The Next 10 Years: One Version

From BoingBoing: Douglas Coupland's "Radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years," from this weekend's Globe and Mail, is a thought-provoking (and somewhat depressing) exercise in linear predictions based on peak oil, rampant financialist malfeasance and climate change:

1) It's going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

2) The future isn't going to feel futuristic
It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do.
The future will feel even faster than it does now. The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.

6) The middle class is over. It's not coming back. (Ack!)
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? That's where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going--to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return.

However, this won't stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we'll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back.

Enjoy the new monoclass!