The NY Times headline caught my eye the other day: “Border Fight Focuses on Water, Not Immigration.” Why? Many years ago, I read an interview with Ted Turner, in which someone asked him what he’d invest in if he were a young man setting out to make his fortune all over again. His one word reply stuck in my mind: “Water.”
I bring this up for two reasons: First, I do believe that Ted Turner correctly foresaw that water rights will indeed be one of the big economic battles of the coming century, with new haves and have-nots fighting over a limited resource, and resulting fortunes being made not only in real estate but in technology. Second, this story is a great illustration of how “news from the future” works. You get an idea of a plausible future, a trend that might come to fruition. They you watch for headlines that tell you that that possible future is indeed coming true. This is such a headline.
It’s this kind of thought process (whether conscious or unconscious) that leads us to many of our best ideas. Consider Make: magazine, for instance. We had a long-term belief that hardware was getting cheaper and more hackable, and that custom manufacturing would be following the same price-performance curve as desktop publishing had done a couple of decades ago. Then we saw more and more stories (whether in traditional news media, or from online sites like slashdot, or from word of mouth) that told us that the trend was gathering momentum. We tested the market with some books, which did well, then put a bigger stake in the ground….
(Make: also illustrates a related point: the need to integrate data points that appear to be from different data sets. As I think I wrote before, this is one of the most fascinating things to me about what Dale Dougherty has been doing with Make:, namely finding the union between the crafter movement and the DIY technology movement. At the Maker Faire, he had one pavilion in which people were remanufacturing old clothes into new fashions, and in another, hard core tech like the biodiesel powered Linux supercomputer made out of recycled PCs. It takes a brilliant leap of intuition to put those two things into the same frame.)
P.S. While googling for the source of the Ted Turner quote, I came across a fascinating document that referenced another Ted Turner comment that the structure of the water industry resembles that of the cable industry. Worth a read.