The famous musician and futurist Brian Eno, together with Kevin Kelly in 1992, predicted the evolution of the world system until 2030. Half of this period has passed, but much of the forecast has already come true: total PR, the flourishing of hand-made, a change in sexual roles. Ahead is the heyday of robotics and transplantology.
- Ordinary people start paying publicists, PR is becoming the most popular profession in rich countries. Life is an endless struggle for press attention.
- Sexual roles have changed: men wear makeup, women in poorly fitting clothes are chasing them.
- Everyone becomes so cynical about the election process itself that the number of the electorate drops to 2% (relatives and friends of the candidates).
“It turns out that almost all the conspiracy theories you've heard about are actually true. The world is truly ruled by 150 malefactors with completely disgusting inclinations.
“At the same time, it turns out that there are serious racial differences between people - the stereotypes are absolutely correct.
- A new type of recreation is becoming popular: you are thrown out of a helicopter in a completely unfamiliar place with a two-week supply of food and water. At the same time, you are convinced that during all this time you will not meet anyone. In any case, there is an emergency call button for rescuers.
- Companies selling seeds are starting to supply packages of unpredictable mutants that are produced by genetic engineering programs: "Sow and see what happens!" Suburban areas are covered with exotic flowers and giant cucumbers.
Promotional video:
- Genetic research has shown that it is possible to create gifted scientists, great artists, subtle linguists and great athletes. People are dying of hunger because there are not enough farmers, chefs and waiters.
- Videophones provoke a new sexual revolution, people sit at home, doing all sorts of ugly things with each other. Reproduction is dropping and the screens are getting bigger and bigger.
- Suicide is becoming not only a daily routine, but also accepted by society and even encouraged. People choose death, living long is considered selfish and old-fashioned.
- The adoration of youth is passing, cosmetic surgeons are opening up a new profitable market: they are doing plastic surgeries to patients to give their faces wrinkles and the appearance of middle-aged and elderly people, wise by experience, who have suffered a lot from life. Eastern aesthetics penetrate the West; the traditional values of body symmetry and flawlessness are now seen as naive and uninteresting. Colorado youths with perfect bodies and faces, who used to spin endlessly in front of a mirror, now save money to make themselves a crooked nose or blacken a few teeth.
- Sunburn is again seen as a sign of peasant origin. People are starting to hide from the sun. Domes are built over the beaches to protect people from ultraviolet rays.
“Allergies are increasing, and this unexpectedly solves transport problems, since everyone is sitting in their tightly closed houses. Telecom stocks skyrocket.
- Forgotten projects of high-rise buildings are becoming the subject of urban chic, passing from hand to hand at ever-increasing prices, until finally lawyers, stock brokers and publicists can afford it.
2010: First transsexual governor elected in California.
- New sedatives for children have been invented (modern laudanum), which are jokingly sold by large pharmaceutical companies. Medicines are called "Time to sleep" and "Land of the Sandman".
- A new concept of “Global Darwinism” is being strengthened: people debate the right of the human species to get rid of weak representatives. Aid to developing countries is ending. Hospitals become “vitality assessment centers” and refuse help or end the lives of poor people and in cases of hopeless illness.
- The result is a new definition of vitality (based on memes - ideas - rather than genes). People undergo exhausting testing (which takes a tremendous amount of time) to verify the authenticity and scope of their ideas. A new profession - a meme inspector - enters life.
- The new magazine "Usual People", published by almost a century old man Studs Terkel, is enjoying great success. The magazine only considers people who have never done anything special to be worth paying attention to.
- A new type of artist arises: a professional fired truvist (or keeper of folklore) - this person is engaged in collecting existing, but escaped attention, amateur works of art and exhibiting them for all to see, which gives them significance. He selects them to his liking.
- The first Bio-Olympic Games in 2004, in which athletes can participate in whom something has been removed or added to the body.
- The Life Support Movement is discovering that the threat of abortion is reduced by 20% when a woman is kept to bed and takes sedatives during the first three months of pregnancy. Congress succumbs to pressure and passes forced rest law. Shopping early in pregnancy is punishable.
- The lobby of industrial robot companies is seeking the cancellation of the production of the film "Terminator 9", they object to the propaganda of stereotypes.
- Judas is rehabilitated.
- The microbe, bred to destroy the films of the spilled oil, begins to devour rubber as well. Transport problems occur due to tire damage.
- Scenarios become more accurate and convincing, people increasingly learn about the possibility of adverse results of their own actions. The entire social life is paralyzed, drowning in endless evaluations of purely negative conditions: "Is such and such an action less harmful than this?"
- There is a revival of travel as a process. People abandon the idea of "moving from point A to point B" and begin to develop (or rediscover) a culture of travel: a kind of semi-nomadic existence. A lot of people are buying high-end, fax- and modem-equipped mobile home models. It immediately becomes a sign of a low position to have a permanent home. Fast modes of transport are viewed in much the same way as fast food establishments - pathetic, unwanted, fake.
- Manufacturers of men's lingerie are finally realizing that men's testicles are not the same size.
- Prince Charles converts to the Catholic faith, which gives him the opportunity to get away from the coronation without renunciation.
“Television directors, impressed by the phenomenal success of the Anita Hill / Clarence Thomas courtroom trial, continually invent and stage semi-surrogate“processes”that emphasize the emotional side of judgment. No one is sure how much this is fiction, partial or complete reality. For the intelligentsia, such programs take the place of wrestling fights and roller skating competitions.
- The well-known notion that children should be raised in an atmosphere of love, reliability and care goes through a serious crisis of confidence when it becomes obvious that children raised in this way are completely unfit for life in a cruel, dangerous and unreliable world. Enlightened parents are beginning to experiment with new forms of toys: they buy their children bears with sharp teeth and unpredictable behavior, cubes with abrasive surfaces, pencils with slightly toxic leads, choose unsafe playgrounds.
Brian Eno in his youth.
- People with disabilities are finally getting the opportunity to act as robot operators. They are the only people willing to spend a huge amount of time to hone the clarity of actions not in their bodies.
- Slavery is entering a new round of evolution. Professionals, tired of being responsible for their own affairs, go on “slave leave” every year, where they do hard work without any remuneration and under vigilant supervision. This becomes a worldly variety of sacred vows.
- Big changes in education: the combination of monetarism and liberalism creates a new paradigm, according to which schools should be run like a successful business, industrial enterprise or research institution. Hence the results:
- Children's minds are used to solve problems, the unbiased originality of children's thinking is bought by the flagships of the industry for a lot of money.
- Production of a wide variety of goods: hand-painted wallpaper and postcards, primitive sculpture and tableware, clothing and fabric design.
- Teachers are selected (by children, of course) based on their performance and potential effectiveness. They go through the most rigorous selection and cross-examination by children, their future employers.
- The old concept of "abstract" (that is, not related to real tasks) education is valid only in the most backward places of the old world - England, America, etc.
- Successful children are lured from school to school, the transition requires a lot of money.
- Schools have completely overcome the age distinction. People of all ages come and gather in effective groups that work for profit.
- People with big money give their children or their schools small start-ups for Christmas.
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It is worth mentioning that Brian Eno and Kevin Kelly made this forecast for the developed (First) world. The Second and Third Worlds were out of their sight. But one of the world's leading financiers and architects of the European Union, Jacques Attali, gave a politicized forecast of the world in 2050 in his book A Brief History of the Future:
“By 2035, at the end of a very long battle and in the middle of a severe environmental crisis, the US - still the dominant empire - will be defeated by globalization (mondialization) of markets, especially financial markets, and the power of concerns, especially insurance. Exhausted financially and politically, like all other empires before them, the United States will cease to rule the world. They will remain the leading power on the planet; they will not be replaced by another empire or another dominant nation, but the world will temporarily become polycentric, ruled by a dozen regional powers.
It will all start with a demographic shock. In 2050 (if no powerful catastrophe occurs), the earth will be inhabited by 9.5 billion human individuals, i.e. 3 billion more than now. Life expectancy in the richest countries will approach a century; the birth rate will stop even in the vicinity of the reproduction threshold. As a consequence, humanity will age. The population of China will increase by 360 million, India's population by 600 million, Nigeria and Bangladesh by 100 million, the United States by 80 million, France by 9 million, Germany by 10 million and, possibly, Russia by 30 million. Two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities, which will double in population, just as the amount of energy and agricultural production consumed will double. The number of people of working age will also double; more than two thirds of children born during these years,will live in the 20 poorest countries.
At the same time (around 2050), the market, which is unlimited in nature, will prevail over democracy, which is institutionally limited to some territory. States will weaken; new nanotechnology will reduce energy consumption and transform the last areas that were still collective - health, education, security and sovereignty; there will be new major consumables - "surveilleurs" to measure and monitor compliance: everyone will become their own doctor, teacher, controller. The economy will become more economical in the use of energy and water. and the fear of non-compliance will become its limit.
Transparency will be required; anyone who wants to hide information about his property, morals, health or educational level will be a priori suspicious. The increase in life expectancy will give power to the oldest who decide to take it upon themselves. States will give way to enterprises and cities.
Hypernomads (hypernomades) will lead an open empire without soil, without a center - hyper-empire. No one will be more loyal to anyone but himself; enterprises will no longer have any nationality; the poor will create a market among others; laws will be replaced by contracts, justice by arbitration, police by mercenaries. New differences will emerge: while sedentary amuse themselves with spectacles and sporting events, huge masses of poverty nomads - infra-nomads - will cross borders in search of livelihoods.
Insurance companies, which have become regulators of the world, will fix the norms that states, enterprises and individual structures will have to obey. Resources will become more scarce, robots more and more numerous. Time, even the most personal, will be almost completely consumed by the use of goods. On the same day, everyone will be able to fix themselves, then make prostheses from themselves, and finally be cloned. The person will turn into an artifact consuming other artifacts; a cannibal eating cannibal items; as a sacrifice to nomadic evils.
Just on the eve of the disappearance of the American empire, the climate will become almost unbearable, the population will fight for territory. Permanent wars will begin, as nations, pirates, mercenaries, mafias, and religious movements will have access to new weapons and instruments of observation, intimidation and retaliation, and will be able to use the capabilities of electronics, genetics, and nanotechnology. Moreover, the rise of hyper-empire will lead everyone to become an enemy / rival of all. They will fight for oil, for water, for preserving the territory, for leaving it, to establish one faith, to subvert another, to destroy the West, to establish its values.
Military dictatorships supported by the army and the police will come to power. The most devastating of all wars, the hyper-conflict, will break out.
By 2060 or earlier (unless, of course, humanity disappears under a stream of bombs), humanity will no longer be able to put up with either the American empire, or hyper-empire, or hyper-conflict. The new forces, altruistic and universalistic, which are already operating today, will come to power on a global scale in the form of an empire of necessity - an ecological, ethical, economic, cultural and political necessity. As a result of their uprising, hyper-democracy is formed."
