Obligatory Prediction Post for 2017
Each year since about 2003 I’ve done a reading of the trends and compiled them into a notebook for myself. These I have referenced over the years in an informal way to decide my next moves as well as to be a better resource to the people who rely on me for that kind of information.
On January 1, I started putting together my predictions for 2017. Since I consider my birthday to be the official start of *my* new year I’ve gone ahead and given myself the luxury of waiting until after the inauguration of our 45th president to finish penning my new year's predictions.
Given the extra time, I have decided against removing any of my predictions however some of my predictions have taken on new dimensions in the final weeks of January. The time has further cemented my visions of what’s next and afforded me new insights into what I think will be a breakout year for anyone who possesses latent entrepreneurial instincts or the soul of an upstart.
Technology enthusiasts and business professionals who like to keep their ear to the ground will be interested to know that 2017 offers up many marvelous opportunities for make a major pivot in your life.
Amidst the populist uprising of the last 6 months, many of the sacred cows of capitalism we’ve followed for the past few decades will be brought into question and challenged on their promises and their merits.
The establishment MSM will continue to be outed for calculated deceptions against the public while alternative media will enjoy a period of accelerated growth in both production and consumption. The formerly distinct trends of blogging, podcasting, self-publishing, disintermediation and personal productivity have already reached a head, breaking new ground in the notion of a real-time web.
The realization that very company must evolve into part media company and part technology company to maintain a competitive advantage will become a guiding feature of every business plan.
This is also the year that year that blockchain enters mainstream consciousness, marked by the near perfect alignment of the new year with the price of Bitcoin reaching parity with that of gold, both at $1200.
Institutions of learning will try to delay the imminent draw-down of their unchallenged rule over all manner of accreditation schemes that are, at their core, futile attempts to co-opt the shifting center of gravity toward individual learning.
Apps generally replace the website as the primary interface between users and their providers.
Nipping at the heals of this forced evolution in business is the changing nature of work on the individual level. As the gig economy widens in scope, people will divest steady jobs for opportunities with greater growth potential and creative freedom. Corporate refugees will start that business they always wanted and the overqualified underemployed will organize to help them.
Over the next couple of days I will be sharing my predictions for 2017. It is important to understand that these are my attempts to describe the state of play in technology and business this year, not to call out the plays of specific actors. Therefore there are only a few specific predictions included. Take what you will from them.
It’s become popular to do “prediction posts” in the days leading up to a new year, since well before the inception of blogging. Whereas it used to be left to print media to tell what's next, people increasingly look to credible individuals within this loci of attention for guidance. It think this is an apt description for the sea changes in society that may take the next decade to understand fully.
In the spirit of this, Instead of posting my predictions as some authoritative mega-article, I’ve decided to do something a little different and publish my predictions in discrete chunks so that people can weigh-in on what hopefully is one concrete idea at a time. Therefore, each prediction bears a heading which I feel encapsulates the central idea while leaving plenty of room for expansion. In addition, I intend to expand on each of these ideas in future articles.
It’s a Wiki-World
The Wiki will become the dominant metaphor for understanding the new social order. Just as a wiki is the product of collective intelligence so will the business of society increasingly decouple from itself from the wiles of individual actors and at the same time become packaged and processed by consensus reality that it creates. This is not without it's downsides.
Breathless Last Breaths of the Legacy Media
One of the areas where this is most vividly brought into view is the media. The so-called American “free press” will continue to be outed for their calculated deceptions against the public.
In response to the up-welling of healthy skepticism thus engendered in the public, we will see major news networks carry out punctuated, albeit sincere reforms to repair their credibility. This will correctly occur to the public as a transparent effort to patch up their reputations, seemingly in spite of ongoing revelations about their track record in accuracy. Some media companies will take this opportunity to pivot to new business models, alter their identity or substantially alter the content of their programming, as in the case of Yahoo’s recent announcement to change their name. I believe all the major news channels will look completely different by 2018 and one or two big ones will disappear.
We will also see public figures and talking heads from last year’s election proceedings suddenly change careers, employers or disappear from public stage altogether as they attempt to distance themselves from last year’s embarrassing episodes in objective journalism. For those of us monitoring the changing state of the media it will come as no surprise at all when certain talking heads are sent into exile by their audiences or employers.
This period will still go down in history as an embarrassing chapter in the history of the American press, but the narrative of a renaissance in alternative news may temporarily drown out the equivocations of the establishment media. In spite of this (and, seemingly, in spite of themselves) MSM will attempt to maintain the illusion of objectivity by stepping up their deceptions to near fantastical proportions. We can expect a vocal criticism of the populist uprising its champions to continue into 2017. This will only embolden the public to make dramatic changes in their consumption of information and further cement establishment media's place in dustbin of history.
From an organizational psychology standpoint, this is the dynamic of congruence at work in the organism of the media. Their denial that they’ve lost the narrative will run strong throughout 2017. The legacy kingpins at these companies will grow frustrated when their tried-and-proven tricks no longer work on the popular consciousness. The environmental sea-changes in the media space will necessitate much soul-searching at the institutional level. These same institutions will downplay these formidable changes as inconsequential “pivots” by the media’s own talking heads, who will employ multifarious justifications for their bad faith distortions of truth, but short of admitting guilt.
Cambrian Explosion of New Media & the Internet
This is great for open-source media enthusiasts as we’ll see new ventures and markets open up in the area of democratic media. Podcasting is on the move as it matures into people’s preferred method of infotainment. What has been a decade-long cottage industry is emerging as the de facto method of distribution by companies of every size, replacing the blog as the preferred platform for disseminating information and demonstrating thought leadership.
Much of the growth we’ll see in the content space will center around new tools for enabling it’s commercial exploitation by both media aggregators and creators. These trends are likely to have to do with advertising at first, in order to entice the pioneers of the 5th estate to homestead on their new platforms, but will be revealed as most pronounced in the areas of content creation, curation and collaboration. Significantly, hardware solutions will continue to merge with software solutions for a more seamless and unified digital experience all around.
I also anticipate that a new wave of activist and public-service apps will surface. These will facilitate, promote and crowdsource direct action participation and joint-mobilizations between geographically distributed and concentric identity groups. First on your phone, then on your computer, these communications platforms will take many of the institutional types by surprise with their useful innovations. Some of the innovations that we might see include:
Blockchain integration
Further growth in encrypted communications
The proliferation of micropayments
The resurgence of barter
The deployment of specialized digital currencies
Their integration with blockchain technology and digital currencies will be limited in scope leading up to 2018, but the weather vanes will clearly show which the way the wind is blowing by the end of the year.
The Innovation Ecosystem
Conversely, tech giants will realize that they can’t be all things to all people and will pare back their offerings in order to increase R&D in areas with the highest growth potential, namely: Blockchain development and new media distribution. We’ll see the consolidation of many niche services. Many of our favorite tools will be shuddered or rolled into other offerings in the same way as as Google Reader was “shut down” and Feedly picked up their torch. While tech giants will continue acquiring up-and-coming technologies I feel that their pace will slow down and that this relationship will increasingly take on the character of investor, partner and mentor.
Anti-Social Media
As a social network, Facebook will suffer a quiet exodus as their network homogenizes the cognitive field of play and its user base becomes increasingly skeptical of its real value in their lives. Facebook will not admit it but almost none of its users will be spared from seeing friends and family formally quit the network, quietly curtail their usage or simply go silent. However, what Facebook loses in numbers they will gain back more in ROI. Financially, Facebook will show a sustained growth trajectory due to its strategic investments outside of the social network arena and 2018 will demonstrate a somewhat more formal recognition of the transition away from its corporate identity as a “social network.”
Truth About Government Surveillance
The truth about government surveillance through your devices will become common knowledge, stimulating the public to respond, first in fits of abstention from blacklisted networks, then in coordinated efforts of obstruction, culture-jamming and finally through the adoption of seemingly-securer methods of communication. The tech sector will preempt and capitalize on this trend, using it to sell their next generation of technology devices and “security features” including the liberal use of anonymizing agents, biometric id's and other gimmicks. Most notably, the more-or-less under-the-radar “Unified ID” plays of 2014–2016 will come into full view of the public the moment tech giants begin to promote the benefits of their unified id systems. The drumbeat of security will do it's job drowning out the odd protestations of those who know that the Private Sector has provided the government with backdoors into all its tech because its been made profitable to do so.
Blockchain Enters the Mainstream Consciousness
2017 is the year that blockchain enters the mainstream consciousness and Bitcoin will lead the way. Blockchain technologies will follow the same pattern of adoption as bitcoin, but likely accelerated by a factor of at least 10x over its champion use case as a store of value. Blockchain organizations while, one on hand enjoying a considerable uptick in publicity by mainstream publications, will be challenged on the basis of their futuristic theories and the threat that poses to the established order. Many will not survive the uncertainty of the marketplace. However, the mysterious and sphinxlike nature of blockchain tech will captivate the imaginations of a professional class that had grown jaded with bad-news scenarios and take it upon themselves to “be the change” they want to see manifested in the world by launching major blockchain-based initiatives for the social good.
Major governments will trial balloon the regulation of blockchain technology; efforts which will be seen as ineffectual and unenforceable by authorities in the blockchain space. Their attempts to steer public discourse will be met with rabid rejection by the technology sophisticates at large, whereas financial institutions, having preempted the rise blockchain in 2016, will stand as the only real threat of regulatory capture over investment vehicles like Bitcoin.
Reset to local
Finally, we’ll see a reset to local. On the back of all the changes in the media, the resetting of currencies, and likely economic downturn, people will reorient their focus toward matters and concerns they can have a direct impact on, things which will turn out to be local in nature. We’ll see a shoring up of the lines of communication between members of the community, with purveyors of the aforementioned apps taking a large enabling role. But the real heroes of the story will be those who adapt the technologies and tools being created to breath new life into their communities on a local and global stage.