Note: I published this first to Medium on December 31st, 2019.
Asymmetric information availability, its propagation, and transient value remain the focusing lens burning the ants in my brain.
Last December, Patrick Perini posted A Few Predictions for Tech in 2019 which I enjoyed watching play out over the year. Here’s some areas I’ve been watching more closely that I wasn’t when the year began.
Data deals
Real-time indexing deals in public sites such as Twitter will continue, but the untold growth stories will be the private information sold by services aggregating piles of highly valued content that average systems can’t absorb.
Your TV has been using “Automatic Content Recognition” for years, and even if disabled will continue to report about once a minute on what data is still captures.
Cash remains clandestine
As card and digital-based transactions rise, we’re heading toward a phase-out of currency systems that can’t be tracked or taxed. Know Your Customer controls are in place globally, affecting all manner of business, and building toward a more complete mapping of currency flow. Even moving money between my own accounts creates a pile of reporting.
Physical currency has plenty of downsides beyond portability and ease of destruction, but I’m wondering how long until we’re entirely sold on the idea of becoming “cash free”?
More than 10 People Pay Amazon to Watch my Dog Shit Every Single Day and Night, and They Love It
Corporate-owned surveillance in America is forever on the rise, but as an immigrant, increased public partnership with the government and local law enforcement is surprising in its quiet progress. Ring doorbell cameras, Clear, and Delta boarding pass face capture [more], are three I’m in the vicinity of frequently.
For some services you can opt out if you know the hoops to jump through. I assume it’s a short matter of time until legislation comes into effect and exceptions become rare or disallowed.
Between the street corner and my apartment’s door I appear on six cameras that I know of. I don’t know the camera owners or how the images have been used. I don’t even know what rights I’ve already given up.
My patterns are well logged by now, and building a model of when my home is unoccupied, which nights I’m more likely to order food, and what temperature changes influence my clothing choices should be trivial. But none of that data is mine.
iFace
My iPhone Eleven Professional Maximum has already made this this the case, but it’ll be impossible to take a photo on a new phone without forced ‘AI’ skin smoothing assistance. It’ll increase in quality to appear more subtle then become its own selling point, “you just look more fulfilled in life when you own a [whatever phone].”
Then probably a continued wave of esteem issues in younger and more desperate folk because only the “truly ugly” (or poor) have bad photos after 202X. I’d love to get a basic photo of the sunset on my phone without Apple turning it into a forced technicolor fantasy to accrue Likes.
Good News Exists for Those Who Can Afford it
There’s a continued model shift toward small and topic-centric news aggregators. Those who value news and insight enough for it to make a financial difference in their lives, and have the means, will pay for closer and better access to it.
This exists in the form of $1k/month subscription for the elite to know which social events matter, and I’ve humorously and historically done well in similar space, but more recently Substack and Memberful are two platforms I’ve noticed grow rapidly on the accounts of those considered knowledgeable enough to directly fund.
Those without means will continue to be subjected incredible volumes of undifferentiated information, with deeply negligent corrections process via social media, or curated news in automated fashion (Apple News, Google News, the like) that is only technically meaningful as long as you want to hear about sports from the night before, or the same three political talking points brought up the last thousand days by fellow podcast-fans.
In addition to this, I used to worry that people don’t read news articles, but now people don’t even read the headlines or click through before deciding how the giant image confirms the opinion they already held.
Then what? / A disclaimer
I don’t see these fires being extinguished any time soon, so what little it takes to stoke them and at what rate will prove increasingly interesting.
Nothing posted here is printed with non-public information. These are some fairly basic shifts in public life that feel somewhat natural in 2019, but wouldn’t have even been considered two years ago.