12 Leaders The Economist April 9th 2022
up and murdered in Bucha are a “staged provocation by the Kiev
regime”. The Economistsent a reporter to check; he came back
with his clothes stinking of death.
Thousands of kilometres away, in another very different
country, a third leader is inventing threats as a way to cling to
power. A noconfidence vote against Imran Khan, the prime
minister of Pakistan, was scheduled for April 3rd. The deputy
speaker of parliament, an ally of the former cricket star, declared
it a plot by the United States and cancelled it (see Asia section).
Political chaos ensued. Mr Khan is said to have lost the support
of Pakistan’s army, which often meddles in politics. He no doubt
calculates that in a fresh election, which he has called, it will do
him no harm if voters believe he stood up to a wicked American
conspiracy. There is no evidence of one.
Starting on April 10th, under a political system unlike Hunga
ry’s, Russia’s or Pakistan’s, French voters also face a choice between hope and fear (see Briefing). Marine Le Pen relies on exag
geration rather than lies, and tries to put a respectable face on
fearmongering. She frets about France’s “submersion” by a flood
of immigrants. She proposes to ban public wearing of the hijab
and give French people priority over foreigners, even euciti
zens, in jobs, housing and welfare. That would violate the prin
ciples of the eu. If she were a marginal figure it would not mat
ter, but she may conceivably be the next president of France.
Masskilling dictators like Mr Putin are rarer today than dur
ing the cold war. More common are leaders who win power by
sowing fear and division. For all their many differences, such
leaders all pose a threat to tolerance and decency (see Culture
section). To defeat them, liberals must neither underestimate
them, as they did Donald Trump in 2016, nor copy their tactics.
In the long run, lies must be fought with truth, painstakinglyre
searched and patiently expressed. It will be a long struggle.nF
ifteen yearsago Steve Jobsannouncedthreenewproducts:
a music player, a mobile phone and an internet communica
tor. As Apple’s thenboss gave his presentation, his audience
slowly realised that the three products were in fact a single gad
get: the iPhone. Cue applause, cue Apple’s renaissance, and cue a
new era in technology as the smartphone overtook the desktop
pc as the centre of personal computing.
Today even Mr Jobs might be surprised by how many uses
have been found for his versatile device. The small screen has
come to handle banking, networking, mapreading, gaming and
much more. Apple and other phonemakers have been enriched
not only by hardware sales (worth $530bn last year) but by con
trolling what happens on the platform, from app stores (which
raked in $135bn) to mobile ads (worth nearly $300bn).
Yet there is mounting evidence that the
smartphone era is fading. Phone sales have
been in gentle decline since 2016, as slower
technological improvement has led to people
upgrading less often. In rich countries, already
saturated, the decline is especially marked. So
tech innovators and investors are on the hunt
for the next big thing, in hopes of winning not
just a juicy hardware market but the potential to
control the platform on which everything takes place.
The current big idea is virtualreality (vr) headsets, spurred
on in part by pandemic lockdowns. More promising, but further
off, are glasses for experiencing augmented reality (ar), in
which computer graphics are overlaid on the real world. Most of
America’s big tech firms—among them Apple, Google, Meta and
Microsoft—as well as Asian giants like ByteDance (TikTok’s Chi
nese owner) and Sony, are developing or already selling vr or ar
headsets. What has so far been a niche market is about to be
come very crowded (see Business section).
Any claim to have discovered the next big platform deserves
caution. There have been plenty of false starts. Tablets were pro
claimed as a rival to the smartphone, yet Apple still makes six
times as much money selling iPhones as it does from iPads.Smarthomeswereseenasanotherpossible megaplatform, but
so far Alexa and her like serve mostly as jukeboxes and eggtim
ers. Incar tech is another platform that has proved useful and
valuable, but hardly threatens to become the centre of anyone’s
digital life. It is easy to imagine headsets, which are now used
mostly for gaming, getting stuck in a similar niche.
What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual move
ment by consumers towards a constellation of new wearable de
vices. These include voiceactivated smart headphones, which
can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches,
which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. A growing ar
ray of healthtech gadgets measure everything from blood sugar
to sleep patterns. In America unit sales of these “wearables” are
already close to sales of smartphones.
These gadgets are more like accessories for
the phone than replacements. But as comput
ing shifts away from the pocket and towards
wrists and ears, a growing share of consumers’
attention and spending is seeping away from
the phone, too. As vr and ar glasses become
lighter and cheaper, they could form the most
powerful part of the wearable cluster.
People are not about to ditch their phones,
any more than they threw out their laptops a decade ago. But as
they interact more often with earphones or, soon, glasses, more
of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, pri
marily there to provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As
chips get even smaller, phones may not be needed even for that.
Don’t expect any of this to happen right away. Interneten
abled phones were launched in the late 1990s and failed to catch
on outside offices. ar headsets—bulky, pricey and so far used
only in industry—are at a similar stage. Yet when technological
tippingpoints are crossed, things can change fast. Four years
after Mr Jobs introduced his iPhone, smartphones outsold all
laptop and desktop computers worldwide. Silicon Valley’s latest
great hope is still a work in progress. But if and whenthe right
product appears, the future may arrive very quickly.nIn Silicon Valley the search is on for the next big tech platformAfter the smartphone
Technology