Twenty years ago, we described the new millennium as one of FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt. The Turbulent Teens followed – a decade which we forecast would be defined by the rise of dissent, populism, disruption and climate denial. It opened with the Arab Spring and ended with the birth of a deadly new coronavirus in a Wuhan seafood market.
In the interim, we had the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, DIY European terrorism, LGBT+ rights visibility, the rise of the alt-right, the Rohingya massacre, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
It was also a decade of continuous technological disruption, with rising online commerce at the start, and the dominance of big data and ubiquitous global mega-systems such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Alibaba at its close. We used our phones to get connected and then lost online, wearables to monitor our health, the Cloud and 5G to make us more agile, and the gig economy to become more fluid. We also wrestled with advanced robotics, AI, machine learning, data privacy, mixed-reality interfaces and the right to be forgotten.
