Back to the future

At the end of 2011, we asked writers to predict what would happen in their field in 2012, from economics to pop music. As the year draws to a close, we caught up with some of last year’s crystal ball-gazers, to see what they made of their predictions 12 months later.

AMERICAN POLITICS: Ken Layne

Prediction: "For three decades, the American left has been drearily impotent. Three painful years of supposed recovery and Obama’s limp administration is waking Americans from their stupor. The Occupy Wall Street movement, spontaneous and thrilling, has shown how to change the conversation. The left’s disgracefully long stretch of good behaviour is finally finished."

What happened: “I have little faith in predictions, especially my own, but at the end of 2011 it seemed apparent that the Occupy movement had already chosen the tone and topic of the 2012 US election. Class warfare went mainstream, with Mitt Romney dismissing the 47 per cent he claimed added nothing of value to American life and Barack Obama finally acting a bit like a liberal by making Election Day a referendum on tax hikes for the rich. Capitalism survived, but ongoing joblessness and the growing income divide finally turned the national conversation away from fearmongering about gay marriage and terrorism to the reality of America's rule by the very, very wealthy.

A year of record heat waves, destructive drought, continual wildfires and Superstorm Sandy brought climate change back to the fickle popular consciousness, but this time it also illustrated the massive gulf between the rich and everyone else—the brilliantly lit Goldman Sachs skyscraper over an otherwise darkened and crippled Manhattan is the lasting image of America's 2012.”

Ken Layne is a journalist and former editor of wonkette.com

TECHNOLOGY: Tom Chatfield

Prediction: "A new kind of people power came to politics in 2011—more will come in 2012. We are at the beginning of something new, and not necessarily better. There are dangerous opportunities for those on the margins.

But this inclusivity can have benefits. We already take it for granted that mothers may use Facebook as much, if not more, than their children. Now, the time of the grandmothers is coming too."

What happened: "From legal twitter-storms to nuclear-programme hacking and extradition wrangles, 2012 certainly felt like a year in which online activity (not to mention its ownership and regulation) became more than ever a central part of our politics. Indeed, it's already starting to feel so obvious a feature of everything from electoral campaigns to espionage that discussing the “digital” aspects of a situation has begun to feel absurd. Every election is now a social media election, every protest sends ripples through the physical and virtual worlds alike, because these are simply the facts of the present day.

I remain a cautious optimist for technology in 2013—but only if we can continue what progress has been made in 2012 by focusing on the particular experiences our young technologies create, and what it means to make these better, rather than making a fetish of the medium itself."

Tom Chatfield is an associate editor of Prospect

POP MUSIC: Kate Mossman

Prediction: "We’ve had 1970s and 1980s music revivals—the 1990s are next. The 1960s retro soul movement still has life. And once again, it’s all about girls—like Ren Harvieu and Lana Del Rey.

We’ll access more music through streams and SoundCloud while ‘bundled’ subscriptions—a Spotify account rolled into your broadband package—will be widely available. Facebook and YouTube will become the most powerful music platforms thanks to their simple ‘like’ function, and 2012 will be the year of reckoning for artists still hoping to make money."

What happened: “Technology is somewhat easier to predict than taste! First up, streaming. YouTube is now the biggest music player in the world (far bigger than iTunes) while Soundcloud underwent a major redesign this year, transforming it from a tool for the bedroom musician to an accessible engine of music discovery. In November, Facebook revealed that 62.6m songs have been played 22bn times across its partner services, Spotify, Deezer and Pandora.

The top-played song on Spotify was Gotye’s “Somebody That I used To Know,” which is proof that the music press often miss the important records the first time round: his album Making Mirrors hardly got any space, while Alt J won the Mercury Music Prize with a record unanimously ignored by reviewers upon its release in May.

If there was a grunge revival it didn’t happen anywhere near me—and the Stone Roses’ gigs caused much more excitement when they were announced than when they actually happened. Lana Del Rey suffered at the hands of the hype machine—her album may be one of the biggest sellers of 2012 but we'd lost interest in the personal story by the time it was available.

Augmented Reality or AR (virtual imagery superimposed on music – a kind of “visual album”) was road-tested by The Rolling Stones on the “gorilla” campaign for their greatest hits album GRRR! Robbie Williams and One Direction now have their own augmented reality music apps, with lots more to follow next year.

Kate Mossman writes about music for Prospect, the Guardian and the New Statesman

SCIENCE: Philip Ball

Prediction: "In 2012, scientists exploring a computer-based approach to understanding social phenomena—from civil war to economic crises—will achieve critical mass. This initiative will be boosted if the international project known as FuturICT wins the €1bn it is seeking from the European Commission.

Building computer models of civilisation demands huge investment in data collection, software and hardware, original thinking and collaboration between disciplines. But the hardest challenge might be to persuade policymakers to abandon ideological positions in favour of a rational exploration of the consequences of their decisions.”

What happened: “We still don’t know if FuturICT will get funded, because the EU put back the funding decision, originally due in the summer, first to the autumn and now to early 2013. Though there is a very good chance of a thumbs up when the decision eventually comes.

More generally, research in this area continues to grow, though it's hard to identify another marker that says “it's arrived.”

On a different front, traditional economics continues to plough its sorry path, though the thinking is slowly showing signs of changing to this new paradigm, via meetings like this and articles like this. “

Philip Ball is an associate editor of Prospect