What were you wrong and right about - predicting future trends in fashion, music, etc.?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just searching topics for interesting things to read. And I found the What the Hell Was Wrong with People in the 1970’s? thread. In in there are several predictions about what people would think about 2006 (then current) fashions in a decade or two. And of course, many of those were wrong. Which got to thinking - what are some predictions you made in the past about future trends in fashion, music, etc. that turned out to be correct or incorrect. Bonus points for those you felt strongly enough to put in writing.

I don’t remember ever feeling strongly enough about any to put them (though I may have just forgotten about having been passionate about some). I’ve just never known enough about fashion (or music) to comment. I certainly never predicted the longevity of men’s waist-around-the-butt jeans or SUVs, but I never actively thought about them going away (or I did and have blocked out my failed predictions).

Anyway, while I’m moderately interested in prediction of future trends (especially on lightweight things), I find revisiting old predictions and seeing how many were wrong and right and in what ways far more fun.

2

I predicted when Twitter came out, it would lead to the downfall of mankind. My reasons were that it would make abridged and abbreviated emotion-based text the norm and dumb down society.

It gave trolls influence and ensnared the rich and powerful in its insidious grasp, so I was right.

3

Yeah, my one Great Prediction wasn’t “lightweight”. I knew that if acceptance of conspiracy theory thinking became wide-spread, it would lead to the collapse of democracy. How can you have a functional democracy when almost half the voters are basing their decisions on outright lies?

We’re not quite there yet, but we can see the finish line from here.

4

Back about 1977, I and one of my college roommates where wandering campus during spring fair. It was hot and humid, and we were looking for liquid refreshment. My roommate thought that someone could really make a killing selling bottles of water, and that we should start up such a business.

I thought he was a lunatic. Water was available at any nearby drinking fountain on campus (of course the buildings were all locked during the fair) and back at our apartment (which was a long schlep away). I pointed out that Perrier already had a corner on that market, yet no one was bothering to sell it at the fair.

He still blames me to this day for shooting down that idea of his. Blame which I do agree I merit.

5

I bought The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill which I regarded as a masterpiece which would reshape the future of popular music, leading to a new golden age where rap would fuse with soul - thus redefining and reshaping rap music (which was, at that time, starting to (IMHO) lose it’s way.)

So, regarding the prediction bit - I couldn’t have been more wrong.

j

6

I had a friend in the early 80s who was on Arpanet. He tried to explain it but I had no idea what he was talking about and couldn’t see any possible use for it.

OTOH, he had an idea for a science fiction story about a future computer-run dystopia in which the government would ban the use of certain words in communications. All of us present jumped on him, saying that people would just switch to common words as code. Banana was our favorite. That was spot on.

7

I recall telling somebody decades ago that television and the web would eventually be combined, and we’d watch television shows through the internet.

Now, much of television viewing is on demand streaming content.

8

When I first saw it, I thought that Microsoft Excel would never ever come close to the functionality of Lotus 1-2-3.

9

Before the internet I used to advocate for giving the KKK their own public access TV channel. I thought putting them out in the open would show everyone just how stupid and unkind they were, and make racist assholes the laughing stock they deserved to be. Sunshine being the best disinfectant, right? Then for a short time I thought the internet would do that job. I was wrong.

Similarly, when I went to school for broadcasting I gave it up when they made us read Marshall McLuhan. I thought he was completely full of crap, despite having a funny cameo in Annie Hall. Turns out… he was right about everything.

Penn Jillette has talked about his beliefs in the early days of the internet. He felt that no gatekeepers, no barriers to being published and heard, would be a wonderful new freedom and it would change the world. He now says he realizes those gatekeepers were a good thing because now the KKK sympathizer isn’t just yelling at the walls in his mother’s basement - he can now be heard by millions and receive their adulation in real time. I can relate to Penn’s change of thinking.

One thing I was correct about - in imagined the iPad when I was a kid. In my mind it was a newspaper that somehow updated itself to show current news.

Here’s one I’m hoping I will eventually be right about: adaptive eyeglasses. Glasses that can be adjusted in real time so you never need to update your prescription. They could also morph into distance or reading glasses, sunglasses, etc.

10

Way before the internet was a common household thing, a coworker showed me the Mosaic web browser (he had to build it from the source code to get it to run on whatever workstations we had at work at the time. Apollo maybe?) I thought it was kinda neat, but the farthest I thought it would go is that the current geeks using Archie and Gopher would like it. I never imagined my freaking 80-year-old mother would use a web browser on a daily basis.

11

In the late eighties I was convinced that craft beer was going to make it big. Pity I had no investment capital.

12

Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures

13

The Chinese public have become quite expert at these, but so has the government’s efforts to quash them. It’s become a permanent battle like that against hackers, with each side always upping their efforts from year to year.

14

Since 1998 I’ve been saying that email is an outdated technology that needs to go the way of the dodo, and people need to stop cramming more tech on top of it to make it the secure, verifiable communication method it should have been from the start. After being wrong for almost 20 years, I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, and got a job where I basically specialize in those techs stuck on top of the original specifications for email in order to try to make it secure and verifiable. I still have largely the same opinion, but it’s really the best job I’ve ever had.

15

When I was a kid, probably early to mid 1970s, I thought it would be so cool if there was a machine, like at the library or something, that had all the information in the world in it. We aren’t there, and shouldn’t be either, but nowadays? Close enough.

The first time I heard R.E.M.'s debut EP, “Chronic Town”, in early 1983, I thought of a quote about Bruce Springsteen that had been made a few years before, from Jon Landau, saying that he had discovered the future of popular music, and its name was…

…and my dorm roommate (1964-2018, I found out recently :sleepy: ) thought I was nuts. Took a few years, but I was right, for a while anyway.

About a decade later, I read a quote from an unnamed infectious disease physician who said, “In 10 or 15 years, AIDS will mostly be a disease of drug addicts, and you won’t hear much about it.” I’m skeptical about futurist predictions like this, but that doctor was correct.

(And I too remember that Lauryn Hill album being touted as a turning point in popular music.)

16

When Apple released the first iPad, I predicted that it would fail miserably within a year or two. I said it was trying to fill a niche that does not exists. You can’t fit it in your pocket, so what are you going to do, carry it around in a briefcase? If you’re willing to do that, why not just carry a laptop, which is far more functional? I actually still kind of believe this, and I don’t use a tablet myself, but I was pretty wrong about the market for these devices.

17

I boldly predicted that Netflix would fail and go out of business. It was somewhere around 2001-2005 i think. Netflix was still mostly sending physical DVDs via mail but had started playing around with streaming.

But at that time APPLE had dramatically rolled out iTunes and streaming music and video through the iTunes store. I figured: “This is a no-brainer. Netflix is a company fussing around with sending out DVDs while Apple is is the future-tech, uber-hip company that was revolutionizing delivery of streaming digital content.”

Oops.

But I still can’t figure what happened. Apple was poised to eat Netflix’s lunch but they never pounced on it to squeeze out Netflix. They dropped the ball.

18

Decades ago we had a local newspaper columnist who would solicit musings from readers and publish a select few every week. Sort of a “shower thoughts” thing.

Some time in the early 1980s I mailed in a list of my thoughts, which I was pleased to find was published. My list was titled something like “shower thoughts from 1990”.

First item: Remember rap music?

mmm

19

When I was in 6th grade in 1994, I had an assignment to write a one-page story about what I thought my life would be like when I was 30. Most of it was some pretty silly stuff about being a cutting-edge super-scientist, but I did predict having a “pocket computer” that would let me remotely connect to my home and office computers and look up information remotely. This was at a point when “car phones” were still in vogue and I’d never seen a phone that could fit into your pocket - by the time I actually was 30, smartphones were already ubiquitous.

20

Here’s my example, which is an all-in-one for the OP, covering both right and wrong.

When I was a junior in high school, around 1986, I wrote a future-set SF story (long since lost) where the main character was introduced in transit, on his way somewhere, listening to a personalized news report as he went. He had a small device in his pocket, and was wearing wireless ear buds, receiving their signal from the device. The news report was personalized to his specific interests, including only stories on international finance, technology, and a couple of celebrities, with the stories expressing a point of view tailored to his own.

Let’s break it down.

Sort-of-right and sort-of-wrong: I was imagining, basically, a cross between a podcast and, say, the Google News homepage, which, as you use it, adaptively adjusts the stories it shows you to reflect your personal preferences. This combination doesn’t exactly exist; we choose and listen to podcasts, but they’re long-form stories rather than bite-size breaking news. That type of news content, we read, mostly, or skim at least, via Twitter and other text-delivery services. So I had the right notion about people using technology to create their own information bubbles, but the specific form of the bubble was off the mark.

Mostly wrong: The device in the pocket wasn’t an all-purpose microcomputer, like we all carry now with our smart mobiles. It was dedicated to the news-delivery service, and nothing more. It was basically an old iPod, but for the sole purpose of collecting news stories (plugged into a download slot at home, then carried away), and didn’t play music or anything else. (The wireless ear buds, though, were spot on.)

Very right, though now unhappily so: I imagined that everyone in the world was doing this, and that this led to wildly incompatible perspectives on reality. The hook of the story was that the personalized news report was supposed to just be interesting worldbuilding color, and then the guy would get where he was going and the story would start. Except that what he was doing was to participate in a high-tech heist, and it wound up going wrong because everybody on the team believed different things about how the targets of the heist would react when things got started. The details of the heist were dumb and the plotting was clumsy; hey, I was a teenager. But the underlying idea was neat.

And, the bit I got totally wrong: I imagined that this personalized news report was made possible because the guy had sat with a computerized questionnaire, laboriously checking boxes and setting a definition on what kind of stories he wanted, and then this static specification was used to select what got pushed onto the device. Not even a hint of the modern reality where the report is customized via algorithm, with content adapting itself automatically by eavesdropping on and interpreting the consumer’s preferences in the background.

Still. Not too terribly bad for an amateur teenage futurist in the mid 80s.