GAME OF PHONES

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 225  09/04/2013

When we look back at the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century we tend to focus on the steam engine and the railway, and when 22nd-century historians look back at the Digital Revolution that began in the late 20th it won't be the personal computer they single out but the microprocessor, the internet and the mobile telephone. Microprocessors supply processing power to increasingly intelligent devices, and the PC will be seen as a quite brief but crucial phase in the evolution of the microprocessor until it got small enough to fit inside a smartphone or tablet. The rise of the PC was spectacular enough, 1.5 billion over 30 years, but the mobile phone reached 6 billion in around 20.

The reason four times as many people use mobiles as PCs isn't hard to fathom. Most people have little need for calculation per se in their daily lives, but communicating with other people, locating and consuming information are absolutely central. And while both PC and smartphone can do that, a smartphone can do it from your pocket and in the middle of a field. There'll always be professionals who need spreadsheets and word processors, but almost everyone has a use for email, SMS, social networks and Google Maps. What's more mobile phone masts can be erected even in parts of the world that will never get a wired internet and phone network. From Mongolia to the Maasai Mara, farmers and herders deal direct by mobile and cut out parasitic middlemen, cab drivers find their destination without years of study, engineers no longer need carry bulky manuals.

Control of the mobile internet is set to become the hottest of all political issues, in a way that control over the PC never quite was. To be sure there was a period at the very end of the Cold War when the US government tried to deny the Soviet Union access to the latest microprocessors via CoCom, but that apart it's been market forces all the way. And since CoCom ceased around 1994 the world has become a very different place. A handful of giant internet corporations - Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter and the rest - now have annual revenues comparable to those of sovereign states, plus direct access to the hearts and minds of vast swathes of the population that governments can only dream of.

It's no coincidence that every week now brings a new rumour that some corporation, like Facebook or Amazon, is developing its own mobile phone. Everyone seems to be thinking about owning the phone or tablet and "forking" Android to run it in their own special way. Most users are not techies and don't want to be techies, so if you can sell them a branded phone with your logo and your UI-veneer on it, that's all they'll ever see. (Rooting and tweaking are strictly for a tiny, nerdy minority). There's great power to be had there, and great revenues too because unlike the silly old Web, mobile networks remembered to build-in a payment mechanism! Actually an outfit the size of Facebook is so ubiquitous it doesn't need to own the phone hardware: getting its app onto everyone's phone (of whatever brand) would be enough if it offered Skype-style voice-over-IP calls and messaging, which would start to eat the lunch of the mobile operators themselves as well as competiing social networks.

Katherine Losse was a pioneer Facebook employee who used to ghost-write posts for Mark Zuckerberg himself, and in her recent book "The Boy Kings" she offers a disturbing picture of his thinking. The main points of his credo include youthfulness, openness, sharing power and "companies over countries". Asked what he meant by the latter he told her "it means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world." So the model for a new world is the Californian youth-oriented corporation, untramelled by pesky laws and regulations, by messy old-world stuff like pensions and having to win elections. The Nation State is just plain out-of-date, it still practices stupid stuff like secrecy and taxation, it doesn't get the New Digital Narcissism where everyone can be an (unpaid) star of their own channel. All rather reminiscent the 1960s counterculture mixed with a dash of Orwell's Oceania, Eurasia, EastAsia. But actually it starts to look rather like a new variation on feudalism where you'll only get fed if you become a retainer of one of these mega-corporations, as the boring old centralised state and its services wither away.