Another year, another arbitrary division of time around which to discuss what’s been hot, what’s going to get hotter and what technology is going to be next.

You know what cool new things I’d like to see in 2013?

None.

That’s right, I’d like 2013 to be a year of no change whatsoever.

This 2012 round-up video from the Verge goes through the usual end-of-year trend analysis for nine minutes, but on the final frame the editor Joshua Topolsky says

“Now that we know we’re going to live with technology, I think it’s going to be a year of us figuring out how we’re going to live with technology”

This statement would have been equally valid last year, and possibly 100 years ago. However, the idea of adjustment to change is a lot more interesting to me than whether social commerce will [continue to] be big [again].

It’s my firm belief that the Web has evolved too fast for society as a whole to adjust to it. Perhaps you think I’m being dramatic, but to restrict myself to just one example – The success of phishing relies on the combination of ignorance and complacency that you’ll find in the majority of Web users (humans) and that includes perfectly intelligent people of all ages. These conditions are not due to people being stupid or ‘non-technical’ – they are a product of the speed at which the Web exploded. We simply didn’t have enough time to learn to live with it before we had no choice. The same now goes for innovations within the Web, such as Facebook.

The thing is we can’t do this “figuring out” while the thing’s moving. Progress on the Web is relentless. It waits only for a critical mass to get comfortable enough before it marches on to the next thing. Not everybody can keep up and I don’t just mean  the late adopters, I also mean government and the law and the media and all that important stuff that makes the world go around.

Perhaps I’m getting old or perhaps I’m just jaded, but I want 2013 to be the year when nothing happened and everything just stayed the same so everyone could catch up.

Obviously this is total fiction, but please, I really don’t want to see another new photo sharing app before 2014!