definition of all these relationships was suddenly in the hands of a company, being driven by an advertising model and investors. That’s where we got into some trouble.

You wrote a article in 2018 about the bitcoin bubble. At the time, the coin was around $12,000. The price has quintupled since then, and now we see another collapse. What does this say about cryptocurrencies? I think almost everyone has given up on the idea that these things are going to work like coins. We’re going crazy here in the US with 8% inflation. It is very difficult to make this work. In addition, the transaction costs are enormous. When bitcoin came out everyone was saying, “we need a new decentralized currency”. Now they say that’s not what it’s for. I find it a little suspicious.

His interests range from the cholera epidemic in 19th century England to attempts at extraterrestrial contact. What ties all these matters together? Yes, the variety of things I’ve written about is really great. That’s one of the things I love, diving into these crazy fields, talking to experts, learning and reading. I’m very interested in new ideas, how they come into the world. What technologies and scientific advances enabled this transformative idea that cholera is transmitted through water rather than air that Jon Snow had in 1854? Why London and not India in 1800 or New York in 1870? Same thing with bitcoin. Whenever I see a new way of thinking emerge, I start paying attention.

Can we already say that the pandemic left a technological legacy? I think there are two that are quite significant in the long run. One of them is the vaccine. Scientists developed them on short notice, mapping was incredibly fast. It was a milestone in the history of medicine and science. We’ll talk about it a hundred years from now as a fundamental breakthrough.

The other issue is in our lifestyle. They always said that the internet would allow us to live anywhere, without having to crowd in a city like New York or São Paulo, and that never happened. So the pandemic forced us to stay at home and technology finally advanced to the point where a Zoom meeting was really good. I think we’ve all learned that we don’t have to travel 45 minutes every day to the office. And that will have a lasting impact.

In the pandemic we have also seen leaders denying the health crisis and societies deeply divided. That was one of the reasons I wrote “Longevity”. I think one of the reasons we have this kind of anti-science element in our society is because we don’t celebrate the achievements of public health and medicine.

We have a million memorials for military heroes. Any school-age child in the United States has at least heard about the moon landing in 1969. But how many of them know about the smallpox eradication, which was happening around the same time? It was an incredible example of international collaboration and it has a much greater impact on our lives.

People died of smallpox all the time, it’s probably the biggest killer in our history. And we’re much more focused on astronauts on the Moon. If your heroes are astronauts and not doctors and public health officials, you are not preconditioned to appreciate these figures and institutions when a pandemic comes.

Where do we have to look to see the future? I wrote a few years ago the book “The Innovative Power of Fun: How Pleasure and Entertainment Changed the World” [Editora Zahar]. It’s all about pranks and things people do for fun. Our ancestors, for example, created primitive musical instruments before inventing writing. Or the relationship between artificial intelligence and games, for example. Much of artificial intelligence arose from training an algorithm to play a game.

One of the things that makes something fun and enjoyable is novelty. You are surprised, as if you are seeing a mechanical doll for the first time. It has no purpose, but it’s interesting. And to keep surprising people you have to keep developing new things, defying expectations. And that leads to other ideas that are more serious, useful, or practical. You’ll find the future wherever people are having the most fun.

Where are people having the most fun today? Probably the best current example is the imaging tools that are coming out of artificial intelligence. People are just creating these crazy photos with software, and no one is using it officially yet. Just the energy being spent exploring these tools is already a sign that this will be a very interesting space in the future.

Steven Johnson, 54

The author of 13 books on science and innovation, Johnson is the host of the PBS television series Extra Life and the American Innovations podcast. The writer has a postgraduate degree in English Literature from Columbia University and is a professor at New York University.