The next big thing is the small things. All of them. People will start talking to strangers in big cities, instead of just looking at their phones. People will

The next big thing is the small things. All of them. People will start talking to strangers in big cities, instead of just looking at their phones. People will have conversations again. The phone will listen, and suggest information at various points, evidence for your arguments, statistics to back you up, come backs, jokes. Strangers will actually meet other strangers in real life, first, unmediated by any online vetting. There will be some app to enhance this process and that app won't violate or distort the inescapable risk and reward of actually saying "Hi" to someone you've never previously met. The next big thing is rich annotations of the things we do and places we go. Having sex? Your phone / wearable will suggest some useful music, idea or other helpful info. Visiting some new area? You'll get intelligence about interesting gatherings, art openings, deals, parties, happening right now nearby. At the supermarket, gazing at the cold items, which to buy? You'll get purchase suggestions and recipe ideas to inform your choice. The next big thing is people aren't "going to" the internet. It will come to them. People will get back to living normally, just normal lives enhanced with relevant timely information. The internet will become less overt and more covert. After a brief period of being a visible tangible thing in the world, it will recede back into the periphery, ever present, like a collective subconscious. It will be re-absorbed by the world it emerged from, enhancing that world. The actual "library index" internet ( and its interaction "searching" ) will become rapidly less and less important once the critical mass of software, algorithms, and wearable tech brings us this new golden age. The quiet internet. The silent internet. The internet of nothing. Like Seinfeld -- a show about nothing. The internet will be an internet about nothing. That's what it has been best for anyway, pictures of cats, trivia, distraction. Now it will be absorbed back into the culture it emerged from, subtly modulating the rhythms of daily life that it was used for anyway. The shouting internet, news, headlines, adverts, games, apps. The feed. The Consumer. All that will fade away, like the fading of a roaring train. Like the peace that returns to a quiet glade once the busload of snapping gabbling tourists has departed. We'll all get less gawkish and more introspective. Our interactions less "selfie and me me me" and more "you and me, here, now". And all these companies, with their fetishisms of "big company" are going to become, or be presented to us, as a whole lot smaller. The original idea of villages, and geocities, and usenet, and turn of the century blogs, and lots of tiny stuff, disconnected stuff, will come back. Zuckerberg will eat his words, it won't be about "connecting the world", it will be about "connecting a community", one community at a time. They'll spin it as a "return to their roots, after all, they started as a Harvard social network", and yet we'll all, old enough, will know that it's just spin. Google won't be distributing "all the world's information", it will be making sense of information in "your world." Company names will increasingly become less bombastic and more like single letter diminutives, the way hipsters sign their emails "j". Hackers will be obsessed with doing things that don't scale. No, really don't scale. Ever. Everyone's ambitions will become a lot smaller, or will seem to. We'll increasingly live in even more populated cities, and after a brief gaudy explosive renaissance of "ALL THE THINGS RIGHT NOW" we'll value our personal, quiet, disconnected, small world lives more and more, subtly enhanced. We'll delight in the tiny things, the meaningless, trivial interactions. Gen Z will look ancient with its selfie obsession, and prescient with its incognito mode and ephemera. The internet of nothing is coming. And not yet. People, cool people, will actually say "my internet." Internet will lose its "the". An internet of all the small things is the next big thing.