Have you ever been 'ahead of the curve' when it comes to realizing/predicting something?

Bought/mined bitcoin at $6.

Argued for a universal basic income in the 90s.

Quit facebook around 2010.

I imagine anyone in tech has these sort of tales. Of course it's not like I predicted these things sitting and reasoning alone in a room, Descarte-style. There are plenty of intelligent people out there telling us what's to come. As they say, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

At least in my circles, it seemed like I was the only person who foresaw the huge yet totally obvious potential for data tracking and invasion of privacy with a lot of tech in the past 15 years. No one could fathom why I was telling them not to post photos with me on Facebook when it was first getting popular, or why I didn't want to use an app just because it asked for a lot of permissions, or whatever other brand-new thing that I was 'too paranoid' about... well, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

Honestly it's depressing how many times.

I was cleaning out my papers the other day and found the folder I kept all my college essays in. I was in college in the early 2000s when "Globalization" was still the big watchword. I noticed in several papers in my international political economy class I speculated that continuing to globalize trade without robust social programs was going to lead to nativist blowback and right-wing resurgence in the developed democracies. My TA's notes said I didn't support the argument well enough and this was just vague speculation. LOOK WHOSE LAUGHING NOW! (Nobody. Because it fucking sucks).

In a political parties and elections class I wrote that rational decision making in a democratic society depended on media gatekeepers to moderate and structure public opinion. I asserted that the take-over of conservative thought by financially motivated media outlets such as Fox News and talk radio were going to poison the well of discourse and lead to asymmetric polarization of the electorate. I was right about that! I also thought the Internet would be an important countervailing force and by providing an open marketplace of ideas it would, finally, put a lot of the bullshit arguments put out by hack pundits to rest. Oh God how wrong I was there. In my defense, at the time the internet was the blogosphere and I figured there would still be a bit of an "expertise" filter. I didn't anticipate the clout-based social media we ended up with. I was an anti-Facebook luddite for much of college and didn't adopt it until very late for that reason.

I found a paper I wrote for an American National Security class too where I was spot on about China. I speculated that their high rate of non-performing loans would prompt them to crack down on their minority groups and saber-rattle to exert dominance within their sphere of influence, destabilizing the entire region. I figured they were stuck in a trap where they had to continue growing GDP by hook or by crook to keep ahead of the credit-bomb they were sitting on. I expected the bomb to go off by the late 2000s though, but it didn't really. They've still managed to keep that engine running, but I was right about them becoming more bellicose and authoritarian as keeping the train going keeps getting harder and requiring more blood sacrifice. (The bigger your GDP is, the harder it is to get the net incremental improvement). I was completely off about India though.

Interestingly, I was right and wrong about India and, in hindsight, realize I was holding to two ideas at the same time that were contradictory. On the one hand, I anticipated a strong increase in anti-Islamic sentiment within India as it developed. This was based on the fact that most Muslims were employed in fields that would necessarily have to be swept away by modernity (moneylending, small-time shopkeeping, landlordship) and that as education and literacy improved people would be unwilling to put up with India continuing to have different civil law codes based on peoples' religions. I worried that the social cleavages in the nation were putting the Muslim community in a position where India was going to need to run them over to modernize both economically and civically and they'd end up highly economically disadvantaged on the other side of the transition. I also worried that as more Indians learned how to read and study history there would be a sort of reckoning about colonial narratives. I was largely right on this! BUT somehow I also believed the BJP would evolve into being a moderate center-right party, and I was way wrong on this. I had a blind spot here where I figured that being in charge would naturally prompt the party to take on more responsibility and moderate itself in order to do a good job. But I didn't evaluate these two conclusions in light of each other. If anti-Islamism and historical revisionism was going to be a increasingly powerful political force, I should have recognized that this would have pulled an avowedly nationalist party like the BJP to become more hardline, not less.

Robert Shiller was ahead of the curve on the dot com crash and the housing crash, and he also helped me be ahead of the curve on those as well. That said, he is so far ahead of the curve on bonds being almost bubble like, that I am beginning to wonder if he (and I) will ever be proven right.

A co-worker was ahead of the curve on the brilliance of the first iPhone, and I ended up buying one about a month afterwards (is rampant consumerism "being ahead of the curve?)

@skybrian was ahead of the curve on COVID, that helped me be ahead of the curve as well, but only by a week or so.

The COVID pandemic. I had a lot of spare time, and was watching it not go away. After SARS and Ebola, I'd been watching it for three weeks when people I know went "hey, this isn't looking so good," six weeks when US states started shutting down. I didn't think it would be this bad, but I got to watch, in frustration, as people shrugged it off as a flu. I thought that, at first, then Chinese people started dying en masse, then the odd story about people being welded into quarantine (as a modified lock, it was removed when they found a better solution, IIRC). I wrote a short essay for one coworker on Facebook, citing all the current statistics for flu, and estimates for how this pandemic will normalize (I was drunk, and his loud ignorance pissed me off). Now, the US was late to get the memo as a whole, and we're in trouble.

More long term: Social media's risks to individuals and society. At risk of being another "That internet will suck out your brain" type, it seems to be the pattern. I refused to try to turn people on to Reddit after 2012, for example, because I saw what it did to me. I lost hours just browsing the default subs, and it changed me for the worse, or at least in ways I didn't feel comfortable with, and I was already combattive and reactionary (progressive, but tended to knee-jerk at stuff). Facebook is doing that to entire countries, and all social media is trending that way, at least for anything (reddit subs, or sites in general) with mass-market appeal. Jaron Lanier puts the behavior modification issues better than I ever could, but when I saw what he was saying, I realized I'd been seeing it, but couldn't put it together as a thing.

I feel like I'm one of the vanguard in the foreign intelligence threat that China represents, but that's hard to talk about without seeming crazy, and I've seen people accused of being racist for discussing this as strictly a foreign intelligence issue. It's not about the Chinese people, it is completely about the government. One example is the issue with TikTok. If we ban foreign (Non-Chinese) militaries from using it, we can prevent them from getting military-related data. But if civilians use it, you're giving a company access to a nations likes, dislikes, trends, and interests, and this company is strictly required to answer to its government. The folks at the CIA are wiping the slobber off their chins thinking of the information gold-mine that represents to foreign countries. That was a large part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and they were connected to intelligence operations which manipulated elections in several countries using this sort of data. Russia did it to the US, in swing states to convince people to vote Green Party (I voted for Stein, but never saw an ad, she had the best platform, and I voted strictly on that basis as a jilted Bernie Bro). Not many people seem to connect the dots, at least on the possibilities, and it makes me feel like a conspiracy nut, but I've been banging this drum to anybody who'll listen longer than the US government has been actually trying to do anything about it, at least in terms of a civilian data security perspective.

When playing a mock stock market game for a semester in school back in 2003, I put half of my allotted $50k USD in Netflix and the other half in Apple. The Apple stock would be worth $9.7 million today. The Netflix stock would be worth $6 million, at least according to this calculator.

I heavily contemplated buying Tesla stock when they went public back in 2011, but I was pretty young, unfamiliar with how to do it, and ended up being too intimidated by losing what little money I would've been barely comfortable putting up, so I didn't. If I had put the $1000 into it at the time, it'd be worth $65k now.

Bought the first gen iPhone, which I still have.

I was long AMD right before Ryzen launched. Would have made about 30x as of today if I had the money.

Computers being integrated into cars. Specifically, the idea that they’d be designed to interact with the driver and control more and more systems over time. Everyone was like “Have you SEEN a computer? Where would it fit??”.

This was like the early 2000s so micro controllers were already being integrated into cars. I was a kid at the time so honestly I think my peers can be excused for being behind the curve. But my teachers must have just been clueless at that age.

I thought the iPad would be a bust because it had no USB ports. Harry Potter? Just a silly fad for kids.

So take anything I say and do the exact opposite. There’s a great change you’ll succeed.