Everyone around me is equally affected by how people’s intentions change and what that says about their shared thought processes – the mutual future we are always building. Not understanding the speed with which people now recreate futures is why politicians are failing.

There is good harmless fun trend projecting and a couple of years back pure blogging listed a bunch of sites that do it well.

You can review those sites here. And we will review them all here soon.

My apoplectic response to apocalyptic trend spotting and critique goes something like this. Here is a dead easy futures portfolio.

1. The recession will last for a hundred years and you are all going to die. Pessimism sells well – in fact the author of Buyology Martin Lindstrom has shown the science of buying and selling is at one with fear. There is no shortage of futurology that tells folks it is all getting worse and will continue to do so until you listen to me.

2. The second version of futurology goes like this – Gen A (it could be x, y or z) is the ultimate slacker generation and determined to prove its slackiness is purer than the slackers who came before them (the mathematical formula is Gen = n [tusg]p where p = the present and tusg = the ultimate slacker generation.

3. The third category of doom apocalypse thinking is a combination of arguments that all say the condition of the world spells a sticky end soon. Climate, ascent of China, population growth, health care spending.

Behind each of these arguments lies a formulaic response which goes something like – if we get smarter, if we rely become more creative, adaptable, flexible, innovative (innovation is the new progress) then we can just overcome these problems.

When Chris and I started thinking abut metatrends one of the first things we noticed however is how well, how quickly and how imaginatively people are adapting to new circumstances. The brain and behaviour are the things we can change very quickly – curious fact, people continually talk about having attitudes and/or new ways of doing things in their DNA – my understanding is that genetic change takes about 40,000 years to work through in humans. Very little changes in our DNA – other than it becoming damaged or mutates.

It stands to a little bit of reason that change is therefore mostly social and interactive between people and the web is the place a lot of that interaction now takes place.

Here is a case in point During the recession the number of money saving blogs has been increasing as have their readers. This comes at a time when, the FT recently pointed out, old fashioned mutualism is dying out rapidly enough that Governments are trying to save it. American thrifts have had their day and European mutual societies got the high risk, high reward bug. Read all about it here.

By way of contrast we see a different mutualism growing. It is based around using the web as a source of mutual support and the primary weapon is not money but information.

Having said that, money is a focus of a new generation of peering systems, led of course by the ZOPA model. Even here in money, to date, information rules and includes the likes of wesabe and many more on that model.

In other words the adaptation of social DNA (the information repository for persistence) is well under way. We have written about it recently but only in private client papers. Hopefully we can approach the issue publicly soon. Understanding these trends and what they mean, before the opposition do is more important than the thought apocalypse.