‘Life after Google’: Expert predicts what will come next after tech giants fall

An expert who foresaw the rise of the smartphone and wearable technology in a visionary 1990 book has now predicted the fall of tech giants such as Google.

George Gilder, an economist, speech writer and venture capitalist claims that new technologies such as blockchain could bring about the end of today’s vast tech monopolies.

In his book, ‘Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy,’ Gilder predicts that customers will want to retake control of their data.

Gilder says that blockchain – the ‘distributed ledger’ which underpins cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, could one day offer a decentralised way to use the internet – without the ‘walled gardens’ offered by tech giants such as Google.

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Instead of companies such as Google distributing information and keeping most of the advertising revenue, people could pay tiny amounts to enjoy content using ‘micropayments’, Gilder suggests in an interview with WND.

They would also keep control of their own data, he suggests.

Gilder says, ‘The Google dream is a supermind in the sky that knows everything. My dream is to distribute information as human minds are distributed.

‘That makes it possible for you to escape the centralization of a walled garden that collects all the money.

‘So an economy works best if power is distributed in accord with the distribution of human minds.

‘I think what we’re going to have is the capability of a real global capitalism that can be conducted across networks in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion.’