I’ve been inspired by Glenn Beck’s hyped-up doomsday scenarios on the Fox News Channel — like how the U.S. could resemble a third-world country following Obama’s presidency.

If there are two things that bring web traffic and mainstream popularity, it’s top-10 lists and predictions. Without just jumping on the bandwagon, here are my 10 predictions for the next decade. In most cases, this doubles as a wish list.

1. Print media is dead, or an absolute zombie. Are you reading this in the paper? Get a laptop, and get distracted by e-mail, instant messages and Perez Hilton. If anything in this column sounds incorrect, Google it. The fact that you’re more profitable for The State Press as a print reader is no excuse.

2. A mainstream reaction appears against today’s get-laid-get-money mantra in popular music. Not that I necessarily think it’s a bad thing that almost every big-name rapper or band can name the driving forces behind human nature, but I’m eventually going to need something different to listen to. Nihilism, maybe?

3. Either The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal admits they were wrong about President Obama’s policies. Read their staff editorials, and you’re reading about two different Americas. Someone better admit they screwed up, or I refuse to take at least one of these editorial boards seriously.

4. Vehicle blind spots are laughably obsolete. It’s already a joke that I have to turn my head sometimes to change lanes.

5. Prediction markets are popular and common. A prediction market involves “intelligent” gambling on the probability of future occurrences, creating horse-racing-like odds for the likelihood of events like disease outbreaks, economic fluctuations and political races. The gamblers are financially motivated to be right and use a wide range of the best available information, and thus produce astonishingly accurate, market-driven probabilities. Search this headline: “When enough people take a stake in the future, it’s like a crystal ball.”

6. Medicinal marijuana is still largely illegal in the U.S. Ideological convictions trump science!

7. Michael Crow is widely considered a ground-breaking innovator for the evolution of the American university model.

8. All Internet content is aggregated on one platform. When I’m online, I’ll have a Facebook-esque list of notifications about every new development pertaining to my e-mail, Blackboard, LinkedIn, Twitter and every other site I use — like an RSS feed.

9. America’s economy and cultural influence abroad suffers significantly from the impossibility of stopping the piracy of music and movies.

10. No band ever repeats Limp Bizkit’s massive waste of potential. I think these guys had talent, but their lyrics and music videos are impossible to take seriously. Can this never happen again, please?
(The flop is probably too big to repeat.) I still believe that with a few minor adjustments, like rewriting the words to every one of their songs, Limp Bizkit could be decent.

By all means take this list with a grain/mound of salt. As a chairman of IBM once said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Just kidding, that oft-cited quote is either made up or wildly misleading. Good thing we have Google, or this stuff can spread.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.