Some true, some farce: Predictions for the 2020s

2020 January 06 · 365 words · 2 min

Despite all signs pointing to social platforms as time-sucking maelstroms and phones as anti-dream machines, this year I’ve decided to experiment with posting more of what I actually think about in public. It feels fitting to start this endeavor by contributing to the common pool of predictions for the next decade. Enjoy.

A non-exhaustive list:

1. Changes in understanding of genetics and general epistemological shifts in biotech discredit the overarching mainstream narrative of Darwinian evolution.
2. Panspermia becomes legitimate discourse.
3. Explicitly sacred or blessed objects become the new artisanal consumer object: app subscription magicware.
4. The dominant trend becomes prepper medievalism; aesthetics can be typified along a single continuum between specific and generic.
5. Two or three AR games rewire 40% of humanity’s social graph.
6. The distinction between financial and social software applications totally disappears.
7. Price will be so absolutely identified with objects and information that currency will function as an infrastructural layer more than as an explicit medium of exchange.
8. New space technology will suddenly exist; odd partnerships arise, e.g. ESA tries to partner on initiatives more often with the CNSA.
9. There are increasingly visible plays for global government alterior to existing institutions; outer space and spectrum become the venue for this negotiation, with incentive alignments like the U.S. and Luxembourg, etc., plus Russia and China.
10. Nations will continue electing genocidal leadership parties. (N.B. with dismantled healthcare systems, descriptors like “right” need to be more direct.)
11. Communities are atomized along climate zones.
12. There are pan-city climate zones.
13. A “number” rating emerges that defines average per capita sustenance based on arable land zones; some governments (usually post-colonial) try to enforce this.
14. Millennials and younger generations that still even see a political arena, see a theory of political change in shifts at an ontological (and often virtual) reality base-layer rather than electoral politics at scale.
15. Still, some believe a new political party is possible.
16. Most mountains stay mountains.

Image: Depiction of lunar eclipse by Zakariya ibn Muhammad Qazwini (ca. 1203-1283), Walters Museum Collection