It’s that time of year when articles titled “7 things to expect in 2022” fill our newsfeeds. I love them and I love looking back on them even more. What I find particularly interesting is that these future projections are never describing entirely new worlds; but rather a speculation about how existing trends, however minor, may coalesce; propelled by emerging social, cultural, economic and environmental forces that make them snowball to form a new reality.
By that basis, this year’s various lists of predictions will feature the role of NFTs, Web3, metaverses, biohacking the planet, biohacking ourselves, quantum computing, digital and AI ethics, sustainable tech and new covid normals — all on a backdrop of dismantling the power of big tech, saving the planet and being better, more equitably minded humans.
Taking some of these trends, I’ve extrapolated beyond 2022 to 2121 to see where they might land us. It’s not a prediction, it’s just one of infinite different speculations — albeit a techno-optimistic one. Read it with a coffee and a pinch of salt!
2121
It seems odd now, that country seemed a core part of someone’s identity 100 years ago. Nowadays a country provides merely a vague geographical reference point. What use would Country play now? Language, trade, migration, resources, infrastructure, industry, policy, governance and so on, are not unique to a country but rather loosely globally coordinated autonomously set agendas which are activated on a local level.
She wonders what this would sound like to her Grandparents who had recounted how radical digital civic platforms had once been. Imagine living then, in a world in which everything depended on multiple disjointed systems, or where relying on someone submitting a form was the difference between being able to get food or not, or stranger still where items came from all over the world. She’s seen videos of container ships from 70 years ago — not being able to produce what you need in the place you needed it and then having to ship it seemed not only completely archaic but horribly inefficient.
Today, everything is an DAO— a distributed autonomous organisation, with many powered by a City OS — a system that can autonomously build, deploy and manage any system. How did people in the early 21st century manage…
