My predictions for 2012
2012 is the year of “software eating the world“. We will see technology complete it’s domination on masses, and all governments and organizations will push for it. The year of technology allowing a real global scale control.
See more here (this pdf is one of the most insightful document Ive read in ages, and its not too technical). To summarize : “Declining storage costs will make such monitoring not only possible, but likely. (…) The information identifying the location of each of one million people to that accuracy at 5-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year could easily be stored in 1,000 gigabytes, which would cost slightly over $50 at today’s prices. For 50 million people, the cost would be under $3000. (…) The audio for all of the telephone calls made by a single person over the course of one year could be stored using roughly 3.3 gigabytes.”
Prepare yourself to be monitored constantly, or fight against at the same pace if you want to escape it. SOPA in the USA, HADOPI in France, are using the same methods totalitarian regimes uses the control the population in Iran or China. Of course, they won’t give you the real, underlying reasons in democracies. If the majority of the populations don’t stand against that next year, and maintain a constant pressure, this will actually happen.
It will also be the year where civilizations will start to merge, a key year. The world is not yet global, despite all the promises of technologies, there is no “global mindset”. The technology will start to be ready next year, but not the people.
Europe and the USA will be more and more under pressure from other blocks, particularly from the Middle East and Asia. In my opinion, there will be 3 main issues. First, religion over politics. This is far from new, but remember that’s the case in a big part of the world – I mean religion being on top of politics. The outcome of the Arab Spring is one proof, the constant growth of extreme catholics movements in the USA and Europe another one. I’m not saying this issue is going to be resolved in 2012, but it might very well be the start of a new era.
Then, economy over politics. This is nearly done globally: try to find a country where there are MORE public services created than sold to corporations. I doubt you could find even one. The crisis in Europe and the USA will be way worst than 2011, and this will push politics to be more pro active. This goes to the third issue, the energy crisis, which is expected to reach a tipping point. A point where the economy will need to be managed strongly on a global scale to operate a transition. No one knows exactly when it’s going to happen of course, but looking back to 2011 – the protester being Time’s man of the year, the Occupy Wall Street movement, Anonymous, there’s clearly a pattern here about a global debate on politics over business (or the opposite) going mainstream.
We still live in a feudal world. Nearly all of the big corporations already existed a hundred years ago, most of them changed their identity, but this is still the same world we live in. Domination is still the business model, and the way we work. 2012 might be, in my opinion, the year when we will see something new starting.
2012 will decide where we go in the long term. This is true every year of course, but technology is accelerating human evolution every year, and 2012 will be different because old boundaries will break and technology will reach a new level. The world will start to unify in a deeper way, and this ends a very long cycle. Whatever we want it or not, this is happening. All movements are now global, therefore it’s time for the world to choose a common strategy. There’s lots of hope of course, if we do it right the outcome can be truly amazing!
On web technologies
My prediction for 2012 about that will make me seen as Iraki’s former minister of Defense before the US Army arrived in Kuwait. But whatever: I predict a massive return of plugins this coming year.
Why? First, because there are just too much apps. How many of you, on any tactile device, have less than a few pages of apps and always manage to navigate between them without any disruption? Remember your delicio.us account and how it became, like, the start of a new web directory because you just kept on adding stuff?
We might use HTML5 to do web apps that will replace native apps. That will be possible in the future, and there’s no question about that. But we are so far away. JS might be faster than Flash in browsers already, but it’s not even close to have as much features and authoring tools as Flash have. I don’t know if there’s another programming language that got a bigger community than Flash. Flash has integrated functions for P2P. GPU acceleration, audio, video, multitouch, can be connected to AIR applications (and from there offers everything native apps can do)… . And also, designers can use it without having to code.
Apple said that the web will be better without plugins. So Quicktime is not a plugin anymore? Opening a YouTube video from Safari on an iPad is a very bad user experience, really surprising for a company like Apple. It opens the YouTube app and then you’re basically stuck in it? So what could solve the problem? Add previous and forward buttons? So the whole tablet would just be a browser then!
HTML5 won’t replace Flash for at least a few years; actually, Flash and HTML5 are just going to merge at some point. The Tamarin project is all about that and is going to provide ECMAScript on all browsers. Flash and all it’s parts are getting open sourced by Adobe.
Plugins are a good way to separate powers – and this model has proven to be efficient to reduce corruption and trusts. I personally always considered Flash as a temporary measure, until everyone can agree on full standards to share content on the web.
This is just business here, don’t get fooled. The competition between Google, Apple and Microsoft (… and the W3C and all other organizations implied in HTML5) is already and will slow the whole standardization process. Because it’s a big risk for app stores. They don’t want HTML5 to be too efficient and start competing outside of their markets. They want apps, and control. They want to control the purpose of their machines. Open source plugins are the only way to help the transition to HTML5, and a free web.
Anyway, don’t call me Nostradamus on that one – Just wanted to share a few thoughts!