Something really surprising that nobody (except a few people that no one took seriously) predicted will arrive at blinding speed, changing everything.
You know, like always.
Yeah, but everyone pads their stats.
I think you missed my point in that I never compared content producers to drug dealers, instead I said that criminalizing copyright infringement could become the next war on drugs. A farce basically used only to bypass the constitution and empower law enforcement.
Remember the media recording cartels where just recently pushing legislative insanity like SOPA and PIPA, so while some producers and companies are finding innovative ways to profit in the new reality we live in the rich dinosaurs are still out there trying to fight the rising sun.
Whatever new technology develops, someone will use it as:
[ul]
[li]a cat toy[/li][li]a sex toy[/li][li]a way to be a jerk to others[/li][/ul]
While civil rights will *probably *get better, some people will find new reasons to discriminate against others.
I agree, and this is one of the reasons why I enjoy still being alive.
Unpredictability.
A broad-based use of computer technology to attack our basic human rights.
Vast increases in Corporate power.
I didn’t know Tim LeHay was a member of this board…
-An emergence of two power blocs: a democratic, liberal, capitalist Euro-American-Indian alliance against a more authoritarian/traditionalist (ie Russian Orthodox and Confucianist) bloc of Russia and China
-As implied above Russia and China will increasingly move away from Communism to a more nationalist philosophy (something like what Germany would have looked like if the conservative monarchists had taken over rather than Hitler during Weimar)
-Rise of transhumanism as a philosophical, political, and scientific movement. If things go right it will die out and prevent things like human-dog hybrids
-American politics will see Republicans be increasingly neoliberal, internationalist, and quasi-Libertarian after the end of the Tea Party aberration by the middle of this decade gaining the vote of the middle class and Hispanics, Democrats will gradually lose its stranglehold over the urban underclass and instead form a socially liberal, social democratic “Progressive Party”, the remaining Democratic Party will largely be political machines based on the black vote in the cities and the farm vote which will shift to the Dems as Republicans denounce agricultural subsidies
-While the utility of liberalism will be seen in politics and economics will be increasingly obvious to all the fact that much intellectual, religious, and mass thought is rotten and shallow will be realized. In Christianity the current “Prosperity Gospel” and similar ear ticklers will die out in favour of a less political, more intellectual, more theologically solid neo-Puritans and Catholics. Overall church membership will decline and liberal churches will die out 0growth of agnosticism, atheism, and deism but the death of Orientalist thought (except Confucius) in our religious scene. The worthlessness of most modern highbrow thought in will be seen. The century after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand will be seen as philosophically barren except for perhaps Ayn Rand and some Christian thinkers
-In the we may see a healthy revival of old European folk culture in response to increasingly degenerate “high” and pop culture in art and music but unlike what the Nazis/fascists/Soviets thought such healthy folk culture can only function in a free society