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In 2012, I told a story about the future.

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I don't like looking back at things
I've made in the past.

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But in the last couple of weeks,
I've some a few emails saying:

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Tom, ten years ago,
you tried to predict 2022,

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or at least some of the technology
and online world of 2022.

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You should look back
and see if you were right.

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So I've come back to the same place
that I gave that talk.

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Back in summer 2012 this was a
warm, friendly temporary festival site

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with a load of people on it

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and now it's a cold, run-down,
deserted bit of scrubland

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next to a motorway,
but it's the same place.

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I did originally try to film this
without having looked back at the talk,

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to get my actual genuine reaction,

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and it was a terrible video,
I'm bad at improvising

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and I thought of a dozen more things
I wanted to say right afterwards,

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so now I've had some time to think...
let's go back ten years,

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see what I got right,
see what I got wrong,

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and see if I can predict
ten years from now.

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- I've got a story for you.

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It's set in a future.
Not necessarily the future,

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I'm not saying this is what will happen.

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- I think that's the first time
I ever used that phrase.

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It's a get-out-of-jail-free card,

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a way to hedge my bets and say
I'm probably going to wrong.

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I use it a lot when I
write speculative fiction.

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- April 2022. Ten years' time.

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First person we're going to
meet there is Jason Stewart.

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He's the MP for Tooting and Streatham.
He is the Minister for Social Development.

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Considered kind of a hotshot
among his party

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after winning his seat in
2020 General Election

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in a very hard-fought contest.

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- All the political guesses there
were completely wrong, but then,

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when has anyone been even able
to predict politics?

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Also, the faces in this talk
weren't originally blurred,

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I've used YouTube's tools to go back
and blur them in the original as well,

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because there's a big difference
between asking a friend

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"hey, can I borrow your headshot for
this talk I'm just giving to a few people"

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and "can I show that to... however many people
will watch this new video".

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I've got a duty of care there.

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- This is the 2022 iPhone.
Looks about the same,

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the laws of physics dictate you
still need a battery brick.

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- That's a hit. It's a very easy hit,

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"the borders of phone screens
are going to get smaller"

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is not exactly a difficult
prediction to make.

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And by sheer luck, I used a
black background on the phone,

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so you can't see if there's
a notch or not at the top.

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One subtle thing I got
right there as well:

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Apple did change their font.

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Back in 2012, they were using Helvetica,

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I picked the wrong one to change to,
they use a custom sans-serif,

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but I did predict the UI was
going to change a bit.

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- But what has changed is 
the mobile network speed.

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5G now blankets the country in
hundred-megabit internet access,

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and the data caps are a thing of the past.

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- Again, a fairly easy hit.
4G was just being rolled out in 2012,

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so taking a guess at 5G
in ten years wasn't that hard.

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And it actually was
a bit pessimistic:

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there are parts of the UK where you
can get gigabit access on your phone now.

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Data caps are still a thing on some contracts,

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but as far as I know they're not something
most people have to think too much about.

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As you watch this, you've got
to remember that in 2012

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we were almost exactly half way
through the transition to smartphones,

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only about 50% of people had moved
from calls-and-texts-only to

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what we'd call a modern phone today.

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Suddenly, half the population was
carrying a camera all the time,

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half the population could easily
cheat on pub quizzes.

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Things were changing,
and they were changing fast,

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but we weren't in the smartphone era.

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Social changes hadn't swept in, not yet.

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2012 me is about to get to the
fundamental idea of the talk,

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and it's based on one of the big ideas
that was going around

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among technical people at the time:

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lifelogging, the quantified self:

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the plausible idea that we going
store all our memories online soon.

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It was mainstream enough that Black Mirror's
"Entire History of You" had aired

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just a few months earlier,

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and now everyone was getting a computer
with internet access in their pocket.

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2012 was before Google Glass,
before the first Narrative Clip,

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all of which came and went very quickly.

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It turns out that, so far, people just
don't seem to like the idea

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of remembering everything, and storing
that data forever with corporations.

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This talk felt like a warning,

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but I didn't know -- no-one knew --
if it a warning that was going to be needed.

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- Last year, Apple reused a trademark
and introduced iLife.

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It's quite similar to Your History
on Microsoft Nokia phones,

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or Droid Locker on Android.

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They're all descendents of the
accountability systems

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that have been used for police officers
and care workers for years now.

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- So many misses in there!
Apple have since switched to flat design.

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All the Android services have been
rebranded as Google.

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And Microsoft Nokia phones!

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And the idea of private-contractor
body-worn cameras,

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and that all sorts of people
all over the public and private sectors

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would wear them every day as
part of their work...

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it just hasn't come true.
Completely wrong.

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= With iLife, the phone is always recording audio

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and sending it and your 
location to a cloud server.

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The descendents of Siri then 
generate a transcript of it.

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If you're talking to someone else with iLife,
it'll give you a text chat log.

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It's not perfect, but it's close enough.

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- Big miss. Companies just haven't developed that.

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People, I think, don't want that?

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But back then, Siri was a few months old;

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Amazon's Alexa would come out
a couple of years later.

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I'm sure any of those companies could
have developed that product,

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it's entirely possible these days,

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it's just that we went a different way.

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- And if you have the new Apple headset,
it's got a couple of cameras embedded in it,

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which are always recording
video when they're connected.

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That's uploaded, analysed, and
stabilised by the same systems.

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The cable, incidentally, 
still gets tangled in knots 

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every time you put it in your bag.

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- Another big miss. To be fair to earlier me,

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I still think wireless headphones
are a terrible idea.

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I cannot understand why anyone uses them.

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They're expensive, they need recharging,
the battery degrades over time,

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they need a carrying case, they're easy to lose,
Bluetooth is still really dodgy ten years later.

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I still use wired headsets.

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Now, in hindsight, wired 
camera-buds would probably 

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have drained too much battery too quickly,

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but I still think there's a path
that could have got us there by now.

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- Which brings us back to Jason Stewart.
Jason is a member of 'Cheshire Boys',

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the site for old alumni
of his public school.

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It runs on Disco, a fairly
popular community framework,

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that unfortunately has some
fairly major security flaws.

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- That's one of the biggest misses
in this whole talk. And it's subtle.

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It took me a few times watching this
to realise just how badly I'd got that wrong.

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A community of school alumni wouldn't be
a web site or forum these days,

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it wouldn't be independently hosted.

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There are still some places like that,
yes, but depending on demographics

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that would almost certainly be a Facebook group, 

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or a WhatsApp thread, or 
a Slack or Discord server.

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It would be on some centralised service,

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not a private web server
with some off-the-shelf code.

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That whole business model,
that way of operating,

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was dying at the time
and I had not noticed.

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I'm skipping some of the talk here:

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basically, that Member of 
Parliament's password got leaked.

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- His password is 'stewart9',

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that's the same password he uses everywhere,

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and someone goes "hey! 
Let's log into his iCloud!".

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- Why is any of that on desktop?

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2012 was the start of the
transition to mobile-first

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and I just didn't see it coming.

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All these screenshots should 
be vertical, on a phone.

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I must have been imagining people coming home
and checking this on their home computer,

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instead of getting notifications
and using an app on their device.

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A couple of years later that would be obvious, 

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everything would start to 
be designed mobile-first,

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but in 2012, after I'd spent more than a decade

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of writing web sites on and for desktop computers,

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I just missed that entirely.

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That transition was starting, just starting...

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and I hadn't spotted it.

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- First thing they see is Apple's
handy 'Is This You?' feature.

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Jason Stewart can be seen in a few frames
of this walk-by in Shoreditch.

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He wasn't recording, but his phone had his
location and facial recognition did the rest,

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and it didn't take too much effort
to find out what he was doing there.

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A few minutes later, this
poison pen letter arrives in

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every single political editor
and blogger's inbox in the country.

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The Sun eventually runs with it first,

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after all the blogs have
made it public knowledge.

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- Blogging! Blogs were still a big thing
in the public consciousness in 2012,

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and I did not see their decline coming.

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I didn't see them being
mostly-replaced by Twitter.

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Should I have known? Was it obvious?

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It seems clear in hindsight that
the "blogosphere"'s days were numbered,

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but I missed it.

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About one year after that talk,
Google would switch off Google Reader,

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forever gaining a reputation as a company
that shuts down old products

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instead of maintaining them,

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and it was all downhill from there.

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He decides he's going to go on the offence.

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He gets up in Parliament and says that

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'our private lives should be private,
and we must investigate these hackers'.

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And he convinces the Met to
investigate, which they do by

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filing a request with Apple for
any lifelogs that mentioned Jason Stewart

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in the hours and minutes before the leak.

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And Apple agrees, because that argument
got settled years ago,

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...after Blackpool.

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You can tell something about what a
culture is worried about,

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or maybe what a particular author
is worried about,

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00:08:05.600 --> 00:08:07.600
by reading their speculative fiction.

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I just finished "The Brief History of the Dead"
by Kevin Brockmeier,

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and there are references in there to
"terrorist warning beacons"

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that everyone's got used to
and just ignores,

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00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:20.560
and as I read that I thought,
"oh, this is a post-9/11 book".

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And it is, it's from 2006.
And this talk, in 2012,

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still very much in the consciousness of people
working online that we were

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one media-friendly terrorist attack away from
losing what was left of our privacy rights.

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- Your lifelog will get pulled
and searched through by the police.

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it's not like you've got
anything to hide, right?

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- Maybe we still are. It's just that
as far as I can tell from what I read,

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00:08:42.800 --> 00:08:45.040
science fiction in the 2020s is more worried

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00:08:45.040 --> 00:08:48.880
about democratic backsliding,
misinformation, and climate apocalypse.

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00:08:49.680 --> 00:08:51.600
So there's one question left.

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What about ten years from now?

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What about 2032?

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I'm not immersed in web development
and technology any more,

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00:08:57.840 --> 00:08:59.840
I don't code very often,
I work on video now.

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So what can I predict?
Well, here's the guess.

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Not the future, just a future.

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I think short-form video is going
to do to YouTube

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00:09:08.800 --> 00:09:10.160
what Twitter did to blogs.

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00:09:10.160 --> 00:09:12.160
People will still be making 
long-form video content,

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00:09:12.160 --> 00:09:14.400
it will still get linked to and watched...

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00:09:14.400 --> 00:09:18.240
but short-form is so much simpler
that there will be so much more of it.

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A tweet takes ten seconds to write,
requires no proofreading or punctuation,

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00:09:21.520 --> 00:09:23.920
and can be amplified to the world in minutes.

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00:09:23.920 --> 00:09:27.760
A blog post takes minutes or hours to write,
needs spell-checking and formatting,

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and takes time to be discovered.

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00:09:30.160 --> 00:09:32.640
It's not a perfect analogy,
but I have a sinking feeling

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00:09:32.640 --> 00:09:36.800
that short-form video is going to win
just through sheer weight of numbers,

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00:09:36.800 --> 00:09:38.800
the ability for almost anyone to compete

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00:09:38.800 --> 00:09:42.160
on the same, easy, low-effort,
low-attention span playing field.

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00:09:42.960 --> 00:09:44.160
But there's no money in it.

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00:09:44.160 --> 00:09:47.600
There's no money in Twitter, just
the ability to promote other stuff.

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There is still some money in
long-form writing,

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through commissions, or fan subscriptions
on Patreon or other platforms.

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00:09:53.840 --> 00:09:57.760
In the same way, I don't think short-form video
is going to kill YouTube.

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After all, YouTube didn't kill television,
and television didn't kill radio.

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00:10:00.800 --> 00:10:04.560
But there's a transition happening,
just as there was ten years ago.

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If you want a prediction for 2032,

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00:10:06.080 --> 00:10:09.680
it's that the boom times for this platform,
for YouTube, will be over.

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00:10:10.720 --> 00:10:12.240
There's one problem with that, though.

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00:10:12.240 --> 00:10:14.000
YouTube is centralised.

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Blogs couldn't disappear because everyone
hosted their own, in loads of different places,

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00:10:17.200 --> 00:10:18.160
often for a monthly fee.

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00:10:18.160 --> 00:10:22.640
But YouTube... well, we'll have to see if,
in ten years' time,

230
00:10:23.280 --> 00:10:31.840
Google decide to shut down 
this old product as well.