Ten years ago, at the very start of the 2010s, I posted a series of ten predictions about the coming decade. I called my feature 2020 Vision which, even though it wasn't especially original at the time, wasn't yet the cliche it's become. Ten years on I'm reposting my predictions to see how I did - five yesterday, and five today. I've included a link to your 2010 comments, but please only add to the 2020 comments, thanks.
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.
Yes, all this and then some. Ten years ago most phones weren't smart, but today's are optimised to deliver visual snacks and full-on video content to increasingly greedy eyeballs. On the Central line yesterday I looked around the carriage and noted that over half the passengers were staring at a screen, and many more would have been if only there was wi-fi in the tunnels. We've reached the stage where people will happily stream a TV show while they walk along the pavement oblivious to all around them (a special hello to the hipster in the Magic Roundabout t-shirt who nearly smashed into me on Wednesday). Rather than losing ourselves in our own thoughts we now prefer being stimulated by the creations of others, or perhaps we simply don't have the power to tear ourselves away. Meanwhile advertising posters are increasingly morphing into advertising screens because the technology's cheaper now, and because moving images are harder to ignore. Even my local roundabout now has its own advertising beacon blazing down, and it won't be the last. Whether portable or permanent our screens continue to stimulate and distract, and the next decade will only bring greater incursions.
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.
Snark could well be the defining feature of the last decade. Negative thoughts on disparate subjects came to the fore in all aspects of public life, increasingly hard to hide, and frequently embraced. Would Donald Trump have been elected, or anti-European fervour have been taken seriously, without the feedback loops that social media enables? A particularly potent source of anger is the ill-informed opinion, based on instinct or gappy knowledge, but shouted just as loud as if one were a genuine expert. We can all be guilty of misplaced confidence sometimes, but those who fail to stop and think before broadcasting their ignorance can cause a great deal of damage. If your argument boils down to "I know what you're thinking", remember that you probably don't. If someone's action makes you angry, know that amplifying it rarely makes things any better. Rein it in, or brace yourself as societal entropy takes its course.
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.
We discussed this last month. Most UK newspapers lost around 60% of their print circulation over the last decade, which is a dramatic fall, even a full-on haemorrhage. But only the Independent has actually folded since 2010, or at least reimagined itself online, and the others publish on. They may be thinner, more expensive and less widely read, but they are still going and they continue to influence the national debate. I note that I can still buy a newspaper in three places within ten minutes of home, but that's down from five, and a lot of shops that still say 'Newsagent' on their awning have replaced papers and periodicals with packets and provisions. As for local newspapers they really are a shadow of their former selves, often debased to online clickbait, thereby allowing local politicians to make important decisions unobserved. If the 2020s kill off a few more national titles too, our government is unlikely to complain.
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.
At the start of the last decade we had a Labour government (remember those?) and yet I was still predicting cuts. They happened, big time, as the outcomes of the economic crash of 2008 rumbled on and the incoming Tory government chose to embrace prolonged budgetary downsizing. Only recently has the Chancellor deigned to claim that austerity is over, but raising public spending from such a low base is nothing special, and living standards still aren't back where they were before it started. Local government spending in particular remains ruthlessly constricted and may never recover, which I suspect was the original intention all along. For the time being there are still more libraries than food banks in the UK, but don't count on that balance being retained. Pensions are indeed dodgier, benefits less secure and lifestyles more precarious... although if you own property you may not have noticed quite how bad it's got.
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.
I had a good decade, thanks, indeed relatively benign (other than losing my job, which it turned out was survivable). I could have engaged in more fun and frolics, and grasped more opportunities, but never underestimate the allure of stability. Your 2010s may not have been ideal, but if you're reading this you are at least still here to make the most of your 2020s. I hope the first quarter percent of the new decade has been good to you.
Ten years ago, at the very start of the 2010s, I posted a series of ten predictions about the coming decade. I called my feature 2020 Vision which, even though it wasn't especially original at the time, wasn't yet the cliche it's become. Ten years on I thought I'd repost my predictions and see how I did - five today, and five tomorrow. I've included a link to your 2010 comments, but please only add to the 2020 comments, thanks.
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.
I was right that the self-service checkout was on the advance, and in many retail establishments it's very much the dominant force, but it hasn't completely taken over just yet. I still hate the things and avoid using them wherever possible, not out of Luddite sensibility but because of my tendency to make several errors while self-processing (I am that person you stand behind silently tutting "sheesh, he doesn't even know how to use one properly"). I still notice the generational divide, even that younger folk will happily queue to scan things themselves rather than walk over to an empty checkout and interact with a human operator. What hasn't happened is the rise of unemployment through relentless automation. As yet there are still plenty of jobs to go round, just not necessarily skilful ones, and fewer with any degree of reliability and long-term security. The touchscreen and app interface haven't taken over every human role just yet, but they're very much on the advance.
22 Vision: digitalisation
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.
How out of date that first sentence now reads... especially the CD racks and rows of DVDs. Yes I know that you, archetypal DG reader, still play CDs and watch DVDs, but the world around you has very much moved on. Media is rarely bought these days, merely accessed, and most people stream their content from a bottomless catalogue according to whim. It might mean a hefty monthly subscription, but compared to building up a collection of individual discs it's likely a lot cheaper, and far more wide-ranging. Books haven't entirely followed the trend, because e-readers don't quite match the paper experience, but Spotify, Netflix, YouTube etc have risen to take control of audio and all things visual. And whereas your photographs and other data likely started out the decade inside something you owned, they now exist mainly within a private corporation's cloud for easy access whenever wherever. That's fine so long as you pay the subscription, or juggle your files, but one day they're all going to disappear and the historians of the future may struggle to track you down. We no longer care - we have got used to owning everything, and nothing.
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.
There are certainly a lot more of us in 2020 than 2010 - an extra five million in the UK and an extra three quarters of a billion on the planet. We're also using a lot more stuff - and even if you personally aren't, the developing world is consuming hard to catch up. Reassuringly we are now better at taking the energy-efficient option, which is why your newer fridge costs less to run, but the energy required to power your cloud storage and browsing habits might be invisibly cancelling that out. Since 2010 it's become popular to prioritise experiences over physical ownership, which helps a bit, but it's only at the end of the decade that the idea of responsible lifestyle choices has gone properly mainstream. People are finally starting to embrace the environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, tubthumping about the evils of single use plastics and wagging a finger at those who take unnecessary flights, as the results of climate change become ever more undeniable. There is at last acceptance that we should all be doing more to prevent future catastrophe... just no guarantee that the government we've just elected sees saving the wider planet as any kind of priority.
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.
Well yes. Facebook had 360 million users at the start of 2010, it has two and a half billion now. Twitter's active membership has grown tenfold over the same period. WhatsApp was a niche service with a million subscribers then, and has over a billion now, enabling multi-person communication on a grand scale. Instagram wasn't even a thing at the start of the decade, and now provides an intimate glimpse into the everyday lives of one billion plus. We happily volunteer personal information on a grand scale, and big corporations gleefully accumulate all these nuggets into a marketable profile. Click 'Yes' to agree to terms and conditions. Click 'OK' to avoid entering some labyrinthine discussion about cookies. Sure, do whatever you like with my information, just let me watch this hilarious clip of an adorable pet owned by a friend I've never met. Seeing what everyone else is up to can be empowering, or mentally damaging, or both. But the more you share the more you're being watched by unseen forces, and that genie is never going back in its box.
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.
Conveniently I covered much of the evolution of E20 in yesterday's post. The Olympic Park may not have directly recouped the money poured into it, but it's generated billions for a corner of the capital previously unused to wealth, and it's not a bad place to live all told. Sometimes a single decade changes everything.
2
Vision: screens
