Reason Once Tried To Predict The Future. How Did We Do?

IT WAS MAY 1993. Barely two years earlier, a failed coup attempt had marked the last gasp of Soviet Communism. The Cold War was over. Germany was reunified. The Baltic countries were independent. In the former Yugoslavia, Sarajevo was under siege.

- Virginia Postrel

Bill Clinton, a New Democrat who spoke the wonky language of neo classical economics, was in his first months as president. Ross Perot’s upstart candidacy had made the budget deficit a high-profile issue. A free trade treaty with Mexico and Canada was awaiting ratification. The European Union would be born in November.

Later that year, I’d visit Silicon Valley and ask computer whiz Mark S. Miller how Reason should “get on the internet,” as our techie friends kept telling us to do. I had a CompuServe account. Should we start a Reason bulletin board? Wait, he counseled: “There’s this thing called the World Wide Web, and it’s going to be big.”

A month after Reason’s 25th anniversary issue hit newsstands, Marc Andreessen released Mosaic, the first graphical browser. The next year he started Netscape, whose commercial Navigator browser made the web widely accessible. The internet age had arrived.

We were on the cusp of a new era, but the 25th anniversary issue was not highconcept. It had no clever structure or big theme. As editor, I did the easy thing. I asked interesting thinkers to contribute essays on whatever they wanted to write about, given the loosest of prompts: Look ahead 25 years.

Picking writers I wanted to read gave the issue implicit direction. Another editor might have commissioned policy focused pieces or rants against the evils of the state. (Richard Epstein did focus on health care, making the surefire prediction that “there will be greater government control over the provision of healthcare services in this country 25 years from now than there is today.”) But for the most part, my tastes produced meditations on culture, commerce, and technology.