Good predictions are hard to make. Predictions made on the hoof may sound inspirational, but are riddled with biases. But good learnings can be drawn from bad predictions.

David Bowie fans will make themselves known to you faster even than vegans and wild-swimmers. Even six years after his passing, Bowiefication continues so strongly that you might be forgiven for thinking that nobody else had an impact on popular culture between 1962 and 2016.

Bowie’s career is noteworthy for being long and prolific: releasing 128 singles from 26 albums, even if only five were hits. This is double the output of The Beatles in their eight years together, although the Fab Four’s hit-rate was four times higher as one band, higher still when including their time individual artists.

Thanks to an interview on the BBC’s Newsnight in 1999, Bowie is often credited with foreseeing the potential of the internet way ahead of the pack. I’m fascinated by this interview. Bowie and the notoriously abrasive interviewer Jeremy Paxman, both having made comfortable careers in conventional media, are grappling with the concept of the media being democratised.

Paxman adopts as pessimistic stance, as if he sees the internet as a media-delivery tool rather than some sort of cultural movement. But we can’t know whether this is what he thought, since he is a talented interviewer. Either way, Bowie took the bait and began to riff, almost off-the-cuff, about the internet’s forthcoming cultural impact. The core idea he hit upon was the inflection from a small number of massive cultural touchpoints—television interviews, rock stars, etc.—to a massive number of smaller ones. Touchpoints as small as a group of near-anonymous people or, as Bowie calls them, an audience.

Bowie counters Paxman’s pugilistic pessimism with a sense of cultural potential, but his thesis is incomplete. While his sense of fashion had always been progressive, Bowie was technologically conservative. So, even if he wasn’t articulating ideas as he was having them, his thoughts about the cultural impact of the internet were still quite fresh. In an interview two years earlier, he described the internet as just another tool about which he wasn’t wildly excited.

Though, as the star uttered these words, his management were already in talks about founding an internet service-provider with Bowie as both investor and public face. BowieNet launched between these two interviews, which might explain both Paxman’s questioning and Bowie’s newfound optimism.

You can’t sustain such a long artistic career by staying in one place, and Bowie is renowned for reinvention. But for an artist capable of inventing and dropping whole identities as the pop market demanded, his technological skepticism had remained constant.

Bowie’s imperial phase ran from 1975 to 1985; all his hits were released in this period. It was also in this period that he developed a disliking for Gary Numan: another androgynous, highly-styled British male artist and longstanding Bowie fan. Numan’s futuristic 1979 single Are ‘Friends’ Electric had outperformed Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging, so the latter and his fans began casually pouring scorn.

The New Musical Express, a fusty publication that took exception to Numan’s searing electronic disruption of the conventional rock’n’roll format, enjoyed whipping up the vitriol of Bowie fans against emerging artists. In a 1980 interview, egged on by the NME’s Angus MacKinnon, Bowie criticised acts he perceived to have copied him while simultaneously misunderstanding him. In particular, he attacked Numan’s sci-fi themes:

It’s that false idea of hi-tech society and all that which is… doesn’t exist. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that sort of society. It’s a enormous myth that’s been perpetuated unfortunately, I guess, by readings of what I’ve done in that rock area at least, and in the consumer area television has an awful lot to answer for with its fabrication of the computer-world myth.

Skipping forward again to the famous 1999 interview with Paxman: in articulating optimism for his newest commercial venture, Bowie inadvertently offers a number of teachings about the futurism, the internet and people in the media.

1. It’s really hard to make long predictions. It’s hard to research them, formulate them and particularly to communicate them.
   
2. We often consider ideas that are new to us as being new ideas. See also the illusion of explanatory depth. This colours our vision of the future: the things that appear to be us to be happening contemporarily, and therefore signalling new trends, may have persisted for some time even in primitive form and we chose to dismiss them.
   
3. Pre-internet media people become consumed by the mechanics of the media. Their assessment of culture was seen through a lens of what media people would consume. Post-internet, the same is true but no longer confined to those in the media industry. We often blur commercial impact with cultural impact. For example, those who use ‘woke’ in a derogatory way are consistently, but not necessarily deliberately, describing cultural phenomena that cannot easily be commercialised.
   
4. Many technological predictions, in this era, take the incumbent internet and add something to it: sometimes another technology, sometimes an observable consumptive human behaviour, sometimes an ideology. But future behaviours are rarely additive.
   
5. Of course, people maintain a bias towards ideas into which they have tangibly invested. A rockstar who has founded in an ISP bearing his name is going to be far more open to the possibilities of a technologically-empowered future than a rockstar who’s fallen out of step with ever-shifting pop trends.
   
6. Cultural shift on the internet, free of commercialised influence, isn’t one continuously-progressing thing. Grassroots digital culture and behaviours lurch towards an idea, and then that idea is commercialised. the cycle then repeats. Bowie’s observation about the cultural movement being more significant than the tech giants was right, for about four years. Then after another three years it started looking right again, for about two years and so on.
   
7. All recent talk of the liberating possibilities of media-dominating advancements such as the metaverse and crypto can be considered another echo, in which those with tangible investments speak of cultural possibilities. I have no doubt Bowie, if he were still here, would say he found the idea of decentralisation fascinating—full of wild possibilities for artists and their audiences—while also investing heavily in crypto and selling off his creations as NFTs. After a short time, it would show itself to be a new implementation of an old idea: a fan club.
   
8. In all things, the question influences the answer. That’s what Bowie teaches us, time and again. Put someone on a pedestal and give them something to fight against, and they will. Today you don’t need to be a rockstar: the pedestals are plentiful and thepugilism comes from all directions.

Some technological inventions can slip easily into our lives. Others, either immediately or eventually, become hard to live with. Given our contemporary and future constraints, how well will the current crop of digital-era technologies fare?

The microwave oven has low life-integration requirements. You don’t need to remodel your kitchen to accommodate one; you can just place it on the side and it’s at the right height to use. Although what it does is mysterious, it lights up like a regular oven and shows you what’s going on inside. You can be reassured that you can just spring open the door if need be. This level of reassurance from an appliance should not be underestimated.

By contrast, the motor vehicle totally changed the built environment, and not for the better. Cars and trucks don’t mix well with cyclists and pedestrians. Many cities have lines, fences and walls to keep them apart. While some places are made car-free for the betterment of others, far more places are car-only. Cars have changed not only how we travel but how and where we build homes. And cars need to be placed out of the way for the 96% of the time they’re not being used. Worst of all, if we wanted to stop using them, we likely couldn’t.

There are two observable patterns. One concerns the extent to which a particular technology remains coexistable over time. The other is our own awareness of factors that make those technologies more or less coexistable. We are now generally more alert to the fact that things that emit high amounts of carbon—concrete, steel, hamburgers, golf-courses, holidays, signals of wealth—are not as easy to live with as we might have assumed.

When considering new technologies, I can’t help but have coexistence in mind. For example, technological replacements for cash may have security and portability benefits, but come at a significant carbon cost as well as excluding a proportion of the population. A society going cashless is not a microwave oven, since microwaves didn’t need everyone in your neighbourhood to own them before yours worked.

The digital era has developed a taste for technologies that thrive on the network effect; where a large user-base is beneficial to each user or, more poignantly, a small user-base is detrimental. Social media—the productisation of interpersonal relationships—made a fantastic amount of money for its key founders, and this must be a strong incentive for others also to develop products with network effects.

But, many internet-era technologies can also be identified by how hard it is to coexist with them. Their manufacturing costs, in human and planetary terms, are too high. Their operation, in social, political, economic and environmental terms, is too expensive. Their disposal, in any terms you like, is too wasteful. A microwave oven is all these things too, but our standard of coexistence was lower at the point of its invention.

Cobots—collaborative robots—represent the pinnacle of robotic achievement. Humanoid machines that can work along side us without breaking our limbs have been depicted in art and fiction for centuries. Technologies do exist, but cobots are not commonplace even though, one might imagine, they would revolutionise the home and working environment. The reason is because coexistence is fantastically complex, and robotics people keep learning this the hard way.

Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza the robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the boy’s pieces. Rather than waiting for the machine to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte, he said.

“There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait,” Smagin said. “This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall,” he added.

Lazarev had a different account, saying the child had “made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him”. Either way, he said, the robot’s suppliers were “going to have to think again”.

There’s a lag between our standards of coexistence increasing, and technologies raising their bar. Autonomous vehicles are even more hostile pedestrians and cyclists, while also carrying over the high carbon-cost of that which went before. No matter how you fuel them, motor vehicles are high emitters because of how they’re made and how long they last: autonomy does nothing to ease this.

By extension, any technology that compounds previous oversights of long-term coexistence—cryptobullshit being a prime example—will inevitably fail. If we can’t live with it, we can live without.

The ‘like’ button enjoys near-ubiquity in the contemporary web experience as a signal of approval or solidarity. The effect of likes in the aggregate have been net-negative: encouraging a state of persistent distraction, and skewing attention and power towards evermore polarising content.

There is something ingenious about the ‘like’ button, in that users get it. It’s an opportunity to fulfil a deeply-held desire to show empathy; to signal a reaction. For something not thought through in great detail, it’s very clever.

But, consider an alternative reality. Imagine how things might have been if, instead of the like button, someone had implemented another simple, easy-to-grasp function: the ’tip’ button. This exists now in various forms, but imagine an implementation circa 2007, instead of liking or starring, that went on to become ubiquitous. What might that have done for the creator economy? And would cryptobullshit ever have taken hold?

Whereas the ‘poke’ button (an early function of Facebook that sent a simple notification to someone) was ambiguous, the ‘like’ button on individual items of content gave users much clearer direction. What it didn’t do is provide any value: just a slight dopamine hit. With no other tangible benefit, the act of getting ‘likes’ as some benchmark of popularity had become an end in itself. The web experience is the poorer for it, but it has persisted so long that not many of us remember the web before.

While the ‘like’ button has been transformative, a ‘tip’ button would have set in train a cascade of interesting, independent movements. What’s important here is to get the conceptual scale right: I’m talking talking cents rather than dollars; pennies rather than pounds. Perhaps even fractions thereof. This approach would’ve encouraged users to be more discerning, while also offering the independent web a revenue opportunity not dependent on advertising.

But this didn’t happen so, you might wonder, what is there to be gained from pondering it? Because even if micropayments didn’t have their day back then, they may still.

On the internet, there are basically three kinds of price. There are the individual items you buy plus $5 shipping, there are things you subscribe to at around $12 a month, and then there’s things that are free at the point of use. Many exceptions exist, but let’s start here. If you take on too many of those $12/month subscriptions, things start to feel expensive. What’s more, as times get harder for people, subscriptions are a wise and easy thing to cut.

That leaves things people don’t pay to use, like Instagram, and things they have shipped to them: neither are particularly well-suited to the long tail of content that the early web offered so well, and could again.

Also consider paywalls: a product of necessity for traditional media’s stay of execution in the online era. But they don’t work, not really. What paywalls do is create a threshold for accessing individual content to those sufficiently invested in accessing all the content, probably for $12/month; a subscription likely challenged as living costs increase. Meanwhile most people, the overwhelming majority of those who hit the paywall, won’t be able to justify that anyway. Yet there’s no means by which they could chip a few bob into the jar just for whatever it was caught their interest before they hit the wall. Even if the publisher were to adopt one of the contemporary tip-style mechanisms, it’d be too expensive and cumbersome for users.

Another way is possible: the ‘like’ button of payment. Rather than being put off by a subscription that’s disproportionate to whatever interested them, users are free to scatter minute tokens of appreciation around the web as they please—the kind of appreciation you can take to the bank. Making it work means disrupting the maxim of taking three or four steps to set up a credit-card transaction. The web—mainstream and independent alike—is crying out for a means of bunging a penny into the jar as easily as clicking ‘like’.

When you book yourself a flight, you are typically given a six-digit alphanumeric string as your reference number. By entering this code into your airline’s app, for example, every detail of your booking can be retrieved. This joining-up of the many datapoints needed for passengers to board is one of the ways in which the travel industry has embraced the digital era. Yet, there are many other areas in which the handling of passengers’ information is disjointed. What causes these discrepancies?

When returning to Europe from Seoul, the staff at Inchon airport noticed my limp and produced a wheelchair. Inchon is palatial, modern, well-designed and well-run. It is also massive, so I was grateful for the wheels. The staff also rang ahead to my next destination, Charles de Gaulle in Paris, to arrange for me to be met with another wheelchair upon my arrival. But nobody came. Having arrived later than scheduled, and with another flight to catch, there wasn’t time to wait around. I dragged my foot across the airport to another terminal, reaching my connection just in time. My baggage wasn’t so lucky.

This trip, and a few afterwards, gave me a small insight into the many challenges faced by those who rely upon a wheelchair. The travel industry loves dehumanising abbreviations, so uses the term PRM, or passengers with restricted mobility, to mean anyone who requires assistance moving around. Some airports seem to be excellent at this, but others are somewhere between poor and terrible. If you’re going to be using an airport-owned generic chair, they’re often not there when you arrive. If you need to use your own chair, it can be a long wait before it is brought up from the hold so that you can leave the plane.

It’s strange that there should be this discrepancy. Many aspects of travel are disrupted by chaotic factors such as the weather, but given airports are all in the business of loading and unloading flights, you might expect that the experience of accessibility services would be fairly universal. Not so.

The BBCs security correspondent Frank Gardner uses a wheelchair, having taken bullets to the spine from al-Qaida gunmen. Gardner has recounted three occasions (1, 2, 3) when he’s found himself stranded in his seat long after all other passengers have disembarked [update below]. Stories such as this are disturbingly common. In the UK, airports have been warned they face court action by the regulator if they continue to fail disabled passengers.

In this digitally-enabled era, and in an industry with fine margins and so much automation, it’s amazing this happens at all, let alone so frequently. But then, it isn’t amazing, because systems reflect the prejudices of their creators.

That six-digit reservation code is the identifier for a Passenger Name Record (PNR). It identifies that record within a Global Distribution System (GDS): a network that facilitates transactions between travel service-providers. When you book a flight, the PNR contains data supplied by you—the passenger’s names, date of birth, contact and payment details, passport information, etc.—and also data from the airline, such as the travel itinerary, booked seats, baggage etc.

Passengers’ additional requests, such as meal preference or mobility assistance, are all on the PNR as well. So, that one record holds all the data needed for the trip, and can be shared by all the companies and staff that need to access it: the agent and airline, the airport, the security, ground services and special assistance providers. So, with such portability of pertinent data, the system should work flawlessly. But it doesn’t.

GDS systems have at least two big faults. The first is security: those six-digit PNRs are fairly easy for a hacker to guess by elimination. Secondly, because the whole system is born of a culture where there’s ‘normal’ conditions and then ‘exceptional’ ones such as PRMs, it perpetuates that culture of division. Everyone’s journey is exceptional and everyone, to a greater or lesser degree, requires assistance. Cabin crew know this, but the fact this hasn’t been normalised into the systems underpinning the industry exposes how the prejudices of those systems’ creators and operators persist. And as interoperable systems such as this become adopted and standardised, a passenger can’t escape such prejudice by switching airline.

This is the great shadow of the digital era: discrimination is becoming more systemic, not less.

When Gatwick Airport’s current assistance services provider was appointed, its CEO said they would “deliver an exceptional service provision” by “combining innovations in people, processes and systems”. Less than a week after the aviation regulator issued its warning of enforcement action against airports if they keep failing less mobile passengers, Gatwick’s assistance services provider awarded its staff a 15% pay rise. On that same day, a disembarking 82-year-old passenger with restricted mobility tragically fell to his death on a Gatwick Airport escalator, having not been offered assistance services in good time.

Businesses of all kinds are going through some form of digital transformation, just as the travel industry has. This process is often heralded as a great victory for innovation, service and efficiency. But each will pick up striking limitations and prejudices, by treating what it deems to be most frequent as ‘normal’, and everything else as ‘exceptional’. Designers of these systems would do well, next time they fly, to add a mobility assistance request to their booking.

[Update: shortly after this post was published, Frank Gardner found himself stranded, again, on a plane that had landed at Gatwick Airport.]

[Update: to better understand the obstacles faced by wheelchair users, The New York Times sent a reporter and a photographer to document one man’s domestic trip.]

It’s not uncommon for airlines to lose or damage wheelchairs. In 2021, at least 7,239 wheelchairs or scooters were lost, damaged, delayed or stolen on the country’s largest airlines, according to the Air Travel Consumer Report. That’s about 20 per day.

Because of these risks, many people who use wheelchairs say flying can be a nightmare.