Google’s leaders predicted the internet would vanish into pervasive everyday computing

Evidence

In 2015, during a session at the winter playground for neoliberals—and increasingly surveillance capitalists—Schmidt was asked for his thoughts about the future of the internet. Sitting alongside his former Google colleagues Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, he did not hesitate to share his belief that “The internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses… so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room and the room is dynamic.” The audience gasped in astonishment, and shortly thereafter, headlines around the world exploded in shock at the former Google CEO’s pronouncement that the end of the internet was at hand. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 617

Categorization

• CANDY: A tweetable vignette: Schmidt’s ‘the internet will disappear’ remark at Davos, which headlines misunderstood as predicting the end of the internet.
• XREF: connects to: Gates predicted content would dominate the Internet as it did broadcasting — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 862

Broader Connections

• Gates predicted content would dominate the Internet as it did broadcasting #responds-to (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 862