Interview: Socionomics meets fiction in Newell's novel
Here is the full transcript of an interview that appeared in the Socionomics Institute's newsletter (Issue 8). Thanks to Ben Hall of the institute who contacted me for the interview and thanks to Google for letting him know about me. NOTE: there may be a few spoilers in the interview for The Turning, so best to read the book first.
| How did you find out about socionomics? | I can answer this question very accurately (thanks not to my remarkable memory or exhaustive note-taking; but to the power of the internet, rather aptly,). I first learnt of socionomics and Elliott Waves in an article entitled 'I know what you'll do next summer', published in the science and technology magazine New Scientist, in 2002. I do read this magazine 'religiously' to stay current with scientific issues and developments, including the social sciences, of course. Many of the ideas for my writing are sparked by something in its pages. Thinking about it, I'm almost never more than ten feet from the latest issue. |
| Why did you decide to make your protagonist a Demand Forecaster? | I think one of
the most interesting things to explore when writing about
the future is what jobs we'll all be doing. It's more
changeable that people might imagine. In the UK, the coal
industry collapsed twenty years ago. This was a significant
event in the country's history and I remember it very
vividly despite being quite young. It led to massive
unemployment and severe hardship for whole communities.
There was understandably a great deal of anger surrounding
these events. People feared for their children's future.
What would they do now? Today, in some of those regions most
effected, the coal industry has been replaced by tourism in
part and also by high-tech software and systems companies.
The children of the miners are now writing software for the
defence industry. That's a leap of two economic sectors in a
single generation. So, our children may have as a profession
something that we can't even imagine right now. That's quite
exciting. For my book I needed a character whose job it was to know a lot about society and social trends, so a socionomist was an obvious fit. Demand Forecasting was my attempt at inventing a tangible profession for the domain; something readers would 'get'. |
| Do you think there will be a Demand Forecasters that use socionomics as a tool in the future? | There will always be
visionaries and followers. The former group already
instinctively use the principles underpinning socionomics,
probably without even knowing it. By way of example consider
the climate change issue. This rumbled on for two decades
without really capturing the interest of the world. However,
over the last twelve months or so there has been a notable
change in mood. People are starting to care. People are
starting to worry! And who noticed this right at the start?
The Silicon Valley venture capitalists that made billions by
financing the dot com start-ups. They are now pouring their
green into green. They sense the mood change; they see the
writing on the wall. Perhaps, what makes a successful
venture capitalist is their innate socionomic skills, even
if most of them assume Elliott Waves have something to do
with surfing. Whether jobs like Demand Forecasting, employing socionomic principles, will exist in the mainstream is hard to say. I think that its success may actually depend on it remaining a niche practice. Only so many people can predict the future before it starts affecting it. |
| The example of alcohol consumption forecasting is great. How did you come up with that? | If I remember correctly it dates back to an economics lesson at high-school. I don't recall the details but I remember discussing how the very long distilling process created rather interesting market conditions, in which suppliers cannot react to changes in demand. So, when I needed an example this one popped into my mind. |
| Your book takes place in the future. How would you describe the social mood of that time? | The rather dull answer is:
about the same as today. To quote more figures, since the
1950s incomes in the first world have tripled in real terms
? that is, we can have three times as much stuff now as we
did back then ? yet our happiness has remained unchanged.
These figures refer to individual mood, but I believe social
mood follows the same trend. The basic fact about human nature is that whatever our situation we always want a little bit more. This trait explains the success of our cultural advancement, but is also our greatest demon. It means that however much we progress in terms of our standard of living, our social mood will always centre around the same median. I truly hope we can find a solution to this issue (without needing to reach Utopia) but in the meantime, the self-help industry continues abound. |
| You had some very creative ideas about how the internet and social life changed; G and multiple identities. What made you think of these? | The one thing you can say
about technology is that you can't hold it back. One day we
will get to the point that you can barely sneeze without it
being recorded somewhere. Consider our internet activity,
the cell phones we carry everywhere, GPS devices in our
cars, RFID tags in everything we buy, biometric passports,
security cameras with face recognition software,
high-resolution satellite images. As such I think we can
almost bank on there being a significant privacy-rights
movement against these technologies at some point in the
future. Who knows how disruptive this may be? I don't think
it will lead to multiple identities as a solution; there
would be too many obstacles. But in my stories, I like to
throw in some 'what-if?' thought experiments. That's what
fiction is all about for me. The seminal notion for G arose from an ad-hoc discussion at work. A colleague had just stumbled across Google's unit conversion feature. This was the first time the search engine had done more than just search. It had gleaned semantics from the user's query and answered it directly. It was like Google had just grown up a little. This was at a time when Google's user base and suite of tools was ballooning at an unbelievable rate. It led us to postulate that one day there would be nothing else. No desktops, no other software, just Google. You would ask it a question and it would give you the answer. This, is just a fanciful notion, but the idea of considering the internet as a single living entity is a very logical one. It may be conscious in a way that we just can't comprehend, and in a way that just can't comprehend us. Also, I'm very interested in evolution, and in particular how group-selection theory solves a lot of the anomalies with Darwin's natural selection. These ideas were weaved in to make G what it was in the book. For a spot of trivia there are a total of three G-words that led me to choose this name, but I'll leave it to readers to figure these out. |