Deep Currents

My team has started a tradition of coming up with fun and interesting holiday cards, and this year we brainstormed what we believe will be consequential ideas for 2009. Here’s the list:

 • The World Without the West: Rising powers in Asia are increasingly “routing around” the West, deepening their own ties, and in so doing, loosening their bonds to the international system now centered in the West.
• Middle-Class Slippage: All over the world, the global recession is driving people who have only recently achieved middle class status back into poverty—what will be the political reaction?
• Post-Boomerism: Barack Obama’s election heralds the arrival of a new post-60s generation in American politics. Likewise in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the emergent generation of “Youth Leaders” is free of the psychic scars of colonialism and Cold War.
• Resilient Communities: To decrease exposure to systemic risks, local communities are adopting a “loosely coupled” approach to the global system—remaining integrated, but ensuring that basic needs in energy, security, food, communications, and transportation can all be sourced locally.
• Deprivatization: With the nationalization of large, Western financial institutions, the era of privatization is at an end, leading governments to reassert control over sectors such as transportation, energy, natural resources and healthcare.
• Deviant Globalization: The unsanctioned global flows of goods, services, ideas, people, and money is empowering a new class of nonstate actors to challenge traditional local and geopolitical orders.
• Deleveraging: The rapid reduction in the amount of debt held by both financial institutions and individuals, which will produce a serious contraction in global consumption and investment.
• Guerrilla Journalism: While print newspapers appear to be in terminal decline, hard-digging investigative journalism is reinventing itself in online sites, like gnn.tv or ProPublica, that are often dedicated to a specific topical or geographic niches.
• Pushtunwali: Literally meaning “to do Pushtun,” Pushtunwali is the ancient code of honor that governs the Pushtuns and is the main local source of Pushtun cultural resistance to Islamism fanaticism.
• Biobricks: Designed for building synthetic living organism from standard parts, Biobrick parts represent an effort to introduce the engineering principles of abstraction and standardization into synthetic biology.
• IT “Walled Gardens”: In contrast to an open system like the Internet, walled gardens are closed, information services, like Facebook mail or iPhone apps, whose appeal is increasing because they offer protection from malware and spam.
• Nuclear Batteries: These small, sealed, subterranean nuclear reactors can power a city for 30 years at 35MW and represent a potential breakthrough in local energy provisioning.
• Masdar: Set to open in 2009, Masdar is a zero-carbon, zero-waste, and fully sustainable city in the United Arab Emirates that will house over 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses.
• The Talking Book: A $5 digital communications device that allows users to record, play, store and share digital audio files, which will empower the world’s poorest by providing them with affordable connectivity.
• Income Volatility: The doubling of the odds that a family’s income will either rise or fall by fifty percent in a given year, undermining not just economic but also social stability.
• Crowdsourcing: The newest form of outsourcing, crowdsourcing is a technique for leveraging Web 2.0-enabled collaboration and refers to the act of assigning tasks to an undefined and generally large group of people, often without compensation.
• The ‘Slow Movement’: Dedicated to slowing down life’s pace, the slow movement is a decentralized, transnational effort to apply the principles of voluntary simplicity and local orientation to all aspects of life.

Written: November 24th, 2008