1. The impacts of climate change are felt not as a bang but as a cacophony of whimpers - severe weather events wipe billions from local economies in vulnerable areas, protracted recoveries and financial mismanagement in the wake of such disasters are the norm and not the exception as are ‘soft exits’ where there’s no real recovery at all and the area is left to rot with media being expertly manipulates into falling silent. With the right eye, most of the front page of any given newspaper will become issues easily linked to the impacts of climate change. Reactions to this will be paradoxical - increased development of vulnerable areas (Miami, flood plains, hurricane alleys) and employ harmful techniques that act to deepen the problem in future (concrete, fossil-fuel-dependent movement of material over long distances). The collective consciousnesses awareness of the locked-in and second-order effects of. Linate change will slowly widen, taking into account things like the 30-year lag, clathrate gun, albedo, and an acute awareness of the CO2 PPM measurements of their locale.
2. Developed nations decline thanks significantly to repeated election of divisive, ineffective politicians and the neutering, budget cutting and general reduction of the public service that executes on an increasingly constrained vision with greater focus on media perception over results. Which ever side prevails in any particular election will cheer loudly yet their champion will prove just as ineffective as their opponent was imagined to be. This applies to the USA and Britain for sure but likely also many other democracies.
3. The middle class squeeze will continue and the bottom-of-the-hill ambulances in the form of social services, health and mental care will continue their steady march to privatisation, fuelled by the class divide that sees the uppers not rely on such things and so be easily drawn to the raw profit of liquidating it. There will be increasing calls for UBI while the ongoing failure to sustainably fund partial basic income, the pension, will progress.
4. Alternative living arrangements such as tiny houses, van dwelling, intentional communities, Airbnb and even straightforward lodging will be increasingly punished/regulated in paradoxical complement to the wider issues of eroding social services and climate change. Telecommuting/remote work will continue to be a niche, enviously studied by office-dwelling dreamers tracking the lives of a small number of success stories carving their niche (and also revenues) in the blogosphere.
5. We will see increased calls for intensified urbanisation and migration to tackle the obvious increasing poverty divide between nations/regions and provide a path to renewed GDP growth. This will have the net effect of furthering political divides, increasing per-capital emissions, and draining the skills base of developing nations.
6. The imagined bunkers which we would all retreat into as a means of survival from the world will not eventuate in a literal sense except where some billionaire crafts an elaborate folly that we all get to bray over in our news feed. However, bunkers will come to exist in less literal ways - households will continue to shrink, more people living alone with pets and no kids. Social circles will also shrink and the next generation of minds will be crafted by the distant yet immediate judgment of their peers and yet they will rarely meet in person and the expenditure of personal energy in such an endeavour (or indeed any endeavour at all) will become vanishingly rare. Our diets will be made up of increasingly single-serve, processed substances delivered directly to us in single-use packaging.
You know after typing all this out I’ve realised it’s just as much a summation of the past decade as a projection of the next one. Here’s to another ten years of this, then, I guess. Where’s my scythe?
2. Developed nations decline thanks significantly to repeated election of divisive, ineffective politicians and the neutering, budget cutting and general reduction of the public service that executes on an increasingly constrained vision with greater focus on media perception over results. Which ever side prevails in any particular election will cheer loudly yet their champion will prove just as ineffective as their opponent was imagined to be. This applies to the USA and Britain for sure but likely also many other democracies.
3. The middle class squeeze will continue and the bottom-of-the-hill ambulances in the form of social services, health and mental care will continue their steady march to privatisation, fuelled by the class divide that sees the uppers not rely on such things and so be easily drawn to the raw profit of liquidating it. There will be increasing calls for UBI while the ongoing failure to sustainably fund partial basic income, the pension, will progress.
4. Alternative living arrangements such as tiny houses, van dwelling, intentional communities, Airbnb and even straightforward lodging will be increasingly punished/regulated in paradoxical complement to the wider issues of eroding social services and climate change. Telecommuting/remote work will continue to be a niche, enviously studied by office-dwelling dreamers tracking the lives of a small number of success stories carving their niche (and also revenues) in the blogosphere.
5. We will see increased calls for intensified urbanisation and migration to tackle the obvious increasing poverty divide between nations/regions and provide a path to renewed GDP growth. This will have the net effect of furthering political divides, increasing per-capital emissions, and draining the skills base of developing nations.
6. The imagined bunkers which we would all retreat into as a means of survival from the world will not eventuate in a literal sense except where some billionaire crafts an elaborate folly that we all get to bray over in our news feed. However, bunkers will come to exist in less literal ways - households will continue to shrink, more people living alone with pets and no kids. Social circles will also shrink and the next generation of minds will be crafted by the distant yet immediate judgment of their peers and yet they will rarely meet in person and the expenditure of personal energy in such an endeavour (or indeed any endeavour at all) will become vanishingly rare. Our diets will be made up of increasingly single-serve, processed substances delivered directly to us in single-use packaging.
You know after typing all this out I’ve realised it’s just as much a summation of the past decade as a projection of the next one. Here’s to another ten years of this, then, I guess. Where’s my scythe?