Good news. This is the end.

Surprised?

We have a tendency to think of endings as bad things. And some endings are bad things: bereavements, redundancies, bankruptcies. But all of them can also lead to good things, even if indirectly. All biological life is cyclical, with the old giving way to the new. Leaving an old career can open the way to a new, happier one. And a company failure makes room for new, innovative competitors to thrive.

Beyond even that, we’ve all had positive experiences of endings. Just think of those words, “The End”. Where have you come across them before? Maybe in the dark of a cinema, watching the words appear vast and bold on the screen in front of you, after a satisfying couple of hours of viewing. They mark a full stop on that experience — and the beginning of the next. Are you off to dinner afterwards? Off for a quick drink? Or maybe home, happy after a night out.

Perhaps you came across the words at the end of a bedtime story as a child, before being tucked in for a good night’s sleep, ready for the day to come. Or maybe you read them to your own child, just last night. The words make an experience enjoyed, finished, and filed away as a happy memory.

And there are more examples in our sense of time. Year’s end is a time for reflection, before we embark on a whole new year, for example. And we have traditional festivals to mark the end of seasons. Ends are integral to the rhythm of life.

Knowing when the end is nigh

Conversely, there’s a danger in not knowing when the end has come. Think of the toxic relationships that you clung to when they should have ended. Think of the TV shows that “jumped the shark” — that went on beyond their natural lives and became a parody of their old selves. But also think of the companies that couldn’t see that it was the end of business as usual when the internet came steaming into our lives, driving business models — and companies — to extinction.

Often, the biggest blockers of the adoption of Web 2.0 tech were the “experts” of the early web. They knew how to do websites, and what was all this new-fangled “social network” stuff, anyway? It’s just people taking photos of their lunch!

That attitude did not age well. Nor did the claims that the iPhone wasn’t a serious tool, like the BlackBerry. It’s hard to spot the end. When I went to buy one company’s first modem with one of my colleagues, to connect us to the internet for the first time, I had no idea that the end of one phase of my career, but the beginning of the next, could be summed up by that purchase.

As we did then, we stand on the cusp of a new age of digital, perhaps as transformative as the last two. Some people have been actively looking for this next big shift, and got distracted by blockchain and the metaverse. Intriguing technologies, to be sure, but not, as yet, transformative.

The end of the determinative era

But AI is something palpably different. It’s a guessing machine, not one that processes answers in the way we’re used to. It’s a challenge because it up-ends our worldview, or more specifically, our view of computers. We’re used to them being good, obedient little logical engines, not unpredictable, hallucinatory guessing engines. And yet, nothing has had as much potential to make use of the vast reserves of data we’ve been creating for 30 years.

Even the great money-making machine that Apple became during the mobile/digital age has struggled to detect the oncoming end. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball pointed out in an excruciating post for Apple executives, failing to spot AI was a major mistake for the company. It led to them announcing vapourware AI tools a year ago, and having to make a humiliating climb down now, as they can’t (yet) deliver them.

Those whose knowledge of digital history stretches back to the beginning of the internet age might spot an echo of Microsoft and the internet in 1995 or Nokia and its burning platform memo in 2011. Maybe transformative technologies come in 15-year cycles. And that means we’re due one right now.

A digital end in a new political age

And this technology is coming into play just as the world around us is changing, rapidly, and beyond recognition. The world’s politics are more unstable than we’ve experienced in decades. For many of us, it’s more unstable than we’ve ever lived through. The old alliances look less sure, and there’s a sense that the balance of global power is shifting.

And that’s without taking into account the other factors that we have to deal with:

• the climate crisis and both the decarbonisation and the migration that it will produce
• the profound shift in working patterns, post-pandemic
• the changing social attitudes that each generation always brings, but with the added spice of two generations that have grown up post-digital
  

We can bury our heads in the sand. We can issue “back to the office” mandates to workers who know they can work better and live better lives when working flexibly, and who will seek out better employment. Likewise, we can hope that the political changes are a blip, and that the next election will restore a normalcy that is long gone. We can pretend to ourselves that AI is an unpredictable new technology that will disrupt business in ways few of us can predict, and cling to business as normal until that normal business is no more.

Not all ends are good. It’s incumbent on us to pick the right ones.

Embracing the end

This can be hard. Many of us are prone to conservatism bias: when presented with new evidence, we tend to place more weight on the old evidence, and assume that the new evidence is a blip, a quirk. Things will go back to normal after the pandemic. That new political leader is a one-off, and not a mark of a changed landscape.

It’s not helped by another psychological phenomenon: shifting baseline syndrome. Whatever we encounter now is our baseline, and we don’t realise how much things have changed to get us to now. Those of us who grew up in the latter decades of the 20th century, or the early ones of the 21st, have a different baseline assumption of political stability compared to those who lived through the middle years of the 20th century. Most powerfully, this prevents us from realising just how much the natural world has decayed, compared to that experienced by our grandparents.

One of the good things about growing up in late 70s and early 80s Britain was one TV show that helped educate us about loss and change: Doctor Who. In March 1981, when I was the same age as my youngest daughter is now, I watched my hero, whose adventures I’d wait eagerly for on a Saturday, and whose comic I’d read and reread through the week, fall. He fell from a radio telescope, to a hard ground far below. He was clearly dying.

And then he said:

It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.

And then another figure blurred into his, and a new, younger figure sat up in his place. It was the end. But it was also the beginning. Like a generation before me, and now several after me, thanks to the revived series, I was learning a lesson in endings, in loss, but also in new beginnings.

Things end. But you can prepare for that. And do something new.

This is the end. What’s next?

NEXT has always been, at its heart, a digital conference. Our founders, back in the 2000s, though, had the wisdom not to name it after any one technology. The long-gone conferences of the 2000s and 2010s, like Le Web (itself a renaming of Les Blogs), would feel anachronistic in the 2020s.

But that fundamental question — what’s next? — remains as powerful and compelling as ever. And sometimes, your first step in answering the question is acknowledging that the old world is done.

For many, digital still feels like the new world. But it’s not. The form of digital we’ve been discussing for over 20 years is done. The wheels of technology have turned again, and our old assumptions are dead. The consequences of that past era are still playing out, and we’re still seeking to understand what that means for the future.

You see, this is the end. And knowing that it’s the end shall set you free.