The Media

Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.

What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.

The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.

The Military

Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.

What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.

The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.

Business

Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base

What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops

Industrial Design

Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM

What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material

The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on barbarism

Gender Issues

Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into family life as invisible costs

What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume