Illustration by Luke Siemens.

Here’s how you play the game: When a new product or service like the iPad, or Google Buzz comes along you can make yourself interesting at dinner parties (or on Twitter) by simply choosing sides: reject or adopt. It’s a rather safe gamble. You’ve got a sweet 50 / 50 chance that you’ll turn out appearing awesome, finding yourself in the attractive position of saying “It’s great, I’ve been using it for ages” or “It’s crap, and I told you so from the get go”. Should your rejection turn out to be wrong all you risk is the quickly forgotten humiliation of getting a Twitter account way later than anyone else.

But you have to be really early these days, it’s a tight race. After all, how early is early? If you want your time in the sun looking like a trend guru, your judgement must be almost instant, which means you’ll have little time to think your opinion through, check out facts and take all the other necessary steps I’d expect anyone to take before voicing an opinion about anything.

So by all means: don’t think, flip the coin and go for gold. But remember that since new information on the subject will emerge continuously, and the things about the new stuff which you decide to hate will be fixed, changed or discarded within days, the value of what you are saying approaches zero faster than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism .

But, I hear you say, these protestors make change happen by pointing out flaws. Maybe so, maybe so…

But this pressure towards instant reaction that some people succumb to is interesting in times when all signs point towards a world of real-time everything, and this in turn will force us to discuss what I would call your “zoom level on reality”. I will return to this in a post later on.

Photo by Sean McGrath

Make no mistake, people who pretend that they can predict the future make my nose bleed. The more sure they are of their guesswork, the more I bleed. I even consider meteorologists to be dabbling with the black arts, and they’re not even the biggest sinners. Their attempts at clairvoyance at least involve a small streak of science.
I have been known to throw stuff at my television set when people appear broadcasting predictions about the future, and make their nonsense drivel sound as if they can actually predict that which has yet to be.

- The market will go up, says the empty suit-guru on the news.
- Sorcery! I scream, and cross myself violently.

Whenever the weather report is on I start frowning. My girlfriend, who accepts my idiosyncrasies, bless her heart – patiently changes the channel, saying:
- That’s okay dear, we’ll know tomorrow what the weather will be like, why spoil the wonderful surprise? Come now, let me get you a cold beer. Just lie back here on the couch and relax and let me rub your feet with oil and…

…no, not really. At least two thirds of that last paragraph is wishful thinking, and, incidentally, so is clairvoyance.

So why this extreme aversion, you ask. Well, one of my main mantras in life is “research, not opinion” (another one could be “weather is not news, but it’s not, and by the way, it’s not) and it’s terribly difficult to research the future. You can do this without me going postal though, just by being humble.

If you admit that you really don’t know anything, and if you tell your tall tales of the future in a light hearted spirit, I might play along. It also helps if you label whatever you are saying “guessing”.

For as so many intelligent people have demonstrated, we live in a random and unpredictable world populated by irrational people. There is a limit to how much analysis you can extract from what was yesterday and what is today, and extrapolate onwards into the unknown future. Not recognizing these limits is just outrageously stupid. Yet, a lot of people will ask you to perform remarkable feats of clairvoyance in your field of work, and you have to refuse!

In posts to come I will try to dig deeper into this, but right now I must lie down and rest after my tantrum. So there.