Honestly, I've spent the past three decades with my eyes glued to the "progress" of technology. If the way things have been going has anything to say about how things will be, then we can effectively throw politics, religion, and social issues out the fucking window.
Strictly technologically speaking, the 2020s will be the most horrifying decade that humanity has yet to see. Thanks to some friends in high places, I was privy to the NSA's PRISM project as far back as 2005. Here I am, fourteen years later, and EVERY LAST ONE of my most pessimistic, terrible, and downright malicious predictions about the tech landscape today, have come true. Every router, modem, PC, printer, fax machine, website, app, program, and cell phone are bugged, tapped, backdoored, or outright unlocked for the world to see. Social media has baited the narcissistic plebian masses into giving away every byte of information about their life, from the most intimate secrets, to a sepia-filtered photo of their breakfast. Deep Machine Learning software can and has created a pretty fucking accurate profile of everyone who has ever used the internet, regardless of how safe the user thinks he is behind a firewall, VPN, or proxy service. Running Linux Mint in a VM inside your Windows 7 VM inside your Arch Linux machine won't save you from the fact that the
NSA already knows how many veins are in your foreskin by bouncing Wifi signals off of your cockhead. We're not even talking about EZ-mode shit like IoT devices being literal wiretaps that people pay to install in their own homes like the absolute dumbfucks that laypeople are. Just the bare minimum, taken-for-granted, household necessities are being used to spy on us, 24/7/365. All of the secondary and tertiary hardware, like your
Wifi-enabled toaster and Amazon Alexa only exist to close the gaps in information that are being missed. Every byte of data collected from you is worth its virtual weight in non-virtual gold. It should come as no surprise to any of you that datamining is the largest industry on the planet, at this current moment in time.
We currently live in a technological nightmare realm that proves both Orwell AND Huxley right at the same time. I'm sure they'd be nothing short of absolutely fucking horrified by the way we live our lives today. Now, imagine this technology IMPROVING. There's no way to go but up for tech, and all of this datamining, reducing everyone on the crust of the earth to a serial number and a dossier, can only get worse for us, and better for Big Tech. We're a solid five years away from actually good, functional AI. AI that doesn't just curate content, but can understand and create CONTEXT. In the 2020s, it won't be a longshot to predict that propaganda will be not just manufactured, but tailor-made to play off of the individual's values, interests, fears, vulnerabilities, and hatred. We'll have our emotions toyed with by god damned machines, on a level that directly challenges our concepts of free will and individual agency. We will be gaslit by the Master Control Program from TRON, on an existential level. We can have entire world events memory-holed out of the collective consciousness by a machine with an agenda. We will bare witness to false flag events, faked assassinations, and wars that never happened, and few, if any, would be the wiser. An entirely fabricated history in the making. This isn't some Syfy Original Movie shit, it's already begun. Deepfakes, fake news, and the propaganda industry that has grown so large since WWII, has served as the perfect testbed for what you can add, transmogrify, or subtract from extant information. We live in the prototype for what's to come.
Outside of technology, though, I'm rolling for Civil War 2. It's either going to happen within the next ten years, or we'll be merely existing in the world we used to live in. Nothing is going to get better, politically. Every single day, we're "liberated" from our freedoms, in piecemeal fashion, bit by bit, and one day, there'll be nothing left to take from us. It's not like legislative fetishism will ever go out of style for our oligarch leaders. We will be reduced to curfews and permanent martial law before you even realize it's happening. Boiling the frog hasn't failed yet.
Suffice it to say, I haven't "looked forward" for the future since I was old enough to realize how bad things are. The only pill in the bottle is black. Metal Gear Solid 2 has a more accurate outlook on the state of the coming world than anything else I've ever seen. That's fucking terrifying to me.
