I been readin’ about how the new economy, and how the Internet has changed everything. It’s pretty interesting stuff.

For example, didja know time and space have collapsed? It’s true! Distance doesn’t matter anymore, and everything now happens all at once. I read about it online someplace. I went right out and told my neighbor about it in fact, and everyone at the office agreed it was true, too.

I’ve read dozens … no, hundreds of articles from other Recognized Industry Pundits (RIPs) who have an inside track on the future. These RIPs don’t always agree on things, but they all seem to have several characteristics in common:

1. They all present decades-old science fiction as brilliant new ideas. Wearable computers, technology-driven social isolation, and ubiquitous computing — it’s all old stuff.

2. They don’t worry about consistency. For example, spatial collapse — in other words, the irrelevance of location — is merrily juxtaposed with the need for geographic tailoring (to accommodate sociocultural differences) with no concern that the need for geographic tailoring means location does matter.

3. Their trends are ubiquitous. Our whole society, and often our whole planet is going to transform according to whatever trend is currently under scrutiny. We’re all going to be more isolated. We’re all going to work and shop from home. We’re all going to …

Well, we aren’t all going to. Regardless of the trend, social change, or economic force, this RIP knows only one fact about the future: It’s all going to be a lot messier and more unpredictable than what we currently imagine.

Consider the automobile. When the Model T first made it affordable to the average American, nobody predicted suburbs, commuting, and shopping malls, or their darker consequences: Traffic jams, deterioration of our core cities, and the growth of urban ghettos. Nobody foresaw any of it.

Has the Internet changed everything? Will it?

We talk as if the future happens in straight lines, but it doesn’t. The future is always messier and less predictable than RIPs expect. The lines of causation are as tangled as spaghetti.

The Internet is no exception. What it adds to our already complex economy is yet more choice. Since it takes none of our other choices away, there are only two certainties: Everything the pundits predict will happen somewhere; nothing they predict will happen everywhere. If there’s anything at all we’ve learned about human beings, it’s that they persist in being diverse, no matter how hard you try to line ’em up and move ’em out. No matter how big your data warehouse, they’ll still surprise you.

If the future is going to be messy, how does that affect your current e-business strategy? The answer: Hedge your bets. Target more than one niche. Offer more products. Use more channels, and cross-promote each channel on the other.

Have retail outlets? Add the Web. Are you a pure dot-com? Give your customers more than the Web. Remember when Sharper Image expanded from being a pure catalog operation to retail? Here’s a prediction: To compete with Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com will eventually have to open retail stores, assuming it survives. Why? The future is messy, that’s why.

The future is a Markov process … a random walk. Every step is random; every step starts where the last one stopped.

Which is why anyone who claims they can describe it in a 600 word essay is automatically wrong.