TECHNOLOGY - A fractured Internet and radically decentralized social media are the name of the game. This is the cyberpunk dystopia you were promised, but without all. The former communications director scheduled and canceled an event in early August widely believed to be related to some kind of private venture using the same concepts.

The World of Tomorrow - Charlie's Diary. Attack The Block Full Movie Part 1. TECHNOLOGY - A fractured Internet and radically decentralized social media are the name of the game. This is the cyberpunk dystopia you were promised, but without all the messy brain surgery and skulljacks. Getting data across certain national borders will be difficult. Getting news out during a blackout might, in some countries, be worth your life. Most countries that style themselves as free may resist government control of the Internet, but it’s unlikely that they will be able to do much more than maintain zones where the old rules apply. The Great Firewall of China is going to be a popular model.

Lisa Marie Presley is inching ever closer to speaking publicly about leaving Scientology. And yesterday, she seemed to take a pretty big move in that direction. In. Google fired a software engineer yesterday in response to public outrage over the man’s 10-page screed against women being represented proportionally in tech.

Alternative national networks that are inherently biased in favor of the state might prove to be another. Even in countries that prefer to be mostly hands- off about their networks, legislation and policy changes will be put in place to harden their population against psy- op attacks like the one that has crippled America. The dream is already dead: in 3. Drones will be ubiquitous of course, as will anti- drone technologies to clear the airspace in an emergency. POLITICS - Expect socialism, anarchism, and other direct challenges to capitalism to make a roaring comeback in the developed world. The Washington Consensus relied upon Washington to be a reliable broker, and the loss of faith in American leadership due to the Trump Administration will be seismic in scale.

By 2. 05. 0, America has vastly degraded herself from her position of supremacy in January of 2. China, India, and the EU). The global cultural impact of a resurgent Left in the famously right- wing United States may end up being one of the signature features of the new era, if for no other reason than our cultural productions might be one of our few remaining viable exports. It might not be cinema and TV shows by then. It might be hepatic enabled VR that let’s YOU fight the strike breakers in front of the Ford Motor Company gates! Feel that Pinkerton’s skull crack under your Louisville Slugger!

Oh yes, the resurgent American socialism is going to be drenched in Americana, tip to tail. At least it will be if I have anything to say about it!) But, of course, America will as usual be a trailing indicator.

This shift is well underway in Europe already, and with a few more decades to develop it may become a big deal, historically speaking. I haven’t seen much discussion of how this dynamic will play out in Asia. It may be in places where the economy is still developing to a Euro/American level, these appeals will be less persuasive, but I kind of doubt it. It’s going to be a major controversy everywhere.

International boundaries will continue to blur but will not disappear. WAR - Modern war is horrifying in its expense and violence.

This will be ever more true, and the extreme costs of the highest end weapon systems might paradoxically make them less vital in a strategic sense. Sun Tzu identifies the highest form of strategy as learning how to win without fighting, and when a single squadron of fighters costs a sizable fraction of a country’s GDP, their incentive to get creative with how they achieve their contested objectives has never been higher. We see that with Russia’s campaign of election meddling already.

This will formalize as new type of international conflict. Perhaps there will be a new word for it, or perhaps we will simply change the definition of war to “a political conflict in which one side has decided the other’s interests are immaterial and not to be considered.”When it does come to violence, I think we will see a pattern where much of the fighting will be conducted with low to medium cost weapons systems, and a few high end bits of kit meant to act as a force multiplier. How might this look in practice? Consider an urban guerrilla outfit which manufactures its own ammunition out of smuggled raw ingredients and feeds this into their 3. D printed infantry weapons. They have as many riflemen as they want, but for antitank defense they rely on foreign missiles dropped off in the night by friendly special forces helicopters.

One caveat to this: many of the world’s most powerful economies have been sheltering under the enormous US defense budget for generations. With Washington no longer reliable, that may not be the case for much longer. But 2. 05. 0, we may see large standing armies with fully modern equipment in places where they haven’t been seen in generations. If that’s the case, expect the first three weeks of any major conventional war to be an absolute bloodbath…and then the guerrilla phase starts.

For a historical example, look at the Battle of the Frontiers in World War 1. A lot of illusions were shattered at enormous cost of human life, and both sides then scrambled to improvise new tactics and technologies to counter the revealed status quo. Think of that, but without the trench warfare.

Imagine instead if France had been conquered, and then immediately gone into a kind of medium- high insurrection against the occupation forces instead of surrendering. Now add in the Internet, foreign meddling, long- standing internal conflicts coming to a boil, and that will be the pattern for major conventional conflict. And if fourth generation nuclear weapons ever get off the drawing board…it’s not gonna be pretty. ENVIRONMENT - The shift to renewables will be all but complete, and pollution cleanup technologies might be a big growth industry, pushed heavily by China, who have a real strong incentive to figure out how to pull heavy metals out of the water and soil. Antarctica is past the point of no return. Many coastal cities have flooded. To openly be a global warming denialist in some places on Earth is to take your life in your hands.

By 2. 05. 0, I expect at least high profile one climate related assassination to have occurred. Carbon capture technology is one of the highest priority areas of research, and scientists are also scrambling with a way to capture the other greenhouse gasses as well. Geo- engineering initiatives have significant political clout by now. People see the problem and they want it FIXED. Animals are being sampled so they can be cloned back into being after they go extinct. In some places, eco- preservation is almost a mania. The last few stubborn hold- outs in denial are likely to be radicalized and violent by now.

See above for how that’s gonna work out for them. I don’t expect the panic reactions to the Earth visibly starting to fall apart to work. We’re gonna get several nasty surprises.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2. Green cities of vertical farms, a smaller human population living in automated comfort, and a re- wilded countryside is an ideal that’s already attractive to some. Watch Frozen Scream HD 1080P here.

It will only get more attractive as time goes on. HEALTH - The permafrost has already begun to melt.

Surprise, it’s smallpox! Or if not smallpox, some other damn thing nobody’s had to have antibodies for at any time in the past half million years. The death toll might be high, but one hopes a crash program of inoculation keeps this from being the civilization killer that some fear and others hope for. See the movie Contagion for what I’m thinking will happen. We get pandemic scares all the time (We’ve had like three just since I graduated college nine years ago) and sooner or later the bugs will get lucky. Stem cell therapy, 3- D printed organs, CRISPR, etc, are really coming into their own and helping people live longer and at a higher quality than ever before, if they have the money.

I do not expect much in the way of sci- fi flavored biotech, if only because the real problems that these technologies will be bent toward will be more subtle, but more important. Developing a new way to culture bacteria, for example, would be an obvious application of biotech that doesn’t exactly move the average heart to excitement, and yet would be as consequential as the discovery of penicillin.

Alt- Right Activists Call for Google Boycott After Employee Is Fired for Anti- Diversity Paper. Google fired a software engineer yesterday in response to public outrage over the man’s 1. But the firing has become a call- to- arms for alt- right voices on the internet who are crowdfunding money for the engineer, James Damore, and are now calling for a boycott of Google. The calls for a boycott have gained steam on Twitter, where names like Mike Cernovich, Michael Tracey, and Paul Joseph Watson have joined the chorus of people with usernames like CNNis. Retarded, The. Muddy. Cuck, and Grammar Nawtsy in being angered by what they call “diversity crybullies.”Some of the calls to boycott the tech giant refer to getting “red pilled,” a term popular in alt- right circles for when people see reality clearly. The term comes from the 1.

The Matrix, where the hero takes a red pill to see the real world around him. In this case, alt- right activists believe that getting red- pilled means you can see the misandry inherent in Google’s decision to fire the engineer. Others on Twitter have been brainstorming alternatives for Google services, which can be a rather daunting challenge for people who have bought into the Google eco- system.

Duck Duck Go and Bing have been floated as good alternatives for search, while Vid. You. Tube. Google, of course, owns You. Tube. Some of the most caustic voices have said that “only Jews use” Google now. Others seemed to claim that Google was a Nazi- like organization, replacing the O’s in the Google logo with swastikas. Others were more direct in their accusations, saying that Nazis literally run Google. Plays on the Google name like “Guulag” have also popped up. Popular alt- right conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich has added to calls that Google become at least 5.

Republican, saying that political affiliation should “be a protected class under anti- discrimination laws.”Cernovich has even proposed that the US Department of Justice demand to see what kind of political affiliation exists at every company and enforce some kind of quota. At least I think that’s what he’s calling for since tech companies themselves aren’t registered as political parties. Journalist Mike Tracey, who was viciously assaulted by US Representative Maxine Waters in an infamous video, chimed in to say that he hopes the workplace environment at Google is as “unpleasant as possible.”Others claimed that Google was simply too big and that any boycott of the company would be ineffective. But frankly the alt- right isn’t filled with the smartest people on the internet. Some have called for campaigns to contact Google’s advertisers, a move that has been attempted in the past by those affiliated with Gamergate.

Google doesn’t have advertisers in the same way that a newspaper would, obviously. They facilitate the sales of ads and basically own the entire market online. But again, these aren’t the brightest people around.

Wiki. Leaks has taken up the software engineer’s cause, claiming that the firing was censorship and offering to hire James Damore. It’s not clear what kind of job Julian Assange has offered Damore, nor whether the two have been in contact. But for now the alt- right calls for protests against Google are likely to continue, as new hashtags spring up to fight for Damore’s right to create what his former employers allege was a hostile work environment.

If these people think that Google firing an employee for passing around a sexist screed is an assault on free speech, wait until they hear what the Jeff Sessions Justice Department has in store for journalists.