Nu Year. Nu Idea.

It's January again and, with the relentless joy of Christmas fast receding, it's time for a new year. I can tell this because the papers are literally littered with articles predicting what's going to happen in this new one - apparently it's called 2009 and we wont be able to afford stuff. That's right, every Tom, Dick and Sally (lets not be sexist) has decided to get their two pennies worth, and are ramming their predictions down our throats: '2009. The Predictions', '2009 - The Ones to Watch', 'Top Tips for 2009'. If you don't believe me, go check out any technology blog. There’s a staggering 187% chance that it will contain one of these buzz words:

* web 2.0 * cloud computing * iphone * iphone * or the iphone * twitter * touch screen technology * geolocation * mobile * content aggregation * consuming content * 3G Dongles * epic fail (not really a buzz word but still really annoying) * yawning *

Look at this boring bag of boring, he's the worse offender: Technology Predictions 2009

Luckily though, for us, there are some genuinely awesome commentators out there who aren't so vain as to make predictions and tally them up at the end of the year, just so they can pretend it's some kind of rational for how long their journalistic cocks are. "Oh yeah I saw it coming ages ago." Bollocks - you saw it at CES.

If we really want to play the guessing game there is, possibly, no better man than Nassim Nicholas Taleb (he's one of the genuinely awesome commentators). Taleb is a master of the Black Swan. Long story short, he proposes that the important stuff, the stuff that shifts paradigms on a monumental scale, we never see coming - we can't predict it! It's a so called 'Black Swan'. Take the world wide interweb: no one saw it coming. Before we know it, it's causing long tails and stock market bubbles and social change and facebook and on demand content and content aggregation and viral marketing and tweets and blimey - it's a beautifully wild and unstoppable beast.

Taleb goes on to explain (with the help of those clever philosopher type people) why we think we understand the world but don't, why we have the audacity to think that we are clever enough to predict the future, why with hindsight and retrospect we create narratives to make our stupid little brains understand stuff in a context that makes apparent sense, why we paint a flawed picture of cause and effect and call it history, why we are naively over confident about the validity of our arguments. And, why this is extremely dangerous.

Taleb sees the modern world as a chaotic, random and uncertain place, built on an unstable, abstract, and naive society, where we have much less control than we think we do; breezing from one day to the next with our heads in the metaphorical clouds, without realising that the metaphorical pavement is tantalizingly close to metaphorically collapsing - literally taking you with it.

But, before you start pooing your pants, it might just be ok...perhaps.

First, ignore the Guardian, there's a 'nu skool' of thought appearing on the shelves: an odd blend of economics, philosophy, psychology, evolutionary and computational science. Secondly, take a walk through Waterstones, and you will see what I mean: Dawkins, Blackmore, Pinker, Surowiecki, Buchanan, Gladwell, Harford, and Taleb have been publishing a carefully arranged collection of words, in "book" things, which might just save the whole ruddy world, without us ever realising it.

With the apparent chaos raining down on us, the nu skool are doing something a bit more fundamental than predicting the next iPhone update: they are beginning to explain the world as it really might be, by unlocking our secret desires. They have the insight to see past the shoddy predictions, the buzzwords, the clever marketing, the imitation, the hurding, the inductive reasoning, and the confirmation biases, to see us for what we really are: social atoms jostling in a fight for evolutionary survival.

Taleb and co are beginning to explain why evolution has decided that the interweb should provail, why people keep bloody saying "epic fail", why we bother collaborating to create online encyclopedias, why people stand outside the O2 shop for hours to buy an iPhone, why viral advertising works on you, why chasing the expert is a mistake, why you should listen to those slumbering suspicions eating away at you, and why you are addicted to facebook.

Below Taleb’s chaos, somewhere, is a beautifully constructed design, and the nu skool are are slowly starting to peal back the layers to reveal that the modern world actually works with far more clockworkery than we dare to comprehend. And, although this apprent lack of autonomy is a bit too close for most peoples comfort, Taleb et al. might just have the insight to tip the digital zeitgeist upside down and tell it off, whilst furiously shaking all of the iPhones out of its pockets.