American Idol? Then every piece of content will be rendered in shorter words. Twilight fan? Sparkle fonts. _________ Blackmail Here's where it gets scary. Whether it's a rogue employee acting alone, or Disney just not giving a shit any more, what's to stop any of these people from blackmailing you with your personal info? Corporations tinkered with bankruptcy laws a few years back, and by 2018 they'll have done the same thing with blackmail laws. Let's say a series of pictures show up of you knocking a child off the quarter-operated plane ride in front of a Taco Bell and then drunkenly riding it while laughing at their tears and waving a cowboy hat around. We've all done that a couple times in our life, and it would be unjust to have that brought up during job interviews or sentencing hearings or first dates. And maybe no one ever needs to find out about it if we keep buying three chalupas a week if you know what Taco Bell is saying. _________ Videos of you on the toilet sold as ringtones. By 2022, we'll all have computers in nearly every room of our house and will all own cell phones with two or three cameras in them. You will never not be on camera. Also by 2018, America will go just poo-crazy, and amongst other unspeakable things, pictures of unsuspecting people on the toilet taken by invasive Facebook apps will be actively sold as ringtones by companies like Slate - which by that point will have changed business models a bit. _________ Doppelganger Madness In the future, with volumes of information about individuals readily available and ever advancing robot technology, replacing someone with a doppelganger will be a real possibility. These clones/cyborgs/mechanical men will know everything that a person ever purchased or enjoyed, and be able to emulate their behavior accordingly, only now in a manner that's more acceptable to their corporate masters. Here's a conversation which is guaranteed to happen in 2030: Husband: -lovemaking- Oh wow. That was amazing. I love you honey. Wife: I love you too dear. Did you know that right now at Lowe's, a DEWALT 10" 20-Amp Miter saw is on sale for only $549.00? Husband: I didn't, no. Wife: Mmm. Maybe this is the year to rebuild the deck. Husband: Yes. Yes. Maybe. swallows, breaks out in cold sweat.- Yes. -Puts head on pillow, starts crying, never stops.- _________ Immersive Reality Generated by Malevolent AI programs This one should be conceptually familiar to everyone who saw the popular 1990s hacker movie, The Net.

Eventually we'll reach a point where we spend so much time online that it will simply be easier for the corporations of the day to do away with the doppelgangers and fake reality itself. One morning we'll log online and, without realizing it, never log out again. With all of our likes and dislikes neatly cataloged, it will then be trivial for the computer hive minds of the latter half of this century to craft a world perfectly suited to amuse us, while still encouraging us to consume. Imagine an endless Wal-Mart on a beach full of IKEA furniture and explicit pornography, and you just have to think Vitamin Water and BAM, you've ordered a case of it, and oh god, don't think about Hamburglar blowjob, don't think about Hamburglar blowjob, don't think about.... _________ The Dark Ages 2: Dark Harder As Sandra Bullock's character observed in The Net, "Human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." The perfect world created by the machines will eventually crumble, sending the economy and all of mankind crashing to the ground. Eventually the thinkers of this new age will piece together what happened, and vow to never make the same mistakes again. All social networking will be outlawed, and the founder of Facebook denounced as the evilest of men:

I know it's a good column when I can get a picture of Dirk Benedict in there. _________

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