You still believe you're ruling the World, using all your tricks to keep the picture blurred.
2010: well, that was a year. It had the right number of days and everything. I confidently predict that 2011 will be the same.
On a larger political scale, in the UK it had an election that nobody quite won, and a political race to the bottom by every party with even a finger on a lever of power. It's an interregnum - The old order crumbles, no worthy successor rises yet.
In the USA, the ship of hope and change is now stalled in the doldrums of politics as usual - venal and stupid.
There were predictions earlier in the year that there would be bloody protests in the streets of the UK. No sooner had these been forgotten than they came true. Most people haven't actually seen any protests, but the zeitgeist that spawned them hangs in the air - suspicion and weary scorn for politicians of all stripes, who really all belong to the same faction - those would say anything to get elected, the entitled, those who bailed each other out. We're really not all in it together.
It was said a few years ago (during the Blair administration, I think) that public trust in politicians had reached rock bottom. Huh, no: it's still going down, and we don't even know what the bottom will look like.
I've read a little on the finances of the EU, but it's clear that nothing is solved, just temporarily patched, which is good enough if you're a robber baron with an exit strategy. You'll be hearing more about government bonds in the coming year. For countries in Europe, financial survival is optional. How the hell did that happen?
Government bonds are loans to the government that need have interest paid out on them. Ireland was "bailed out". By that we mean that the UK government gave money to the Irish government, who used it to pay the bonds that it owed. Irish citizens got nothing but deeper in debt. Major holders of these Irish bonds included UK banks, and the largest holder is the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is wholly owned by ... the UK government. it's not altruism or trickle-down, it's a circular trickle.
The more that I read news via links on twitter and Reddit, the less I value the mainstream media for news. It just seems to so often be a day late and a dollar short - to miss the important facts or the bigger picture. I wonder if a lot of people are moving like this, and if we're all moving the same way, or fragmenting into ghettos with completely diverging narratives of the world. Some of the decent analysis comes via the websites owned by the more with-it newspapers.
I seem to be slowly emitting a series of links on how the future that we're living in increasingly resembles bad cyberpunk. It's not a coincidence that this "high-tech and low life" extrapolated aesthetic dates to the troubled 1980s, before the boom years of the 1990s. They are:
Japan is weird. 3D Hologram Rock Star Hatsune Miku
Welcome to our bad cyberpunk future: Personal Surveillance Drones: http://www.sensefly.com/products
A few questions we wouldn't be asking in a sane world
Science fiction is no longer ahead on the trail, throwing clues to the future back at us
Kosovo's prime minister is accused of organlegging
Sometimes trends and changes go through a cycle of being predicted, scorned, and forgotten and then coming true, not gradually and predictably, but suddenly and from nowhere. For instance, if someone had said in 2000 that "every sector will eventually be napsterised, even government" They would have been scorned a few years later when the tide went out. It's harder to laugh at that now that the tide is back in.
Napster was smashed, but the smashed pieces grew into new music sharing systems. It looks likely that sooner or later Wikileaks' confrontational style will cause it fatal trouble with some group of armed or lawyered-up thugs, be it a state or otherwise 1. But it's too late to stop the trend. Involuntary openness is the flavour of the times. Personal privacy has been eroded and accidentally exposed for a while now, and now the powers that be squawk blue murder as they too have to take an involuntary turn in the pornoscanner that they built. It's not pretty, but it's what we've sleepwalked into.
There is supposedly a social contract between the rulers of dictatorships and their governed - the people don't complain that they have no say in government, so long as things are good or improving. It's when things get worse that the people are restless for a say. Who'd have thought that the same would happen in western democracies? but
The conflict of interest between a state plus it's rich and powerful backers and their citizens is being laid bare.
Now wait for the next episode: The Empire Strikes Back, where having been burned by this idea, states just try harder to make it work - they want all communications everywhere to be monitored and you will be prevented from accessing undesirable things.
It's been said before and it's still true: We overestimate change in the short term, and under-estimate it in the long term.
Military remote drones and robots are now mainstream, and the only problem with cool sci-fi weapons is that it'll be the US navy that gets them.
Social media is no longer the new thing, it's mainstream and milked to within an inch of its life. We're already learned - and then forgotten, that for a free service like Google or Facebook we're not the customer, we're the product being offered to advertisers. Privacy erosion makes much more sense in this light.
Change isn't stopping, not even slowing down; and nobody is really in control. Given that nobody with power has moral authority (as ever, they claim it, but now the emperor's clothes have been leaked off), this is not the worst thing that could happen.
I'm verging on grumpy old man telling the damn kids to get off my interwebs, except it's the kids that I sympathise with more, who, on the whole, get it better than the rest.
Confirmation bias can be lethal - people continue to use snowfall as anecdotal evidence against global warming/climate change, ignoring opposite anecdotes of an unprecedented and disastrously hot Russian summer. I read somewhere that the UK had the kind of substantial snow that's expected once in 5 years, and had it 3 times in the last 2 years. I can't verify this now, but is this a random fluctuation or a climate shift? Who can say.
Phones are turning into tablets, and so are laptops. Phones haven't been phones for a while now, we just call them that despite that they're really pocket connected computers, which occasionally have a go at transmitting voice. Whatever they did badly last year, they'll do well next year. Half the world has one. By the end of 2011 it will be quite hard to buy a new phone that isn't a smartphone of some kind. Computer interfaces are disappearing into the air. specialised devices (cameras, maps, compasses, timetables, barcode scanners, thermometers), are disappearing into the omni-function "phone".
If you're ever travelling home late at night on the tube, look around you at the fellow travellers slumped alcoholically semi-concious. A good percentage will be holding, nursing, stroking their digital companion devices - like a dummy, a pet, a security blanket, an alter-ego, an appendage. I think this is very telling of the close relationship that people have with them now.
Still, they are the best news that the developing and third world has ever had - They caught on much earlier and stronger in places where access to fixed phone lines was poorer, and are now driving decentralised information and thereby choices to the masses of the third world. And now they are driving decentralised electricity too. This is the 21st century economy growing out of sight; In 20 or 40 years this tail may be wagging the global dog.
E-Books like the kindle are going mainstream, because the price/performance/weight ratios have reached acceptable levels. It's the thin end of the prediction that computers will become small, cheap specialized devices. IPads and phones are specialised computers too, in their own way. Desktop computers have been a minority of the market for a while now, and general-purpose laptops are going that way too. They're still important at the high end as the content creation devices.
Reading this, half of me thinks it's a spittle-flecked rant. The other half thinks that any view of things that is not strange is false - a summary of the state of the world at the end of 2010 that isn't a spittle-flecked rant indicates that someone hasn't been paying attention.
1) Nation-states: huh. I was never convinced by them.
On a larger political scale, in the UK it had an election that nobody quite won, and a political race to the bottom by every party with even a finger on a lever of power. It's an interregnum - The old order crumbles, no worthy successor rises yet.
In the USA, the ship of hope and change is now stalled in the doldrums of politics as usual - venal and stupid.
There were predictions earlier in the year that there would be bloody protests in the streets of the UK. No sooner had these been forgotten than they came true. Most people haven't actually seen any protests, but the zeitgeist that spawned them hangs in the air - suspicion and weary scorn for politicians of all stripes, who really all belong to the same faction - those would say anything to get elected, the entitled, those who bailed each other out. We're really not all in it together.
It was said a few years ago (during the Blair administration, I think) that public trust in politicians had reached rock bottom. Huh, no: it's still going down, and we don't even know what the bottom will look like.
I've read a little on the finances of the EU, but it's clear that nothing is solved, just temporarily patched, which is good enough if you're a robber baron with an exit strategy. You'll be hearing more about government bonds in the coming year. For countries in Europe, financial survival is optional. How the hell did that happen?
Government bonds are loans to the government that need have interest paid out on them. Ireland was "bailed out". By that we mean that the UK government gave money to the Irish government, who used it to pay the bonds that it owed. Irish citizens got nothing but deeper in debt. Major holders of these Irish bonds included UK banks, and the largest holder is the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is wholly owned by ... the UK government. it's not altruism or trickle-down, it's a circular trickle.
The more that I read news via links on twitter and Reddit, the less I value the mainstream media for news. It just seems to so often be a day late and a dollar short - to miss the important facts or the bigger picture. I wonder if a lot of people are moving like this, and if we're all moving the same way, or fragmenting into ghettos with completely diverging narratives of the world. Some of the decent analysis comes via the websites owned by the more with-it newspapers.
I seem to be slowly emitting a series of links on how the future that we're living in increasingly resembles bad cyberpunk. It's not a coincidence that this "high-tech and low life" extrapolated aesthetic dates to the troubled 1980s, before the boom years of the 1990s. They are:
Japan is weird. 3D Hologram Rock Star Hatsune Miku
Welcome to our bad cyberpunk future: Personal Surveillance Drones: http://www.sensefly.com/products
A few questions we wouldn't be asking in a sane world
Science fiction is no longer ahead on the trail, throwing clues to the future back at us
Kosovo's prime minister is accused of organlegging
Sometimes trends and changes go through a cycle of being predicted, scorned, and forgotten and then coming true, not gradually and predictably, but suddenly and from nowhere. For instance, if someone had said in 2000 that "every sector will eventually be napsterised, even government" They would have been scorned a few years later when the tide went out. It's harder to laugh at that now that the tide is back in.
Napster was smashed, but the smashed pieces grew into new music sharing systems. It looks likely that sooner or later Wikileaks' confrontational style will cause it fatal trouble with some group of armed or lawyered-up thugs, be it a state or otherwise 1. But it's too late to stop the trend. Involuntary openness is the flavour of the times. Personal privacy has been eroded and accidentally exposed for a while now, and now the powers that be squawk blue murder as they too have to take an involuntary turn in the pornoscanner that they built. It's not pretty, but it's what we've sleepwalked into.
There is supposedly a social contract between the rulers of dictatorships and their governed - the people don't complain that they have no say in government, so long as things are good or improving. It's when things get worse that the people are restless for a say. Who'd have thought that the same would happen in western democracies? but
The conflict of interest between a state plus it's rich and powerful backers and their citizens is being laid bare.
Now wait for the next episode: The Empire Strikes Back, where having been burned by this idea, states just try harder to make it work - they want all communications everywhere to be monitored and you will be prevented from accessing undesirable things.
It's been said before and it's still true: We overestimate change in the short term, and under-estimate it in the long term.
Military remote drones and robots are now mainstream, and the only problem with cool sci-fi weapons is that it'll be the US navy that gets them.
Social media is no longer the new thing, it's mainstream and milked to within an inch of its life. We're already learned - and then forgotten, that for a free service like Google or Facebook we're not the customer, we're the product being offered to advertisers. Privacy erosion makes much more sense in this light.
Change isn't stopping, not even slowing down; and nobody is really in control. Given that nobody with power has moral authority (as ever, they claim it, but now the emperor's clothes have been leaked off), this is not the worst thing that could happen.
I'm verging on grumpy old man telling the damn kids to get off my interwebs, except it's the kids that I sympathise with more, who, on the whole, get it better than the rest.
Confirmation bias can be lethal - people continue to use snowfall as anecdotal evidence against global warming/climate change, ignoring opposite anecdotes of an unprecedented and disastrously hot Russian summer. I read somewhere that the UK had the kind of substantial snow that's expected once in 5 years, and had it 3 times in the last 2 years. I can't verify this now, but is this a random fluctuation or a climate shift? Who can say.
Phones are turning into tablets, and so are laptops. Phones haven't been phones for a while now, we just call them that despite that they're really pocket connected computers, which occasionally have a go at transmitting voice. Whatever they did badly last year, they'll do well next year. Half the world has one. By the end of 2011 it will be quite hard to buy a new phone that isn't a smartphone of some kind. Computer interfaces are disappearing into the air. specialised devices (cameras, maps, compasses, timetables, barcode scanners, thermometers), are disappearing into the omni-function "phone".
If you're ever travelling home late at night on the tube, look around you at the fellow travellers slumped alcoholically semi-concious. A good percentage will be holding, nursing, stroking their digital companion devices - like a dummy, a pet, a security blanket, an alter-ego, an appendage. I think this is very telling of the close relationship that people have with them now.
Still, they are the best news that the developing and third world has ever had - They caught on much earlier and stronger in places where access to fixed phone lines was poorer, and are now driving decentralised information and thereby choices to the masses of the third world. And now they are driving decentralised electricity too. This is the 21st century economy growing out of sight; In 20 or 40 years this tail may be wagging the global dog.
E-Books like the kindle are going mainstream, because the price/performance/weight ratios have reached acceptable levels. It's the thin end of the prediction that computers will become small, cheap specialized devices. IPads and phones are specialised computers too, in their own way. Desktop computers have been a minority of the market for a while now, and general-purpose laptops are going that way too. They're still important at the high end as the content creation devices.
Reading this, half of me thinks it's a spittle-flecked rant. The other half thinks that any view of things that is not strange is false - a summary of the state of the world at the end of 2010 that isn't a spittle-flecked rant indicates that someone hasn't been paying attention.
1) Nation-states: huh. I was never convinced by them.