Three days before the election, time to write down my election predictions.

Based upon what I have seen of the polls, campaigns and futures market actions of the 2008 presidential election, my predictions of the events of election night are thus,

-- The Democratic party candidates will win the election with room to spare, by at least 5 million popular votes and at least 100 electoral college votes.

-- The election will be called correctly by at least three mainstream 24-hour newsmedia channels before the polls close in the Mountain time zone.

-- There will be multiple allegations of vote fraud in the battleground states; they will ultimately not be sufficient in quantity of affected voters to question the validity of the president-elect.

-- News of vote fraud will be made public faster and more broadly than in any previous election, thanks in part to the advent of popular online video and netroots movements to place videographers at polling stations.

-- The Republican Party candidates will not concede the election before polls close in the Pacific time zone.

-- The Democratic Party will gain at least 7 seats in the Senate, and 25 in the House of Representatives.


Those being my predictions, I'd like to close by noting that the concept of predicting the future with certainty is folly as a claim to knowledge of the outcomes of future events is nothing more than sentiment with no value farther than interest on an “I told you so” or on an embarrassing retraction depending on its accuracy. Futurism is not about making quantifiable predictions like some fortune-teller, but rather to develop likely scenarios of potential future events in order that they can be prepared for. The predictions I make today are of little use in this respect, other than pointing out a few interesting topics to follow in the news on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008.

-Craig Blaylock
10:06:24 PM 11/01/08

On the movements of society

I just finished off a good two hours of sorting and pruning my way through my subscribed feeds.

Though I get the same satisfaction with this that someone with more botanic tastes might find in tending to a bonsai tree, it strikes me how small my ability to absorb and process information is when compared to the enormity of the blogosphere. Most of the opinions and writings available online are like my blog; a few (if any) regular readers, with the general focus being either something personal, or something that already happened somewhere else in the blogosphere.

Personal inadequacy and fury at the inane-echo-chamber effect aside, every time I sit down in front of a keyboard I'm humbled at the sheer diversity of material just a short, magical hand-gesture out of sight. Since the internet went mainstream (1995 or so), it's gone from being something of a gimmick to an indispensable part of modern life.

That's only 13 years. 13 years took us from having to go to the local library to access a tiny fraction of the world's information, to having nearly all of it accessible just about anywhere within a few thousand miles of the entire planet almost all the time.

This is a big change for us as a species. This is bigger than Television, Telephone, or Telegram. It's more game-changing than Aeroplane, Automobile, or Locomotive. This is a change to society at least as volatile as the Printing Press, as innovative as Written Language, and getting right up there with Fire and Speech to compete for most important invention ever.

And it's only been around for 13 years. A system that's been running for 13 years without a single minute of global downtime. Kevin Kelly wasn't kidding when he said that it was the single most reliable machine humans have ever built.


People like to talk about revolutions. There was the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution; and they like to say that we're living in another one, the Information Revolution. I like to tell those people that they haven't seen anything yet. In these previous revolutions, it took generations for both people and society to adapt to the new structure of life. People today who have never seen the world without the web are still in middle school.

These are the kids that will truly start exploring the possibilities in an interconnected civilisation.