Bangkok & the Future

I’ll be checking out for a few weeks while traveling in Asia (w00t!). I may Twitter occasionally but will likely do no blogging (going analog - Moleskin). When I return in July I’ll be working with the Institute for the Future as a Visiting Researcher. In this capacity I’ll be contributing to their 2009 Technology Horizons Research Program. More info on that to come but suffice it to say I am extremely stoked on this development. A second w00t!

Best to all!

Chris

The Revolution is Being Twittered - Tehran is Connected

Image by .faramarz.

“The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.” So opens the #iranelection cyber war guide for beginners just posted today and widely distributed across the web through Twitter. The guide continues with precise information about what behaviors and syntaxes on Twitter are now being watched by the Iranian security apparatus; which hashtags are legitimate and which are state honey pots used to identify and block IP’s; how to pass new open proxies to those within the Tehranian resistance; and smart guidelines for those considering launching Denial of Service attacks on State websites. The author has compiled a brief & succinct guidebook to help global non-Iranians better help those in Iran who are trying to ensure that these events are not hidden from the eyes of the world.

The guide closes with: “Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about.” To me, this is about the future of all people.

As Clay Shirky noted, the events in Tehran mark a hugely important historic moment. Under an old theocratic and belligerent rulership, the modernist progressives from Iran’s urban center, Tehran, are using mobile communications and social networks to bypass the State and reach out to the world. Ahmadi’s swiftly-imposed net blackout has failed against the ingenuity of tech-enabled university students and the eagerness of sympathetic geeks across the world to help fight The Man (in this case, the authoritarian and repressive regime of the Ayatollah, the Guardian Council, and President Ahmadi-nejad). This marks a large state change in global power dynamics. In an age moving rapidly towards ubiquitous networked mobile computing, transparency and representation are the emerging foundations of civilization, simultaneously empowering the principles of Democracy while de-legitimizing the very notion of the State.

Perhaps even more surprising is the critical role of Twitter as the de facto global, real-time, open communication and collaboration channel. Using SMS, every mobile phone user on the planet has the ability to message Twitter and reach out to a global network. Twitter’s architecture guarantees an exponential distribution of information, and their lack of public shareholders allows them to take a more humanitarian posture. Protesters in Tehran were getting messages to hi-value nodes like Stephen Fry, John Perry Barlow, and William Gibson who then retweet the message to hundreds of thousands of their followers. By Monday #iranelection was the #1 trending term across Twitter and has stayed there since. Twitter is the primary channel for information coming in and out of Tehran regarding the contested election of it’s president - in a critical middle eastern Islamic nation, oil-rich with an aggressive posture towards the US and it’s allies, and who is poised on the brink of becoming a fully nuclear state. The out-of-left-field social networking phenomena has been so valuable to the goals of US interests in Iran that the U.S. State Department requested that Twitter postpone it’s scheduled service downtime.

The regime is now evicting reporters from Iran. The challenger, Moussavi, is likely not much different from Ahmadi-nejad. Both are pre-approved by the Ayatollah and Guardian Council. The pro-Moussavi population wants to see voting irregularities investigated and their “moderate” candidate approved as president. Tehran’s tech-savvy are redefining the fundamental relationship between people and governments. All power structures should be watching the events in Tehran and across the web. The people are getting smarter and bolder.

This is the age of empowered collectives striding across a globalized, hyper-connected world. In a virtualized information space, borders are less meaningful and countries are loose contextual buckets through which people interact. The swift assistance provided by western techies is not really about the US helping Iran, it’s about good, aspirational people trying to help other good, aspirational people. The playing field is leveling as humanity learns more and more about itself, overcoming fear and stereotypes and ignorance simply by communicating more effectively.

There will be a reaction as states work to retain power, upping their game to adapt to the new tech. And there will be darker consequences of these new tool as the All-Seeing Digital Eye rises over the land. We struggle now to free information but the next big struggle may be to secure it. All coins have two sides and all technologies will be bent to human will. Hopefully we’re all getting a little bit better at cooperating with each new day.

***This was written in a bit of a rush before I jet. Here are a couple more links:
Here’s a list of good info links.
Lyn Jeffery of IFTF writes Field Notes from the Iran Twitter Stream.
SF Gate article: SF Techie Stir Iranian Protests.
Jamais Cascio: The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution.
And Hillary Clinton Defends Twitter Efforts for Iran.

Blipvert Twitter Bursts on Democracy, Tehran, and the Technological Leveling

I’ve been tweeting a lot more than writing lately. Here are my recent tweets on the Tehran situation, in order of posting:

- Iran SMS networks “mysteriously” fail right before elections http://bit.ly/nsjm3 (via @boingboing)
- “You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control people any longer.” (Iran & Twitter) http://tinyurl.com/kwmh7g (via @mpesce)
- Tech-enabled urbanites push for change as country folk vote for stasis, even reversion. collaborative networks win over tine
- Coordination of Tehran tech-savvy w/ international openinfo/progressive nodes shows leveling of global playing field, decline of statehood.
- Tehran: Ayatollah backs Ahmadi, police take Tehran University to shut down dissident comm nets. Power fears Change. Old fears New.
- University of Tehran held literary session on Saturday reviewing works by Woody Allen. http://bit.ly/Et7fa [Comedy, genius trumps religion.]
- @HiggsBoson23 Totally. The US must have people on the ground in Tehran working to open the comm channels.
- RT @robinsloan: #iranelection Giant photos. You are going to lose your mind: http://is.gd/12G72 [Tehran approaches civil war]
- Incredible to see instantaneous networking around control systems. No oppressor can hide their actions. Tehran: the future of Democracy.
- The events in Tehran are reinforcing the global identity of humanity in a way that directly challenges all oppressive regimes.
- What fascinates me most about Tehran is the empowerment of the tech-enabled to route around the State and reach across the globe.
- To me, the new democracy: granular representation; modernists using tech to challenge traditionalists; collectives taking power from states.
- No surprise that US elements might be encouraging/engineering the scene in Tehran. Via @NickHate: WSWS on NYT & Iran: http://bit.ly/H1s12
- Note: all Iranian candidates are pre-approved by the Ayatollah & Guardian Council. Resolution in favor of Moussavi will not bring freedom.
- Value lies in watching how empowerment of progressive voices impacts the stategies of rulership employed by the Iranian theocracy.
- Is Iranian dismissal of western media the prelude to a brutal smackdown on protests? Def not a sign of sudden openness…
- RT @m1k3y @DavidForbes: The State Department asked Twitter not to shut down yesterday. http://bit.ly/QQoyj #iranelection #awesomeabout
- RT @TEDchris: Here’s Clay Shirky on the incredible role Twitter has played in #iranelection. “This is the big one” http://on.ted.com/zabout
- “Mousavi is no liberal reformer. But the principle of freedom of speech and fair elections and the desire for reform trump that.” @cshirky
- What you should know about the Iranian Cyberwar: http://bit.ly/2b2NL (via @GreatDismal) [History in the making.]

Notes From Metaverse University 2009 - The State of Virtual Worlds

I attended the Friday session of Metaverse University 2009 at Stanford last week. Here are some of my observations:

Themes: interoperability, open source, simulations, visualizations, breaking down the walls, and being stuck with Second Life. Little emphasis on chat and social networking, per se. Much more emphasis on architectures & component solutions.

Trends from Virtual Worlds Roadmap: simulation & training, health care, augmented tourism, mixed-reality museums, live sporting events in VW’s, virtual meetings.

Overview:
While the hype over virtual worlds has faded, many serious researchers continue to do fascinating work in the territory. Monetization of a good VW strategy is still needed but this goal seems to have receded into the future for many of the speakers, as well as many of the enterprise-scale companies investigating these spaces who seem less interested in making money (either through direct development and monetization or by riding the public hypetrain) and more interested in gaining efficiencies and trimming overhead (teleconferencing, remote collaboration).

Google (O3D), Intel (Cable Beach), Sun Microsystems (Project Wonderland), Samsung (Virtual Worlds Roadmap), and Nokia (supporting REalXtend) were all present, as well as many Stanford researchers, including the folks building Sirikata. Many are working to extend the OpenSim fork of the Second Life platform. None of them seem to be working towards direct productization (though Google wants O3D to be the in-browser standard for 3D content) but each were working to advance the platform and explore future possibilities.

With monetization off the table and money drying up, researchers are moving to embrace open source solutions (OpenSim, ScienceSim, Ogre3D) and pushing for open standards (OpenId, OAuth, XMPP) and flexible API’s. Almost everyone mentioned a desire to move away from the proprietary walled-garden approach towards an integrative one that looks to the success of social network strategies. While celebrating open source development of Second Life forks, almost everyone bemoaned being stuck on the platform, often underscoring the feeling with a groan that “there’s nothing else”.

Authoring was rarely addressed with content instead being re-purposed from upstream solutions, eg using 3DSMax & Maya content to build world content. Collada was uniformly mentioned as the exchange format. Most developers still want to shoehorn other modalities (eg PowerPoint, web browsing, document collab, etc) into the VW space. Some examples inadvertantly showed the clunkiness of current solutions. I asked why a technology like PowerPoint is any better in 3D than in 2D, eliciting a long pause from the presenter. There’s still a lot of ambition on the part of developers but not always a ton of common sense.

However, IBM’s manager of service design and service systems research, Susan Stucky, gave me the most reasonable answer I’ve heard yet about why it’s important to move 2D modalities into 3D. She said that for collaborative telepresence it was very helpful to have access to everything you would normally have access to in a meeting. Speaking with her at the break, she told me how IBM has found that the greatest use of their Second Life investment has come from the ability to bring employees and clients from around the world together into a collaborative space. They’ve held conferences, run meetings, and explored simulations of project management strategies. For her, the ROI was gained by telepresence & simulations.

And for me, I had a breakthrough speaking with Susan. One of the most compelling yet least-obvious values of collaboration in virtual worlds is the sense of embodiment conveyed by the presence of the avatar. Identity, social cohesion, team building, and friendship arise more naturally when those engaged are perceived as physically present. Self-awareness and the projection of self onto others is still quite bound to our physical bodies. Perhaps combining the embodiment of avatars with in-world access to knowledge & productivity tools represents a more effective modality for non-local collaboration. I’m not sure how this compares to video teleconferencing but I feel there’s a lot of depth to be explored in how virtual embodiment reinforces social cohesion & collaboration (attn: PhD candidates).

Other notables: Henry Lowood (Stanford Curator of History of Science, Media, & Genetics) speaking on The Ultimate Archive: building virtual museums of virtual world platforms inside virtual worlds (eg a virtual museum with a room that lets you play the first Doom level as it was originally). He noted both “perfect capture” (all the data can be archived) and “perfect loss” (experiences, emotions, and deleted content cannot be captured) in VW archiving. Sheldon Brown (Center for Research in Computing in the Arts, UCSD) showed his mind-bending work Scalable City and called for procedurally deriving world assets and behaviorally deriving world experiences.

Analysis:
Virtual Worlds have lost funding and are presently in the Valley of Hype. Effective monetization strategies have yet to reveal themselves. However, there is value to the enterprise in leveraging virtual worlds for telepresence and collaboration, simulation & training. The VW community is moving the R&D towards openness: open source components, open standards, interoperability, and engaging with the platforms and principles of social networks to enhance connectivity and move away from the Walled Garden. The most interesting work with virtual worlds continues to be in the deeper realms of behavior, psychology, telepresence, and simulations. Graphically, everyone is apparently stuck in Second Life. A smart, well-funded private investor would build a platform with the competitive graphics capabilities (surface mesh, brep, kinematics, HLSL, etc), a powerful and scalable object model that can push to XML/RDF/RSS, a powerful simulation engine with an expressive visualization/analytics front-end, a REST/JSON API capable of talking to agents, tools, and other VW’s (as well as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SMS, Playstation Network, XBox Network, etc), integrate ActiveX embedding of 2D tools (Office apps, browsers, etc), enable a content marketplace built around highly expressive and personalizable avatars and fetish objects, and cultivate a 3rd part service ecosystem supporting all of the above.

Is this so hard? ;)

Companies to Watch: IBM & SAP

In a time of monumental change it’s important to look at how the big player’s are adapting. Their moves are typically the most heavily researched and financed attempts at divining the underlying currents and capitalizing on the shifting technological marketplace. It’s especially interesting when conservative tech stalwarts like IBM & SAP suddenly start looking cool.

Both IBM & SAP are moving quickly into 3 of the most powerful trends in computing, each of which are driven by the enormous amounts of data being captured across all domains: business intelligence & modeling, stream computing, and sustainable systems analysis.

IBM’s new initiative A Smarter Planet states succinctly, “the planet will be instrumented, interconnected, intelligent.” This is a powerful statement from one of the largest and most technologically advanced companies in the world. They’re not just talking about business. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano speaks to the really large-scale planetary challenges in creating smart infrastructures for energy, water, transport, and data.

A key component is the recently-announced System S project for supporting so-called Stream Computing.

System S is designed to perform real-time analytics using high-throughput data streams… to host applications that turn heterogeneous data streams into actionable intelligence… System S applications are able to take unstructured raw data and process it in real time.

“This is about what’s going to happen,” explains [director of high performance stream computing at IBM] Nagui Halim. “The thesis is that there are many signals that foreshadow what will occur if we have a system that is smart enough to pick them up and understand them. We tend to think it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen; and in many cases it is. But in other cases there is a lot of antecedent information in the environment that strongly indicates what’s likely to be occurring in the future.”

With enough data you can start to create connections and patterns. With patterns you can derive meaning and ultimately be better enabled to make more accurate predictions. Since humans aren’t very well-adapted to processing large data sets, we build tools to handle the heavy lifting. Whether Wall Street indexes, ERP scenarios, government accounting, energy grid analysis, or dynamic climate models, serious hardware & software is required to process operational data into meaningful determinations and prescriptions.

SAP has introduced the Clear New World initiative built on their Business Objects service architecture. Again, the notion is that businesses, enterprises, and even governments can run more efficiently when there is a free-flow of data and a suite of integrated services to crunch and render the info into meaningful contexts.

It’s time to build greater visibility, transparency, and accountability into the way your organization works. Because being clear allows timely and relevant information to be available when and where it is needed. Clarity demonstrates that your company is willing and able to stay accountable to key stakeholders. Clarity helps call out inefficiencies, reveal your best customers, create credible sustainability, and give your business the flexibility needed to anticipate and respond to a complex, ever-changing, global environment.

[See James Governor's recent post for more on how SAP & IBM are tackling enterprise sustainability.]

Note the statements about accountability to stakeholders & creating credible sustainability. Clear data & clear reporting. Now consider the latest announcement about SAP for Public Sector “to support the management and reporting of economic stimulus funds”. As a plugin to their Business Objects suite, this utility drafts on the trends towards open accountability and government transparency, often termed Gov 2.0, to provide support for determining just how stimulus money is being spent.

Both IBM and SAP have the power to execute effectively on these strategies, though it remains to be seen how enterprise spending will move to implement these services or if the companies will offer flexible licensing to LLC’s working on the really challenging non-profit global issues. Likewise, SAP has suffered usability problems for years and their core object architecture is old and slow. They will need more than just branding and plugins to make a more transparent world.

Finally, it’s worth noting the branding for these projects. “A Smarter Planet” is a global posture indicating agency and identity on a planetary scale. This hints at the real deep trend across the human species towards a global sense of purpose and strategy. “Clear New World” acknowledges both the occlusions under which human endeavor has marched thus far and the great clarity of visibility we’re now gaining across all domains & enterprises, while admitting that indeed everything is changing and we are moving into a New World. The technology is stepping forward to help us more effectively manage the present and navigate into the unknown future. But of course like all foresight, it remains to be seen whether individuals will choose to act appropriately with the knowledge they come to possess…

Las Vegas Tweet Round-Up

I stayed in Las Vegas for a few nights this week to see Jane’s Addiction at The Pearl. A large part of me loathes much of what Vegas is (and by “Vegas” I’m mainly referring to The Strip and its satellites - no offense to the folks who live in the city) yet I can’t help but be mesmerized and amazed at the sheer scale of fantasy on sale there in the wasteland of the Nevada high desert. It is by all accounts an impossible mirage, timeless and ephemeral, drawing in the seekers, fleecing them, and sending them back home like it never existed. Inevitably, it seems it will fall back into the desert as Lake Meade dries up and the drought deepens, leaving behind skeletons of a once mighty empire. Caesar’s Palace may retain it’s name but Nero is the ruler of today’s Vegas.

Anyway, here are my tweets from the trip, in chronological order:

- Heading off to Sin City for glittering nights & saltine days before it all dries up & blows away. #NIN/JA2009 New Aeon Rat Pack 8:55 AM May 17th
- Have successfully played my role as cattle/combatant/customer in SanJoseAirport security theater. Now matriculated to cargo. 10:22 AM May 17th
- Tarmac running to the jetwash mirage of Las Vegas. 12:06 PM May 17th
- Vegas directs its formidable will at constantly maintaining the illusion of plenty. Super Size everything while the desert bides its time… 4:41 PM May 17th
- Vegas, in a nutshell: http://twitpic.com/5ew00 10:21 PM May 17th
- everything about this city is designed to separate me from my money. call me the mark. 12:29 AM May 18th
- Vegas commodifies dreams and the easy score, selling back crumbs at criminal markups, preying on mammon & ruin. 12:02 PM May 18th
- A sign of my age: hoping to trade my #NIN/JA floor tickets for seats. 1:13 PM May 18th
- Little fluffy clouds march relentlessly across the ancient Nevada desert as spacemen floating high above tweet us thermospheric thoughts. 1:45 PM May 18th
- As growth stalls, Vegas withdraws into the strip to focus on sustaining the mirage. The illusion thrives at the expense of the sprawl. 2:35 PM May 18th
- Recent NPR story spoke of tracts of abandoned LV tenaments haunted by erratic chirpings: the sound of fire detectors with dying batteries. 2:40 PM May 18th
- About 2M people inhabit Las Vegas. Nellis AFB brought federal stimulus; the mob & Howard Hughes built The Strip. 5:19 PM May 18th
- Deserts are like seas, vast & deep. In this The Strip is a glowing lure above the gaping maw of a dark desert angler. 5:25 PM May 18th
- You think you’re about to score a nice meal but really you are the prey about to feed something much larger. 5:26 PM May 18th
- got tix sorted. now heading to The Pearl for NIN/JA with @jingleyfish & friends. w00t! 7:28 PM May 18th
- Goddamn i love Jane’s Addiction 12:31 AM May 19th
- crawling the vegas strip with the good dr 1:17 AM May 19th
- new dreams waking with the sun on the fiery vegas strip, raging towards another night 5:49 AM May 19th
- ack. marinating in ambient cigarette smoke on the casino floor. 4:31 PM May 19th
- your trowelled-on cake facade masks the withering age of dessicated bones, too long standing on sore heels to hawk & bark a distant fantasy 4:37 PM May 19th
- Ruminating w/ @jingleyfish about the resource usage profile of the Vegas strip. How much does this desert fantasy consume? Is it a threat? 5:52 PM May 19th
- To paraphrase the bubbling hatery, is Vegas a “cankar needing to be excised”? Carbon tax would likely crush phallic wavings of Wynn et al. 5:56 PM May 19th
- sleepless pineal cascade, flush with endogenous indole, wondering if im really still stuck in this airport 7:27 PM May 19th
- on the ground rolling back to santa cruz. crowd-induced stabby mysanthropy subsiding. actual sleep nigh iminent. 10:24 PM May 19th

Modeling & Superstructing

A core human competency is the capacity to model outcomes. This predictive ability has contributed to our successful growth as a species and provided the stage from which we extrude our technologies. We observe our world, log our experiences, and use this information to envision & plan our future possibilities. In the rush into tomorrow we’ve deputized machines to assist in our scenario modeling as our plans grow ever greater in scope.

Today we have tremendous amounts of data available about any system we wish to model. Drive platters are bulging into the terabytes just to store all of the information gathered by sensors, services, and empowered humans. Whether we study business networks, financial models, or natural systems, our awareness of their complexity has grown exponentially. Things are far wider and more interconnected than we could have imagined even 20 years ago.

All systems are sets of nodes with properties & variables that govern their behavior, coupled together by relational rules governing their interaction. The more complex a system, the more unique nodes and the more interconnections between nodes. Given the human constraint of being able to hold only 6 or 7 unique objects in mind at any given time it’s clear that we’re overwhelmed by even the relatively simple tasks of understanding, for example, a mid-size business structure enough to predict its future, especially when you consider the business system itself as a single node embedded in a much larger global socio-economic system. Imagine the difficulties climate modelers face trying to document global circulatory systems…

One emerging strategy for modeling complex systems looks to software and the floating-point wonders enabled by Moore’s Law. Computers are phenomenally capable of managing the inconceivable amounts of operations necessary to begin modeling dynamic systems. Yet, until very recently one needed to book time on a supercomputer cluster to run weather models or robust behavioral analysis. Even today’s bleeding hardware strains under the weight of such complexity. Research institutions have pursued natural systems modeling for some time and the business world has been paying attention. SAP now offers modeling capabilities with its business intelligence ERP solutions, enabling executives to run scenarios and envision possible outcomes of strategic decisions. Oracle recently acquired Hyperion, adding “performance management” to their suite of BI tools. You can bet these technologies will work their way into government & geopolitical protocols, as well as social & personal behavioral engineering as we increasingly track & model our lives.

Effectively, this pattern emulates the deeper shift from individual enterprise to collective collaborations. You can only model a complex system with another sufficiently complex system. However, even the most interesting algorithms are encumbered by the impositions of their logic: they can only be as creative as they were written. A second emerging strategy for modeling complex systems looks to deputize humans as processing nodes, crowdsourcing future possibilities across infinitely creative sets of minds. The Institute for the Future has taken this approach with its Signtific Lab and the Superstruct platform, leveraging the principles of gameplay to engage massive participation in envisioning scenarios.

The Superstruct games have drawn in thousands of players offering their thoughts & dreams of the future. Players become processing nodes for the chosen subject (eg. “when augmented reality is everywhere”, or “when personal satellites are as easy to deploy as websites”) iterating across large sets of potential outcomes. From these inputs, patterns emerge showing trends with greater frequency & momentum among the collective. Perhaps even more interesting - and where the Superstruct method is more flexible than computational modeling - are the outliers that emerge from players. Many of the most compelling signals of the future are those that completely break from current patterns. Indeed, one of the most fundamental prevailing shifts in the global paradigm is that change is accelerating in ways we cannot even imagine.

These two approaches both consider complex systems & scenario modeling from architectures that themselves are complex, object-oriented systems. The programmatic approach brings heavy-weight numeric bit-crunching to dynamic data streams, while the Superstructing approach offers wide-reaching creativity and human sensing. Augmenting one approach with the other will mark the next phase of predictive analysis necessary to safely navigate civilization through the future. Envisioning these scenarios and building compelling narratives around them will inevitably draw them into becoming.

Our lives are more & more complex and our enterprises & collaborations are commonly reaching global scales. The need to effectively model & predict is a fundamental human trait, reinforced in the face of escalating complexity in a hyper-connected, Read-Write world.

Possible Futures?

I really like the simplicity of this Possible Futures graphic from the folks at AMEE. The real effectiveness lies in how easily the image leverages both the ingrained familiarity & narrative complexity of popular scifi movies as a barometer of our sense of the coming future.

Patterns: Global Systems & Human Adaptation

Overview: The top-level context for the next 10-20 years will be characterized by growing environmental challenges across the planet, notably more irregular weather patterns with increasingly severe storms, a rise in temperatures and a reduction of rainfall leading to shifting distributions of agriculture and farming. Regions that are heated but retain humidity will face rising bacterial & viral outbreaks, especially if these regions see further economic declines due to declining food production. These changes will challenge many populations, adding pressure to invest in more climate-controlled (and energy-intensive) infrastructure and/or migrate towards more wet & fertile lands. The great dependence on rainfall and water delivery infrastructure coupled to its widely distributed nature will impact drought-stricken regions considerably, as well as neighboring water-rich regions (eg. Los Angeles and Northern California) that may see growing tensions across resource inequities.

Within this global system the primary drivers remain materials technologies, energy capture & generation, health care (freemium & premium), cleaning & streamlining industrial processes, managing supply chains (particularly with respect to resource/energy overhead, social & environmental impacts), remediating toxic environments, and coping with persistent disruptions to all of these. In communities, trends are moving towards group empowerment through emerging technologies for computation, communication, collaboration, design, and fabrication. This empowerment enables both resilience & resistance, aiding some to design better civic structures & local production capacity, for example, while others design and execute disruptive events and attacks on high-value targets.

Across the species, though in no way homogeneous, lifespans are extending, health care is more reliable, mobile computing is more powerful & ubiquitous, screens and media are proliferating, and more people, objects, plants, and animals are creating digital identities and communicating across the cloud. There is a rapid movement to digitize human information and expose it to massive computational structures, iterating exponentially across literally billions of logical nodes. This movement into the cloud has a huge energetic overhead only recently being considered - not to mention the social and economic impacts rapidly rewriting much of the first world.

Computational systems are evolving to model and predict larger living systems. We now model natural systems, business enterprise, financial variables, and human behavior deriving greater ability to predict future probabilities. All in order for the species to continue its adaptive success while willfully managing our resource requirements & impacts while effectively supporting a global virtualization of human endeavor, expression, and creativity.

In a nutshell, the patterns and processes we’ve relied upon are moving into a time of great flux with all systems facing regular perturbations. Change is the only constant. Survival, as it always ultimately has, depends on flexibility, resilience, collaboration, and adaptation.

Disruptive Civil Technologies
Six Technologies with Potential Impacts on US Interests out to 2025 (National Intelligence Council):

Key trends, “most likely to enhance or degrade US national power out to 2025″
- Biogerontechnology
- Energy Storage Materials
- Biofuels and Bio-Based Chemicals
- Clean Coal Technologies
- Service Robotics
- The Internet of Things.

[The NIC report offers some interesting signals but I personally disagree with their sense of trending towards biofuels. Turning human energy sources (food) into industrial energy sources (biofuel) is exceptionally short-sighted and dangerous and has already incurred a large backlash in common sense. I don't know enough about so-called "clean coal" to comment... but I'm highly dubious.]

From the IFTF Winter 2009 Overview and Jane McGonigal’s initial Superstructing results.

Top Signals 2009
- Geolocation
- Biometrics & accelerometers
- Handheld augmented reality
- Simulation engines
- Lifecasting platforms
- Social networks for every living thing
- Avatars everywhere
- Virtual worlds based on real worlds

Critical Factors
- Evolvability
- Extreme scale
- Ambient collaboration
- Reverse scarcity
- Adaptive emotions
- Amplified optimism
- Playtests

DRAFT 2009 Climate Action Team Biennial Report to the Governor and Legislature (California Climate Change portal):

All simulations indicate that extremely hot daytime and nighttime temperatures (heat waves) increase in frequency, magnitude, and duration from the historical period. Within a given heat wave, there is an increasing tendency for multiple hot days in succession—i.e., heat waves last longer. Furthermore, the number of days with simultaneously hot daytime temperatures in multiple regions in the state increases markedly; this has important implications for emergency response and satisfying electricity demand in the state.

…In the northern part of California, the tendency for drying fades and even reverses but in Southern California the amount of drying becomes greater, with decreases in some simulations exceeding 15% drier. became significantly wetter by the end of the century.

…The results suggest that climate change will decrease annual crop yields in the long- term, particularly for cotton, unless future climate change is minimized and/or adaptation of management practices and improved cultivars becomes widespread.

…In summary, without changes in operating rules for the water system in California the reliability of water supply will be severely affected. On the other hand, it seems that California could afford the implementation of adaptation measures that could significantly reduce the system’s vulnerability.

Kevin Kelly - The Nine Laws of God

I’m re-posting this from The Whole Earth Catalog archives because I think it’s an excellent summary of the core principles needed to evaluate natural systems. This also speaks to the foundation of much of my own thought about human social, cultural, and technological evolution.

The Nine Laws of God
By Kevin Kelly * Whole Earth Catalog * Spring 1994

Distribute being. The spirit of a beehive, the behavior of an economy, the thinking of a supercomputer, and the life in me are distributed over a multitude of smaller units (which themselves may be distributed). When the sum of the parts can add up to more than the parts, then that extra being (that something from nothing) is distributed among the parts. Whenever we find something from nothing, we find it arising from a field of many interatting smaller pieces. All the mysteries we find most interesting - life, intelligence, evolution - are found in the soil of large distributed systems.

Control from the bottom up. When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast-moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore, overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity.

Sow increasing returns. Each time you use an idea, a language, or a skill, you strengthen it, reinforce it, and make it more likely to be used again.

Grow by chunking. The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization - such as intelligence, or a market economy - without growing it, inevitably lead to failure.

Maximize the fringes. In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must adapt to the world by occasional monumental revolutions, one of which is sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt to the world in a thousand daily mini-revolutions, staying in a state of permanent, but never fatal, churning.

Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everyone else is doing it. To advance from the ordinary requires a new game, or a new territory. But the process of going outside the conventional method, game, or territory is indistinguishable from error. Even the most brilliant act of human genius, in the final analysis, is an act of trial and error.

Pursue no optima, but multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none of them can be served exclusively. Rather than striving for optimization of any function, a large system can only survive by “satisficing” (making “good enough”) a multitude of functions.

Seek persistent disequilibrium. Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation. A good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent offbeat, out-of-kilter notes. Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion, and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.

Change changes itself. Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do: they coordinate change. When extremely large systems are built up out of complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change the organizations of other systems. That is, if the rules of the game are composed from the bottom up, then it is likely that interacting forces at the bottom level will alter the rules of the game as it progresses. Over time, the rules for change get changed themselves.

Evolution - as used in everyday speech - is about how an entity is changed over time. Deeper evolution - as it might be formally defined - is about how the rules for changing entities over time changes over time. To get the most out of nothing, you need to have self-changing rules.

These nine principles underpin the awesome workings of prairies, flamingoes, and cedar forests, eyeballs, natural selection in geological time, and the unfolding of a baby elephant from a tiny seed of elephant sperm and egg.

These same principles of bio-logic are now being implanted in computer chips, electronic communication networks, robot modules, pharmaceutical searches, software design, and corporate management, in order that these artificial systems may overcome their own complexity.

When the tecfinos is enlivened by bios, we get artifacts that can adapt, learn, and evolve. When our technology adapts, learns, and evolves, then we will have a neobiological civilization.

Human Identity & Evolutionary Biology

Some rough notes from the weekend on the Northern California coast… I’m trying to get at the core of my general orientation towards the world. It’s coming into focus at the nexus of evolutionary biology & technology. Or…

How does evolutionary biology express through culture & technology?

Requirements of human biosurvivial & social identity (compare to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs):

water, food shelter, fecundity, mortality, socialization, cognition, communication, migration, lineage, history, myth, aspiration, discovery, expression, emotion, time, transcendence.

Global comm networks are rapidly bringing the world closer and changing human cognition in ways we cannot yet fully see. What are the impacts and consequences of the emerging self-identification of the human species? How will we manage the human agency? Do we have a global strategy yet, or just a Balkanized polyculture of mostly-competing sub-identities? (Obv. the latter.) Compare to the Greek & Roman consciousness that embodied emotional states & psychological constructs in the mythic drama of deities & demigods. The western religious myth of Earth as resource and Earth as purgatory elevated us above the natural world. The planet is now urgently reminding us that we are within the natural world - a subset embedded in a much larger and ultimately self-interested system.

The assertion of the natural world compels us towards alignment with biomimetic solutions & protocols. Or towards oblivion as we are corrected by the planetary system. We cannot destroy the world before it limits our ability to do it damage. The compulsion towards environmental protection is a species-wide awareness rising from our very cells and fueled by our growing awareness of our impact on the planetary ecology. Adapt or perish.

Socio-economic & ecological adaptation is not on a uniform schedule. Diverse states & peoples have their own schedules to work out as they march up the pyramid of civilization. Does this demand caretakers & parent states? Globalization is a normalizing force, but inequities between self-appointed parents and emerging economies will grow, as will the ability of smaller networks to inflict their will on states, NGO’s, & global systems. This democratization of technological empowerment is yet another major current working through our species. We’re getting stronger yet the morality(?) & responsibility expected to wield this power is not uniform across cultures & peoples. Core biosurvival needs remain the primary driver, exposed to shifting climates and diminishing conventional energy sources. There will be (more) blood.

The race is whether the technologies of liberation & salvation will outpace the technologies of destruction & exploitation. Of course, the real technology underneath both is the human brain - a much more subtle & powerful tool, highly malleable but stubbornly resistant to overt change.

Radiohead, Humpasaur Jones, N8UR

Over at N8UR I’ve just posted 2 new tracks I’ve been working on. The first is Into Winter - a heavy electronic piece featuring vocals from Humpasaur Jones that I chopped up considerably. The second is a disco trance track called Disco Assassin.

Also, while you’re there please grab the Radiohead remix I did of Naked: Nude (Dressed Up Mix).

Cheers!

Every Enterprise Needs Its Own Twitter

To the title of this post, I was on a tech support call with AT&T/Apple this afternoon. Facing surprising SMS overage charges on my mobile account, I wanted to know if Twitter apps like Tweetie might be using the SMS channel to conduct their transactions. I figured not but the Tweetie site gave me no info.

So I asked the support person, who knew about Twitter (better than AT&T) but not about whether Twitter iPhone apps use SMS. She put me on hold to ask a support specialist. About 15 minutes later she came back with a reasonable response (”they probably don’t use SMS”) and a suggestion to talk to the app vendor.

All this had me thinking about the huge inefficiency at play with the responder trying to locate the specialist, get their attention and time, probably juggling multiple phone lines, to then give me one person’s measured response. I imagined a not-too-distant future where the call responder typed my query into a local Twitter-clone running on the tech support network inside AT&T/Apple. This query would immediately push out to subscribers - some required by their manager to subscribe to all tech support feeds, and others who just want to see the problems customers are encountering. I then imagined that some of these subscribers would run search filters on the messaging stream in order to be alerted to those queries they were most interested in tracking.

So somewhere in the bowels of tech support there’s a guy who is a Twitter power-user, or an engineer who wrote the SMS api’s, or a community developer that helps 3rd parties like Tweetie write iPhone apps… and they get pinged every time a tag of interest comes across the network. They see “iPhone Twitter SMS” and respond with the info. With enough of these transactions the call responder will have an archive of tech support tweets they can search through to see if someone has already responded. Of course, this archive provides another layer of analytic data that can be mined to get more info about the problem areas most often reported to tech support.

This concept isn’t particularly new. Businesses have been trying to do this with IM for years. The difference is that IM only gets you access to one person at a time and you have to think to contact them specifically. Then you get caught up in a conversation when you really just need an answer. The Twitter broadcast model quickly gets your query out to a pool of possible responders. Even more importantly, by subscribing to the posts of others throughout the business (eg sales, dev managers, support, evangelists, brand managers, etc…) employees extend their sensors out to include many more valuable inputs. Once they get beyond a certain size, most businesses inevitably Balkanize into distinct units that gradually build up walls and grow insular. Enterprise Twitter (for lack of a better term) would help dissolve these boundaries. This is especially critical in an age of convergence where even the most diverse businesses are feeling the need to integrate and build interoperability across their portfolios.

Again, enterprise Twitter isn’t a new concept but it’s one that so far seems to have escaped either the demand side of the equation - businesses (I’m constantly amazed by the deep endemic failures of communication within companies), who desperately need better & more efficient forms of internal communication; and the supply side, which remains unable to provide any sort of internal enterprise-grade broadcast messaging solutions.

[Updated: Check out Mike Gotta's note on Enterprise Version's of Twitter.]

Dematerialize: Changing the Ways We Relate to Product & Ownership

There is a large and fast-moving shift occurring within the landscape of tools & technology. Increasingly, products are dematerializing and being re-engineered as services. This shift is being driven in part by rising production costs and an increasing awareness of the very real environmental impacts of producing durable goods and managing their end-of-life downstreaming into landfills. It is also a response to the rapid digitization of culture pushing many consumables into less tangible data transactions, often mediated through increasingly fetishized devices. Thus, content is becoming disengaged from fixed carriers like disk media and paper and is, instead, flowing through networks and devices.

Perhaps the most iconic and revolutionary example of this trend is the pairing of Apple’s iPod with its iTunes service. For the past 20 years, millions upon millions of cd’s, dvd’s, cases, and printed inserts have been consuming resources, fixing materials into unrecoverable or downcycled hard media and filling landfills. Apple has fundamentally rewritten this paradigm by dematerializing the content - music & movies - and connected it directly with the player. The materials & energetic overhead has been consolidated into a (hopefully) more durable device, freeing the high-volume transactional content from such a large resource burden. While there are manufacturing and reclamation costs associated with the device, the impact is lessened by decoupling those costs from the content.

There have since been an ever-increasing movement away from product towards services, as easily illustrated with the rise of online services within the Web 2.0 age. Digital cameras are another example that, like the iPod, decoupled the relentless production of content from a toxic & non-renewable material carrier - in this case, film & print paper. Likewise, print production itself has increasingly moved away from expensive, wasteful, and toxic inks & papers and has re-targeted to the ubiquity of screens. More & more “print” content - once the domain of magazines, newspapers, brochures, and advertising shwag - has moved away from hard carriers. Again, the pattern shows content being released from material substrates to move effortlessly across networks and devices.

There are a few interesting effects of this trend. Of course, piracy of content becomes considerably easier and cheaper. Content can be copied and moved across networks effortlessly, and copy protection is just another set of bits to be cracked. As Stewart Brand keenly observed, “information wants to be free” and the rapid digitization of culture has radically reinforced this proposition forcing every pre-web industry to completely re-evaluate their business models. Conversely, the bitifying of content and the democratization of powerful desktop authoring tools has empowered and emboldened the historical allure of remixing and massively reinvigorated our cultural creativity. Ironically, in an age that has enabled so many to create so much, the notion of intellectual property has less merit now than ever. When your content contains bits from 10 other pieces of content, who actually owns it? As has been noted by many authors & analysts, the genie is out of the bottle.

But perhaps more interesting are the behavioral and psychological shifts happening in response to these trends. As stuff dematerializes into intangible bits, the fact that we can no longer touch product subtly undermines the very notion of ownership. We begin to abstract our relationship to stuff as something we interact with more than possess. While this is potentially liberating it also makes it easier for content providers to assert total ownership in perpetuity: you’re merely borrowing content through a service provided by the “real” owner. Without direct ownership, are we protected and do we still have the right to share?

With respect to content, personal ownership has shifted to the device - the increasingly fetishized container through which content is constantly flowing. Our smart phones are awesomely empowering extensions of our selves, conferring unimaginable abilities to their owner. The simplest & most intuitive of these devices become second nature, third-hand extensions of our bodies, effortlessly wiring us to each other, to content, and vast stores of knowledge. Of course we fetishize such objects and of course we’ve grown dependent upon them.

Industrialization has regrettably optimized its business model through planned obsolescence, with much hard product designed to time-out and push an upsell to the next model. No doubt the devices we now rely so heavily upon have their own built-in failings, whether intentional or simply as a byproduct of the profit margin incentivised to invest in no more quality than is absolutely necessary. So have the benefits of dematerializing content from cheap carriers been negated by the resource requirements and inevitable breakdown of our devices? Has the energetic and environmental impact spared by going paperless been doubled by the sheer overhead of manufacturing and running vast global server farms? Any real evaluation of the dematerialization of products to services must consider the very large impact of the infrastructure supporting it.

Nevertheless, this is where we’re headed. Mobiles will get smarter & prettier and will be increasingly targeted for content and transient marketing. Screens will continue to multiply at an exponential pace finding their way into all aspects of our lives. Hardware manufacturers will be increasingly beholden to both international standards committees and shareholders to account for the carbon and environmental impacts of their processes. And the notion of object and ownership will continue to be challenged in ways yet unknowable.

[Acknowledgements to Gavin Starks of AMEE, Tish Shute at Ugotrade, and Lane Becker and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction.]

Julian Bleeker - Design Fiction: A Short Talk on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. [Etech09 Notes]

My raw notes from Julian Bleeker’s talk at E-Tech 2009 - Design Fiction: A Short Talk on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction. [This is a topic near & dear to my heart. Compelling narrative writes the future.]

“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” Bucky Fuller. “Future is here it’s just not evenly distributed” W. Gibson. Near Future Lab and Nokia. Convergence between design, science, fact & fiction. Ways to meaningfully shape the future. Science, fact & fiction are all knotted up. Eg moments from films, eg Minority Report. How did minority report as a film become a meme around advanced speculative interface? Google search on “Minority Report” returns a muddling between the film and real experiments.

Imaginary worlds become instantiated in the real world. Becomes an index that helps cohere imagination around a desire to realize the speculative fiction. Expectations of what realized tech should do typically reference the prevailing fictional representation. Eg GSpeak - company looking at gestural interfaces, started by the guy that informed tech of Minority Report. Moved from fictional authority to real authority.

Stories Matter More Than Features, Specs & Engineering. The framing of a new idea helps transmit it and engage people to act on it or bring it to realization. Compelling fiction makes the effect of the tech transparent and easily understood. Eg don’t need to spend any time talking about the gestural interface in Minority Report - it explains itself. Eg Jurassic Park leading to Time cover about Dinosaurs. Conflating fact and fiction to look forward. Diegetic Prototype, “diegesis” the moment of the narrative - David A. Kirby. “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes”. Stories matter when designing the future.

Science Fiction Can Do Things Science Fact Cannot. A hybrid of the two can do more than either alone. Science fiction is much better at circulating scientific knowledge than real science. The narrative is compelling, the delivery is humanized. Expands the realm of possible futures. eg Star Trek, How William Shatner Changed the World; Star Fleet Technical Manual. Eg Death Star over San Francisco. Eg Dark Knight.

Entanglements between fact & fiction. Finding productive ways to allow the crossover. Highlighting the concern over ubicomp & surveillance. Eg Listening Post (Hansen & Rubin) displays conversations on the network. EG 2001 Filming the Future. Kubrik & Arthur C. Clark worked with scientists and ET researchers to better inform the narrative presentation. Conflict of what is imagined and what comes to pass. Possible challenges, pitfalls, and failures.

Why Muddle Design, Science, Fact, & Fiction? It’s valuable to explain, to imagine, to materialize ideas, and speculate about different kinds of worlds. How might the world transform itself and address the challenges that face us today? Using narrative to inform what might come to pass. Think of PKDick as a System Administrator. There are insights to be had when reading Bruce Sterling as Software Documentation.

Helps to Think of Science Fiction Props as Conclusion to Today’s Engineering Prototypes. What is the world like, what are their daily routines, and how are these things affected by the speculative tech? http://cli.gs/designfictionessay (failure is important so dystopias are valuable to show us what not to do, rethink and reflect on the proposition).