What do you think? Is there some merit to these?
Dmitry Orlov, author of “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects”
State liquor tax revenues will drop for the first time in many decades as more and more Americans find that they can no longer afford beer and switch to cheap and plentiful Afghan heroin and other illegal but very affordable drugs. Marijuana smoke will start edging out car exhaust as America’s most prevalent smell.
Distressed municipalities throughout the country will resort to charging exorbitant fees for such things as dog licenses. Many will experiment with imprisoning those unable to pay these fees in county jails, only to release them again when the jails overflow. Some towns will abandon the idea of having a fire department and decide that it’s more cost-effective to just let house fires run their course, to save money on demolitions.
Several countries around the world will be forced to declare sovereign default. There will be a mad shuffle to find a “safe haven” for hot money, but none will be found. Numerous investors around the world will finally be forced to realize that the best way to avoid losses is to not have any money to begin with.
Organized crime rings will start using data mining software to identify lightly guarded cabins and compounds in Montana and other remote locations that are well stocked with food, weapons and gold bullion, and start “harvesting” them by softening the target with mortars, rockets and aerial bombardment, then sending in commando teams with grenades and machine guns.
The Pentagon will attempt to start repatriating troops from Iraq, Afghanistan and US military bases around the world, but find that they lack the resources to do so, stranding them where they are, but asking them to start “resupplying themselves” to defray costs. Military families will be invited to send in donations for food, uniforms and toiletries for their loved ones overseas.
E. Paul Zehr, Professor of Kinesiology and Neuroscience at the University of Victoria and author of “Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero”
Palmeiras of Brazil wins the World Club Cup of Football.
Tiger Woods has public confession of mis-deeds on Oprah – all is forgiven. Sort of. Actually, not really, the whole thing is way too creepy.
After a thrilling tournament Germany wins the 2010 World Cup of Football Chelsea of the English Premier League wins the UEFA Champions League.
E. Paul Zehr finishes “Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine”, the second book in his trilogy exploring human potential through the metaphor of pop culture comic book icons. I predict it will be very good. I am biased though.
The first fatality will occur during a mixed martial arts competition. It will occur as a result of a choke that causes a carotid artery thrombus and fatal brainstem stroke.
In the DC Comic Book Universe, Bruce Wayne will return from the “dead” (or limbo, or purgatory, or wherever he is supposed to be hanging out right now) and be restored to the mantle of the Dark Knight.
All the consternation about global warming will finally turn from who is responsible – it doesn’t matter at this stage, things are changing regardless of what we do now and all we can do is minimize the effects – to planning for how to deal with the changes to the planet’s many ecosystems. And moving houses away from waterfront exposures…
In the capable hands of Jon Favreau, and enacted by the marvelous Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man 2 (subtitle uncertain…) will eclipse the previous excellent worldwide box office gross of $585 million for 2008’s Iron Man.
The International Olympic Committee will install new doping regulations that are based upon genetic testing. This will be a direct attempt to fight head on the new wave of “gene doping”.
“Madhill”
2010 will be the year when the outcome of the war in Afghanistan will become evident. The complete failure of reaching any of the goals will prove a disaster for the US-led NATO forces. This war for geopolitical influence will end like the Soviet invasion in the 80s. Drones, satellites and laser guided missiles don’t work on the asymmetrical battlefield. Iran will become the new military target.
The economic situation will continue to worsen with increasing national debts, defaulting bailouts and mass unemployment. Structural failures in international financial markets, lacking transparency, fiat-money and increasing cost of natural resources represent a few of the complex dysfunctions in the economy. Added to this environmental policies and the reality of “peak oil” will undermine any real growth. Developed nations will increasingly have pockets of third world standards.
The media industry will undergo its most dramatic transition in its history. Robert Murdoch’s desperate move to charge subscription fees for online content will be an utter failure. Automatically generated news, independent blogs and e-book publishers will become more popular than expensive and censored news hidden behind subscriptions. The introduction of the e-reader for the consumer market will enable a new generation of user created content.
There will be many technological breakthroughs in 2010. Many “wild cards” from the 90s have matured. Therapeutic stem cell treatment, medical nanotechnology and synthetic biology will increasingly make headlines in scientific journals. Bio fuels based on synthetic organisms and increasingly efficient solar panels is cause for optimism in the energy industry. 3D and OLED screens will enter the mass market.
Medicine will become tailored for your DNA. Personalized medicine and vaccines will become available at a high price. Cognitive enhancers (IQ-pills) will become increasingly sophisticated and tailored for individual needs and situations.
“Norsar”
The economical situation will take a turn for the worse and we will see even more people become jobless. Most countries will try to resolve this by throwing more money at what they think is the problem, which of course will not solve anything. China will be strengthened by the economical crisis and when it all blows over will be one of the largest player in the game. The crisis will give power to the people who want to see global governance/New World Order, and new regulations for trading will be enforced.
As the USA will not be able to take back all the soldiers from around the world (they would end up in the streets as there are no jobs for them) there will most likely be more places that will “need” “liberation” and lots of people to do the job.
There will be problems with crops at some places around the world and the price of most foods will rise. Genetically modified ingredients will be more common in the food we buy at the store.
The swine influenza will mutate and sweep over the world again, the second wave might already have started in Ukraine. A third wave will probably come in the autumn of 2010.
Iran will keep up the fight for their nuclear program and will at some point end up with nuclear weapons. Afghanistan and Pakistan will see more fighting as they become more unstable. Iraq will have more bombings and “terrorist” attacks and any withdrawal of troops will be seen as a victory for the “bad guys”. The military buildup in South America will continue but will probably not result in a war in 2010. Russia’s friendship with India will empower CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) even more and CSTO will get a bigger role in that part of the world.
On the battlefield we will see larger use of UAV’s and more high-tech solutions, the squad leaders will have more information to base tactical decisions on.
As always, the politicians will keep making stupid laws that will make life more cumbersome and
we will have more supervision from the government in all parts of life where we don’t want it.
Josh Kaufman, head of entrepreneurship self-learning site personalmba.com
I don’t make predictions - the universe is complex enough that anything can happen at any time, so planning for scenarios is far more useful than pretending to be a seer. Personally, I do what I can to ensure I’m flexible and resilient enough to handle whatever happens. Here’s what I’m doing:
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Paying down all outstanding debt, so no one has any outstanding claims on my work or time. In many ways, debt is slavery - throw off your shackles as quickly as you possibly can, and refuse to put them back on.
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Continuing my self-education. Knowledge is power, and a little reading and experimentation can go a very long way if you focus on learning economically valuable skills. Your local library is a treasure trove of information that can improve your abilities in whatever you’re interested in - use it!
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Preparing for the unexpected. Investing in a home emergency / first aid kit, car kit, and extra resources like food and water isn’t paranoid - supplies like these are cheap insurance for the intelligent, particularly in the winter months. You may never need them, but you’ll be glad they’re there if you do.
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Building my reputation. The more people think I have something uniquely valuable to offer, the more secure I really am. The best way to build your reputation is to do things other people find useful, then encourage them to spread the word. The better your reputation, the more options you have to pursue.
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Ignoring the news. Seriously - 99.999% of the things you hear in the media are completely outside your sphere of influence or locus of control. The news media makes money by attracting attention, and nothing gets attention more than the rumor of imminent danger or threat. The only likely outcome of watching the news is that it’ll sap your attention and divert your energy from improving your situation to fretting about what the world’s coming to. Keep your attention on what you’re doing to build the life you want to live, and it’s only a matter of time before you get there.
Chris Nickerson, professional hacker at Lares Consulting and lead cast member on the TV show “Tiger Team”
As I write this, I would love to talk about the sensationalist musings of the grand chaos to come but for some reason I can’t do it. As much as I would love to talk about 2000 years from now, where the United States is merged with the Chinese economy so much that it will be the technological equivalent of Microsoft, Google and Apple joining forces… I just can’t do it. Even further, I can’t even talk about the Cyber Jihad that could come any minute but will likely hold off till we all have RFID/material implants and can be tracked from space (Yes, this technology exists today, I HAVE SEEN IT). I would even love to talk about the uprising of a REAL cyber culture from the children of your children’s children, where packets are the bullets of freedom fighting and the wars are an endless fight to summit a never-ending mountain of surveillance and government oppressions of freedom… but I just won’t. The reason for this is simply that, when I look into my magic 8-ball it responds “Outlook Hazy.” Not too good of a prediction… Or is it? I would like to pose this as more of a question to the reader. “What do YOU want for your future?” The time is upon all of us where language, race, religion, creed, and even likes/dislikes are almost irrelevant. We are quickly becoming a society of Ones and Zeros. In this place of interconnected anonymity it is time to choose your role. Will you be YOU or will you use this opportunity to be something else? Will you use this medium of a new world to be on the good or bad side? Will you change? Will you stay the same? Or, will you just watch? Maybe you will take these stories and visions of the future and believe them. Maybe you will believe them SO MUCH that YOU will be the reason they happen. For that reason and that reason alone, my words and thoughts of the future are jailed. The cone of silence used on my mind and others will be the blank canvas of our future. Think of this. A world of “I don’t know.” In this world ANYTHING is possible and NOTHING is rooted in a manifest destiny provided by the clever observations of brilliant minds. Think of a world where every day you get to draw in your global etch-a-sketch and every night you get to clear your vision to allow for something completely radical and new. Think of the opportunity you have to be a savior, an observer, a builder, a breaker, a fixer, a freedom fighter and a prophet. All of this IS our future, and it is a screen name change away.
Tom Chittum AKA Sgt. Skull, author of “Civil War II: the coming breakup of America”
In California a little girl will be videotaped digging in a garbage can for food. Conservatives will argue that the “thieving little bitch” should be sent to a supermax prison for life under California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law. Liberals will maintain that she should be adopted by Roman Polanski so she can have meat at every meal.
Unemployed Americans will start eating heir pets. Nevertheless, sales of cat and dog food will soar as many will no longer be able to afford human food.
Street gangs will go political and start social programs such as food giveaways and taking over vacant houses for homeless people to live in. Some will start marching in armed formations on public streets. Conservatives will claim it’s just another pinko plot by ACORN and liberals will get their panties all in a bunch because peasants aren’t supposed to have guns, that right being reserved exclusively for Goldman Sachs limousine liberals.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization will grow in size as one or more nations jump ship from the Western block and join the Russia/China block.
An unemployed person will publicly immolate himself on Wall Street to protest the economic collapse. Republicans will argue that the lazy bum could have made an honest buck by renting himself out as a tiki torch at the Bohemian Grove and Liberals will denounce him for contributing to global warming.
The price of gold (as denominated in rolls of U.S. toilet paper “money”) will increase every year from here onwards until the final economic collapse which will be no later than 2016.
The Nobel Prize Committee will grant a posthumous “Peace Prize” to Attila the Hun so Barak “Let 'em eat cake” Obama won’t seem so bad.
Under the terms of the “No Tickie No Washie” Treaty with China the price of food will soar after President Obama announces massive sales of entire American food crops to China in a attempt to pay down our national debt.
“Road Kill” will replace turkey as our national meal on Thanksgiving Day which will be renamed “Don’t Give a Fuck Day.”
President Obama and VP Biden will both resign and move in with ex-president Bush in his “Fourth Reich Rancho de Bilderberg” in Paraguay after the CEO of Fuck You Real Estate Inc., George Soros, raises the rent on the White House. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will declare martial law and announce there will be no election for a replacement president due to nonstop food riots and that the new president will be decided by a cat fight, hair-pulling contest between Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton held in the mud wrestling pit of a strip joint in Las Vegas. Hillary will win and declare that the new national anthem is “The Bitch is Back.”
The price of food will soar across the entire globe due to decreased harvests due to plunging global temperatures caused by to decreasing sun spot activity. Al Gore will announce that he was “just kidding about all that global warming stuff” and open up a chain of fast food restaurants called “Colonel Gore’s Tennessee Fried Polar Bears.”
A space ship from another galaxy will land on Earth, take a quick around, declare that “This place sucks!” and blast off at warp speed vowing never to return.
(PS: The author is a 62-year old widower living in semi-beautiful Frederick, Maryland USA and would welcome a visit by shapely Swedish lady on vacation)
Ronald Eaglin, Doctor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Central Florida
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The introduction of the Apple iTablet will become the game changer in the Electronic book market. This will force this particular technology into the mainstream (similar to the Apple iPod and iPhone forcing music players and smart phones into the mainstream). This will have a major effect on the publishing industry.
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The economy will begin to recover, however the jobless rate will continue to remain high reflecting a permanent change to the economy. Businesses will continue to be reluctant to hire high risk employees opting more to hire proven productive workers. This will create a disparity between skilled and non-skilled workers and create a large disaffected population group.
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Ill-educated Americans will continue to deny global warming even as scientists continue to gather more evidence and develop models of the effects warming will have. No major efforts towards reducing carbon will be launched on an international level despite agreements.
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Emerging power China will play its highest role ever in world politics, overtaking the US in a number of economic indicators.
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At least one major natural or weather related catastrophe will occur in the US and at least one internationally. The response of the US will determine the political outcome of the next election.
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Health care reform will pass and the sky will not actually fall despite dire prediction of the managed health care industry.
Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and author of “Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias”
Forget about all those predictions of wars, economic perturbations, famine and celebrity crash and burn rituals. It’s not that they aren’t going to happen. They are. But you already knew that.
As it turns out 2010 is also going to be one of the most pivotal years since the Gregorian Calendar was invented, which is not to say that the average person is actually going to notice it. What’s going to happen you ask? Well, 2010 is the year that aesthetic computing is going to morph and spawn narrative guided programming. It’s also the year that we come to understand that everyone is a programmer. The combination will be a potent mix that changes everything. It will be crowdsourcing on acid AND steroids.
What is narrative guided programming? It’s the idea that programming by an unlimited number of individuals can be guided by aesthetically compelling narratives, rather than rigid flow charts of boxes, diamonds, and lines. What do I mean by saying everyone is a programmer? Well, everyone who plays World of Warcraft or Second Life is in effect engaged in a form of high level object oriented programming. The idea is that once narrative guidance is harnessed to the hundreds of millions of people who are already adept at higher level object oriented programming, we go from a paradigm in which programs are written by a handful of geeks squirreled away in office cubicles (or a few thousand people folding proteins or classifying galaxies) to a new paradigm in which hundreds of millions can simultaneously participate in tackling complex problems in a coordinated if flexible and fun fashion. The result will not only be an explosive growth in the sophistication of the resulting programs, but those programs will also be infused with compelling aesthetic quality. Our culture and our technologies are going to be completely rewired, and it all begins next year.
Oh and one more thing. Watch out for the chikungunya virus. It’s coming next year too, and it’s going to mess some people up. Hopefully not you.
“SteviePUA”, world-renowned Pick-Up Artist and NLP teacher
You read the book in 2005, in 2010 see the film!
I’m talking about the latest craze to hit your local streets and clubs. Following on from 2005’s book “The Game - Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists”, by Neil Strauss, comes “The Game” – the movie for 2010. What will this mean for your social life just around the corner?
Firstly, “The Game” book brought picking up girls into the mainstream. I was there at the beginning of the current enterprise in the late 1980s, experimenting with NLP and seduction. Ross Jeffries led the way. In the 1990s came the internet, bringing the growth of an online, still somewhat underground, seduction community.
The launch of “The Game” opened wide the techniques we shared for meeting, attracting and managing our relationships. The ideas Strauss, Mystery, Tyler Durden and I had kept within our private community were revealed. This led to a growth of online and local communities and to the breakdown of alliances as the community became an industry. People who had previously pooled their knowledge began guarding their secrets and developing commercial models. Nevertheless, the reach of these developments was limited to people who read books or were regularly online.
The launch of “The Game” movie in 2010 is likely to bring an unprecedented amount of attention to the pick up community. This has happened somewhat recently anyway, with shows on TV e.g. VH1’s “The Pick Up Artist”. Visual entertainment is to become the lowest common denominator for learning in the 21st century. A Hollywood movie, backed by a multi-million dollar marketing budget, will take the attention into the stratosphere. People who usually never set foot inside a bookstore will be made aware of the training available and will be out in bars and clubs in your locale using pick up techniques.
With increased attention, increased commercialisation is likely to result in 2010. You’ll see more adverts, shows and discussions about pick up, aimed at empowering men who lack confidence or social skills. It will result in hordes of guys, using the techniques they’ve seen in the film and the rediscovered book, trawling the clubs. In an evolutionary arms race type situation, the girls (their targets) will start hearing the same old lines and approaches and they’ll take these as lacking sincerity – they’ll have been mostly plagiarised from that movie everyone was talking about. Ironically, the truth is this is not always the case. Often, men just don’t know how to allow her to see the fullness of his personality. In many cases men don’t know how to bridge the initial gap of talking to someone new. They need a way that lets them interact with her in a way that gets them past the initial autopilot responses people tend to use as self-defence mechanisms when they meet a stranger. We, as pick up artists, try to develop ways to break through these barriers to let her open up enough to see the genuine value we have beneath the surface.
Therefore, in 2010 you’ll find more mainstream pick up communities developing. Conversely, though, to stay ahead in the arms race, so will many more underground communities emerge and strengthen among people who want to share cutting edge knowledge secretly with their peers. Thus the community will begin to come full circle with a set of well known techniques being run by newbie pick up artists and a new set of techniques and understandings being shared underground by people who are out there at the vanguard.
David Holmgren, co-inventor of permaculture
In 2010 the perceived separation between the global climate, energy, economic and political crises will break down in a complex web of interaction and reinforcement. Any international agreements to limit carbon emissions will quickly be made irrelevant by new unpredicted expressions of this gathering storm. Economic stagnation and energy costs will be recorded as doing more to reduce emissions than agreements, policies or technology. Carbon farming, bio char and other aspects of bio-sequestration will become the great hope driving a renewed focus on the land by farmers, environmentalists, bankers and politicians, while geo-sequestration will be declared stillborn. Bio-energy from forests and wood waste will be the real winner in the renewable energy stakes as agricultural bio fuels and more exotic renewable energy technologies generate a lot of heat but little net energy. Plans for nuclear expansion in many countries will promise to generate lots of heat from dwindling uranium reserves while funding for fusion power will finally fizzle out.
In affluent countries, media and public attention to peak oil will remain minimal as the event becomes history. New symptoms of the crisis will tend to distract rather than draw attention to the central role of energy flow rates, quality and profit. Faith in economic recovery and future consumption will go through ups and downs, mostly going down. The price of gold and oil will remain volatile but will mostly be up.
Grass roots movements for local community resilience such as Transition Towns will expand rapidly, drawing increasing fire from powerful interests threatened by the shift away from globalised formal economies to localised more informal ones. In the process permaculture, as a conceptual framework for creative responses to the energy descent future, will begin to get some attention outside of counter-cultural circles. Most of the attention will be negative, focusing on perceived, and real, weakness as well as “skeletons in the cupboard” of the past thirty years of permaculture activism. None of this negativity will have much impact on the accelerating growth in dumpster diving, creative recycling and retrofitting, permablitzing, water harvesting, semi-nomadic dairy goat herding and burgeoning grey economies outside the control of corporations and governments. At the same time unprecedented opportunities for influencing policy agendas, major sustainability projects and social engineering dynamics will present dilemmas for permaculture designers and related activists.
In Australia these processes will be more muted and even go into reverse as our role as an energy superpower, or at least super supplier to China continues the bubble of debt and consumption. The Rudd government will continue to develop more authoritarian approaches to symptoms of the unfolding crisis and play a larger hand in global affairs along with Brazil and other emerging energy super powers. The first threat of fuel shortages will lead to stronger legislation for rationing and plans for Compressed Natural Gas infrastructure to keep the national fresh food logistics system from grinding to a halt. Weird and extreme weather combined with commodity and currency fluctuations will act as a counterpoint to the opportunities of carbon credits, having farmers not knowing whether they are coming or going (to the beach). Meanwhile down at the beach, concerns over the long term viability of coastal real estate will lead to a fall in values of water side apartments and subdivisions as the climate wary investors make an early exit. A major campaign by owners saddled with these “assets” will see the new Liberal government in NSW change the law to commit future governments to build sea walls to protect coastal real estate. Calculations of the greenhouse gas emissions from the volumes of concrete required by 2050 will exceed that generated from the proliferation of mega desalination plants to keep the swimming pools and spas in these same apartments full of pure (no chlorinated) water. The first permablitz retrofit of an abandoned luxury seaside swimming pool will mark the start of a rising tide of innovative mariculture.
The interesting times will get more interesting.
“Armed Hippie”
I believe that next year will be of tremendous importance for the future of Sweden. We have an historical election coming in the autumn and the political parties have already begun plotting and from somewhere around April the election will dominate media as the campaigns start. The reason this election will be historical is that for the first time in Swedish history the communists have a real chance of having a member appointed minister due to a cooperation with the social democrats and the environmentalists. Also the quasi-nationalists, the “Swedish democrats”, likely will win seats in the parliament for the first time. This will provoke the militant left to the point of rioting. There will be blood.
The most likely outcome will be communists in the government and nationalists in the parliament and increasing polarity in the political climate. This will increase the level of political violence even further. Also, I believe, the change back into a socialist government will make the far right lose fate in changing society by democratic means all together. I have heard conservatives and libertarians talking of saving themselves and leaving Sweden, political migration from Sweden will be a fact.
Also, a socialist government with both environmentalists and communist ministers will create a climate that is fiercely hostile towards business owners and corporations. Investors will understand this and the stock market will drop when the election results become official. This will result in fewer jobs as entrepreneurs, investors and the well off will look for greener pastures. In the long run this will speed the decay of the Swedish economy and thereby the Swedish welfare systems.
However, the future has not happened yet, and defeatism is immoral. Next year you’ll find me on the barricades fighting destiny. You’re welcome to join me; I always have room for one more freedom fighter in my home.
Love, respect and fidelity / Armed Hippie
“Ferdinand Bardamu”, blogger and contributor to online men’s magazine The Spearhead
There will be at least two George Sodini-style sex-motivated rage slaughters in Western countries. Feminists will claim that the killings are evidence of “pervasive misogyny” in society and push for even more punitive anti-male laws. On a related tack, there will also be at least two high-profile cases of young women being murdered by their sexy husbands/lovers. Feminists will also use these deaths as evidence of “pervasive misogyny.”
The nightclub industry will collapse as the recession takes its toll. At least one-third of the clubs in major U.S. cities will shut their doors by year’s end.
A group of congressmen will introduce a bill proposing a “bachelor tax” to encourage “selfish single men” to marry and plug the budget deficit at the same time. With the support of feminists and social conservatives, it will pass in the House but die in the Senate.
A working sexbot will be developed by a Japanese robotics firm, to go on sale in 2011. Pre-orders will outstrip supply by ten-fold.
Canada’s Conservative government will fall due to a vote of no confidence. The Liberals will win a minority government in the subsequent election and will form a coalition with the NDP.
The Tories will sweep Britain’s parliamentary elections, winning a strong majority. Labour will sink to third behind the Liberal Democrats. The British National Party will make a breakthrough, winning at least one seat.
The Democrats will retain control of both houses of the U.S. Congress, albeit with substantially reduced majorities.
Sarah Palin will declare her candidacy for the presidency in 2012, running on an ill-defined, vaguely right-wing platform. Conservatives will applaud her, liberals will boo her, and both will completely miss the point.
American right-wing author Ann Coulter will be outed as a lesbian by TMZ. She will subsequently publish a memoir on her struggle to survive as a homosexual woman in the “homophobic, dick-dominated” world of conservative punditry. She will score an interview with Oprah.
“TJTMB”
Christmas is on its way and I’m sitting on the train to my home town in North Norway. In front of me in the train there are four people sitting talking about the future of the Norwegian army and our chances if here was to be a new war. What would happen if the Russians come to take our oil?
The discussion has been going on for about 20 minutes and is mostly useless in content. But this is interesting. Would Norway stand a chance if the Russians came to invade us? Well, the short answer is no. Our army is so small that even an attack from 6000 left handed drunks would be able to take us out on a good day. But is it likely?
The conversation in front of me goes on and they seem to think that there is a chance Russia will come and take us in the close future. I personally don’t think so. Russians have never attacked Norway and I don’t think they would risk it. But perhaps it’s not so much risk when it comes down to it. In the latest news Iran has been discovered to have been developing components for a nuke even when they have agreed not to do so to the UN. But the reactions from the world community have yet to come in full force. The same can be said about the North Koreans. They do as they please and don’t seem to be stopping with nuke programs. USA doesn’t want a new war yet, they have too much as it is. In the past the balance between West and East would secure that one attack would result in retaliation, but perhaps this is not the case anymore. Just look at what happened in Georgia last year where the rest of the world just used words when people were killed in huge numbers by the Russians. I say all this only to reflect on our local and global stability. I think perhaps that we think we are more safe then we really are.
What will happen in the future? The conversation in front of me has trailed off to local politics. But where they stop on the good stuff I continue to think about the future. What will happen in 2010? Well, hard to say. I think North Korea will make a fuss with a certain nuke program, they haven’t been in the news lately and Lil Kim loves the spotlight like a bad little girl. But like always they will stop with the nuke project for the time being and all will be good with the UN and USA. Iran will make some more news, they have extreme politics and also want nukes. If they get them there will be trouble and therefore the world goverment will work to stop it. Perhaps there will be some problems in Zimbabwe where Mugabe doesn’t want to share power with the winner of the last election. I don’t think there will be a new big war in the year to come. The climate will be in focus and perhaps a big vulcano or something nature related will happen to help the climate frenzy go to new levels. I think it will be a slow year to come for the survivalist waiting for some big thing but I am known to be wrong most of the time when I guess so there is hope that the Rapture will come in the year to come. (It will not come in 2012 so why not 2010, that would fuck up for the Rapture buffs.and that would be nice.)
Sean Kennedy The Fucking Man, co-founder of RantMedia
Okay…
You wanna know what’s comin’?
Private Security Robotics will become the market to be involved in.
Globally the populaces will be divided between the imperialistically militant religious haves who are fundamentally driven that their cause is just… and will never quit.
iRobot and Taser stock will go through the roof very soon (3 yr max). Once legislation gets sorted and people understand the very real threat of privatized security forces deploying to control a local urban environment with Complete impunity and legal support; it will be too late
America will put its own spin on a roving state-of-the-art crackdown as will be demonstrated by the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. War vets from Iraq will be put into service as militarised police along the Mexican border.
The 2010 Olympics will be a complete, contained, mess. Transit will be a nightmare; and this will compound the affect that protesters are going to have on the downtown core that will result in a “police incident” that will set the tone for "Civil Rights’ in the next ten years for north America.
China is going to continue to flex its muscle in its gradual long grab for the globe. Incidents that should provoke outrage continue to be third page news until China provokes so many people globally, they are compared to Nazis heavily in mainstream media and it cannot be ignored.
Hollywood will continue to pimp the re-run generation for as long as it can.
It might get another three good years out of it, and then another two after that. Now is the time to begin putting out publications and building Darwinian mass media clusters that act like lobes in the same brain of one emerging consciousness.
These mass media clusters will continue to grow and be augmented and will become referred to as the Singularity and within the next decade it will emerge. The Head mounted display will emerge as augmented reality becomes the new iPhone
(…Most likely Detected as a weird bandwidth spike at first by network engineers, and this will lead to fuel the Meme of “Server”. )
In the next ten years Robotics becomes what computers were in the 90’s. Japan leads the way in automating living for the old so they can exist with less and less outside contact in further isolation of age.
The weather is going to get so screwy, that everyone stop giving a crap about whose fault it is. They will put down the blame throwers and pick up the flamethrowers to keep environmental refugees out of their back yard. An example could be cited as similar to the media treatment of “Katricians” only far better organised and executed vilification.
Freenetproject.org and Second life will be labeled “Terrorism Pedophilia” in the mass media. Wikileaks wil be taken out by black ops “framed scandal” (<5yrs ). Cryptography will become like a terrorist tag. People using it will feel like they have to cover their tattoos while walking through an airport.
The future of hope belongs to the few with guile to be effective against the coming trials; and maintain the physical discipline to train themselves for the storm.
…But that’s just a ballpark shot.
John Robb, decorated former USAF special ops pilot, 5th Generation Warfare expert and author of “Brave New War: the next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization”
The first MMO game that encompasses a complete real world social and economic system will emerge. Its transparency, clarity, flexibility, resilience, and speed will make it evolutionarily superior to all of the human organizational frameworks that have come before it. After that, nothing will be the same.
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre, survivalist blogger and author of “The modern survival manual: Surviving the economic collapse”
2010 doesn’t look too good.
More unemployment in 1st world countries, more social problems and an increase in crime.
People that used to live in places where they didnâ??t even lock the doors will now suffer home invasions and either adapt to the new reality or become victims.
Friends and relatives that had high standards of living are now poor.
More people on the streets, more families dumpster diving.
The wave of people in Europe that lost their jobs in 2009 are now running out of “el paro”, the unemployment bill the government gives them, this will probably cause protests and maybe even some social unrest.
More people will return to their countries of origin as the 1st world countries they went to now lack job opportunities.
In USA the government will desperately go out hunting for tax money. 2010 will likely be remembered as a year of increased taxes as well as new ones. Fines and such, they will all go up in price to round up money to pay for the bailout and free healthcare.
Government control and invasion of privacy will become a more serious problem as the authorities try to control every aspect of people’s lives, and their spendings.
It’s not all bad. It will also be the time for business opportunities. Those that understand the new needs and new social sectors may find ways of making good money.
Even more people will be moving back to their parents and families living together chipping in all together to make a living.
The grandparents are now sought after for their nanny capabilities, saving money for the family doing such job.
There will be a reduction in the leisure market. People will be buying some luxury items but even the higher classes will become a bit more careful about spending in general.
Throwing money ridiculously won’t be fashionable any more, and different groups and non profit organizations will be formed, not to save the whales or rainforest, but to feed the new generation of poor children.
There’s going to be an increase of small, home based business and companies, started by ex-unemployed.
2010 will still be a complicated year for most people, mostly regarding unemployment, poverty, inflation and a new problem: higher rates of violent crime.
By the time we start 2011 we will have both a more solid economy and society. By 2011, the main problem won’t be the economy, but governments that now have too much power, power that was granted to them to get the people out of the crisis.
Kevin Carson, themutualist.blogspot.com
The U.S. economy in 2010 will experience either the second leg of a double-dip recession, or near-zero job growth. The long-term trend will be something like the Great Malaise Alan Greenspan described back in the '80s: we’ll see stagnation of both growth and employment. The unemployment figures may be partially concealed by discouraged workers dropping out, but employment as a percentage of the population is one statistic you can’t fudge. That statistic peaked in 2000, and is now about 10% lower than its peak. It will probably continue a gradual decline. With an end to asset bubbles and consumer debt as a basis for purchasing power, there simply won’t be enough demand to put that idle industrial capacity back to work.
It follows that, of necessity, we’ll see the unemployed and underemployed shift a growing share of value creation from wage labor into the informal and household economy. We’ll see an increasing number of household income-pooling units in which only one full-time wage-earner brings in outside income.
Dovetailing with these trends to a considerable extent will be the continued growth of distributed and relocalized manufacturing, with industrial production shifting increasingly from traditional mass-production industry to local job shops using general-purpose machinery to switch rapidly between short runs of many different products. The networked manufacturers of Emilia-Romagna are the wave of the future. An early sign of this trend in the United States is the 100k Garages project.
Worldwide, we’ll see an increasing trend among supplier networks of traditional manufacturing corporations to enter directly into flexible manufacturing networks with each other, ignore the trademark and patent rights of their former corporate clients, and treat corporate headquarters as redundant nodes to be bypassed. In China, in particular, fleets of rusting containerships and enormous idle industrial capacity mean the only hope is reorienting to production for local demand. That means marketing identical knockoff goods without the brand name markup, and selling them cheap to the local population. The transnational corporations that have outsourced everything will realize they’re nothing but hollow shells, and all the actual production that’s currently going on could go on just as well without them.
From Interesting Times issue 3