It’s from The Onion, so it’s funny.

It’s also probably the most radical vision of the future you’ll see today (if you read this today and you haven’t seen it before – I have no idea how long it’s been out there.)

From today’s Big Think and The Razor’s Edge between Nobility and Crime: Who is Julian Assange?

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh once put it like this: “Ask the American public if they want an FBI wiretap and they’ll say, ‘no.’ If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone that helps the FBI find their missing child they’ll say, ‘Yes.’” Just make us safe. Just assure us our children will be safe. Just tell us what we need to know. Let the rest be silence.

Imagine what it’ll be like when the police not only have to sift through your boring Social Media sillage but that of your, erm, chickens too:

Today Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans appeared on the company’s netcast, Talk2Cisco, to answer questions about the next 50 years and beyond via email and Twitter. Turns out one of the world’s biggest technology companies is betting the Internet of Things is going to be big. . .

Evans said humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined, although a lot of it is useless – comparable to saving all 2,000 photos from your weekend trip to the beach.

It doesn’t have to be all about police work. Adam Greenfield imagines the world of the read/write city, where we go beyond the civic participation experiments of things like FixMyStreet and hook up bus stops and lampposts to Facebook:

But what if we took a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities.

Then we can begin to treat the things we encounter in urban environments as system resources, rather than a mute collection of disarticulated buildings, vehicles, sewers and sidewalks. One prospect that seems fairly straightforward is letting these resources report on their own status. Information about failures would propagate not merely to other objects on the network but reach you and me as well, in terms we can relate to, via the provisions we’ve made for issue-tracking.

Let’s hear from the lampposts. . .

I found The Onion video via Sean Garrett’s Posterous. // The news screengrab is from this interesting blog on media psychology.

The Onion video reminds me of that more-amusing-than-funny montage of the CSI Effect in action, Let’s Enhance:

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