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    Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age
    Unavailable
    Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age
    Unavailable
    Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age
    Audiobook5 hours

    Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    Narrated by Samuel Cohen

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good For You, New York Times bestselling author Steven Johnson's Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to classrooms, from protest movements to health care. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview -- influenced by the success and interconnectedness of the Internet, but not dependent on high-tech solutions -- that breaks with the conventional categories of liberal or conservative thinking.

    With his acclaimed gift for multi-disciplinary storytelling and big ideas, Johnson explores this new vision of progress through a series of fascinating narratives: from the "miracle on the Hudson" to the planning of the French railway system; from the battle against malnutrition in Vietnam to a mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan; from underground music video artists to the invention of the Internet itself.

    At a time when the conventional wisdom holds that the political system is hopelessly gridlocked with old ideas, Future Perfect makes the timely and inspiring case that progress is still possible, and that new solutions are on the rise. This is a hopeful, affirmative outlook for the future, from one of the most brilliant and inspiring visionaries of contemporary culture.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781101579589
    Unavailable
    Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age

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    Reviews for Future Perfect

    3.5/5

    68 ratings19 reviews

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    • 3/5
      (This is a review of an advance reading copy from the publisher through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.)This is basically a manifesto for an emerging school of thought that Johnson calls peer progressives. Their one liner slogan could be, steady incremental improvement through networked peer production.Roughly speaking, it is good popular science writing, with the plusses and minuses of that. It is anecdote oriented and only slightly theoretical. It is only slightly analytical and does not point the way to the next stage of analysis. But it is a fast read and food for thought, a start on the next stage of discussion of how do we get positive social change.
    • 3/5
      I liked the premise of this book, and the idea of peer progressivism in general. Particularly appealing ideas are those around the delegation of local spending powers to local communities and Lawrence Lessig's proposal for the democratic reform of the way politicians' campaigns are financed. I was less convinced by the notion of 'liquid democracy', which was (to my mind anyway) only vaguely defined and without obvious benefits.
    • 1/5
      I wanted to like this. I enjoy Steven Johnson -- his Mind Wide Open was a great read, as was FEED, back in the day, and he usually has some interesting ideas. But this was not one of those books. He seems obsessed with coining the phrase and movement and politically minded group "peer progressives," and if I ever read the words 'Legrand Star' again it'll just be far too soon. The literary equivalent of banging in a nail with your hand. Over and over and over again.Yes, networks are cool. Using tools in ways the creators never intended them is cool. But this could have been an article, rather than a book.I don't not finish many books, but this is one I just put down, two thirds of the way through.
    • 4/5
      I'm a fan of Steven Johnson's work. I think in interdisciplinary webs and networks rather than silos, and his work reflects that approach. This book is no exception.Future Perfect is Johnson's look at networking - through the internet, sure, but in other, lower tech ways as well - as infrastructure for effecting change and building communities. The book is essentially a series of case studies in which he examines networking. The cases are interesting, especially if, like myself, one is interested in movements within a political context.This book is grounded in a substantial literature (though if offers a much easier read!), especially Manuel Castells "The Rise of the Network Society." In fact, this book caused me to go back and read Castells again; I found that Johnson helped me take Castells out of a solely theoretical framework and understand better how his concept of "flows" is enacted on the ground.Less flatteringly, this book is also the predecessor for such books as Gavin Newsom's "Citizenville," in which the concept of the power of networks for political change is reduced to replacing human interaction with computer networks.And herein lies the one difficulty with a smart book like Johnson's work. Humans tend to be reductionist, and Johnson's elegant understanding of the subtleties of utilizing the power of networks for progress is likely to be misunderstood by others. It is one of the perils of being an intelligent thinker in a time and place that devalues deep thought. I, for one, believe this book will survive the era of oversimplification and will be seen for the useful work it is.
    • 3/5
      Peer networks to save the world! The book lacks a discussion of possible trade-offs (like "Everything bad is good for you" had). Not Johnson's best.
    • 3/5
      This book was not exactly what I was expecting. Lots of insight into how technology is shaping society, but at the end there was more political advocating that I would have liked. The political review would have been fine if it had been less opinionated.
    • 4/5
      Steven Johnson outlines an idea of social and political organization he refers to a the "peer progressive" philosophy. There are two main components to this concept: 1) a belief in the possibility and reality of social progress, and 2) a principle of organization based on a decentralized network through which information can flow freely and problems can be solved in a distributed way. This second point, of course, describes how the internet works on a technical basis, and also how such internet-based projects as Wikipedia function, but it need not necessarily be technological. For instance, some corporations function along these lines, to varying degrees.Johnson believes this can also be a valuable strategy to use in government, and, indeed, views it as a new political movement. It's one that he sees as unaligned with either the traditional Left or Right, but rather as a completely different way of conceptualizing things, one that believes that neither government nor corporations should exert the powerful top-down control they are currently wrestling with each other over, but that sees an essential role for both free market competition and government oversight.It took me a little while to really click with what Johnson is saying here. For a good chunk of the book, I found myself, somewhat paradoxically, alternating between thinking that he was talking about things that were trivially obvious and thinking that the ideas he was discussing were so nascent that there really was not very much to be said about them yet. But somewhere in there, I started to find myself nodding a lot and saying, "Hey, that's actually a really good idea!" Prizes instead of patents as a means of incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs? Damn, that's a good idea! A strategy of campaign finance reform that allows taxpayers to designate some portion of their tax money to fund the campaign of the candidate or party of their choice, and forbids candidates who accept that money from taking donations from elsewhere? Hey, that's got to be better than what we have now!Other proposals, such as the "liquid democracy" scheme in which voters can essentially transfer their votes to people they believe know more about the issues than they do, strike me as considerably more dubious. Still. the ideas here are very much worth giving some thought to, and they're presented in Johnson's usual lucid, engaging, and extremely readable style.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating, and optimistic, look at the direction our government and technology may take in the future. It is a very short and quick read, that could be compared more to an extended article than a book, it still offers insights worth digesting. While doubtful that everything the book covered will pan out, it is nice to see the optimism that is still driving some people to better our government and use of technology.
    • 4/5
      Johnson is a "big idea" guy, or should I say that he is THE self-proclaimed big idea guy. In this book, he has revealed research and case studies involving peer to peer networking. My brain lit up as I read about the progress we have already made by thinking together and sharing information in our new web 2.0 society. I began to imagine a utopia where we solved global problems across a digital network, communicating and learning and relating ideas and people and places.But, when I got to the section on Race to the Top and competition, one of the few subjects in the book that I know well, I was disappointed. He oversimplifies the role competition can play in public education. He fails to account for the details and unintended consequences of this federal policy. And, by the time I was done reading that part of the book, I wondered how well he studied the other sections--that I knew less about. If I hadn't known how misguided RTT is, I might believe his assertions about how incentives work.Johnson should read Drive by Dan Pink, because he does not understand how motivation works.This book would be a good text for a graduate level course on using technology in the classroom, because it gives a perspective on our recent history of web 2.0 and it describes the implications for this technology on how we learn and grow both individually and societally.
    • 4/5
      Future Perfect by Steven Johnson is a book about a big idea. And Johnson is a good person to guide you through the big idea, he has dealt with big ideas and he is quite adapt at presenting the cross coupled and complex ideas adroitly.In this case, the idea has to do with peer-to-peer networks. While the name itself sound like it has something to do computer and communication technology, it is a very interesting concept which can be implemented without the help of technology, although it surely could help. The gist of the idea is that in a peer-to-peer network there is no top or bottom, the network just is. There is no centralized command and control, the network exists to pass information efficiently amongst those who need information to thrive and survive. This concept, when extrapolated to other networks, for example: communities, journalism, technology, labor, governance, and corporate structures, can redefine and revolutionize the way these networks work or not work. Very importantly, Johnson is careful in trying to divorce the reader’s mind from the status quo views of the society. He emphasizes that most people distrust both big corporations and big government equally since both entities have demonstrated their incompetence in dealing with our problems. Having our system of thought be strictly dictated by this dichotomous structure is what is hindering our progress towards solving problems. John son then gives examples in various networks and presents ground breaking cases where the peer-to-peer networks in various forms are implemented.The structure of the book gives the impression that these implementations are organic outgrowths of independent thought, and that the author is the one who vaguely recognized the structures, which is how the book is born. I am not sure if that is the case, I do not doubt the author and it seems plausible. The author actually does a very good job of telling the stories in great detail as well as explaining the intricate comings and goings of the networks. I truly enjoyed reading the book, it will take me a long time to revisit and re-think the premise and the evidence presented. This is not a book that will leave you once you are done reading it. The echoes of the big idea will resonate and haunt my thoughts for a while yet.The one thing that was kind of an anomaly within the book is the attacks that the author launches against teachers unions, and he does this without any apparently reason nor any basis for introducing the subject into the discussion. It is an odd and jarring broadside which surfaces time and time again.Overall I would say this is an excellent and thoughtful introduction to a big idea. The book was well conceived and well presented. It does require some original thought on the part of the reader to absorb the concept and be able to accept the premise of the idea.
    • 5/5
      Future Perfect is an optimistic book about technology, society, and the future. That’s remarkable in itself, since pessimistic (or at least cautionary) books tend to outnumber optimistic ones, but what’s even more remarkable is the care and precision with which Johnson makes his case. The new communications technologies, he argues, are significant less for what they do than for what their capabilities enable us to do, if we choose to do it.The first of the book’s two sections lays out its central premise: that distributed “peer networks” allowing the free flow of information between diverse individuals are a powerful force for social progress. decentralized networks are a powerful tool for facilitating interaction between individuals, and thus for social progress. It concludes: “We have a theory of peer networks. We have the practice of building them. And we have results. We know that peer networks can work in the real world. The task now is to discover how far they can take us.” The second, longer section – a series of thematic chapters on subjects like journalism, technology, and government – makes good on that promise. It presents case studies that show what peer networks have already accomplished, and contemplates what they might accomplish in the future.Johnson’s goal, in Future Perfect is not to write a primer on the theory of networks, an analysis of how distributed networks function, or a history of distributed networks (though he touches, expertly but wearing his expertise lightly, on all those subjects). Nor is his goal to predict the future: The potential applications he describes for peer networks are presented as possibilities, not certainties. His evident goal is, rather, to encourage readers raised in a world (largely) defined by centralized networks to think seriously about one (more) defined by peer networks. It is a manifesto, but an intellectual rather than a political one. In the spirit of Apple Computer (the subject of one of Johnson’s case studies), it urges: “Think different.”Future Perfect is, in this sense, a spiritual sequel to Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You. Like the earlier work, it takes a proposition that, at first glance, seems completely absurd -- the height of fuzzy headed wishful thinking -- and patiently shows that the “absurd” idea is a more useful tool than the received wisdom that “everybody knows.” Future Perfect improves on Everything Bad, however, by its carefully delineated internal structure and its layering of case study on case study, thematic chapter on thematic chapter. Johnson’s central idea is breathtakingly simple. His development of it, at length and in detail, is what gives the book its power.Steven Johnson is both an insightful thinker and an exceptionally graceful writer. If you haven’t encountered his work before, this is an excellent place to begin.
    • 4/5
      This book made for light, easy reading. It was so light I think it would have been better off as a series in the paper or a magazine article. The actual premise was interesting but dragged out. I read and enjoyed "The Ghost Map" and some of his other books looked more interesting too.
    • 4/5
      Steven Johnson's latest is Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (Riverhead, 2012). It's an optimistic meditation on how "peer progressive" values (as Johnson coins them) might be able to transform everything from government to medicine to the mass media. While I confess I'm not entirely as convinced as Johnson that this method will solve all the problems he thinks it could, it's certainly nice to read a positive essay which offers a reasonable way forward.Johnson, as he typically does in his books, examines historical precedents (for things like prize-backed challenges) and profiles case studies where he sees peer progressive-style initiatives as having been successful in the past (Kickstarter, New York's 311 system and more). If you're a fan of Johnson's earlier works I can certainly recommend this one.
    • 5/5
      Having thoroughly enjoyed Where Good Ideas Come From, I was delighted to receive an early reviewers copy of Future Perfect to review. I heartily recommend this book as a good and important read of 2012. In this book Johnson looks at the potential of peer networking in politics, business, and everyday life. He gives some intriguing solutions for improving our world from the bottom up. While the distributed network of the Internet is referenced, the underlying concepts are not just technology. based. Here is an optimistic view of the future potential of peer networks with lots of data backing up the arguments. Having been an early Internet adopter and participant in some peer projects, Johnson's words make perfect sense. I certainly wouldn't have predicted the success of Wikipedia but there is a lot of merit to the wisdom of crowds. Johnson's decentralized solutions do not align with either Democratic or Republican party but can speak to members of both parties. There were a number of excellent programs highlighted in the book, and the end of the books Notes chapter has given me a good reading list of both books and Internet links. I feel as if this book is a current snapshot of a changing world and look forward to Steven Johnson's next insights.
    • 3/5
      not a big fan of steven johnson's work. Very dry and hard to read. Factually well done and interesting but takes a lot to get thru the book
    • 5/5
      Won this book from the early reviewers group. Very interesting, and quick read. The book is about peer progressive networks, which basically states that management and decisions should be decentralized and shared by the whole. This would be great in the private sector, and some examples are given, Apple and Wikipedia. I do not think this would work well in the public sector, some examples are given of some municipalities that are doing this, by the use of a telephone number you can call, but to truly create a web as described in the book where ideas and management of those ideas flow freely, most governments will not either want to share the power, or spend the money to update their IT infrastructure to handle such an endeavor. I recommend this book for your reading pleasure, it is very thought provoking.
    • 4/5
      In Future Perfect author Steven Johnson describes in detail an emerging political movement or philosophical worldview he names peer progressive. According to Johnson, peer progressives are in favor of decentralized, distributed networks with no single command center—similar to the internet but not necessarily technology based, which makes sense. Peer networks have surely been around as long as there have been humans. As a political philosophy peer progressivism straddles the line between Republicans and Democrats, sharing some ideas with each, though often the reasoning behind those common beliefs is different. Future Perfect is similar in theme to many of Johnson’s other books, but unlike them it has a sort of one note song feel. Its only topic is peer progressives. Johnson’s enthusiasm is infectious, he has interesting things to say about what a world enhanced by peer progressive networks might look like, and his ideas seem worth discussing and considering, but the book’s 200+ pages felt long to me.
    • 4/5
      Johnson provides an interesting approach to tackling societal problems based on broad, diverse, and egalitarian input and distribution of information, using the internet as system model. The examples are interesting and encouraging. It's certainly an approach worthy of consideration. His enthusiasm may extend its powers too broadly but who's to say. It's certainly worked well in numerous cases.
    • 4/5
      FYI: This review is based upon a uncorrected proof provided to me by the publisher.Johnson's book is overtly political and progressive, but his arguments don't fit neatly into the standard left/right model. He is arguing for a new kind of politics - one he bases on the Internet. He uses fascinating examples - for example, how New York City solved the mystery of a faint maple syrup odor that showed up on several occasions - to argue for political solutions not coming from a hierarchical order, but from the collective wisdom of citizens themselves. Color me skeptical, but his arguments are earnest and worthy of discussion and consideration. His ideas are a future worth exploring.