I think I'm seeing the future somewhat now. I'm very intuitive, and I'm good a looking at large greater trends and guessing what's coming in the future. About 10-12 years after the advent of consumer-used WWW - we're finally starting to see some of the real potential (good and bad) of the web. It's so funny - my generation started out really using the web and doing things with it - we were the catalysts for the dot.com "boom" and bust. There were great ideas but also a tremendous lack of forethought. It was like all this great possibility but with a lack of understanding of the sociology of the web (there has to be a sociology first). So buinesses were started with many ideas of a traditional business and business of the web. There were so many failures! I always think about pets.com which had 100's of millions in venture capital thrown at it, but it failed. Afterwards, analysts looked at it and said it failed because there was not an impetous for people to buy items for pets and pay for shippping over just running down to the store to get items for them.
People do love their pets and will buy even expensive items for them, but that's a niche market. The vast majority of people will buy no more for pets than what they can get at the grocery store. And why not a direct market electronic grocery store? Although there are grocery delivery services, and there is a place for these types of sales, as people have done for millennia, given an open society and freedom to mingle, people with anything to sell will congregate in a market and try to sell. For food, etc. usually people want and must go out at the time they want to eat to get fresh food. So they need immediate point of access for groceries and other consumables. And even in a society constrained by energy shortages and materials shortages, as I believe our future might be, the basic way that people will meet, eat, and get together won't change.
And although this may sound like the ramblings of a neo-sage hippy, I see the future really evolving around a world where people meet their immediate needs by ways that THEY choose to shape their world. This isn't a view I have because I think that people will all come together in peace and love and harmony, but because they're selfish. There are also darks sides, etc......
Again...the world a small village. In the middle ages with villages and guilds, artisans etc. why was there the societal and socio-economic fabric of that time? Is this something that we will see again? Today there is no true job security. This may seem scary, but there are also job opportunities the like of which have never been seen before. So- I see many, but not all, good and services moving back to a guild/freemason-type marketplace. In a sense we're already there. Should people expect to "get a job" with a big corporation? Will ALL of us be self-employed?
In the middle ages, the poor, the uneducated, unwillful, etc. starved or begged in the streets. The somewhat industrious were able to at the least scrape out a living, but the really industrious and talented and insightful and lucky were able to at the least perhaps learn a trade through an apprenticeship and move up, etc. Goods, services, etc. were able to emerge. This allowed the first advances of collective farming technology, etc. It wasn't high-tech, but trades offered a way to make shoes, to smith things. Skilled workers in this segment of the economy and society worked out of their homes. They probably grew many of their own vegetables but if they were able to trade and to earn either money or value-added goods or commodities, they could also buy other goods or foods in the marketplace.
Villages and cities in Europe worked more or less this way for centuries until the industrial revolution. Many factors, including population density, disease, etc. affected the "tipping point" rise of industrialization. Many people went to the factory to work after the revolution. There have always remained a few "freemasons" -
From our vantagepoint - advantages no gen has had
