In 2012, I told a story about the future.
I don't like looking back at things I've made in the past.
But in the last couple of weeks, I've some a few emails saying:
Tom, ten years ago, you tried to predict 2022,
or at least some of the technology and online world of 2022.
You should look back and see if you were right.
So I've come back to the same place that I gave that talk.
Back in summer 2012 this was a warm, friendly temporary festival site
with a load of people on it
and now it's a cold, run-down, deserted bit of scrubland
next to a motorway, but it's the same place.
I did originally try to film this without having looked back at the talk,
to get my actual genuine reaction,
and it was a terrible video, I'm bad at improvising
and I thought of a dozen more things I wanted to say right afterwards,
so now I've had some time to think... let's go back ten years,
see what I got right, see what I got wrong,
and see if I can predict ten years from now.
- I've got a story for you.
It's set in a future. Not necessarily the future,
I'm not saying this is what will happen.
- I think that's the first time I ever used that phrase.
It's a get-out-of-jail-free card,
a way to hedge my bets and say I'm probably going to wrong.
I use it a lot when I write speculative fiction.
- April 2022. Ten years' time.
First person we're going to meet there is Jason Stewart.
He's the MP for Tooting and Streatham. He is the Minister for Social Development.
Considered kind of a hotshot among his party
after winning his seat in 2020 General Election
in a very hard-fought contest.
- All the political guesses there were completely wrong, but then,
when has anyone been even able to predict politics?
Also, the faces in this talk weren't originally blurred,
I've used YouTube's tools to go back and blur them in the original as well,
because there's a big difference between asking a friend
"hey, can I borrow your headshot for this talk I'm just giving to a few people"
and "can I show that to... however many people will watch this new video".
I've got a duty of care there.
- This is the 2022 iPhone. Looks about the same,
the laws of physics dictate you still need a battery brick.
- That's a hit. It's a very easy hit,
"the borders of phone screens are going to get smaller"
is not exactly a difficult prediction to make.
And by sheer luck, I used a black background on the phone,
so you can't see if there's a notch or not at the top.
One subtle thing I got right there as well:
Apple did change their font.
Back in 2012, they were using Helvetica,
I picked the wrong one to change to, they use a custom sans-serif,
but I did predict the UI was going to change a bit.
- But what has changed is the mobile network speed.
5G now blankets the country in hundred-megabit internet access,
and the data caps are a thing of the past.
- Again, a fairly easy hit. 4G was just being rolled out in 2012,
so taking a guess at 5G in ten years wasn't that hard.
And it actually was a bit pessimistic:
there are parts of the UK where you can get gigabit access on your phone now.
Data caps are still a thing on some contracts,
but as far as I know they're not something most people have to think too much about.
As you watch this, you've got to remember that in 2012
we were almost exactly half way through the transition to smartphones,
only about 50% of people had moved from calls-and-texts-only to
what we'd call a modern phone today.
Suddenly, half the population was carrying a camera all the time,
half the population could easily cheat on pub quizzes.
Things were changing, and they were changing fast,
but we weren't in the smartphone era.
Social changes hadn't swept in, not yet.
2012 me is about to get to the fundamental idea of the talk,
and it's based on one of the big ideas that was going around
among technical people at the time:
lifelogging, the quantified self:
the plausible idea that we going store all our memories online soon.
It was mainstream enough that Black Mirror's "Entire History of You" had aired
just a few months earlier,
and now everyone was getting a computer with internet access in their pocket.
2012 was before Google Glass, before the first Narrative Clip,
all of which came and went very quickly.
It turns out that, so far, people just don't seem to like the idea
of remembering everything, and storing that data forever with corporations.
This talk felt like a warning,
but I didn't know -- no-one knew -- if it a warning that was going to be needed.
- Last year, Apple reused a trademark and introduced iLife.
It's quite similar to Your History on Microsoft Nokia phones,
or Droid Locker on Android.
They're all descendents of the accountability systems
that have been used for police officers and care workers for years now.
- So many misses in there! Apple have since switched to flat design.
All the Android services have been rebranded as Google.
And Microsoft Nokia phones!
And the idea of private-contractor body-worn cameras,
and that all sorts of people all over the public and private sectors
would wear them every day as part of their work...
it just hasn't come true. Completely wrong.
= With iLife, the phone is always recording audio
and sending it and your location to a cloud server.
The descendents of Siri then generate a transcript of it.
If you're talking to someone else with iLife, it'll give you a text chat log.
It's not perfect, but it's close enough.
- Big miss. Companies just haven't developed that.
People, I think, don't want that?
But back then, Siri was a few months old;
Amazon's Alexa would come out a couple of years later.
I'm sure any of those companies could have developed that product,
it's entirely possible these days,
it's just that we went a different way.
- And if you have the new Apple headset, it's got a couple of cameras embedded in it,
which are always recording video when they're connected.
That's uploaded, analysed, and stabilised by the same systems.
The cable, incidentally, still gets tangled in knots
every time you put it in your bag.
- Another big miss. To be fair to earlier me,
I still think wireless headphones are a terrible idea.
I cannot understand why anyone uses them.
They're expensive, they need recharging, the battery degrades over time,
they need a carrying case, they're easy to lose, Bluetooth is still really dodgy ten years later.
I still use wired headsets.
Now, in hindsight, wired camera-buds would probably
have drained too much battery too quickly,
but I still think there's a path that could have got us there by now.
- Which brings us back to Jason Stewart. Jason is a member of 'Cheshire Boys',
the site for old alumni of his public school.
It runs on Disco, a fairly popular community framework,
that unfortunately has some fairly major security flaws.
- That's one of the biggest misses in this whole talk. And it's subtle.
It took me a few times watching this to realise just how badly I'd got that wrong.
A community of school alumni wouldn't be a web site or forum these days,
it wouldn't be independently hosted.
There are still some places like that, yes, but depending on demographics
that would almost certainly be a Facebook group,
or a WhatsApp thread, or a Slack or Discord server.
It would be on some centralised service,
not a private web server with some off-the-shelf code.
That whole business model, that way of operating,
was dying at the time and I had not noticed.
I'm skipping some of the talk here:
basically, that Member of Parliament's password got leaked.
- His password is 'stewart9',
that's the same password he uses everywhere,
and someone goes "hey! Let's log into his iCloud!".
- Why is any of that on desktop?
2012 was the start of the transition to mobile-first
and I just didn't see it coming.
All these screenshots should be vertical, on a phone.
I must have been imagining people coming home and checking this on their home computer,
instead of getting notifications and using an app on their device.
A couple of years later that would be obvious,
everything would start to be designed mobile-first,
but in 2012, after I'd spent more than a decade
of writing web sites on and for desktop computers,
I just missed that entirely.
That transition was starting, just starting...
and I hadn't spotted it.
- First thing they see is Apple's handy 'Is This You?' feature.
Jason Stewart can be seen in a few frames of this walk-by in Shoreditch.
He wasn't recording, but his phone had his location and facial recognition did the rest,
and it didn't take too much effort to find out what he was doing there.
A few minutes later, this poison pen letter arrives in
every single political editor and blogger's inbox in the country.
The Sun eventually runs with it first,
after all the blogs have made it public knowledge.
- Blogging! Blogs were still a big thing in the public consciousness in 2012,
and I did not see their decline coming.
I didn't see them being mostly-replaced by Twitter.
Should I have known? Was it obvious?
It seems clear in hindsight that the "blogosphere"'s days were numbered,
but I missed it.
About one year after that talk, Google would switch off Google Reader,
forever gaining a reputation as a company that shuts down old products
instead of maintaining them,
and it was all downhill from there.
He decides he's going to go on the offence.
He gets up in Parliament and says that
'our private lives should be private, and we must investigate these hackers'.
And he convinces the Met to investigate, which they do by
filing a request with Apple for any lifelogs that mentioned Jason Stewart
in the hours and minutes before the leak.
And Apple agrees, because that argument got settled years ago,
...after Blackpool.
You can tell something about what a culture is worried about,
or maybe what a particular author is worried about,
by reading their speculative fiction.
I just finished "The Brief History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockmeier,
and there are references in there to "terrorist warning beacons"
that everyone's got used to and just ignores,
and as I read that I thought, "oh, this is a post-9/11 book".
And it is, it's from 2006. And this talk, in 2012,
still very much in the consciousness of people working online that we were
one media-friendly terrorist attack away from losing what was left of our privacy rights.
- Your lifelog will get pulled and searched through by the police.
it's not like you've got anything to hide, right?
- Maybe we still are. It's just that as far as I can tell from what I read,
science fiction in the 2020s is more worried
about democratic backsliding, misinformation, and climate apocalypse.
So there's one question left.
What about ten years from now?
What about 2032?
I'm not immersed in web development and technology any more,
I don't code very often, I work on video now.
So what can I predict? Well, here's the guess.
Not the future, just a future.
I think short-form video is going to do to YouTube
what Twitter did to blogs.
People will still be making long-form video content,
it will still get linked to and watched...
but short-form is so much simpler that there will be so much more of it.
A tweet takes ten seconds to write, requires no proofreading or punctuation,
and can be amplified to the world in minutes.
A blog post takes minutes or hours to write, needs spell-checking and formatting,
and takes time to be discovered.
It's not a perfect analogy, but I have a sinking feeling
that short-form video is going to win just through sheer weight of numbers,
the ability for almost anyone to compete
on the same, easy, low-effort, low-attention span playing field.
But there's no money in it.
There's no money in Twitter, just the ability to promote other stuff.
There is still some money in long-form writing,
through commissions, or fan subscriptions on Patreon or other platforms.
In the same way, I don't think short-form video is going to kill YouTube.
After all, YouTube didn't kill television, and television didn't kill radio.
But there's a transition happening, just as there was ten years ago.
If you want a prediction for 2032,
it's that the boom times for this platform, for YouTube, will be over.
There's one problem with that, though.
YouTube is centralised.
Blogs couldn't disappear because everyone hosted their own, in loads of different places,
often for a monthly fee.
But YouTube... well, we'll have to see if, in ten years' time,
Google decide to shut down this old product as well.