1.0 The timeline

We are futuremakers, living in an age when destiny doesn’t have to be entirely random, a world where everything can be made and measured.

This is an age of two-way interactivity, where every digital human has a voice, an imagination and a unique ability to contribute.

The essence of code is binary, it’s made up of 0’s and 1’s. These bits and bytes of code are protein chains for digital life. You could call them the double helix’s of our digital DNA.

‘Welcome to the future’, the app’s release note says. ‘This has never been done before in history’ it goes on.

If data is ‘the new oil’, as it’s sometimes described, and attention is a currency, then how now do we make the best use of all their riches?

Looking at the first years of the 21st Century with the benefit of some hindsight, we can see perhaps the digital world is something only now sufficiently mature for us to have a semblance of understanding about it.

This is the greatest A/B test of all time. A test to find the brightest and best path for us as digital humans.

The human genome was fully mapped in 2000 C.E. It may follow that the entire universe of human activity and all its technical connections is fully mapped and monitored in just a few short years.

Digital technology enables us to record history and chart the progress of humankind in ways that were previously unimaginable. Insights from any number of chapters from the past can be recalled in an instant now and placed at our fingertips.

Since the beginning of the 21st Century, what used to be referred to as ‘industrial-scale’ to denote size has been completely redefined by companies like Amazon, Ebay, Google and Facebook.

Machinery and hardware have embarked on a noble quest over the last 30 years, a journey towards being smaller and more convenient.

‘Necessity’s the mother of invention’, it has been said, and the Second World War was the catalyst for something equally seismic: The age of data, together with our growing human dependency on machines and artificial intelligence.

During those glamorous ‘Mad Men’ years, the ‘Don Draper’ maestros in the real world included people like Bill Bernbach and David Ogilvy who produced these two famous press ads in the 1960’s.

With the arrival of the factory came the mass market. Factories made it possible to produce products and trade resources on a scale far greater than anything previously thought possible.

A great many new scientific disciplines emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution. They included new fields of professional practice such as engineering, design and several branches of medicine.