Written for a year everyone expected to be loud. When people stop trusting institutions they don't stop needing shelter; they build it — re-sorted social platforms, personality-driven news, an AI that fits each of us with a private haven. Comfortable. Also the exact opposite of a crowd.

Gramsci's line about the old world dying and the new one struggling to be born, applied to the year the Meta–Google duopoly cracked and ChatGPT showed up. The monsters were the crypto salesmen. And also all of us, going goblin mode for the last scraps of attention.

The only reliable forecast for the decade was disorder, so this one is about planning for it. It's also where I argued that following a billionaire is a different brand of authoritarianism with a capitalist tint, and that presence — knowing who else is here right now — would matter more than any single metaverse.

The pandemic pulled five years of digital adoption forward, and the report asked which of it would stick. One call I'd make harder today: the offline experience gets more premium as the digital version becomes a loss leader for the tour. Dua Lipa's livestream mostly sold the tour.

Published a month before lockdown, on which company would own the platform after the phone. Wrong about the timing of nearly everything, right about the shape: algorithmic culture, ambient computing, and a rising anxiety about all of it. The last forecast from the old world.

The platforms that aggregated everyone's attention turned out to be the easiest things on earth to abuse, and 2019 was when the bill came due. The trend I'd underline now: media haves and have-nots, where the people who can pay get the ad-free version and everyone else gets the feed. The K-shaped experience economy, in embryo.

The internet's first act was over: four platforms had stopped being an industry and started being the economy. All culture is digital culture, the report said. True then, true now, and exactly the condition the book argues we've started pushing back against.