Throughout his most popular novels, Douglas Coupland defines terms that come to define generations and also manages to create stories that perfectly describe and connect with a certain culture at a certain time.
In a series of recent articles, Coupland has done this once more, but looks toward the future, instead.
One, an article covering Coupland’s prophecies for the coming ten years:
Try to live near a subway entrance: In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.
In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.
It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are: Much of what we now consider “personality” will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
And two that together form an extensive glossary of terms for this coming period:
Ikeasis: The desire in daily life and consumer life to cling to “generically” designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information.
Omniscience Fatigue: The burnout that comes with being able to find out the answer to almost anything online, usually on your phone.
Pseudoalienation: The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating”.
Situational Disinhibition: Social contrivances within which one is allowed to become disinhibited, that is, moments of culturally approved disinhibition.
via @vaughanbell and Kottke