Predictions

[avram]

Today I was poking around in Google’s archives of rec.arts.sf.fandom, the Usenet group where I spent most of my online time back before blogging took off. I was looking for a thread from October 2000 in which one poster had asked anti-Bush people to make some predictions of what sort of negative consequences would follow a Bush victory. (Yeah, lots of politics in rec.arts.sf.fandom.) Not many actual predictions were made, and of course nobody came close to what’s actually happened. If I could post backwards in time and tell people “Well, it’s 2005, and the World Trade Center is rubble, and we’re bogged down in a hopeless war in Iraq, and New Orleans pretty much doesn’t exist anymore, and the government now has the authority to imprison American citizens without charging them with a crime” nobody would believe me, except maybe for the bit about Iraq.

I did find a post of my own in that thread, with a prediction that came true:

I'm just waiting for TV to die and be replaced by high-bandwidth video downloads. No more discovering a good show with the fifth episode and having to wait six months for them to rerun the first four. No more having to choose among the three things you want to watch that are being shown at the same time.

(Yeah, lots of topic drift in rec.arts.sf.fandom.) I pretty much nailed that one. mamishka just recommended a new show, Charlie Jade, that’s not showing in the US yet, but Google found me some BitTorrent hosts carrying episodes.