Scenarios for the future of Technology (Lockstep document)
For decades, technology has been dramatically changing not just the lives of individuals in developed countries, but increasingly the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the developing world. Whether it is a community mobile phone, a solar panel, a new farming practice, or a cutting edge medical device, technology is altering the landscape of possibility in places where possibilities used to be scarce. The Rockefeller Foundation and GBN began the scenario process by surfacing a host of driving forces that would affect the future of technology and international development. These forces were generated through both secondary research and in depth interviews with Foundation staff, Foundation grantees, and external experts.
Once crossed, these axes create a matrix of four very different futures:
LOCK STEP – A world of tighter top down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback
CLEVER TOGETHER – A world in which highly coordinated and successful strategies emerge for addressing both urgent and entrenched worldwide issues
HACK ATTACK – An economically unstable and shock prone world in which governments weaken, criminals thrive, and dangerous innovations emerge
SMART SCRAMBLE – An economically depressed world in which individuals and communities develop localized, makeshift solutions to a growing set of problems
Now we will be focusing only on LOCK STEP
A pandemic arrives & governments respond with emergency powers. Citizens, exhausted & frightened, surrender their freedoms willingly, grateful for the firm hand guiding them through the chaos & then the emergency ends but the powers don’t. That in its barest form is the “Lock Step” scenario. Written in 2010 as one of four speculative futures imagined by the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network, it reads today less like institutional forecasting & more like a document someone left in the wrong decade.
The Setup
The scenario opens with a pandemic like a novel influenza strain, devastating & swift killing 8 million in seven months. The world scrambles as most governments respond poorly but a few don’t. In China, the narrative notes approvingly seals its borders with efficiency, imposes mandatory quarantine & suffers fewer casualties as a result. The lesson that world leaders draw from this disparity is not one of preparedness or public health infrastructure. It is one of control. & the takeaway is, its absorbed by governments across the globe & that the tighter authority works (the tighter, the better). What follows is the gradual normalization of the emergency state. Biometric IDs for all citizens, body temperature checks at train stations & supermarkets. fMRI scanners at airports to detect “antisocial intent.” Citizens willingly surrendered privacy in exchange for safety and stability. They were eager for top down direction & are grateful for it.
The Architecture of Compliance
What makes Lock Step genuinely unsettling is not the dystopian imagery but it’s the clinical detachment with which it’s presented. This is not a warning but it is a scenario, a planning tool, a framework for thinking through possibilities & yet the scenario doesn’t treat the erosion of civil liberties as a catastrophe to be avoided. It treats it as a condition to be managed, a trade off to be weighed, an outcome that under the right leadership could even produce positive results. Air quality improves in India, water access expands in Ghana, the Ganges gets cleaned up. Authoritarian governance is neither good nor bad. It depends on the quality of the leaders wielding it. That framing should give any reader a pause. The scenario does not question whether handing emergency powers to governments is dangerous. It asks only whether those governments will use the power responsibly. History has a consistent answer to that question & it is not encouraging.
The Technology of Surveillance
The document’s treatment of technology in this world is equally revealing. In Lock Step, innovation is driven not by human curiosity or economic competition but by government mandate & government mandate is pointed almost entirely at monitoring & controlling populations. Scanners that read intent, health screenings as prerequisites for freedom of movement, national internet firewalls that fracture the global web into state controlled zones. These are presented as natural extensions of governance in a world that has chosen security over liberty. Nowhere does the scenario ask who decides what “antisocial intent” looks like on an fMRI. Nowhere does it interrogate what happens when screening becomes a tool for suppressing dissent rather than containing disease. The possibility is acknowledged only obliquely in the observation that authoritarian leadership works less well in countries run by irresponsible elites. The elites apparently are the variable. The system is not!
The Pushback That Comes Too Late
To its credit, the scenario does not end on a note of triumphant order. By 2025, citizens are growing tired, civil unrest spreads, Nigeria’s government falls. The tight architecture of compliance begins to crack under the weight of accumulated resentment. The authors note that a feeling lingered that something would inevitably upset the order governments had worked so hard to establish. People pushing back against surveillance states & entrenched control is not a system failure. It is a system working as it should.
Final Assessment
Lock Step is not a recommendation. Its authors would insist on that & they would be right technically. It is a scenario, a thought experiment, a map of one possible future drawn for the purposes of strategic planning but thought experiments carry assumptions embedded in their architecture. The assumptions embedded in Lock Step is that emergency powers can be safely granted that control & stability are roughly synonymous that the danger lies only in bad leaders rather than in concentrated authority itself which are worth sitting with long after the document is closed.
This is a scenario that describes a world sliding quietly into something it cannot easily name & the most disturbing thing about it is how reasonable it all sounds on the way down.
Original Paper: “Future of Technology and International Development” (Rockefeller Foundation / Global Business Network, 2010)
