The Tyrell Corporation:

Based in Los Angeles in the year 2019, Tyrell is named after its founder Dr. Eldon Tyrell and is a high-tech biocorp primarily concerned with the production of life-like androids called replicants. Tyrell’s slogan is “More human than human”. The headquarters for the corporation is over 700-stories tall. The Tyrell corporation is the only outfit making Nexus-6 replicants which are so human-like that the only way L.A.P.D Blade Runner Units can indentify them is to sit suspects down and go through an exhausting empathy test called the “Voight-Kampff Scale.”

The Tyrell Corporation was also involved in the exporting of replicant labor to the outer space colonies for situations deemed too dangerous and degrading for regular humans such as military operations, high risk industrial work, prostitution and slave labor. One could call it interstellar commerce or just growing an army of slaves.

From Mark Pesce’s recent presentation at Personal Democracy Forum 2008::

Hyperpolitics: American Style
It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,” for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.

…These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’

…Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.

A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she’s nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.

I’m just coming off an 18-month work project and am now taking some much-needed R&R. I may or may not be blogging in the next couple of weeks… Probably mostly just enjoying the Summer and staying fairly unplugged. Ahhhhhhhhh.

FWIW, my head has been focusing more on global systems dynamics - an old interest in nonlinearity and chaos - now with a socio-economic-political angle, thanks in large part to John Robb’s excellent book, Brave New War. Likewise, as his work does, I’m thinking more about the local sustainability and survivability of my community with respect to rising global market/resource instabilities. While I don’t expect the situation to get any better, I do consider these times as hearkening a counterbalance to globalization, favoring regional stability over global chaos.

I don’t know a lot about the politics within the EU or about the details of whey Ireland has rejected the Lisbon Treaty. I do know the treaty addresses the appointment of a president of the EU and a new definition of how funds will be distributed, and that support for the treaty was encouraged by the booming business class in Ireland but was ultimately shot down by the voters who, I suspect, are not overtly thinking about the dangers the modern world presents to wider distribution.

Given the trending inability of large states to manage resources effectively and provide for their citizenry, as well as the ascending power of the market and it’s own profit-driven dismissal of the common good, it’s becoming increasingly important for regional communities to reclaim control over their land, power, agriculture, and other vested interests. The economic web of globalization is proving itself to be exceptionally open to disruptions, as current crises spinning off spiking oil prices illustrate. In this case, high oil prices translate to high food & goods costs, higher energy prices, high infrastructure costs, and flagging state economies as a result. These factors in turn encourage business to trim costs by laying off employees, which raises unemployment, feeding both the burden of welfare on the state and the deterioration of urban communities from decreasing state support and increasing crime. In all likelihood, barring any major technological interventions, this trend will continue.

So now more than ever the state is being challenged and undermined by both corporate and insurgent guerrilla interests (as explored in John Robb’s work) while the reliability of increasingly distributed and vulnerable infrastructure nets is flagging, all in the face of rising costs and diminishing supply of the fundamental substrate of our entire civilization: energy. As states hollow out and over-extend into resource struggles, local communities must pick up the slack and build their own support infrastructures capable of keeping the lights on and the water flowing.

In this context, the desire of Irish voters to retain greater control over their lives and their country is very wise indeed.

Bonny Doon is up in the hills above Santa Cruz, Ca. where I live. The locus of the fire is in an area that I’ve been hiking and enjoying deeply for almost 20 years. Many homes are threatened, as well as precious ecological preserves. The fire is in a very dry and wooded area with fuel for miles. The primary defensive perimeter is Laguna Creek at Ice Cream Grade. [5pm 6.12.08]

DONATIONS: Santa Cruz County Bank is accepting donations. Call 457-5000 or drop off

Here are a bunch of important news feeds about the fire:

Map of the Bonny Doon/Martin fire
Better Google Map mashup
Map of all current Cal Fires with details of size, containment, damage.
KRON front page chat feed: this is the most active and up-to-date channel I’ve found.
Summize sort for “Bonny Doon”: Twitter feeds about Bonny Doon.
Waveturtle aggregator: A great aggregator by Rob Knight includes feeds from Google News, Flickr, Twitter, and other sources for Bonny Doon/Martin Fire.
Santa Cruz Fire Blogspot: Good list of resources and general updates from locals and those working to manage the situation. Also a spot where residents and evacuees are posting their status. Includes available support options for evacuees, pets, livestock etc…
CalFire updates: Straight from the state.
Santa Cruz Sentinel: Local paper coverage, somewhat delayed.

Best of luck to all and much thanks to CDF and Cal Fire crews, Red Cross, and all volunteers.

Oh, and here’s an older Flickr stream of Moon Rocks. This is pretty much at the epicenter of the fire and is a place I and many others have spent a lot of time enjoying.

More keen & critical insight from Mark Pesce about the unprecedented transformations in human culture rising from the mobile webs & meshnets spreading across the globe. Hierarchy is falling to the network.

Riding the wake of Second Life’s 2007 publicity blitz, there have been many new entrants into the world of 3D immersion, once idealistically known as “virtual reality”. While Second Life has created an interesting experiment, they have so far seemed unable to turn the exposure into compelling innovation. The new batch of lukewarm 3D-world offerings seem little more than shiny re-iterations without anything truly exciting. Too often they all seem to reduce to fancy chat rooms. VR may be edging into interesting territory in quiet research groups and questionable government projects but the practical applications that hit the street seem to be stuck in the uninspiring rut of fashionable avatars and in-world video streaming. The exciting possibilities of the virtual domain appear to me to be lost in the banalities of the 20th century marketplace.

Way back in the early 1990’s the visionary projections of what VR could become, as touted by Terence McKenna, Jaron Lanier, Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer, Howard Rheingold, and many others, were rich with grand roadmaps towards deep immersion and hyperconnectivity. Great fantastic vistas would rise up in cyberspace while we clothed ourselves in magical representations, walking as telepathic deities in an unbridled world of our own making. The mind would become manifest in a vast psychedelic playground of the Soul. To be sure, this grand vision has been incrementally realized to some degree but the narrative was so compelling and exciting that the world expected it to arrive as soon as the internet started wiring us all together.

The early experiments pointed the way forward but were unrealizable in any practical setting that didn’t require $150,000 of university or milspec hardware. The dream was quickly subsumed by the criticism and the simple limitations imposed by the tech needed to support such visions. Platforms like VRML, ActiveWorlds, and Blaxxun emerged to try and bring VR to the masses - or at least begin to lay the foundations for practical world building - but once again they were assailed by those who wanted the fabled metaverse now and were unwilling to wait for the tech to catch up to the vision. Indeed, the worlds painted by William Gibson and Neal Stephenson - arguably the visionaries most responsible for the general conception of what VR is supposed to be - were so rich and compelling that, in some ways, they set the bar so high that attempts to date have typically been judged on their failure to reach that vision instead of on their movements towards its inevitable realization.

From my perspective, the current climate of discussion around open immersive worlds seems to have internalized the criticism and imposed it’s own self-limitations. The dream is no longer seen as safe or economical. The scope of implementations represented by Second Life, There, Metaversum, as well as the brand worlds like VMTV and Sony’s Home seems restrained and cautious, either sitting on old open platforms hoping the users will create compelling content from faded API’s, or erecting pretty, branded walls around restricted party clubs that are little more than targeted marketing opportunities. The only visible push for innovation seems to be jumping on the social net bandwagon and attempting to integrate Facebook-like features into 3D, but the actual implementations have seemed short-sighted and awkward at best. And why should Facebook just snap into 3D? Isn’t there a different modality that’s more appropriate to immersive worlds?

The need for a safe business model seems to have overwhelmed the value of a compelling forward-looking vision and a willingness to embrace new technology. The new Linden CEO seems to be a business functionary, brought in by the investors to drum up profits. Will they use them to push the platform forward or just make better ad space? And I understand that money is required to do these things and you really *do* need a good business model. But developing proprietary client platforms that try to re-invent the wheel every time they want to integrate a web 2.0 feature is not cost-effective or safe. All of the prevailing social web sites have open API’s that provide query returns and push-data streams. Flash and other rendering layers will happily provide dynamic overlays that enable truly compelling and interactive representations of user data. A safe and valuable business model would be to build a powerful scenegraph with rich material support and an elegant renderer, give it a simple javascript API, then skin it with a dynamic 2d layer. Wire it up and avatars now have pretty callouts that can display their interests and affiliations, their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles elegantly parsed and reconfigured for in-scene consumption; you have dynamic layers in-world that can show Twitter updates and RSS feeds, or media content and push advertising; your personal UI affordances can live alongside unobtrusive world nav controls; you have SMS, IM, and mobile comm support across worlds; you have the ability to have scaled interfaces and affordances appropriate to multiple device interfaces; you have the ability to send your camera feed out-of-world to a web page embed. The possibilities grow exponentially when immersive worlds are designed from the ground up to be cloud-aware, social, and scriptable.

I keep looking out for really interesting developments in this space but nobody seems to be doing it (caveat: I don’t see all and I’m only writing from my limited perspective). The most compelling examples are in the carefully-crafted MMORPG’s and truly immersive worlds like GTA4 but these worlds are closed and financed by huge warchests. Nevertheless, they are the ones who are painting the future and start-ups would do well to study their success and consider the properties that make them so compelling. Do we really need another hokey tween clubhouse? Maybe we do but let’s also take back the dream of truly rich and collaborative worlds that redefine what it means to be human and where the lines between material reality and digital space blur beyond recognition.

I do honestly applaud the efforts to create new 3D platforms but I plead with developers to push against the restraints imposed by critics and markets alike. The hardware is mighty, world culture and communication is going digital, and open networks are becoming the default standard. There has never been a better time to be idealistic about virtual reality and immersion.

I have a lot of issues with Second Life - mostly because I’m frustrated by their potential and their seeming inability to act on it - but it’s nevertheless an interesting sandbox to explore the greater frontiers of virtual immersion and social ontology. To this end, Japanese researchers have wired up a Second Life avatar to respond to the thoughts of a paraplegic.

…he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.

…”In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves… and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.

For general caveat, see above. @chris23

The latest web2.0 gizmo, Plurk appears to be following Twitter’s lead in the instant-message-microblog-sms-pipe domain of social apps/services. My first impression? Meh. But again, see the caveat above re: Twitter. (BTW, Twitter is lit up with talk of Plurk right now… I just saw 135 “plurk” tweets come through in 5mins).

Some nice affordances, but the awkward UI and obvious youth branding kinda bug. The deal-breaker for me is the apparent lack of any sort of public UI. Plurk’s runtime layer is opaque at the moment, though this may be the plan given the teen gimmicks.

- UI is strangely awkward. Branding is trying to be cute but alt-y. Too much UI.
- Branding is also focusing on self-celebrity with a no-age twist: “It’s instant gratification, instant self-indulgence, instant celebrity, instantly YOU.”
- I like the scrubbing timeline concept but it seems to flow from right to left, instead of the standard right=now(er).
- Display of posts is not as linear as Twitter (eg it’s more difficult to at-a-glance see when posts have happened).
- Karma is credit for number of posts. More posts (>karma) gets you access to special emoticons and other TBD shwag.
- I like being able to open up a conversation from a post.
- Have already seen multiple tweets re-branding the word “plurk” with “puke”.
- Crawls the usual IM/email suspects for friends to invite.
- Friends & Fans
- “Supports” image/video posts by thumbnailing posted urls.
- Can include a basic set of emoticons >emotiYawns<, clearly targeting teh yout’s.
- No sign of public API (this will be the first and only-necessary nail in the Plurk coffin unless they spin it as a controlled safe-haven for kiddies).