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.

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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).

The fundamentals haven’t been addressed at all,” Wilkinson, a London-based partner at consulting firm Oliver Wyman, said in an interview at the Hotel Morosani Schweizerhof. “The things that caused the previous crisis – loose monetary policy and trade imbalances – they’re actually bigger now than they were then.

In Egypt we’ve watched as the government, in an unprecedented way, shutoff Internet access for the entire country. We’re building a system that can’t be shutoff–it’s as decentralized as possible. You could jam the signal somewhat, but to do that at the scale of a country is a very very difficult task. The system we envision has two components: One in space and one on the ground. We’re building a very decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer mesh network. Because there is no central point you can’t turn off connectivity like they did in Egypt. That mesh network will allow people to communicate with each other locally, and if it’s needed they can switch to the satellite to connect to the outside world. We think there’s a need now to put an end to the Internet kill-switch.

The Tor Project, a system to enable online anonymity, has been crucial in aiding activists around the world. Thanks to this week’s fundraiser to help Tor fight the blackout in Egypt , Tor has begun experimenting with ways to improve performance over satellite and mesh networks, VSAT and BGAN connections. The results of this research, Tor reports, will “benefit those with little to no Internet access, whether due to political unrest, natural disasters, or remote locations, who nonetheless seek to keep their online activities safe.”

The super-strong space net is being developed with a 100-year-old Japanese fishing net company and is designed to catch small particles as well as larger objects such as spent rocket stages.

“People here are suffering much more than Egypt or Tunisia but you don’t see it. They keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to be locked up for 10 years,” said a graduate medical student, surfing the web at an internet cafe.

Sitting next to him, a young lady finished updating her Facebook page and chatting with friends online – one of thousands of young Syrians adept at using proxy servers to get around the official ban on Facebook.

Although internet users must register their names with the cafe on a list that can be collected by the police, when asked if she had any concerns over breaking the ban on Facebook the young woman said all her friends do the same thing.

This city has become a slaughterhouse. I saw police shoot two people to death Friday. And I was shot at the next day.

At this point, we don’t have the option of not being technological creatures.

There have been a growing number of reports of looters/thugs conducting smash and grabs across Cairo. Interestingly, there’s also a growing number of reports that when these thugs are caught, they have police/interior ministry identification on them.

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The question is: will it work? A decade ago, certainly. Today? No way. Too much backchannel.

..as we have seen in Egypt, the ability of the open source insurgency to withstand/shrug off counter-attacks grows as it moves closer to its goal. Even though hundreds have been killed in Egypt by the police (on 29 January, 2010), it hasn’t shaken the movement at all. Online connectivity is an early enabler of open source insurgencies.

Once they are formed, online connectivity is not a requirement for their continued operation over the short term. In Egypt’s case, shutting down the Internet didn’t work (it only made people more upset).