Faster travel, reduced privacy: France considers the implications of Big Brother Technologies
Since they began to find profitable applications ten years ago, it has been fascinating to the see the degree to which RFID tags are being used in a variety of convenience-enhancing applications. Don’t stop for toll roads! No need to swipe your card! Just get near enough for us to scan you, and you’re on your way
.Naturally, this has an unintended consequence: human being are generating massive amounts of data about their behavior, from travel patterns to shopping preferences. These data are being collected by central databases, both by governments and private entities. Free democracies have certain implicit and explicit expectations of privacy, but we are at the point of unprecedented technological power in tracking human 
beings and most everything they do.
Dialogue is in order - we need to decide what we feel about this, what we expect; our values of right and wrong.
Some have already started: France’s Le Figaro newspaper has an article this morning about how the rail company is sounding the alarm that it cannot necessarily guarantee “anonymous” travel when using the regular RFID-chipped NaviGo pass.
This has led to a higher paid, but anonymous version of the card called “Navigo Decouverte.” But also it leads to a polemic. Is our privacy ours, or must we purchase it just as we purchase other goods and services? Are our laws made with enough foresight to handle the challenges these technologies may pose to liberty and open society?
It’s nice to see that France is paying attention. Let’s dialogue!
The Dangers of Overly Social Media
With a hat tip to Where’s My Jetpack, it seems that social media really would have sounded bizarre as a scenario:
How to do new things effectively in 2009
The theme of 2009 and beyond is “Doing New Things.” After all, it’s not enough to describe which institutions (banking, media, governance, etc.) are breaking down - we’ve actually got to build new insitutions in their place. This is exciting - this is scary, too.
While you’re thinking about doing new things well, watch this great video from Tim Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Workweek,” on how showing up and working hard is not enough when trying new things - there are special tricks involved. These are the kinds of skills we’ll need to master if we are to navigate so many changes in the years to come.
New website in production
For those of you who were redirected here from www.competitivefutures.com, sit a spell, have a look around, and read to your heart’s content. We’re in the midst of creating a new website. Be back soon!
2009: The Status Quo versus The Long Emergency
Again, stop whatever elese you were doing, like reading things I wrote about 2009, and read Jim Kunstler’s forecasts about 2009. The author of The Long Emergency is experiencing the unenviable task of seeing dire structural change ahead, change that won’t be mollified by new gadgets, and being right about its consequences.
Some highlights:
He’s not a fan of techno-solutions. (not unlike yours truly)
The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.
He sees Dow 4000:
A consensus in the blogoshpere says that the stock markets will rebound strongly during the first Obama months. This is possible just on the basis of pure “animal spirits,” but the Obama Bounce will occur against a background of continued dismal business and financial news. It will appear to defy that news. By May of 2009, the stock markets will resume crashing with the ultimate destination of a Dow 4000 before the end of the year.
He believes that you’ll actually need positive cash flow to make a business run (old-fashioned, but radical!):
We’ll turn around early in 2009 and discover that we are a much poorer nation than we thought because from now on credit will be extremely hard to get for anyone for anything. The businesses that survive will have to keep going on the basis of accounts receivable…Giant enterprises requiring giant loans to get from quarter to quarter will tend to not make it. Borrowing from the future will become a practical impossibility as past bad debts from previous borrowings continue to unwind, cease performing, and get written off.
Real change. Not new technologies for old philosophies. Nobody will save the day. We’ll need to make workable solutions for many different types of people.
And still - people will need things. Goods and services will be required, perhaps just different types.
Business development will need to be on its toes! Are you ready?
The high-resolution society: the future is in small companies
Stop everything you are doing, click here, and read this fantastically thought-out article from Paul Graham on why the future of economies will no longer depend on giant, hulking organizations, but small, nimble startups - and why this is socially disruptive.
Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious, they want to start it.
This doesn’t mean big companies will disappear. To say that startups will succeed implies that big companies will exist, because startups that succeed either become big companies or are acquired by them. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.
The top-ten most overvalued real estate markets: most of them in California
Last night, California said it was going out of business. I don’t know if this means it’s going to be sold back to the Aztecs or what. I suspect it will mean that the health care industry will be transformed since the states will not be able to foot the bill for their obligations.
Also last night, somebody sent me this link to Forbes top ten worst real estate markets. EIGHT of them are in California. The average projected drop in value is around 25%. A connection?
Of course, the tenth most overvalued market is mine in Washington DC. But then again if you read this blog, you knew that. I think some of that overvalue might be from people selling their apartments for $10,000 for the coming inauguration. We’ll see.
Commercial developers headed for bankruptcy, naturally asking for a bailout
The most important part of thinking about the future is systems thinking. In our Future Intelligence method, the first part of every project or exercise is to map out the system of any business, activity, or market. Thinking about the beer market? Don’t just stop at consumer tastes, think about packaging, trasnportation, distribution, leisure, sports, etc. That way, you think not just about one kind of change, but the relationships.
This financial crisis is one long lesson on the interconnected nature of all industry, governance, finance, and geopolitics. This is going to surprise you all, but now, since they are part of the whole system, the commercial developers are now asking for bailouts from the federal government.
Let us not consider the merits of such a proposal, but just marvel at how much all of these industries are interconnected. Every actor in the system requires certain behavior from the others in order to survive. When one actor changes (e.g. suddenly ballooning the amount of credit) all the others respond.
Subprime mortgages are now changing the dynamics of the construction of mini-malls around the world.
It’s a mess, but at the very least it’s interesting.
If retail and commercial development are melting down, what comes next?
Competitive Futures’ Official Predictions for 2009
I tend to avoid short-term predictions, but these days, six months really IS the mid-term future. So after the response to yesterday’s pithy analysis of the coming year, here are our OFFICIAL PREDICTIONS FOR 2009.
The future is now. No, seriously.
Take it from a guy who talks about the future all day long: there’s going to be precious little interest in the year 2029, and total interest in getting through the next six to eighteen months. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan for the longer term, but most all long-term planning will be through the lens of the next year.
It’s OK. 2009 wil be a nice year to clean house.
Global problems. No global solutions. (Yet)
The bank annihilation of 2008 will show the world something it was learning in a much more abstract way through climate change. While the effects of national policies are truly global, we have no way of really working together. Climate change is an alarming development that has a vaguely defined effect, and thus our initiatives (Kyoto, et al) are equally vague.
The collapse of banking will cause real, immediate economic pain around the world in 2009 - factories closed, jobs lost, countries leveraged to the remaining power brokers. It will require a global partnership, but that’s still difficult in a world of nation-states.
The world will drive more toward some sort of global governance, regulation, or at least monitoring to avoid such problems in the future. This may result in ceding more national power to organizations like the WTO or even the United Nations. The results may not be satisfactory, but institutions will seek some sort of insulation from one country’s lack of financial regulation annihilating eight or ten central banks around the world.
Your uncle who keeps sending those emails about “One World Government” will lose his mind.
Barack Obama will not fix the world in 2009, but will do really boring things to improve the function of the U.S. federal government.
I won’t stultify non-Washingtonians with the details about OMB, CBO, GAO, career versus-political appointees, and other phrases that indicate you’ve lived within the Beltway for too long.
Most of the world is familiar with the problems of the United States government: two interminable wars, collapsing financial infrastructure, skyrocketing debt, etc. But they never hear about the mechanics of federal agencies, which will take much re-engineering after the last eight years. The Obama Administration will spend the majority of 2009 rebuilding the federal infrastructure, especially attracting talent to key agencies and organizing the teams that will carry out the policies of the remainder of the term.
The details of this will be WAY more boring than any conscious human being can handle, so plan on plenty of juicy scandals involving the naming of the White House puppy.
Home prices will continue to fall, because they were never worth as much as we pretended.
Policymakers, mostly American, are bending over backwards to keep the world-record high prices for housing from collapsing and detonating the whole economy. Still, there remain two choices: inflation of all prices to match the doubling of housing or deflation of the housing. Because the houses were never as much as people were pretending. As I have said for five years now, you can’t keep wages stagnant and then increase home prices 38% a year.
Economies will choose between the slow, stagnant suffocation if home prices don’t re-adjust, and quick, terrible pain from returning these houses to their appropriate value, in line with wages.
Neither of these are fun choices, but then again, we thought that paying $780,000 from a two-bedroom condo with granite countertops was never going to turn out well.
Out: Organized labor. In: Communities of labor that happen to organize
Labor unions the world over will come under suspicion, rightly or wrongly, for its association with the collapse of the American automotive industry. Labor unions will be weakened for being as inflexible as their managerial counterparts.
And ironically, more people than ever will be looking for ways to negotiate fair wages and a healthy standard of living with their employers, particularly as developed economies see their social security programs tested. The inequity of wealth distribution is at its highest level since the Gilded Age of robber barons in the 19th century. Standing on the shoulders of 20th century labor and armed with the social media of the 21st century, people will continue to communicate with the institutions of big business, those that remain anyhow. Labor will need to be every bit as agile and open-minded as business and government, not an intractable institution susceptible to the sane weaknesses as all such institutions.
In 2009, it will occur to many Americans how underfunded the pension system really is.
We’ve heard tale of a great number of pension funds that were designed expecting a 5 - 8% return to keep everything in the black. If you can name a fund guaranteed to get 5 - 8% in the next few years, I suspect the next time we see you, you’ll be at your villa in the South of France.
America’s private healthcare system will not ask for a bailout.
That’ll be 2011.
Small entrepreneurial businesses will attract more attention, good will and capital in 2009 than giant world corporations.
This is because small businesses are much better at quickly proposing useful services in response to the panoply of tangible problems we will all face next year.
Also, when small businesses fail, the owners go home, complain to their spouses, feel shame, drink stiff cocktails, and mope around before starting more businesses.
When giant corporations fail, they ask taxpayers for billion dollar giveaways.
This will make small business more popular.
American cars will continue to suck.
Hopefully the 150 mpg (!) Chevy Volt will change that. But otherwise I remain firm in this prediction.
The media business will continue its inexorable charge toward chaos.
2009 will be fascinating for the business of media. The business model for print, music, and television will be disintegrate further, resulting in more layoffs, bankruptcies, and fracturing of giant conglomerates looking to keep something profitable as more advertising revenue heads for Craigslist and Google. At the same time, broadband penetration will continue around the world, and people will have the most awesome televisions and computers in history.
Nobody will know what’s going on, many companies will lose MILLIONS, people who used to make no money will make HUNDREDS, record companies will continue to sue widows and children, television will focus on even more sensationalist nonsense, and Twitter will somehow begin to supplant CNN.
In other words, it’s going to be a lot of messy fun.
Ideas, creativity, humanity, and community will trump authority, power, and control in 2009.
Feeling scared and confused about the world? Feel like it’s all out of control and that the old ways don’t work while the new ways haven’t yet been defined? Guess what - so do the supposed “authorities.”
In 2009, we’ll need all hands on deck - all the creative ideas, broad-thinking, open-mindedness and partnership you can muster. You’re right this new world is too complex to expect a few guys in nice suits to take care of. So, in 2009, get to work!
What else are you going to do? Worry? That’s so 2008.
What’s Out 2008/ What’s In 2009
Folks, we’re in the forecasting business, so we get to have a bit of an early say on what will go down next year. Let’s check back in June and see what really happened.
What’s Out 2008 / What’s In 2009
Out: Authority / In: Community
Out: $4 gasoline / In: $4 houses
Out: Mergers & Acquisitions / In: Hunting & Gathering
Out: Control / In: Imagination
Out: Profit / In: Survival
Out: Credit derivative swaps, financed as a 20-year zero coupon bond by the Royal Bank of the St. Lucia Protectorate, tranched and repackaged as a structured-investment-grade device for Swedish pensions / In: Cash
Out: Hail-Mary Passes / In: Slow, committed strategies
Out: Million dollar CEO bonuses / In: Million dollar CEO bonuses (Huh? Really? Wow. OK.)
Out: Editorials from the New York Times / In: Some dude’s Twitter feed
Out: Copyright protection, lawsuits / In: Pay-what-you-want, guilt
Out: Mass customization / In: Knowing your customers by name
Out: Green business as a PR move / In: Green business because you haven’t got the budget to waste on low-mileage vehicles, inefficient buildings, polluting processes
Out: Size / In: Agility
Out: Speculation / In: Investment
Out: Eye-popping government deficits / In: Not even opening your eyes, for fear of reading about the actual deficit
Out: $30,000 Toyota Prius status symbols / In: Fixing your Toyota Corolla and getting 38 mpg anyway
Out: Dinner at casual restaurants / In: Crockpots, stews, roast chickens that last for three soups and nineteen sandwiches
Merry Christmas to all.
Be social