New book #1 is done. Now to catch up with What’s Next, which is now so late it’s almost historical (and hysterical). Several things caught my eye today. Firstly, a new term – fauxstalgia – meaning new technologies that make the contemporary look classily dated. According to Wired magazine, an app called Retro Recall is a good example. This randomly showcases fashion, music and TV from 1980 onwards. iZotype is another example, which is a sound-processing program that adds ‘authentic’ vinyl crackle to digital recordings, although when I looked at this it didn’t quite seem to be what the app was offering.

What’s going on here? Possibly it’s the idea put forward by the writer Simon Reynolds that for sections of society “the past has replaced the future in the imagination.” Why so? I think it’s possibly related to anxiety caused by uncertainty.

More seriously, the other things included an article in the FT saying that India’s richest 100 people own assets equivalent to 25% of Indian GDP. Also, fact that 800 million Indians live on less than 50 cents a day. Meanwhile, in an older edition of the FT, there’s the assertion that next year the US Air Force will have more drone pilots than pilots of ‘real’ F16 fighters.