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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘prediction’
12.12.2022

Manu Schwendener/Unsplash
I like what Robin Sloan had to say in his blog post, āA Year of New Avenuesā. It’s typeset in Filosofia, which is another great reason to read it.
Iāve often said the trends of a new decade, or century, donāt emerge on the dot. Youāve got to get a few years in for them to become apparent. (Some even argue that we should look at decades beginning midway, e.g. 1975 to 1984, to identify groups of trends.)
Robin believes that the platforms of the 2010s are history.
And just as Iāve drawn parallels between 1973 and 2022, Robin feels that 2023 is going to have some of the energy of 2003, as far as the internet is concerned:
It is 2003 again. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram havenāt been invented yet ⦠except, itās also 2023, and they have, so you can learn from their rise andĀ ruin ā¦
As the platforms of the last decade crumble, we might put āfounderā culture back on the shelf ā¦
IĀ want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, IĀ want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each otherāsĀ tweets.
Thereās more good stuff after that, which Iāll leave you to read. Itās a glass-half-full world of where the web can head, and if Robinās even half-right, then itās going to be an upbeat time for creative people.
Tags: 2003, 2023, Big Tech, creativity, internet, prediction, technology, World Wide Web Posted in culture, design, internet, media, publishing, technology | 2 Comments »
11.11.2016

FJM88NL, licensed under Creative Commons
Iāve had a phone call and a lot of comments on this in the last couple of days: my Dad, who is 81 with early-stage Alzheimerās, called the US presidential election for Donald Trump months ago. I posted it on my social networks the day he made his definitive call, and friends remembered it. Thank you for all your compliments.
Go back to 2015, he had called the Republican primary for Trump.
I wasnāt as confident but I had Tweeted the week before the election that polls were understating Trumpās actual support by at least 6 per cent.
In 2008, when everyone had dismissed Gov. Sarah Palin, he said that she wasnāt going to go away, and that sheād command an even greater influence in the first Obama term. While he predicted an Obama win, again quite early on, he wasnāt optimistic and didnāt think there would be great change in the US. You may or may not agree with that.
Going right back to the 1980s, when I was at college, and before China showed any signs of opening up, he made the call about its economic rise, and that I would be assured, by the time I was in my 30s and 40s, that many would want to deal with the country. It would be, I remember him telling me, a career advantage to being Chineseāin contrast to the racism we encountered far more frequently back then.
During the height of the Muldoon era, Dad, who counted himself as part of Robās Mob, made the call that Sir Robert Muldoon would not be able to hold on to his power or reputation in his old age. When a documentary aired condemning Sir Robert after his death, so that he wouldnāt be around to file a defamation suit, he said, āI told you so.ā
Even in the elections I contested (and he encouraged me to run), while he refused to be drawn on what he thought my chances were, he was unequivocally clear that my rival, John Morrison, wouldnāt win, in 2013. Dad certainly did better than some so-called political experts I can name.
And if you want to get really spooky, during the Martin Bashir interview of Princess Diana, he said that by the time she was 37, sheād have a āreally bad yearā. He didnāt say sheād die.
No, heās not a Mystic Meg of any sort. Heās a guy whoās been around for a while and kept his eyes open.
If you want to know his secret, I can tell you that his political projections are based in part around reading. Not mainstream media, but websites that heās discovered over the years himself. Heās a keen web surfer and loves his news. He doesnāt put that much stock in political āexpertsā, and after having run myself, I can fully understand why.
Heād even take in the viewpoints on Russia Today, which gives you an idea of how varied his reading was. Just today I caught him watching an address from Edward Snowden.
With Palin, it was probably the sudden rise of her fan sites set up by US conservatives. He hadnāt seen such a rapid rise of sites that soon galvanized their support around the former Alaskan governor before. While mainstream media dismissed her and gave the impression that post-2008, she wouldnāt matter, Dad had entirely the opposite reading. Politically centrist, and, like me, a swing voter, he kept following the sites out of interest, and saw how they morphed into the Tea Party movement. He also knew they wouldnāt go away any time soon, and observed that there was a Palin effect, as the likes of Ted Cruz soon found out when contesting their Senate seats.
And, despite my own criticisms of this practice, Dad would read the comments. Sometimes he would wade through hundreds of them, to get a sense of what people were thinking.
It was his reading of media from left and right during the latest US presidential election that saw him made his calls very assertively.
Rather than dismiss certain conservatives as ill-educated, as some media might, Dad treated them as human beings. He knew they would galvanize and get behind Trump.
When youāve lived through a world war (including an occupation) and then a civil war, and saw your family start from the bottom again after 1949, you get to be good at knowing what people go through.
Heās always been politically switched on, and had a keen interest in history and economics, the latter of which he studied at a tertiary level. But heād always explain to me that it came down to people and their behaviour, and never rational decision-making. I might have only lived just over half his lifetime so far, but I find little fault in that statement. All new movements have plenty of power, till they become the establishment.
His thoughts on China in the 1980s could well have stemmed from that: I never asked him, and aphasia means heād now find difficulty telling me anyway.
Sadly for the US, he finds appeal in the theory that the nation will break up, though he hasnāt quite yet made the call in the same way he made the one for the Trump presidency. But as with his Trump prediction, Iām publishing this one online.
Heās never stated it as succinctly but he has, in passing in the 1980s and 1990s, said that the British Empire wouldnāt last much longer beyond our current monarchās reign.
You never know, we might be coming back to this post in a few yearsā time. These are gloomy scenarios but Iād rather put Dadās ideas out there now, as I did with the Trump presidency, rather than tell you ex post facto how clever he was. The lesson: treat people as people, and itās amazing how much that will reveal.
Tags: 2016, Aotearoa, China, conservatism, consumer behaviour, Donald Trump, economics, Edward Snowden, history, John Yan, media, New Zealand, politics, prediction, Sarah Palin, science, Sir Robert Muldoon, UK, USA Posted in China, culture, media, New Zealand, politics, UK, USA | No Comments »
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