ReputationDefender Blog was sifting through the old internets and found this quirky piece from kk.org. In a post called Unthinkable Futures, Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno engage in a thought experiment in 1993 to try and predict what the future world might look like. Here are a few of their postulations:

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* Everybody becomes so completely cynical about the election process that voter turnout drops to 2 percent (families and relatives of prospective politicians) until finally the “democratic process” is abandoned in favour of a lottery system. Everything immediately improves.

* It turns out that nearly all the conspiracy theories you ever heard were actually true — that the world really is being run by 150 malevolent men with nasty prejudices.

* Smoking is proven to be good exercise for the lungs.

Some of these ideas are silly, others are bizarre and still others have actually come to pass. The entire article is interesting and worth a read, but a few predictions jumped out at ReputationDefender. For instance:

* Ordinary people routinely employ publicists.

This may have seemed like an improbable scenario in 1993, but ReputationDefender works with people everyday who enroll in our MyEdge service, which is Personal PR for the Web. Another ReputationDefender service was spotlighted in the piece when the authors pointed to the need for consumers to take action against data mining agencies and control their privacy.

* Direct-mailing organizations carry increasingly complex and subtle character assessments of their targets. To avoid being deluged by the resulting irresistible offers, people routinely begin buying inconsistent products. This is designed to confuse the profilers.

With MyPrivacy, individuals can remove their personal data from the internet and opt out of data collections routinely performed by companies today. We at ReputationDefender work hard to stay on the cutting edge of reputation and privacy matters.

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