This decade has been great. So great that some Youtubers decided to end the decade by planting 20 million trees which is a very good initiative but by African standards, more trees would have been planted for one dollar. It just shows how inflated the U.S.A. economy is. Russians should be laughing. It is this decade that we have lost several great members of the wildlife and environment in general. Oh, and some species also arose from the dead. Of cause the Dodo bird was not one of them. After all, it is just a Dodo.

This decade has also given us a lot of bloat and defined the position of other bloats that we inherited from the previous decade. Some of them include;

Internet Censorship and Surveillance

China has still been strong in this. They have been synonymous with blocking more than 100 major websites and are willing to block any other that does not conform with their set of strict rules. Even after Zuckerberg himself decided to marry a Chinese, his wife’s mother country has been adamant. The same has been experienced in African countries.

A good example is when Egyptians were up in arms with the government and someone decided to switch off the internet there. This did not work very well when Europeans started connecting Egyptians to the internet using phone dials.

Agencies of countries like Rwanda, Uganda and Cameroon have been other bad boys in this field. Rwanda for instance has been using this to hunt down some of the President’s enemies oversees. Uganda introduced some tax for using social media and was rumoured to be among the major clients of Hacking Team, (along with Kenya, Sudan and Egypt) a Milan based Cyber-Hacking company.

Detox

Of all the pseudo-science, this should be the worst demon that we have to carry to the next decade. While the world is growing fat, there has been increased need for people to look for ways to shed off the excess fat. Someone sat down and said that people grow fat mainly due to accumulation of toxins which when shed will make one ‘barbie-skinny’ again. These toxins are supposedly dealt with by eating a special diet of mainly vegetables and fruits whose recipe is quite expensive and makes the owners rich.

Detox is one of the models that will surely make money to sellers of the idea in the next decade. Other schemes that will promise a quick way to lose weight are sure to expand the market. Except telling people to eat less.

Data Auctioning.

Facebook was badly hit. 2018 and 2019 will go down in Zuckerberg’s books as the second or third worst years in history of Facebook, unless there is more to come. Facebook in the cause of its business was busted for selling data to Cambridge Analytica. This made people to open up their eyes on business models of major companies like Facebook. Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Most of these companies which offer both free and paid services have been known to connive in auctioning data to other clients, government agencies and to other members of the big club.

This is a trend that is bound to go on into the next decade with the evolution on IoT starting with digital assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby and Alexa. The next decade could be seeing the death of Cortana but other members of the IoT like smart fridges, Smart TVs, Smart watches, Smartphones, Smart Cars are sure to collect expensive data which will be auctioned and used to make people rich. Smart objects and IoT will reach a point of autonomously negotiating for data resources while bidding and buying resources in the next one or two decades.

Poaching.

As mankind gears towards the 11 billion mark, the general population has been known to be a big enemy to the environment. Poaching did not see a significant decline especially after the Chinese government played ping-pong with the world on legalizing and banning ivory trade in China. Some African countries are still housing cartels involved in poaching while others like Botswana are revising laws that previously banned game hunting and poaching.

Amazon forest is still crying foul while people steal its precious birds and animals for American, Europeans and Asian Markets.

Cell phone Addiction

Now, this is a vice that we got immediately after Apple invented the smartphone. A research by Pew Research Centre shows that 81% of Americans own cell phones as at 2019. In 2011, this value was at 35%. With a huge number of adolescents getting access to smartphones, it is viewed that they are the most hit. Cell phone addiction has not been officially declared as a medical condition by the World Health Organization but it looks like we will have headlines with titles containing the words Cell phones and Addiction from the WHO. In 2019, WHO declared gaming and betting addiction as a medical condition and we guess that Cell phone addiction is headed in that direction as well.

Most apps and websites, especially social media platforms are designed to have a feedback loop that boosts our dopamine levels with each post like or subscriber we get. This makes the users to spend a lot of time in these platforms and thus contribute to a person sticking to his/her phone all day long. Feedback loops are so well engineered that every year, there is something new that will hook up a person to a platform.

While the new decade will come with some new stuff, it looks like we will have to make sure these vices cross with us as we look for solutions. Many people will fall victim and many will make money but we simply don’t need all of them.