who are simply looking for a network, a connection to others like them. In the coming years, geography will become far less important than shared attitudes, beliefs, experiences and values. The Internet ensures that whoever we are and whatever our passion, we have a very good chance of connecting with ‘virtual neighbours’ who will support and sustain us. This trend can be benign (at-home dads forming support networks) or it can be truly dangerous (already White Power activists, conspiracy theorists and holocaust revisionists are gaining strength on the Net). As people become more adept at harnessing the power of cyberspace, these unions will have the potential to change the world, for good or evil.
Next: Privacy is Dead
Of all the pre-millennial fears we face, loss of privacy is perhaps the most common. The truth is privacy is dead. It’s been taken away by the microchip, and it’s not coming back. One interesting side-effect of our lack of privacy is that it will spell freedom for many people. Instead of being ashamed of what we might consider our perversions or ‘unnatural’ impulses, we’ll see more and more just how many people think and behave the way we do. And once we realize that our indiscretions, big and small, are never secret for very long, we’ll be encouraged to allow our wild sides out of the closet a lot more often.
So, while the right will grow stronger and far, far more outspoken, we’ll also see an increased indifference to scandal (how scandalous can something be when ‘everyone’ is doing it?). From infidelity to bondage, from foot fetishes to businessmen wearing women’s undergarments, we’ll see an ‘assumed blindness’ develop to one another’s underbellies, along with a sense of futility regarding efforts to keep humans from being human.
Next: Am I Normal?
Getting inside the heads of ordinary people is an international craze. We now expect every guest who appears on a talk show to bare his or her dirty laundry – and very soul. And the fascinating thing is, just about all of them oblige us! There’s even a family in Sweden that has mounted a camera inside their refrigerator so visitors to their Website can monitor the family’s eating patterns.
Is this trend simply a movement toward exhibitionism? We think it’s much more than that. What we’re seeing is a deep-seated desire for confirmation. We want to know that what we’re doing, thinking and feeling is normal, and we’re looking to an audience of strangers to reassure us that no matter how bizarre our actions or attitudes, there’s someone else who’s far stranger. And as a result of our own loosened tongues, we’re angrily rejecting everyone else’s right to be discreet. (Just consider the backlash against Britain’s Royal Family when their mourning of Diana’s loss didn’t meet the public’s new standards of grief.)
A surge in typeradio – online chat with a moderator-announcer controlling the flow of the dialogue – and online support groups and discussion forums will be one of the more obvious offshoots of this trend. In the political forum, we’ll be willing to forgive every mistake, indiscretion or even crime – as long as we are privy to a detailed and heartfelt public confession or even an angry denial of wrongdoing. What we won’t forgive is the sin of silence.
What’s Next? Trend Bytes for Tomorrow
The remainder of this chapter is filled with trend bytes, our prognostications regarding new products, services and ways of working and living that will develop in the next few years. Some of the ideas may strike you as unfeasible or ill-conceived; others may be exactly in line with your vision of the future. Even the authors disagree as to which of these observations and postulations are most significant. What we all do agree on, however, is that each of the following entries makes for intriguing fodder in our continued effort to discern the possibilities – and, ultimately, the probabilities – of life in the next millennium.
Lifestyle
Simple Pleasures Sewing, quilting bees and other activities from times past will emerge as an antidote to today’s chaotic lifestyles. Look for a revival of such crafts as candle making, wood carving and paper making.
Hobbyist Cooking Staying at home to prepare a full meal will no longer be a customary practice in many households; instead, cooking will be seen as more of a hobby, a way to entertain one’s friends or spend time with one’s family.
Dinner Clubs In some families, dinners will become a bigger priority as parents struggle to connect with their kids and as busy days leave no time to enjoy a relaxed breakfast or lunch. Groups of neighbours will form ‘dinner clubs’, whereby each household is responsible for providing one dinner a week to all five participating families.
Silicon Sex In an age in which real-world sex has become risky, to say the least, many are turning to the relatively safe and frequently anonymous world of silicon sex. Options range from cybersex (in which partners – or groups – engage in explicit, real-time online communication, including chat and/or video) to online pornography, from computerized sex toys to the forthcoming ‘sexbot’. Tomorrow’s schools will incorporate cybersex and online sexual content into their sex-education lesson plans.
Co-parenting Working parents will seek more assistance in raising their children from childless (or ‘childfree’, depending on one’s point of view) relatives and friends. Gay couples unable to adopt children will be among those who co-parent. Retirees will serve a greater role in the lives of young children, not just as caretakers for their own grandchildren, but – on a paid or unpaid basis – as surrogate grandparents and field-trip organizers for kids whose own relatives live too far away.
Experience Collection As excesses are increasingly recognized as such, expect people to place greater emphasis on acquiring (and giving) experiences rather than things. Diamonds may well be forever, but they don’t have the conversational value of an African safari. Dinner at a favourite restaurant, day spa treatments and even movie rentals will become increasingly common ‘gifts’ – replacing a host of unwanted ‘things’.
VRTV Virtual reality headsets will let viewers ‘walk through’ TV shows.
Pop & Pulp Providing a brief respite from info overload, enormous value will be placed on activities that allow one to temporarily switch the brain to ‘off’, such as sports, simple TV programmes and comics – anything that doesn’t require deep thought.
Healthy Cults New tribes of kindred spirits (e.g., parents who home-school, organic gardeners, mothers who perform community service, upwardly mobile professionals who bowl) will become the healthy cults of the twenty-first century. Cataloguing these hyperlocal associations will allow marketers to target such groups with products and pitches designed especially for them.
Easing Up As the true costs of stress (physical, financial and emotional) become more commonly known, look for companies to monitor and attempt to reduce the stress levels of employees. We’ll see everything from on-site aromatherapy centres and healthful cooking classes to all-expenses-paid, company-planned vacations.
Surroundings
Rebirth of the Big City We’ll see a backlash against country living as word gets out that the rural lifestyle is actually less healthy than living in metropolitan areas – this is already true in the UK. Telecommuters especially will stay in or return to the cities in an effort to retain a sense of connectedness to the world at large.
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