ARTISH PICKS: 7 Projected Trends That Will Shift Popular Culture in 2021
We didn't get flying cars at the end of the 2010s, but the last decade notably signalled the start of humanity's fast and glorious era. Solutions in internet connectivity like the introduction of 4G/LTE, made it possible for social media to overshadow traditional media, subsequently birthing this algorithmic era of artificial intelligence and big data. Outside of software and cloud computing, lower costs of manufacturing computing chips has led to the mass production of even faster devices that consume less energy. The result has been, advancements in biotech, robotics and electric automation.
With so many facets of our everyday life already altered permanently between 2009 and 2019, it didn't seem like there was more to expect in innovation trends at the start of 2020. But that was until COVID-19 became an earmark for this superfast era for human existence. As we wrote in our debut Big Story last April, historically, "pandemics often spread through geopolitical trade networks; nations and economies transform rapidly during times of pestilence and disease; social behaviour, popular literature, arts and culture, are often inundated permanently." 2020 was no exception to these semiotic trends, as the medical industry, big-tech and survival of many corporations depended on how well they were able to take advantage of innovations of the last decade, to adapt to the sudden global switch to a world of masks, lockdowns and virtual meetings.
With 9.7 million infected cases and still counting, even with vaccines being rolled out around the world, there is no guarantee that humanity will ever return to the world as we knew it before corona. Instead, post-COVID realities as they surface in the coming years will offer a glimpse at how the trends that shaped 2020 will become the stuff of history books for generations to come. Based on the previous 12 months, the following are our top projections for the local and global trends we believe will define 2021.
Words: Toye Sokunbi
Producer: Toye Sokunbi
The murmurs first began as the rate of infections climbed last year, but anti-5G conspiracists are still pulling antics around the world. From this rubbish claim that a USB-Drive priced at over $400 will protect users from the negative effects to 5G to a recent vandalisation of MTN and Vodacom towers in South Africa, many regions of the world it seems, are still reeling in the realisation that the connected world we live in now will only become more even more connected. The reality however, is that while 5G and it's planned 6G successor still have limited application for the mass market, devices and software with provisions for the additional connectivity already exist. Machine learning AI is already being employed for programmatic advertising and social media algorithms. Smart home tools like Google Home and Alexa also use a similar operational framework. But away from all that big data hocus-pocus, edge computing enabled chips are also being developed for a generation of devices that can process machine learning data without the cloud. Last year, chip-manufacturing company ARM, announced the designs of two new chips Arm Cortex-M55 and Ethos-U55, which are capable of faster neural processing tasks such as object recognition in real-time (kind of like how our brains work). Even more interesting, these chips are not necessarily designed for phones, tablets or other forms of mobile computers. According to techblog, Verge, "One use case ARM imagines is a 360-degree camera in a walking stick that can identify obstacles". This kind of technology is already available in self-driving cars at limited capacity. ARM is expected to roll-out functional prototypes of these chips this year, which means we can expect more use cases down the line for more specific, less traditional computing devices. And thanks to these developments, artificial intelligence is expected to gain more real-world prominence this year, subsequently kickstarting the foundational years for the mass use of the internet of everything.
One of the more talked about effects of COVID-19 on education and the corporate world was the transition to remote study and work. There's isn't much we don't already know about the remote life landscape. The subject of how Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Skype became the biggest productivity tools of 2020, has already been hammered on so much by social and mainstream media but the jury is still out on whether remote work is the new normal or not. Corporate productivity experts still can't determine if the benefits of working from home outweigh the costs in the loss of collaborative opportunities resulting from workers being under the same roof. Last year, despite Mark Zuckerberg's estimation that half of Facebook's staff could be working remotely for a long time, the company still acquired an additional 730,000sqm New York office space lease, in a deal that is projected will cost a little over $1billion through the period of the lease. A bigger conversation the remote work era has spawned is the birth of the gig economy, where workers can and will juggle as much as two to three side-hustles with their main jobs thanks to the extra free time saved from what would've otherwise been office-commute hours. For professionals and casual social media users, the arrival of voice-led platforms like Clubhouse is also pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally expected from text and image-based platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It's not hard to imagine the use cases of such voice-driven mediums becoming more diverse as content creators and brands become more innovative with community-building. A likelier reality going forward, however, is that the continued dependence on these teleconferencing and productivity services may tilt many big corporations and schools towards building their own native applications and chat services for the sake of privacy and data protection.
"Format Wars I & II", one of the most popular story-arcs from, Cartoon Network's animated TV series, Regular Show, features the show's lead characters getting caught in a war of relevance between content storage and distribution formats like VHS, CDs and streaming. It's understated today, but the innovation in the space of data storage is of the easiest ways to understand the crazy pace of innovation in the information age. Take the music industry, for instance, it took 48 years to move from vinyl to CDs but took 20 years to move to peer-to-peer music sharing also known as online downloads. Now in the 2010s, 10 years later, streaming platforms have further redefined how we listen to music through the cloud. At the dawn of global coronavirus lockdowns, social media became our collective windows to the rest of the world, providing entertainment, real-time information and keeping us connected to our loved ones. As social media usage soared, its use also became more dynamic, with more people taking up content creation as a pastime. According to the Global Web Index, by March 2020, at least 3 in every 10 people were creating content of some sort. Platforms like TikTok became the birthplace of viral challenges, Instagram and YouTube became a mainstay for live streams, and traditional public forums like Facebook and Twitter were used to sustain the conversations. While the synergy of content across social media platforms (aka cross-platforming) meant more people were spending more time online, the effect was a fast-moving virtual environment where most uploaded media had little to no staying power. For big corporation content creators in film and music, whose tours and box office openings were seriously impacted by social distancing regulations, they had to become more inventive as many big music names and film studios had to adapt to a world where artists couldn't go on tour and cinemas were closed. While the music industry, albeit reluctantly, continues to embrace internet radios, live streams and virtual concerts, most movie releases got postponed or naturally went to the stream. Some of the trends that shaped 2020 in that regard like Beyonce's Black Is King and Nadine Lustre's Wildest Dreams, visual albums are more an expansion of the long music video format we have seen Kanye West, The Weeknd and Travis Scott, dabble in pre-covid. Only with these two examples from 2020, the emphasis on storytelling and quality refinement were more reflective of an attempt to give fans an immersive experience, given the unavailability of other mediums to enjoy the music. Emerging tech in extended reality took things a step further with Travis Scott performing a live set to 12 million players on Epic Games' Fortnite. Nigerian rapper, Olamide also debuted Africa's first VR music video for "Loading" featuring Bad Boy Timz off his 2020 album, Carpe Diem. Now in early 2021, we are about to witness another fully immersive merger of music and visuals, with Sia's upcoming musical drama and directorial debut, Music, starring Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr. According to Billboard, Music will have a limited release in theatres in the U.S and Australia, before going to streams. We expect to see more of such innovative approaches to content creation in the coming months, especially for established name brands and film studios looking to bounce back from last year's COVID-19 disruption.
Despite a record dip in the global economy and huge losses in profits recorded in 2020, it was also the year where a record number of new businesses were launched virtually out of nowhere. According to the BBC, 13,275 new businesses launched in the UK last year, in comparison to the 11,503 of 2019. Similar trends are noticeable around the world, with much of these businesses being driven by DIY-solutions. From food delivery services, to e-commerce websites, online thrift stores and craft-based vanity accessories, social media became the new marketplace for many people who were either trying to pass the time with a profitable hobby, or maintain a steady income after losing public-facing jobs during the pandemic. It's a widely held belief that over 20% of new businesses fail or are run by founders who are only in it for the short haul, it's not far-fetched to expect much of the business solutions inspired by the pandemic to diffuse into other sectors of a digitally-aided DIY industry in the coming months. These side-hustles and DIY-businesses could also become a way for the world's growing millenial middle class to earn passive income.
The attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters and Twitter's subsequent permanent ban of the former American president's account is hardly one of the most controversial consequences of big tech oligarchy we have seen the last decade, but somehow, it opened a pandora's box of sorts to the realisation of how powerful social media platforms have become at the global stage. On one hand, we saw what happens when hateful speech, is allowed to be published unabated without moderation, on the other, the world looked on, as one of the most powerful citizens of the world, was institutionally censored by platforms that rode into public graces on the promise of the promotion of free speech. This slippery slope is a moral one because it asks two crucial questions; who is to be held responsible when social media platforms are misused; and who governs the government of the cloud regime? It's noteworthy, however, that this panic is not new. Last year a slew of antitrust suits were filed against Facebook and Google for what over 40 U.S attorney generals deemed illegal monopolistic behaviour that gives both companies unfair advantages in a manner that stifles competition and harms innovation. This follows growing scepticism and concerns around the world about the power of big-tech and the demand for regulation, as seen in hearings with top executives from Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google in the American Congress last year. Amidst this legal clamour for feed moderation, regulation and even breaking up some of the biggest tech companies, now both major US parties are looking to dismantle Section 230, a provision in the US constitution that gives tech companies liability protection for content posted on their platform. Though both Twitter and Facebook have agreed they also want the provisions of Section 230 updated, the biggest sufferers of the blowback may be new tech start-ups, who will have to jump through a new round of legal hoops to operate. In Europe, a more proactive approach towards shaping the future of laws governing big tech first became big news far as back in 2018, when General Data Protection Regulation laws were put in place. In the same year, the European Union fined Google $9billion for anti-competitive practices. Now moving forward, the European Commission unveiled draft legislations for the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, at the tail of last year. If passed, the two legislations will further protect the safety of people online with moderator guidelines and limit some of the gatekeeper advantages that some of the biggest tech companies have on smaller players in the ecosystem. Though Google's scepticism skewers towards how these draft legislations may affect small businesses, Facebook thinks they are "on the right track to help preserve what is good about the internet". Regardless of how things play out, all evidence points to 2021 being a groundbreaking year for the collaboration between experts in the field of the humanities and new technology.
In 2019, an infamous tech-related scandal ripped through the medical world, after a robot came into a sick man's California hospital room with a screen attached where its face should be. On the screen was a doctor who informed the sick man and his granddaughter that he was dying. A video of this exchange made it to Facebook and subsequently the news, and the consensus at the time was that it was a rather cold and callous mode of delivery for such a sensitive situation. Fast forward 2020, however, telemedical services rendered over phones, tablets and computers became not only necessary to avert unmetered transmission of COVID-19 through hospital halls, they also provided an innovative avenue to deliver affordable medical diagnosis using artificial intelligence. There are still obvious limits to telemedicine, as the need for internet access which may be a limitation in rural areas, and the inability of doctors to run more hands-on tests and scans virtually. Even doctors are also confident video-conferencing with patients will never replace physical medical exams. In fact, many cities where telemedicine became an alternative to hospital visits at the peak of the pandemic have started seeing patients physically once again. This doesn't however mean there would be no place for telemedicine in a post-covid world. Medical services like mental health counselling could become more accessible to the public virtually (see BetterHelp app for iPhones and Android devices). Also, pharmacies in low-income communities where locals can't afford hospital bills or health insurance (basically most African countries), will be able to diagnose patients with the help of a licensed medical professional, hence improving healthcare delivery in troubled regions. Having a physical doctor a call away will ease diagnosis of simple ailments, or managing medical cases that require close monitoring, especially for an increasingly retiring and ageing global population who may not be so mobile. Telemedicine may not be the future of medical sciences yet, but it may provide necessary support somewhere in between, a world where medical service support for helping people who need it the most, is like talking to really good customer service rep (if those actually exist).
This one is a doozy because many people only think of blockchain within the context of cryptocurrency. Yes, blockchain technology is the core process for many cryptocurrencies, but many people don't actually understand how it works or it's multiplex of applications in the information age. The Worldbank explains blockchain as a "type of a distributed ledger. Distributed ledgers use independent computers (referred to as nodes) to record, share and synchronize transactions in their respective electronic ledgers (instead of keeping data centralized as in a traditional ledger). Blockchain organizes data into blocks, which are chained together". Within the context of money, cryptocurrency is an open record of transaction-data, that allows a network of users contribute and track digital assets in real-ish-time. Blockchain ensures secure transfer of value from one verifiable party to the other, ensuring every transaction can be traced with a specific timestamp. This is the main reason the arrival of cryptocurrencies have shaken up the global financial industry because they remove traditional middlemen like central banks and monetary settlement agencies whose sole purpose is to validate where money is coming from and where it goes - as the sender intended. With blockchain, money moves in a peer to peer network of users called "nodes", who can exchange digitally encrypted information about value, time and place between each other stored as hashkeys. Hashkeys are a unique tag connecting the chain from one block to another block. The selling and buying of stocks between shareholders functions on a similar principle. But if that crash-course on cryptocurrency still doesn't make any sense to you, let's put it this way; blockchain is basically a new way to think of trust and legitimacy in business and asset ownership. Co-sharing and co-living services like Uber, Airbnb and AWABike, are great examples of how a system built on trust with blockchain properties can work, thanks to the availability of data to exchange between the owners and users who are basically the nodes. The decentralised nature of blockchain's node system is protected by digital footprints, and this gives us a new way to look at ownership. Because, like stocks, the higher the value of the blockchain, the greater the profit for every member of the node, who is now pretty much an investor. The application of blockchain to other facets of society is similar to the trend of employee-owned companies where a percentage of the company is offered to employees and collectively the team works towards the success of the company. This applies to a popular economic idea that has been taking shape over the last five years, that in the future, nobody will own anything. Founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab was first quoted to have projected it to a 2030 timeline, back in 2016. But the agenda surfaced once again, with renewed urgency, thanks to the forum's 2020 Great Reset initiative, described as "a set of dimensions to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being". This concept is important because, the idea of money and value, etcetera is that we (as a society) all collectively agreed to the price of something over a long period of time. If blockchain technologies continue to evolve, we may have to update that idea, with the ability of the value of a thing to be open-sourced, therefore sustained by a network of players and contributors. To put the reality of The Great Reset in perspective, Ethereum, a cryptocurrency a little over five years old is designed to mimic the qualities of a real contract, and this could redefine a whole bunch of things; assets, ownership of creative content and how companies issue stocks. The application of blockchain to intellectual property or creative work like music, film, photography and digital art, could also redefine how original thinking and ideas are valued.