Subrena E Smith

Samsung USA hoped to capitalize on millions of eyeballs on last night’s Oscars by continuing a recent campaign for its growing family of Galaxy smartphones, phablets and tablets. Situated in the (very, very brogrammer) office of a fictional game developer, the newest ad showed the development team sitting down with famed Goth director Tim Burton to kick some ideas around for a new game, “Unicorn Apocalypse,” relying heavily on their personal Galaxy devices to do business. Underneath the strained hipster dialog and over-the-top madhouse millennial office scenery was a buttoned-down message: your employees can have it all, without compromising IT security. Here’s a replay:

Until this week, we’ve mainly had the initial show-and-tell promo, runway shots and some random viewings of street tests to learn more about Glass, Google’s hotly anticipated augmented reality spectacles (formerly known as Project Glass). The company is now opening up limited-time applications for Glass to the public—units awarded—for $1,500—to devotees with “bold,” “creative” ideas for use tweeted with the hashtag #ifihadglass—which it will bestow at special “pick-up events” in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

They are a pretty diverse group that spends most of the year frantically differentiating themselves from one another: forecasters, branding and creative agencies, analysts, consultants, bloggers, columnists, and technology gurus. But come December 1st they all share a particular affliction, a kind of creeping trend eschatology. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill foretelling of end-times (sorry, Mayans), but a kind of self-renewing compulsion to offer predictions about what will be in the coming calendar year. You’ve seen them, doubtless read them, and perhaps even felt a twitch to offer one or more up (Quartz certainly has)—the Top 10 Tech Trends for 2013, the Top 7 Toy Trends for 2013, the Top 5 Digital Media Trends for 2013, the Top 3 Eating Trends for 2013, and so the list goes on.

Thirty years ago, the word “disrupt” meant something you did in class, and in doing so you got sent home with a note featuring the word in red cursive ink. I know this from personal experience. It was also something that happened to electricity supplies, sex or church services. It was not a good thing.

On the Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the center of Paris, just off the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg and just a short stroll from the Sorbonne sits the main campus of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. Known now as Mines ParisTech, this venerable school was set up in 1783 by decree of Louis XVI as the center of education for the finest civil engineers in France. Nearly 230 years later, just an hour’s drive to the east at Disneyland Paris, some of the next generation of the world’s most innovative mining and industrial engineers convened this past weekend—but not for a seminar on metal stress or a lecture on geology. At this gathering, over 4,500 teens, pre-teens and some brave adults swapped server addresses and toted 8-bit pick axes around Minecon, the second annual gathering of hardcore players of Minecraft, possibly the hottest, yet one of the most low-tech games on the market today.

As the US presidential campaign of 2012 comes to a close, one indisputable fact is that it has been the strangest in living memory, probably since the late 19th century. As a political junkie since childhood, I’ve paid attention to many, going back to Nixon’s 1972 win for a second term. While Watergate, Lewinskygate and Chadgate given us some strange periods in presidential politics, the 2012 election has been one long, logic-bending parade of odd choices, odder personalities, and convention-defying new realities. As someone who writes carefully researched future scenarios for clients, my work is getting harder as reality catches up with near-future fiction. In short, you can’t make this stuff up.

Should Mitt Romney manage to collect 270 electoral votes in November and win the White House, he will have achieved something novel. Yes, he will be the first Mormon to win the presidency. He will also be the first corporate CEO to have successfully gained the most powerful office in the land. As an unabashedly data-driven, even data-fixated, man, his ascendancy to the post would also be a new high water mark for a new group rising to the top of US and probably global culture. Romney would be the first presidential representative from the Computational Class.