Did any futurologists from last century predict online harassment? All I remember is VR, full-body haptic interfaces, video-telephones that would translate as you talked…. It was all this kind of thing:

• “Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
• “The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
• “Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
• “the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
• “Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
• “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
• “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion”
• “Cables are disappearing.”
• “grammar checkers are now actually useful”
• “Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.”
• “The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software”
• “Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.”

All of these are from Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), specifically its list of predictions for 2009.

The most insightful-in-retrospect predictions I recall were from Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication (1993), but that book was about honest errors and confusion, not venom and spite. Surely someone speculated about the Net enabling new ways of making people’s lives miserable, but I’m having a hard time recalling examples which are really pertinent. I can’t help thinking that the downsides which people had in mind weren’t the ones we face now.