Coronavirus covid-19, war in Ukraine, inflation… What if all of this had been predicted? In any case, this is what the French men and women most familiar with the foreign press might think: in 1997, the American magazine Wired published a collection of catastrophic predictions likely to put an end to the (then) prosperity that knew all or part of the world. Some of the scenarios considered are surprising in their… degree of precision. The English fact-checking site Snopes (formerly known as Urban Legends Reference Pages) returned to the question in November 2021… and does not hesitate to speak of a particularly lucid journalistic work.
All in all, the platform specifies, 10 scenarios were considered by journalists Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, who published their work in the July 1997 issue (entitled The Long Boom). A number of them now seem to have come true. More information about this in our slideshow, which you will find at the end of this article.
Not all of the predictions made by Wired journalists have turned out to be catastrophic – even though some might try to put some of the benefits mentioned into perspective. And for good reason ! They also envisage two important trends: the acceleration of technical developments, particularly related to the Internet, for example, as well as the increase in global economic cooperation. In other words… Globalization.
