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Convictions and Trends - Ed Hurst - 11-22-2021
In my case, I have a tendency to see where trends are headed. It's not a question of some kind of intelligence; it really does require testing things in my heart and seeing them from above, as it were. So it's not prophecy in that I can't see where it's going mixed in with everything else at the same time. What I see is a matter of, "If this keeps going on the same path..." I can extrapolate something down the road from it. I still can't see the final result, because the Lord isn't showing me the whole picture, for whatever reason.
So I predicted a few years ago that Microsoft would do something totally stupid to alienate users. It wasn't a single thing, as I had personally expected, but it was several critical things. One was the broken promise about Win10 being the last OS. It isn't going to be the last OS they release. Worse, Win11 is yet another collection of reductions in user options.
For example, I once used MS Office a great deal on my books and stuff. Not any more. Just a month ago, roughly, they removed several formatting options, especially with their online Office suite. Worse, they are now trying to force everyone to use their online engine instead of allowing users to install the apps (this happened rather suddenly with Android and ChromeOS).
Now, recently they've been getting more and more difficult about their Edge browser. You are no longer allowed to make any other browser your default for activating URLs. That is, you can set it any way you like, but Edge will still pop up when you click a link. And I know this kind of user abuse is going to keep getting worse. And I'm pretty sure most Windows users will not switch their computers to something else. Indeed, most users simply cannot. On the other hand, I do know that people are buying devices that don't run Windows more often these days. Through the school administration I've learned that an awful lot of kids now have Chromebooks. And a whole municipal government in Germany is migrating all of their computers to Linux, as have a significant small number of companies here the US.
So that much of my prediction came true. Now that we are there, I can't see where it's going from here. And it doesn't matter.
Instead, I now see that the Internet is going to become far more difficult in terms of censorship. As a separate issue, we stand to see a huge CME, maybe even a Carrington Event, that could wipe out whole sets of undersea cables because of a peculiar vulnerability they possess. At least one major CME should come soon. And every time the power goes down, it affects consumer access directly, as well as some of the stuff behind the Internet that most people don't know about. How well protected are cell towers from power outages? Not all of them have a backup power source.
I see the censorship as one trend, and the access issue as another trend. They'll surely overlap, but I get no clear image of that.
On a related note, I believe that the West will essentially die with the Boomer Generation. While a lot of features will continue, it will all be under the Networked Civilization. It's already here. And it probably won't live long. I have no idea what comes after that; it's not pertinent to my calling.