At a rummage sale, I picked up a book by cartoonist Scott Adams called The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century published in 1997. I thought I might find a clever prediction about the future, which we can now verify from the standpoint of 2026.
The text of the book is mostly dumb. I get the impression that Scott Adams was making easy money with a guaranteed humor book contract. I don’t recommend the book to anyone.
HOWEVER, with my paper copy I kept skimming ahead to see if any of his predictions about the future were impressive. Finally, on page 200 I found something.
Recall, the internet only became publicly available in the early 90’s. Respectable newspapers might have started to lose out to cable news in the mid-90’s. Blogs did not start until after Adams’ book was published. Social media proper (marked by the launch of Facebook) started in 2004. (Let millennials quietly walk away from Xanga journals and pretend that never happened.) So, my interest in this passage hinges on the fact that this book has a publication date of 1997.
The following is copied from Adams’ humor book.
I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they’ll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren’t “news” in the traditional sense.
This will limit the reporting to a few stories per year about famous people who are killing other famous people. And if there are not enough of those stories to sell advertising slots, the media will…
Prediction 51: In the future, the media will k*** famous people to generate news that people will care about.
The end of traditional news outlets will not limit people’s access to information. Thanks to the ubiquity of video cameras and the Internet, every citizen will be a reporter. If something happens in your neighborhood, you’ll tape it, stick it on the Internet with your own commentary and make it available to the world… The weather reports will be computer-generated and constantly available by computer, pager, voice-mail… All news gathering will be disaggregated.
Prediction 52: In the future, everyone will be a news reporter.
People will have access to software that constantly combs the internet for “small” news that is relevant to them.
…
your software will be able to do a sort of “credibility credit check” on any person who posts information to the Internet… This won’t be foolproof, but nothing is.
This new model depends on people being willing to take the time to put information on the Net without the benefits of payment. Why will people do that? They will do it because that’s our most basic human nature: People like to talk more than they like to listen.
Joy again: Not bad as predictions go. Notice the quaint terminology, such as “tape it” and pagers. (Pagers use radio networks instead of cell towers.) Attention is scarce, and writing is not (even pre-LLM). Adams predicted what I call poastmodernism.
Economist Writing Every Day 