Top 6 reasons a pragmatic pessimist (me) remains an optimistic realist for 2016–2017
At the very beginning of 2015, days before the horrific January attacks in Paris, I penned a piece on why, despite storms rising, I remained an optimistic realist for the immediate future and gave 6 reasons why. I stand by them today and will revisit each, 12 months later. There are reasons for caution and some, like umair haque, are warning of a “new fascism” rising with the National Front in France and the Trump candidacy in the US. My personal take on the macro situation is this: the 2010s are similar to the turn of the 20th century, technological accelerations and their perceived consequences are starting to durably displace the old order, which generates enough frustrations that neo-Luddites and arch-conservatives are coalescing.
Let’s revisit the 6 reasons I outlined a year ago and look towards the future:
#1: Recent incidents with Russia, North Korea and their economic consequences should show us that we are ONE and totally interconnected
Russia has managed a tour de force in less than a year, turning itself from a quasi-pariah state due to the Ukrainian/Crimean episode into the go-to ally of the West against Daesh in Syria. The backdrop to this denouement has twin roots, the end of Pax Americana in the Mideast in favor of the Asian pivot, and the folly of the Saudi gamble to bankrupt the US/Canadian shale gas and tar sands oil boom. Vladimir Putin’s economy is still essentially oil-based and the sudden drop of the price of oil has severely impacted Russian GDP and thus Putin’s spending money. The inextricable link between oil&gas and geopolitics is clear in the current Mideast mess and demonstrated by the maneuvers of the US and European Union vis-à-vis Russia. The outlook for 2016–2017 is somewhat bleak: Daesh is being rolled back from its Syria/Iraq stronghold into Libya, China and Japan are playing a dangerous game in the Spratlys, and Iran is torn between the interests of the “bazari” middle class aching to trade with the rest of the world and the mollah-cracy’s China-like strategy of holding on to power. My realistic optimism is that the interconnections are strong enough between the main power centers that everyone, grudgingly, is more interested in keeping trade going than starting yet more regional wars. An additional glimmer of hope just came from the Indian subcontinent with a surprise visit to Pakistan on Dec 25 by Indian PM Modi.
#2: Technology will accelerate more in the next 5 years than in the last 10, a result of the combination of cheaper computing power, mass connectivity and mass democratization of post-industrial building blocks such as 3D printing
I was perhaps too optimistic for 2015 when I wrote, in relation to 3D printing that it was going “beyond the hobbyist/proto-industrial phase” and that “2015–2016 will see the rise of Etsy-powered creators who will be able to serve a global community of niches with their products.” Both Stratasys/Makerbot and 3D Systems are experiencing headwinds in their deployment beyond industry, with 3D Systems discontinuing its consumer printer. The “cloudization” of computing on the other hand is accelerating as Amazon’s AWS business has grown to nearly $6B/year in 2015, up 78% from 2014, with nearly 30% in profit margins. There’s a real movement to the cloud on the consumer side as well with Apple shipping 16GB iPhones that consumers use in conjunction with iCloud vs local storage. Larry Ellison’s prophecy that the “network is the computer” is becoming true via cloud-connected mobile devices. The massification of video content is fuelling rising connectivity needs, even with North American broadband networks lagging vs Europe and Asia. The convergent cable companies and telecom carriers can be counted on to feed the connectivity to “quench” the public’s thirst for fixed and mobile broadband. The public announcement in December of Google and NASA’s quantum computer — the D-Wave 2X — could be a sign of the acceleration of tech advances.
#3: Consumers will become “owners” of their interactions with the world: as the true owners of their brands and owners of their data/metadata
I wrote last year that “the numerous hacks of major platforms have heightened web users’ sense that they must take back control. My hunch is that major platforms have heard the message loud and clear and will deliver.” Facebook’s latest efforts with its Internet.org initiative and a rather tone deaf op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg shows that this is still no the case, so I was a tad over-optimistic. Most major platforms rely on the fact that users will value convenience over privacy so the jury is still out on this one…
On mass customization I wrote that it would “inch towards reality with the combination of brands willing to operate as tastemakers enabling power users and 3D printing.” Shoe company New Balance is set to announce a new 3D printed initiative at CES 2016, which is good news, but it will take more brands to embrace this trend for it to take hold.
#4: Media disintermediation will boost relevance and curation, all for the benefit of the audience: readers/listeners/viewers
I’ve written and spoken often about how the current FOMO one feels in the digital world is of the same nature as the one felt at the dawn of the printed age when Renaissance men couldn’t say they’d read “all the books”. Media disintermediation, not the oxymoronic kind, is accelerating and we’re truly in the age of atomized content. “One of the surefire ways to curate well is to go back to the roots of modern media and be a central node to cut through the noise.” This still holds very true and I predict that curation will become a sought after skill for budding “journalists”. When looking back at the birth of modern media and the first “gazettes”, you find that they were indeed the “Buzzfeeds” of their age, aggregating and curating news from other sources before producing so-called original writing. The accelerated atomization in the video content/tv space, as demonstrated by almost daily launches of OTT (Over The Top) video services, calls for curation to help viewers find relevance. Apple’s Siri-zation of its latest AppleTV device announced in Sept and its proclamation that the future of tv lies in apps can be challenged. Given that increased unbundling of traditional cable television means more content but not more tools to cut through the “noise”, there will surely be a call for a digital re-bundling. Amazon Prime has started the process, with the announcement in December that it was offering Showtime and Starz as add-on options. Amazon’s OTT bundle will most probably signal to other players in the video content space that 2016 be the year of smart curation.
#5: Storytelling boundaries will be pushed via augmented reality, virtual reality and the digitization of the analog world
The total VC investment since 2010 in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality totals nearly $4B. As in all major software platform rollouts there are skeptics, such as Kevin Rose in his latest Medium post. I’ve been bullish long term on VR and AR since 2014, I wrote last year that “2015 will also be the year where VR will go mainstream or not, Samsung, Sony and Oculus should all three roll-out their headsets”. 2015 most definitely was NOT the year all major headsets were released, save for Samsung’s Gear VR. As to the mainstream aspect, 2015 was the year where mobile VR came seemingly out of nowhere, with GearVR capturing early market share. CES 2016 will see dozens of GearVR competitors coming out, such as IonVR and the Avegant Glyph. Google Cardboard is the other development of note for VR in 2015, its embrace by the NY Times which shipped 1M of them in November will be copied by other media companies. Montréal’s special space in the VR universe, in addition to Félix&Paul, is highlighted by VRVana’s upcoming Totem headset and by Minority Media’s Time Machine VR game, which has garnered great reviews.
2016 should therefore see the long-awaited commercial release of the Oculus Rift, as well as Playstation VR and HTC Vive. The combination of these hardware releases, the growing catalog of VR games but also of VR narrative experiences, including those by Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott, should contribute to push VR into the mainstream.
#6: All’s good as we all just might be part of a huge virtual universe
I ended my 2015 post with a reference to “the “probability” that we just might be living in a giant simulation, created by super-advanced beings”. It seems that this idea has kept on popping up pretty much everywhere, even on my friend Tony Bacigalupo’s FB postings. A companion idea to the simulation theory is the multiverse.
I’ll repeat my 2015 conclusion: “until we know for sure, let’s not take ourselves too seriously and allow for dreams to flourish !”
