Happy New Year, everybody!…

…Right? It is going to be a happy new year, right? Regime change operations in Iran and nuclear button talk in North Korea and biometric banking and a million other concerns beside, it is going to be a happy new year, isn’t it?

You see, it’s just that the last article I read in 2017 was this horrifying treatise on “Everything Amazon’s Alexa learned to do in 2017” and it just seemed so ridiculously à propos to my year-end editorial on technocracy that it was almost hard to get excited for the dawning of 2018.

I mean, really. Everything Alexa “learned to do” in 2017. Learned to do. As if it’s a person. A perfect stranger that millions of people are happily inviting into their homes to share in their most private and intimate moments, even though they are fully aware (and fully expect) that the infernal contraption will be sending all that data off to Amazon to be analyzed (and to the NSA to be data mined, of course). It’s infuriating.

So I think we could all do with a little levity to begin the year, right? I know I can. And what better way to start things off than by skewering all the ridiculous new year prediction lists that are no doubt clogging your news feed right now (and having a little fun while we’re at it)?

So, without further ado, I present five ridiculous new year predictions that I guarantee will not actually happen this year!

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