It’s finally up. Late, but up. For the brand new issue (issue 22) of my (free!) What’s Next trend report just go to nowandnext.com and click on the orange box on the home page – far left top. Enjoy!

As you can tell I’m not as busy as I have been. I’m also obsessed with Tag Crowd. The image above is what happened when I fed about 0,000 words from a failed book experiment into the tag machine.

People again!!! Don again????

So I’ve been thinking. What if you could capture what people are saying (talking on phones), texting and typing (email) and do a tag cloud for each minute, hour, day, week and so on. Wouldn’t that be fascinating? What would we all be saying? I know there’s Google Zeitgeist but that’s not quote the same thing. That’s just internet searches. I’m talking about what everyone in the world is saying to each another.

Where’s Wally? I’m in Hong Kong. The airport is scary empty. London Heathrow was much the same. Is it the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) or just the GAP (Global Anxiety Pandemic?). I think a mixture of both. Anyway, no trouble ordering a bacon sandwich in the Virgin Clubhouse.

Great talk by the CEO/Chairman of Cafe Nero at the Retail Forum I was speaking at in London. He mentioned that he ran a regular one day event for all regional and area managers – about 160 staff- in which he wasn’t allowed to speak for six hours (he could write things on flip-charts but that was it). Staff were not allowed to say ANYTHING positive whatsoever about the company during the day. In other words, the aim of the session was to identify problems and weaknesses. He didn’t seem to have a name for this idea but I like the idea of reverse brainstorming. In short, build a problem factory and the innovation will come….

Remember my 2009 trend map? Well look again and you will see an Influenza Pandemic as a global risk top right hand side. Guess I got lucky. Or perhaps not. What I think we have currently is an information pandemic.

News is travelling too fast – thanks to global connectivity – and what is contagious is actually anxiety, which is moving too fast to be contained. For example, I was staying at a hotel this morning and I asked for some bacon for breakfast. I couldn’t have any. It was off the menu due to Swine Flu in Mexico. Give me a break.

Is this a problem? One would imagine it is. First this is adding to existing anxieties (the economy, climate change and so on). Second, if this turns out to be not the real thing – which, I suspect, it will – then we will take less notice when there really is a genuine global pandemic out there.

I suggest that everyone tales a couple of aspirin and calms down.

I’m in Hong Kong reading FT Weekend eating a Chinese spring roll (bit of
a conundrum, but in the end I went all eclectic and opted for the brown sauce).

I got a lift to the airport from Andrew who is working on a project for a pharma company so his car was full of OTC medicines. Sex at 35,000 ft? Unfortunately not, although I did manage to find a very fine film on the plane called Sex Drive.

The last week was fun. Eight talks across Wales on weathering the economic storm. What a fantastic country. I even bought a CD of Welsh male voice choir music, which I played whilst driving through Snowdonia. Talk about stirring the soul. My mental Magi Mix was on high speed with thoughts whipping around my ears at great speed.

One thing that occurred to me half way up a Welsh mountain was that I’m not very found of new things. This is pretty ironic for a so-called futurist but there you go. I far prefer things that are old. Things that have been there, done that and come back clutching a T-shirt. Why could this be so? I think it is because old things, especially things that have been made by the hand of man, somehow put things into context. They remind us that we are nothing. Or at least they put the brakes on any grandiose thoughts we have about our own self-importance.

Twitter? Give me a break. In the grand scheme of things this idea is not even a punctuation mark. I suspect that even the internet may turn out to be no more than a glorified new motorway system. Things will move faster than ever before and we will undoubtedly be able to do many things that were once impossible but, when more has been said than done, the basics won’t have changed very much.

By the way, buy the first issue of Wired magazine (UK edition). It’s quite interesting, although quite how I became an “expert” is quite beyond me. Maybe if you hang out somewhere for long enough people just think that you belong.

Interesting article by Jan Dalley in the FT last weekend (I get rather behind with my reading sometimes). Are we riding a wave of anti-nostalgia at the moment? I think Dalley might be onto something with this trend. The idea here is the ‘old world’ versus the ‘new’ and how the new often falls flat on its face and disappoints. She is talking largely about art but the idea stands up on a broader level I think.

One could perhaps frame this conflict as technology versus humanity. Where’s the evidence? Personally I’d point to the current popularity of old predictions circulating on the internet and books such as Where’s My Jet Pack by Daniel H Wilson. Interestingly there is possibly a connection here with two of the scenarios worlds that I commented on a few weeks ago, namely ‘Enoughism’ versus ‘Smart Planet’. Keep your eyes open for other examples of techno-backlash.

I keep meaning to finish off the last few pages of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb but I keep getting sidetracked. This time it’s because of another book called Tomorrow’s People by Susan Greenfield. I’m doing a presentation on Friday on the Future of Policing to a law enforcement agency and I’m reading up on future technology. If you haven’t read it this is a superb book on how technology is changing the way that people think and act. In fact it could be the best book I’ve ever read on the subject.

Some of the other stuff I’ve found within scenario documents produced by the CIA, National Intelligence Council and the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre (part of the MOD) is quite breathtaking. I was aware of some of this but the sophistication of some of the surveillance and predictive technologies (especially reality mining) is quite extraordinary. BTW, I’m not saying that this is good or bad, just that it exists and will become more pervasive in the near future.

One of the trends that I talked about in my book, Future Files, was that globalisation was creating a strong counter-trend of localisation and that eventually we would see a rise in nationalism and economic protectionism. Well sure enough it’s happening.

India has just banned all imports of Chinese built toys for six months. India gets about 50% of its toys from China and exports are worth around GBP £350 million per year to the Chinese economy. Meanwhile, in the UK there are calls for “British Jobs for British Workers”. It’s much the same story in North America and elsewhere.

So far all fairly obvious. But what are some of the other consequences of a global slowdown?

In my view economics deeply influences politics so we can expect the economic situation to deeply define politics for at least the next 2-3 years. The bad news is that we will probably see a swing towards extremism and there could easily be a significant swing to the far-right.

The model here is the politics of the 1930s, where economic woes fanned the flames of far-right extremism in Europe but also of racist movements such as the KKK in the US. Don’t think that this could be a slow shift either. If recent events tell us anything it’s surely that we live in a globally connected world where ideas and actions can travel at extraordinary speed. I hope this isn’t 1939 returning.

Another strangely addictive posting from the blog set in the year 2049 (p40y.com)

Ridiculous. I couldn’t do anything today because of an ant. The kitchen was full of them so I wiped them all up with a dishcloth, threw them into the sink and turned the hot coffee tap on. They all drowned except for one with a very large head. It had climbed up to the very top of the dishcloth and sat there surrounded by a sea of coffee. I was going to save it on the basis of sheer tenacity but when I came back to the sink two minutes later it was dead. I feel terrible. Here was an ant with drive and determination and I killed it. I am the ant bully.

Off to Shanghai for a few days tomorrow for the 165th Hospices De Beaune wine tasting. I got a special offer about this on my AiPhoneâ„¢, which had predicted that I would be interested in going having tracked my movements in and around Beaune last year. I think my voice conversations about my love affair with French reds probably triggered something in the phone company database too.

My favourite wine last year was the 2044 Mazis-Chambertin Grand Cru Cuvée Madeleine Collignon followed by the 2045 Mersault Genevrieres 1er Cru Cuvée Philippe Lebon although I still haven’t got over the Chinese guy that diluted his wine with organic Coca-Cola.