I could be wrong, I could be right – A review of 15 years of blog comment …
First a note about the headline.
I prompted DALL-E to give my LinkedIn profile pic a ‘punk makeover’ and I loved the result, particularly the montage in the background.
I started secondary school as punk rock became mainstream and, much to my parents’ horror, I loved The Sex Pistols and later Public Image Ltd/John Lydon.
That’s reflected in my Ten Top Tens on here that I put together to celebrate getting my hearing back with advanced digital hearing aids back in 2012.
Former Pistol’s front man John Lydon uses the “I could be wrong, I could be right” line in his stage show and it is a lyric from anti-apartheid song Rise he created with PIL. You can always count on the former ‘Johnny Rotten’ to give it to you straight and I’ve always loved how he can still cause chaos all these years later, even though he has mellowed a lot with age and personal tragedy, like the loss of his beloved wife Nora to the ravages of dementia.
In 2009 I kicked off commenting on various aspects of my working and home life in a blog entitled “2020 Visions – Imagining the World my Children will inherit”
I’ll let the category cloud give you an idea of what I’ve been pontificating about mainly over the years.
Embedded below are a selection of 24 posts from the last 15 years with captions commenting on if or where things have changed and, indeed, whether I was wrong or right in those observations.
All highly subjective and viewed through my lens of course but hopefully makes for some interesting reading.
Back in 2011 I was debating with others what impact social media was having on social unrest.
I felt it was being over-stated at the time but 10 years on the US erupted with the ‘Capitol Hill riots’ and now the UK is enduring a ‘summer of discontent’.
In both instances it’s been acknowledged that social media fuelled misinformation has fanned the flames.
That, in many respects, is a deterioration from a decade ago when social media was a useful tool in enabling mass protests based on facts that were affecting large populations (rising food costs in the case of the Arab Spring).
Right now in our history it is very much the catalyst as well as the enabler.
There’s nothing yet that has stemmed my cynicism generally about The Internet being a force for democracy as it continues to be used to promote a damaging form of populism that is doing more harm than good in our societies.
Watching the Paris 2024 Olympics, and particularly the opening ceremony, which was a departure from the typical stadium based event, brought back memories of London 2012.
Reading Stephen Emmott’s short but powerful book ’10 Billion’ was a real slap round the face back in 2013 but over 10 years on the stark assessment and predictions that led the author to stating “I think we’re fucked” are becoming even more of a reality with more and more experts adopting a similarly depressing outlook.
The sustainable transport campaign I worked on back in 2012 was trying to encourage single person car journey travellers onto more sustainable forms of commuting.
I am generally disappointed with how little progress seems to have been made over the last 15 years on compelling narrow track vehicles that are essentially a crossover between motorcycles and cars.
The idea of some form of modular transport whereby electric drive chain developments allowed for power levels to be multiplied up or down depending on the passenger/load requirement occupied my thoughts a lot back in 2010.
China appeared to making major in-roads on the global economy at the start of the 2010s when the company I was working for had a department dedicated to dealing with factories in China’s main industrial regions. A recent article in The Economist highlights how much of the global economy is sucking up in the developing world while the West tries to stifle that growth with punitive and misguided tariffs. In effect this is forcing China to get even better at product development.
Yep – guess what? My favourite gadget is still going strong another 15 years on. I think what saddens me most about this is that all the lobbying by the fossil fuel industries over the last four decades has held back the solar revolution. Also the profit imperative that drives manufacturers to build in obsolescence creates many mountains of tech waste.
Ten years after making this set of predictions Wired published an interesting article that explained why it is so hard for humans to predict the future accurately.
The majority of e-commerce observers and experts would no doubt call me wrong on continuing to keep the faith in Drupal Commerce, particularly as it was impacted so heavily by the Drupal core upgrade from 7 to 8.
Someone commented to me during the last week that ‘The person who is tired of Twitter, is tired of life’ – I’m fast coming to the conclusion that ‘The person who is tired of Twitter, will get their life back’…
Going through a list of high profile sites that used to be run on Drupal I noticed some showed the telltale signs of a switch to Sitecore. I presume this occurred in the wake of the Drupal 7 to 8 upgrade and the decision points this forced on site operators.
Helping Immediacy grow and prosper as a software vendor was definitely a major highlight of my career but it very much emphasised the generally fleeting lifecycle of proprietary developments that are neither big or niche enough to sustain profitability.
As the global climate gets hotter and hotter with each passing year of the 2020s the number of wildfires ravaging our only home reaches ever more staggering proportions.
As observed in a recent LinkedIn post I do get a sense that meaningful personalisation can be achieved by organisations in their digital presence. It’s been happening in the social channels they use for interacting with audiences for quite some time now and content management systems are increasingly integrating AI enabled capabilities.
Hopefully old style one directional broadcast intranets have been consigned to history and organisations are using much more dynamic ways to keep employees engaged and productive.
I definitely overstated the potential impact of Asia on CMS development. You clearly have enormous platforms like Alibaba, WeChat and TikTok but I imagine things like supply chain management are more likely to be the focus of Asian software developers.
With WordPress becoming even more dominant over the last decade I struggle to see how proprietary vendors can hope to succeed in such a commoditised market.
Beyond 2020 Visions ... 