TechScape: looking back at our tech predictions of years past

Anyway, as we come to the season finale of the Long 2020, with the reintroduction of a global villain viewers thought was defeated and an increasingly convoluted B-plot involving chaos in the top tiers of the British state, I thought I would borrow that concept.

And then, in March that year, the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the pages of the Observer, and YouTube was forgotten.

We all know what happened next, of course: reinstated to the Android App Store, Epic took the nuclear option, simultaneously breaking the rules of both Android and iOS in a bid to get itself thrown off the stores with standing for a lawsuit.

That said, I did get some things right, from the fact that workplace activism would come to Apple (aided by the pandemic, which pushed the secretive company on to remote working platforms and so enabled organising for the first time) to the continued failure of the UK government to pass the online harms bill (now known as the online safety bill, and barely closer to actual passage than it was two years ago).

In fact, the pandemic probably helped tech futurists more than it harmed them. Its immediate effect on the industry was to accelerate trends that were already well on their way to fruition: if you predicted more people using videoconferencing, more people shopping online, or more people playing video games, well, the pandemic helped you out.

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