2010 Predictions and Such

Well, it’s New Year’s Even in NZ… I’m staying in and not going out… the cat’s come in covered in bidi-bids… Gladiator’s on later… and the TV, and every media thing you care to tune into is rewinding over the previous decade, and stepping on eggshells around the decade to come.

So it’s probably time to put my Nostradamus hat (and beard) on and make a load of predictions. But first a picture of an owl, that I stole from somewhere.

That’s what I would look like if I was an owl, about to predict the future.

Ok. I’m not going to predict the future – I’m just going to try to identify current tectonics that may or may not have a bearing on what actually winds up happening.

1) The Battle For The Root.

This is one that’s going to kick off in 2010 when the Evil Empire tries to impose 3 strikes type laws all over the world – forcing ISPs to become policemen, and internet businesses to proceed with great wariness with regards innovation… in the knowledge that they exist at the convenience of major corporations.

Whether this will make a difference – or the web will simply route around that as well, remains to be seen… but this is the big battle of 2010. It’s the lead up to ACTA. It’s a serious threat, and we need to get organised.

2) The Internet Wants All The Information In The World.

This is like an osmotic law of nature… information… all of it, is somehow drawn into The Universal Mind. It’s a kind of emergent morality – that nothing should be lost… everything should be saved for future generations – and in fact the current generations – similar in spirit to Public Libraries in the industrial era.

There should be a fundamental human right that people have access to any information they need for their educations… especially when these educations are for the majority of people, life-saving. Reducing child-mortality rate is the most effective way we have of reducing the birth rate. We need this.

3) A hyper-connected planet. Who knows what the fallout of this one is going to be… but I can’t imagine it not leading to a sharp uptick in human standards of living. It’s also been said that a society with an internet is a qualitatively different thing from a society without. What this will mean for the balance of power in places like China – who’s power-structure is actually fairly brittle, is anyone’s guess… but I’d be surprised if it stayed the same.

4) Speaking of China, they’re buying up all the world’s mineral reserves. The trillion dollars that America has borrowed to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is being used by China to buy up the mineral reserves… in Afghanistan and Iraq… as well as provide infrastructure in those places. It’s almost seems at times like China stepping in with a Marshall Plan without getting involved in the preceding fighting. Inevitable, bulldozer-like cleverness.

5) People are worth less. People everywhere, not just developing countries, will need to start shifting off-grid as a matter of survival. This is something that needs to happen at a community level… at the same time that people are engaged in the biggest migration in history – from low to high-density living. And high-density living is not conducive to community-forming. Always-On-network/Off-grid… always-connected-to-people/alone. And The Money has an inbuilt weakness which makes it unsustainable. Put it all together what do you get? No idea – but the resilient survive, and resilience comes from network. From multi-cellularity. From diversity.

6) Green Tech is now a juggernaut that can’t be stopped, albeit a juggernaut a lot smaller than the current energy giants… still, a juggernaut it is. This combined with the off-griddery above, will lead to people being able to create their own energy, which will cause the economy to crash again… assuming it ever recovers from the current crisis. If people ARE off grid though, they might well be fairly well adjusted to weather this crash. This and the dodginess of conventional debt-based currency will push people even further into off-griddery.

I mean it’s not making us happy is it? Everyone’s suffering from depression. We’ve got a culture that is driven by marketing – ie: the manufacture of desire, and as a Buddha somewhere once told me – desire is the root of of all unhappiness.

7) Ok… fuck all that. Lets talk about reality etc.

8) Things are going to happen to reality… there seems to be this human-flirtation between “real” and fantasy – and this turns up really strongly in sex and violence. People love both. People hate both.

Art is this oscillation/flirtation/dynamic between accurately reflecting what is, and presenting a distillation of what resonates. Similar dynamics exist in pornography, entertainment etc. War is only fightable if you can somehow pretend that the “bad guys” are less than human… which you can’t really do, which is why about 1/4 of the people I was taking really bad drugs with in the gutters of Soho back in the 90s were ex-military… but take a look at the innovation going on at the moment. Sooo… much time and effort and resources are going into a fantasies of what war is like. It’s a game.

One the one hand you’ve got armies/communities of people making their own robotic weapons – including rocket-firing UAVs for fun, on the other hand you’ve got people flying million-dollar-machines over Pakistan from bases in Nevada, coming down with greater incidences of PTSD than people on the ground.

(In the coming decade the US is going to have to stop doing this, because if it doesn’t it will be a 3rd world country in the space of a generation)

But anyway… back to reality. Great hope and hype is being place on Augmented Reality – which seems to involve holding an iphone up in front of your face wherever you go. Fuck that.

Augmented reality is on its way, but it’s not going to be about superimposing hyperlinks or tags or adverts over reality – which reminds me of Web 1.0 for some reason. That might happen as well – (might be useful for shopping etc, remember boo.com?) but the quest for snippets of information doesn’t play into the human condition that much. I think augmented reality will be to do with “hyper-realing”. Immersive entertainment, with resonant aspects amplified – especially those to do with violence and sex. The flipside could well be war, with reality taken out of it.

Another possibility for hyper-realing is 1st person tourist drones… machines controlled over the web with cameras that you can see through… but they won’t be sitting on a beach in Majorca. They’ll be going to Rio and getting into gunfights. You’ll have some poor girl masturbating on a bed being watching by a room filled with buzzing robo-flies – I mean you’ve kindof got that now with webcams… but with 1st-person tourist drones the punter will be able to control the angles etc. Creepy. Creepy Crawly. Maybe not – but I think drone tourism will be quite popular when it happens.

And who can tell what is real and what isn’t? You could possibly just as easily have someone flying round in a simulation… and that will happen as well, but… authenticity is valued. As I say, people have this flirtation between reality and fantasy. The resonant and the real.

But anyway – humanity has a really odd relationship with reality – it’s spent most of its existence living, fighting, dying for things that aren’t real… aren’t true… and the nature of that is changing, but it’s not going away.

9) Oh yea, and there’s a robotics and genetics revolution underway, and the planet is heating up… which is, at it’s essence, a severe problem to do with water.

10) I’m vaguely expecting a type of software-lego that will allow people to make physical stuff using
digital->physical printers/cutters… allowing people to make things without the overhead of learning design skills. The way word-processors/printers allowed people to be produce documents without messing about with movable-type etc.

In spite of all the passion and enthusiasm of my illustrious peers though, I doubt that this will take hold anywhere near as quickly as paper-printers though – because we don’t use 3D stuff as a communications medium. We simply don’t need that much 3D stuff… and if people were that keen on DIY, everyone would have a sewing machine… but that is a tendency that appears to be on the wane. Marketing again. Marketing killed the sewing machine.

11) Haven’t mentioned “social” stuff much have I? Nah. Boring. Bored with that now.

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Me? I’ll carry on web-devving and will probably move to Aus early in the new year. Get a life etc. All that sort of thing.