…not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy – but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you “follow” somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.

Today, faced with the limits of the internet, digital activists are reviving such ideas. One of them, “mesh networking,” would let people connect simply by opening their Wi-Fi networks to incoming traffic. The inhabitants of an entire city could be connected to one another, without anyone even having an internet service provider. Then that city can connect to another, and so on.

Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.

Experts have discovered the remains of a 1900-yr-old, 15ft-high Roman super-highway in the UK that ran from London to Exeter.

The road, found in the depths of a forest in Dorset, shows no sign of the potholes that blight our modern roads.

Constructed by the Roman invaders as part of a route from London (Londinium) to Exeter (Isca), the 85ft wide earthwork stands more than 15ft high and consists of a sweeping road with deep ditches at the side.

It was found when the Forestry Commission, acting on advice from English Heritage expert Peter Addison, cleared the Norway spruce fir trees in Puddletown Forest.

The section uncovered is made of gravel with a central cobbled ‘street’, which would have been used for rapid troop movements, and outer ‘droving’ roads for livestock, as well as ditches for water drainage.

The future is 90% familiar, 8% predictable, and 2% weird stuff you couldn’t imagine. So my formula is to start with the present day, add the predictable stuff — faster computers, hotter media, unstable climate and so on — then try and identify the scope for really peculiar second-order effects to crawl out of the woodwork and bite us on the futurological ass. Finally, add a couple of bits of random-to-the-point-of-surreal shit and bake until cooked.

As for looking like a nebbish because you guessed wrong — that’s not going to happen this decade. Frankly, so few people are even *trying* to engage with the near future that readers cut you a lot of slack.

…

PS: “Rule 34″ isn’t out yet, but I’ve *already* been sandbagged by one of the near-future predictions I made (cheap DNA testing being used to identify delinquent dog owners from their pooches’ crap).