22 Vision: older About the only thing we can say with any certainty about the upcoming decade is that it'll be 10 years long. That's but a blink in the history of humanity, but a significant proportion of your lifespan on earth. A hundred and twenty months to live, and love, and yearn, and strive. Five hundred weekends to fill with fun and frolics, or to hide away in lonely desolation. Three and a half thousand days to enjoy, or perhaps to endure. Five million minutes, any one of which could be your finest, any one of which could be your last. May you make the most of every opportunity the forthcoming ten years may bring. Seize the decade, before it seizes you.
22 Vision: austerity We'll never have it so good. Blame who you like - governments, bonus-stuffed bankers or an ever-greedy society - but our immediate future is financial depression. No you can't have a new loan, because we gave too many to people we forgot couldn't pay them. No you can't step onto the property ladder, because that's still only for those who stepped aboard several years ago. No you can't have another job because too many other people want too few, not unless you scale down your goals and expectations. And no you can't have a decent pension when the (delayed) time comes, because current reserves can barely afford to fund those who've already retired. We should expect a decade with less financial security, lower aspirations and reduced support by the state. There'll be pressure to cut services left, right and centre, which'll be fine until some service you rely on is scaled back, made chargeable or deleted altogether. You won't really need that 3D plasma TV, and your life won't end if you don't go on four foreign holidays this year, secretly you already know that. But there'll be no protection from the erosion of social provision, not unless you already boast a privileged cushion of wealth. The next decade is blue, and the next decade is in the red. If you haven't started saving yet, you're probably too late.
22 Vision: extinction I shall miss newspapers. Proper newspapers you buy, as opposed to ad-packed comics stacked with celebrity gossip and press releases, because their days are surely numbered. News now streams 60/60/24/7, so if I want to know the big story that's just happened I can find out everything online, whether Rupert Murdoch's erected a pointless paywall or not. I can read about it, watch video content about it, even join a conversation about it, all several hours before I pick up my paper from the news-stand. And yet I still prefer the print version to online, because of the different ways the two formats are structured. On paper I start at the front and work through to the end, scanning every story and reading those that pique my interest. But online there's a hidden hierarchy, a decision tree to negotiate, which means I overlook several stories I'd otherwise have found really interesting. Online I cherrypick my news, rather than taking a broader outlook, and I'm reliant on headlines and thumbnails to grab my attention. I like a newspaper I can carry, and scan, and spread out, and scribble on. But the smartphone generation don't think like that, preferring instant-free to delayed-physical, so newspaper sales are bound to tumble over the coming years. Titles will go to the wall, unsustainable by internet advertising alone. Campaigning journalism will fade, replaced by lo-cost reporting and PR-repackaging. Regular deliveries to the nation's smaller newsagents may even cease, kicking off a vicious circle of spiralling decline. Gradual extinction will save paper, but won't save papers. You youngsters may not care, but I shall miss them.
22 Vision: snark We've always been a nation of moaners. Be it over the garden fence or gossiping over a coffee, there's nothing quite like slagging off something, or someone, that fails to meet our expectations. In the past these complaints have been aired mainly in private, out of earshot of those being complained about. But now we're increasingly able to slag off people and organisations in public, where everyone can listen, without necessarily having any visible means of response. If you're angry that your train's been cancelled, be sure to vent your bile via an instant tweet. If there's a political opinion you disagree with, why not leave a bigoted fruitloop comment on a newspaper website? And if there's some journalist or multinational or individual that you think we should all gang up against, tell us which online community to join and we'll sign up and hound them into submission. There's a fine line between indignation and persecution, and connected networks make it so much easier to tip from one to the other. Prepare for snowballing hatred, anonymous vilification and crowdsourced prejudice to become more widespread as the decade passes. And should you dare disagree, feel free to leave me one of those typically pompous irrational comments of yours, just to prove my point.
22 Vision: screens Our lives are increasingly dominated by screens. You're staring at one at the moment, when you could instead be staring at the view, or some art, or deep into your partner's beautiful eyes. There might even be someone staring at you right now, trying to attract your attention, whereas your mind is lost instead inside some swirling field of photons. Stick a screen in the corner of your living room and the family is transfixed by it. Switch on a screen in a pub and the conversation falters as eyes drift away. Be it gaming, computing, e-books or video, there'll soon be nothing quite so ubiquitous as the screen. Need some exercise? Take your eyeballs for a virtual Wii-jog. Waiting for a train? Why not watch an advert instead? Have a burning desire to know the cricket score while you're halfway round the world? There'll be a screen in your pocket can tell you. The shining light of the future will be the permanent screenglow illuminating your face. Best make sure you're plugged in, or fully recharged, else 2020's going to pass you by.
22 Vision: Stratford Village By 2020, the London Olympics will be long gone. In their place, up the Lower Lea Valley, will be a cluster of new-build communities establishing themselves in the Stratford hinterland. If all goes to plan, thousands of people will have moved into the stacked-up flatlets hastily erected around the stadia where international sporting records were broken. Bankers will grab the luxury penthouses in Radcliffe Towers, cosmopolitan couples will take up residence in Pendleton Court, and local Newham families will pack out the blocks along Tom Daley Crescent. There'll be new schools, new bus links and a swimming pool that'll have every other London neighbourhood seething with jealousy. The best connected residents will probably be those in the former athletes accommodation, since rebranded Stratford Village, a mere javelin's throw away from a whopping shopping centre and trains to Heathrow and Paris. Because it turns out the Olympics weren't about sport after all, they were about rejuvenation. Four of the poorest boroughs in the country given a once-in-a-lifetime financial uplift, and a swathe of contaminated sub-industrial wasteland transformed into uber-desirable prime real estate. The post-2012 property bubble should recoup billions of the billions of pounds that were spent on staging the Games in the first place, or at least that's the plan. We'll know by 2020 whether the parkland towers of London's Olympic legacy have created a characterless sink estate or a thriving mega-community. Who knows, maybe you'll even have moved in by then.
22 Vision: babble It may be hard to remember, but there used to be a time when you didn't know what all your friends were up to. You couldn't ring them on their mobile wherever they might be. You couldn't swap endless text messages to while away an afternoon, or agree where best to meet up after you'd left the house. You couldn't repeatedly update status messages about what you were having for lunch or what you thought of that last kick in the football, let alone simultaneously read what everyone else was doing too. As recently as the year 2000 most people's lives were closed and private, and most definitely not Googleable or shared or broadcast. Expect the barriers to tumble even faster by 2020. We'll be firing off updates left right and centre, both intentionally and unintentionally, as technology enables the broadcast of everything around us. Specific location, emotional state, video livestream, all freely available to anyone who cares to look. Advertisers will have a field day, friends will become absorbed in an addictive web of data, and stalkers will never have had it so easy. We older folk may hold back because we still value the dignity of privacy, but an entire generation will have embraced a 24/7 transmission of their existence. Join in, or be nobody.
22 Vision: consumption By the end of the decade, we'll be using far more of the earth's resources than we are now. There'll be a lot more of us, for a start, which won't help. We'll all have a greater number of gadgets and gizmos, and they'll devour a lot more electricity. We'll still prefer to buy stuff rather than recycle, and more of our goods will journey here from countries further away. We'll travel more, even though we know we shouldn't, which'll belch out lots more CO2. And we'll probably recognise that this wasteful lifestyle can't go on, just like we do now, but we still won't have done anything about it. Why sacrifice today for the benefit of the future? Why fly less often, or change your light bulbs, or cut your food miles, while the industrialisation of the developing world continues unabated? Why adopt the environmental path when materialism is so much more fun? Hell, let's just party hard until the oil starts running out. Unless, of course, by 2020 the party's over.
22 Visiondigitalisation There's probably a wall where you live stacked high with the media you consume. Bookshelves, CDs racks, rows of DVDs, all lined up ready for use when fancy strikes. They may not be there much longer. Music is vanishing as a physical format, with most new purchases downloaded rather than catalogued. E-books are coming, and they don't need shelves. And why buy DVDs when you can watch films on satellite, or last night's TV on iPlayer, or a cat falling off a skateboard on YouTube. You might keep your old stuff on show for now, but your new media acquisitions are increasingly available only invisibly. Photographs have already vanished inside the machine, and soon all your other entertainment clutter will follow suit. Let's measure storage capability in megabytes, not cubic metres, thereby enabling access to your entire collection anywhere, anytime, anyhow. Why wait until you're in the High Street to buy stuff, when it's far easier to download your heart's desire right now? But digital formats can be lost as easily as they're obtained. Upgrade your software, mislay your smartphone or pour coffee into your laptop and they can all vanish. You never physically owned these files, they were never meant to last. And whereas you probably still possess a book or CD you bought in 2000, by 2020 you'll probably have lost almost everything you download this year. The future may be in countless ones and zeroes, but it's only temporary.
22 Vision: redundancy I was at the supermarket checkout earlier this week with a small basket of groceries when the future hit me. Of the ten or so cashier-staffed checkouts only one was open, and a long queue had formed. Meanwhile as many as sixteen self-scan checkouts were lit up ready for customers to do it themselves, but most were empty. A handful of staff tried gamely to guide shoppers from the single queue to the no-queues, even offering to do the scanning on their behalf, but absolutely nobody over the age of 40 was willing to shift. They clung gamely to what they knew, to the nice lady who does everything for you, rather than risk the pressure and potential humiliation of having to bag stuff themselves. Better get used to it, however, because by the end of the decade refuseniks may not have the option. Automation and outsourcing are on the advance everywhere, cutting costs for businesses and taking away the human touch. Why hire someone if you don't need to, and why provide a personal service when a machine will do almost as well? There are going to be fewer jobs to go round over the next decade, never again one for every available adult in the UK population, which means a world where unemployment is increasingly the norm. Expect to battle harder for the skilled jobs that remain, and to end up having to do a lot more for yourself, for nothing. And do remember to bring your own bags to the 2020 supermarket, because there'll be nobody to do it for you.
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Vision: older
