Circumstances are conspiring to create a world in which we are all espionage agents, whether we want to be or not. It is not widely recognized yet, but the much ballyhooed Information Economy is, in fact, an Intelligence Economy where we will all wake up one morning to find ourselves locked into the go-go lifestyle of Spy vs. Spy. Or hadn’t you noticed that “knowledge worker” is just another name for “intelligence analyst”? In our new Intelligence Economy, we’ll all be working for the jokers with the satellites.
Predictor: Kinney, Jay
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Jay Kinney, editor of Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions, writes: ”Circumstances are conspiring to create a world in which we are all espionage agents, whether we want to be or not. It is not widely recognized yet, but the much ballyhooed Information Economy is, in fact, an Intelligence Economy where we will all wake up one morning to find ourselves locked into the go-go lifestyle of Spy vs. Spy. Or hadn’t you noticed that ‘knowledge worker’ is just another name for ‘intelligence analyst’? In the old intelligence agency paradigm, it was the special province of spooks to compile dossiers on people, send coded messages, establish mail drops, and hatch schemes to subvert the enemy. The rest of us were supposed to happily live ‘normal’ lives buying and selling widgets and raising families. Well, those innocent days are over. Now we all get to do the dirty deeds. Consider the following. We’ve got an offer you can’t refuse. Lots of cool hardware that was first developed for military-intelligence applications has rolled down the pike. Now we get to use it. The only catch is that it carries with it the mode of social relations of the guys who first developed it. Yesterday it was spies sending burst transmissions via satellite to headquarters. Today, it’s the home office paging you on the road via satellite. Good guys, bad guys, whatever: In our new Intelligence Economy, we’ll all be working for the jokers with the satellites.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: Employment
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: James Bond R Us!
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/james.bond_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney