Back-Casting From 2043

When it’s busy like this the viz sometimes shifts like the color bleed you used to see on those old Sunday comics, way back in the day. Ubiquitous fiber pipes & wide-band wireless still can’t give enough bandwidth to the teeming multitudes downtown. The viz starts to lag, gets offset and even orphaned from the hard world it’s trying to be a part of. Hyperclear Ray Ban augments, lenses ground down by hand-sequenced rock algaes to such an impossibly smooth uniformity, run through with transparent circuity & bloodied rare-earth elements, scanning the world in multiple dimensions, pinging the cloud at 10GHz and pushing articulated data forms through massive OLED clusters just to show me where I can find an open null shield and the best possible cup of coffee this side of Ethiopia. Then the pipes clog and those ridiculously expensive glasses turn into cheap 3D specs from 2010 pretending to make 2D look like real life but instead here they’re doing the print offset thing, flattening my world into color shifts and mismatched registers.

Marks are flickering in & out, overlapping & losing their z-order. A public note on a park bench glows green – something about the local chemwash schedule – then loses integrity to one of my own annotations left there, like, a year ago. A poem I cranked out on a late night bender but it’s unreadable with all the other layers clashing. Even the filters get confused when the pipes clog. If you look around fast enough, marks start to trail & stutter in a wash of data echoes like when screens used to have refresh errors. Only now our eyes are the screens and the whole world gets caught in recursive copy loops.

The Ray Bans correct it pretty quickly, attenuating the rendered view and pushing up the hard view as the dominant layer. But for a moment it feels like you’re tripping. It used to be physically nauseating, a sudden vertigo brought on by that weird disconnect of self & place. Like so much of life these days, you spend a lot of time adapting to disconnects between layers. Between real and rendered. Between self & other, human & machine. Between expectations & outcomes.

The arc of glorious progress that opened the 21st century seemed to have found it’s apogee around 2006 or so and then came hurtling back towards Earth. And it wasn’t like earlier “corrections”. This one was big. It was a fundamental stock-taking of the entirety of the industrial age to date and things were suddenly, shockingly, terribly mis-matched from the realities of the world. Planetary-scale disconnects. The carrying capacity of economies, nations, ecosystems, and humanity itself came into clear & violent resolution by the 2020’s when everything started to radically shift under the twin engines of hyper-connectivity and ecological chaos. These two previously unexpected titans directly challenged and usurped the entire paradigm of the developed and developing worlds, setting us all into choppy and uncertain seas.

Sure, we still get to play with the crazy cool tech. Or at least some of us do. What the early cyberpunks showed us, and what the real systems geeks always knew, is that the world is not uniform or binary. It’s not utopia vs. dystopia, win vs. lose, us vs. them, iGlasses or collapse. It’s a complex, dynamic blend of an unfathomable number of inputs, governors, and feedback loops constantly, endlessly iterating across inconceivable scales to weave this crazy web of life. So we have climate refugees from Kansas getting tips from re-settled Ukrainians about resilience farming. We have insurgencies in North America and social collectives across South America. The biggest brands in the world are coming out of Seoul & Johannesburg while virtually-anonymous distributed collaboratives provide skills & services across the globe. And we have Macroviz design teams from Jakarta & Kerala directing fab teams in Bangkok to make Ray Bans to sell to anybody with enough will & credit to purchase. Globalization & it’s discontents has proven to offer a surprising amount of resilience. Heading into the Great Shift it looked like the developed world was headed for 3rd world-style poverty & collapse. But it hasn’t been quite that bad. More of a radical leveling of the entire global macro-economic playing field with the majority settling somewhere on the upper end of lower class. Some rose, many fell. It was… disturbing, to say the least. It simply didn’t fit the models. Everyone expected collapse or transcendence.

We humans want things to be as simple as possible. It’s just natural. Makes it easier to service the needs of biosurvival. But we’ve not created a simple world. Indeed, the world of our making looks about as orderly as the mess of 100 billion brain cells knotted up in our heads or the fragmented holographic complexes of memories & emotions, aspiration & fears, that clog it all up. We built living systems as complex as anything the planet could dish out. Not in the billions of years nature uses to refine and optimize but in a matter of a few millennia. We raced out of the gate, got on top of the resource game, took a look around, and realized the whole thing needed to be torn down and completely redesigned for the realities of the world. The outcomes no longer fit the expectations. In some strange fractal paradox, the maps got so accurate that the territory suddenly looked very different from what we thought.

The null shield was created as a black spot. A cone of silence for the information age. They’re like little international zones offering e-sylum in select coffee shops, parlors, dining establishments, and the finer brick-and-mortar lifestyle shops. And in conflict zones, narco-corridors, favelas, gang tenements, and the many other long-tail alleyways of the ad hoc shadow state. The null shield is a fully encrypted, anonymized, opt-in hotspot that deflects everything and anything the global service/intel/pr industry tries to throw at you or copy from you. What’s better is you don’t even show up as a black spot like the early implementations that would hide you but basically tell the world where you were hidden. You’re invisible and only connected to the exact channels you want.

These were originally created for civ lib types and the militarized criminal underclass as a counter-measure to the encroaching security state. But as traditional states universally weakened under the weight of bureaucracies and insurmountable budgets (and the growing power of cities and their Corp/NGO alignments), the state’s ability to surveil the citizenry declined. All the money they needed to keep paying IT staff, policy researchers, infrastructure operators, emergency responders, and the security apparatus – all that money was siphoned up by the cunning multinationals who used their financial wit & weight to undermine the states ability to regulate them. Now states – even relatively large ones like the U.S. government – are borrowing money from the multinationals just to stay afloat. The iron fist of surveillance & security has been mostly replaced by the annoying finger of marketing & advertising, always poking you in the eye wherever you go.

Keeping on top of the viz means keeping your filters up to date and fully functional. Bugs & viruses are still a problem, sure, but we’ve had near-50 years to develop a healthy immunity to most data infections. We still get the occasional viz jammer swapping all your english mark txt with kanji, and riders that sit in your stream just grabbing it all and bussing it to some server in Bucharest. But it’s the marketing vads and shell scanners that drive the new arms race of personal security. Used to be the FBI were the ones who would scan your browsing history to figure out if you’re an Islamic terrorist or right wing nut, then black-out the Burger Trough and grab you with a shock team right in the middle of your Friendly Meal. Even if they had the money to do it now, the Feds understand that the real threats are in the dark nets not the shopping malls. So the marketers have stepped in. They want your reading list so they can scan-and-spam you wherever you go, whenever, then sell the data to an ad agency. They want access to your viz to track your attention in real-time. They want to fold your every move into a demographic profile to help them pin-point their markets, anticipate trends, and catch you around every corner with ads for the Next Little Thing. And they use their access to rent cog cycles for whatever mechanical turk market research projects they have running in the background.

Google gave us the most complete map of the world. They gave us a repository of the greatest written works of our species. And a legacy of ubiquitous smart advertising that now approaches near-sentience in it’s human-like capacity to find you and push your buttons. In some ways the viz is just a cheap universal billboard. Who knew that all those billions of embedded chips covering the planet would be running subroutines pushing advertising and special interest blurbs to every corner of the globe? There are tales of foot travelers ranging deep into the ancient back-country forests of New Guinea, off-grid and viz-free, only to be confronted by flocks of parrots squawking out the latest tagline from some Bangalore soap opera. Seems the trees were instrumented with Google smart motes a few decades ago for a study in heavy metal bio-accumulation. Something about impedance shielding and sub-frequency fields affecting the parrots…

So while the people colonized the cloud so they could share themselves and embrace the world, the spammers, advert jocks, and marketing hacks pushed in just as quickly because wherever people are, wherever they gather and talk and measure themselves against each other & the world… in those places they can be watched and studied and readily persuaded to part with their hard-earned currency.

Or credits or karma points or whatever. Just like the rest of the big paradigms, value has shifted beyond anybody’s understanding. Gold and currency at least attempted to normalize value into some tangible form. But the markets got too big & complex and too deeply connected to the subtleties of human behavior and the cunning of human predators. While money, the thing, was a tangible piece of value, the marketplace of credit & derivatives undermined it’s solidity and abstracted value out into the cold frontiers of economics philosophers and automated high-frequency trading bots. So much of the money got sucked up into so few hands that the world was left to figure out just how the hell all those unemployed people were going to work again. Instead of signing up for indentured servitude on the big banking farms, folks got all DIY while value fled the cash & credit markets and transfigured into service exchanges, reputation currencies, local scrip, barter markets, shadow economies, and a seemingly endless cornucopia of adaptive strategies for trading your work & talent for goods & services.

Sure, there’s still stock markets, central banks, and big box corps but they operate in a world kind of like celebrities did in the 20th century, though more infamous than famous. They exist as the loa in a web of voodoo economics: you petition them for the trickle-down. Or just ignore them. They’re a special class that mostly sticks among their kind, sustaining a B2B layer that drives the e-teams & design shops, fab plants & supply chains to keep churning out those Ray Ban iGlasses. Lucky for them, materials science has seen a big acceleration since the 2010’s with considerable gains in miniaturization and efficiency so it’s a lot easier to be a multinational when much of your work is dematerialized and the stuff that is hard goods is mostly vat-grown or micro-assembled by bacterial hybrids. Once the massive inflationary spike of the Big Correction passed, it actually got a lot cheaper to do business.

Good news for the rest of us, too, as we were all very sorely in need of a serious local manufacturing capacity with a sustainable footprint and DIY extensibility. Really, this was the thing that moved so many people off the legacy economy. Powerful desktop CAD coupled to lo-intensity, high-fidelity 3d printers opened up hard goods innovation to millions. The mad rush of inventors and their collaborations brought solar conversion efficiency up to 85% within 3 years, allowing the majority of the world to secure their energy needs with minimal overhead. Even now, garage biotech shops in Sao Paulo are developing hybrid chloroplasts that can be vat-grown and painted on just about anything. This will pretty much eliminate the materials costs of hard solar and make just about anything into a photosynthetic energy generator, slurping up atmospheric carbon and exhaling oxygen in the process. Sometimes things align and register just right…

So here we are in 2043 and, like all of our history, so many things have changed and so many things have stayed the same. But this time it’s the really big things that have changed, and while all change is difficult we’re arguably much stronger and much more independent for it all. Sure, not everybody can afford these sweet Ray Bans. And the federated state bodies that kept us mostly safe and mostly employed are no longer the reliable parents they once were. We live in a complex world of great wealth and great disparity, as always, but security & social welfare is slowly rising with the tide of human technological adaptation. Things are generally much cheaper, lighter, and designed to reside & decay within ecosystems. Product becomes waste becomes food becomes new life. Our machines are more like natural creatures, seeking equilibrium and optimization, hybridized by the ceaseless blurring of organic & inorganic, by the innate animal disposition towards biomimicry, and by the insistence of the natural world to dictate the rules of human evolution, as always. After all, we are animals, deep down inside, compelled to work it out and adapt.

Time’s up on the null shield. Coffee is down. And the viz is doing it’s thing now that the evening rush has thinned. Out into the moody streets of the city core, the same streets trod for a thousand years here, viz or no. The same motivations, the same dreams. It always comes back to how our feet fall on the ground, how the food reaches our mouth, and how we share our lives with those we care for.

A Short Note From Limbo

My posting here has been intermittent and in a bit of flux lately. I’m debating about whether I should use this blog to focus on a specific domain (eg GeoPol/insurgency/shadownets, 3D/AR/convergence, etc…) or continue to use it as a general outlet for my admittedly broad interests. Most of this is driven by the fact that I’m still technically unemployed and that specialization (for now) seems to be more valuable than being able to look across domains and tie them together. This will likely change but I feel like I’m perfect for the job nobody realizes they need yet. In 5-10 years there will probably be a huge awakening to the role of systems-types in the broader strategic landscape but not so much right now. Most smaller companies are cash-strapped to hire anyone new and most big co’s are chained to the short-term quarterly revenue announcements with little room to effectively innovate & strategize.

So for now things will remain sporadic here until I figure this out and/or get a real job.

The Evolution of Sharing

I have an article up at Shareable.net. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:

Sharing isn’t unique to humans but we seem to do it a lot more than any other mammals. Some combination of intrinsic altruism, on-the-spot cost-benefit calculus, and perhaps the routine abstractions we subconsciously employ to reconfigure our internal reward systems has positioned us to be exceptional at sharing all manner of things.

So much so, it seems, that we’ve constructed a global web of technologies whose function seems to be primarily adapted to the simple, rapid, and non-local giving and receiving of ideas, emotions, experiences, templates, tools, and just about every other aspect of the human experience.

Indeed, the Information Age and all its wondrous gadgetry, heaved up by materials science and sustained by ridiculous amounts of energy, is the dawning realization of industrialism turned from hard goods to the exchange of dematerialized content.

Read the rest at Shareable.net

A Ramble on Virtualized Selves and the Global Mind

I’ve been consuming a tremendous amount of information lately. Maybe too much. Some of it is focused on my own research interests but then there’s the daily/hourly webiverse immersion, constantly pinging Gmail & Twitter & Reddit & a suite of news ags ostensibly to check for direct correspondence or critical info but then so very easily sidelined into general browsing of all & sundry in the human datastream. Or at least the bit of it that I routinely consume. Relevancy is starting to be undermined by pure serendipity where I find myself burning cycles on all sorts of flotsam & ephemera.

So there’s this ongoing datavore consumption reinforced by an increased merging of my sense of self with the hive mind, relentlessly sharing things as if they’re somehow invalid or unverified without being uploaded to the consensus. I can feel this shift in myself driving the necessity of sharing, virtualizing my reality to somehow make it more real as witnessed by the masses. In my more wistful moments, I can glimpse this as an emergence of, or perhaps the early characterization & symptomology of, the Global Mind. In my more pragmatic and self-effacing moments, I see it as an addiction fed by little squirts of dopamine into the amygdaloid stew of my brain, keeping me from meaningfully and intentionally engaging with the real presence of my life, all flesh and blood and alive with sensation, seeking joy and warmth, stillness & silence.

The convergence of mobility and the cloud makes this relentless info-gorging so very easy and ever-present, each one of us active nodes connecting across networks to report status, pass links, share overheard’s and twitpics, ping other nodes and generally engage in this bizarrely transformative-yet-simple orchestration of distributed human processing. In the smart phone era, we’re all knowledge workers of some kind, crunching our lot of bits about this or that but always in some relational connection to others. For those with access to smart phones, being truly alone, being bored, being without task, is something you have to deliberately seek out, unplug, leave the cellphone and the laptop at home, go to an island or desert or mountaintop that doesn’t formally recognize the cloud.

And maybe this gap is what Shirky is getting at with his new work on cognitive surplus (I haven’t read it yet) – that, for the first time in history, a considerable chunk of humanity is always available to be processors for some distributed task. You’ve always got the smartphone and it’s pretty much always wired so why not browse/share/crunch while standing in line at the DMV? This was impossible 15 years ago. That was time to read a book, maybe, but forget about being productive.

But what does it mean to be productive these days, anyway? Is tweeting in line at the DMV productive? I suppose it is if you’re contributing to someone else’s productivity by passing the info or sharing your insight.

And maybe this is why I like to imagine some socio-evolutionary acculturation or entrainment towards a global mind: because each of us are individual nodes in this monstrous global spaghetti of non-locality yet more and more we’re behaving as contributors to the multi-cellular efforts of our extended social nets, affinity groups, work projects, etc… We’re individuals embedded in large, non-local, instantaneously communicating virtual organelles, differentiating to address specific sets of tasks and goals, like functional bodies within the brain. And our nervous system seems wired to reinforce this through the immediate feedback of that heady stew of neurochemicals that bind reward and satisfaction and pleasure to the interactions that compose our social nature.

We are social animals. With smartphones. And a global repository of instantly read-writable living knowledge. And we’re rapidly adding a massive virtualized layer to our experience of each other and the world.

I’m painting a big romantic broad-stroke, of course, but it’s certainly a considerable trend in the nascent information age and one that has already radically altered the fabric of our lives. Timeshifted forward 50 years, barring any cataclysmic intervention by the biosphere or inability to bridge the energy gap when the tar pits dry up, we’ll see multiple generations that have grown up connected and virtualized. I mean, it feels weird to me and I can see it in myself but I’ve only been playing this web game seriously for about 17 years or so. Imagine the kids – and future adults – that have been embedded in this world since birth. What will the mind of the 40 year old in 2050 be like compared to mine? Kids these days don’t even speak on phones. They send short messages, small bursts of data, back and forth with blurring thumbspeed. Kids deal with online bullies that have no physical presence in their lives, can’t hit them or steal their lunch, yet are able to drive their targets to suicide. This is staggering. And it is evidence that the self is very quickly extending into the cloud yet seemingly incompetent at distinguishing it from reality.

Reality. Pish! It’s been a nebulous things for millenia, anyways. We tried to heap some mechanistic rationalism on it and it continues to routinely shrug it off. Reality has always been highly subjective and now it’s also virtual, augmented, more consensual than inescapable. More malleable than reliable. Especially so in the shifting sands before the doorstep of whatever grand event horizon our civilization seems to be presently, painfully, hurtling towards.

KTLS: Emerging Cityscapes

Over at KedgeForward I’ve contributed a piece exploring my sense of what cities might look like in the coming years based on current trends and emerging constraints. The question posed by Kedge founder, Frank Spencer, is:

“In what ways will the concept and landscape of the city change over the next decade, and will this change bring about positive or negative impact in terms of global resilience, transformational development, and human evolution?”

My answer begins:

“All human systems and technologies are ultimately embedded within the larger natural ecosystem of the planet. As we’re now beginning to witness across all such domains, nature is applying more and more pressure on civilization to force it into better alignment with the principles of conservation and homeostasis critical to balanced living systems. As massive aggregations of society, technology, commerce, industry, resource consumption, and waste production, cities will feel tremendous impact from the corrections imposed by the natural world. Megacities in the developing world like Lagos, Jakarta, Delhi, and Mexico City already exhibit enormous stress due to rapid urbanization, rising populations, and the energetic consumption and waste production that attends their growth. With aging populations and over-burdened consumer economies, first world cities like London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo will find it more & more difficult to support their resource demands. Indeed, given projections for energy prices, food stocks, and clean water & sanitation, cities across the world are trending towards a lower common standard of living.

Continued at KedgeForward…

Notes From the IFTF 2010 Ten Year Forecast

Last month I attended & participated in the Ten Year Forecast conference presented by the Institute For The Future. This event at Cavallo Point was the culmination of several months of research looking at the signals, trends, and possible futures of five global domains: the carbon economy, the water ecology, adaptive power, cities in transition, and molecular identity. I contributed research for the carbon economy & adaptive power, looking at carbon markets and the distribution of energy resources for the former and investigating insurgency, narcoterror, and the emerging shadow economy for the latter.

Over two days we presented very challenging content, both in scope & complexity, as well as tone. These are major foundational systems that intersect with every aspect of civilization. Most of the forecasts & scenarios were undercut with a tone of constraint and great challenge given the turbulent nature of these modern transitional times. In attendance were many high-level representatives from some of the largest corporate entities on the planet, as well as from NGO’s, government, and private research. The scenarios presented them with a near-future significantly constrained by resource shortages, rising costs of production, and the growing urgency of climate change. All of these constraints were very clearly articulated to highlight the need to reduce consumption, engineer positive behavioral change, and identify new measures of prosperity & wellness unhinged from growth & GDP.

I spoke directly with several VP’s, some responsible for guiding multi-billion dollar corporations, and all expressed a surprising awareness & understanding of the deeply challenging realities we face. I was met again & again with the sentiment that energy constraints will corral growth and compel companies to both modify their operations to reduce energy use and evolve their products and services to be more sustainable. Indeed, everyone acknowledged the impact of sustainability on their business, admitting that nature has now entered the boardroom. To be clear, some of these companies are the largest transporters on the planet – major keystone energy consumers. So when they start admitting that business-as-usual has to change, it’s hard not to feel the gravity of our times.

The first day was especially powerful. There was a distinct thickness to the large ballroom by the time Jane McGonigal was giving her after-dinner keynote on the Epic Win. We had thrown so much really overwhelming information at the attendees, all of which heralded significant changes that will likely impact all human systems in the next ten years. We painted pictures of a civilization that will either adapt quickly & effectively or spiral into a malaise of constraint, decline, & chaos. Yet the tone of the room and the comments & conversations that emerged were radically optimistic, embracing the dire news and ready to press on into the cold night for a better tomorrow.

Undeniably, we live in interesting times. Things seem increasingly out of control. Or at least, we now see so much of the world in such minute detail that our historic models of what order should look like are failing against the vast interconnected global systems laid bare before us. What we know for sure is that inevitable growth is a cancer and cannot be sustained. We know resources are finite and expensive and their industrial use is poisoning the planet. And we know that the planet itself is the ultimate Invisible Hand that will easily wipe us clean if we don’t acknowledge it’s centrality and honor the necessity of it’s health. Perhaps in more pragmatic terms these realizations are now reaching into the boardrooms and staff rooms of our global institutions. Economics, humanism, and ecology – the triple-bottom line – is making it’s way into the machines of commerce. And more and more people are looking for a meaningful future in their own triple-bottom-line of happiness, resilience, and legacy.

Outliers & Complexity

Or, The Risk of Extrapolating Linear Trends Against Non-Linear Systems.

A common habit in forecasting, particularly in energy futures & economic growth, is to take roughly linear trends and extend them over the next few decades. The notion is that there is inertia in what has already happened that will make the future look markedly similar, or at least there will likely be a more-or-less linear movement along an existing path. For example, many forecasts suggest that energy consumption will increase by 50% towards the year 2035. This is based on data over the past 30 years that is then extrapolated forward along expectations, so you get graphs that look like this one from the EIA’s 2009 Annual Energy Outlook Early Release Overview:

The graph shows mostly linear growth in energy consumption. The assumptions here are that, given previous growth rates, and given a rough set of expectations about future growth, energy consumption will steadily grow across all sectors. Yet you’ll notice a few bumps & dips for transportation & industrial in the later months of 2008 and early 2009. These suggest outlier events. Outliers are the unexpected events, the Black Swans that come out of nowhere and blow expectations out of the water. In this case, economic activity got a big boost by the inflated gains of the securities market, then took a dive after all the hidden risks came to the surface. The following graph from the same EIA report really highlights the 2008 economic black swan:

Here we see the market prices for the primary energy sources. This graph really shows the instability churned up by the securities outlier. As the ultimate determinant of just about all economic activity (nothing happens without energy) we can see energy prices climbing at the same time demand was ramping up (compare to the last graph of consumption). Then heading into the crash energy prices plummet as fears mount, workforces are downsized, factories go dark, and productivity retracts in the face of economic doom. In spite of expectations the market collapse came as a surprise. Yet, forecasts still commit global energy consumption to a future of roughly 50% growth in demand (see those post-2010 consumption lines in the first graph?). In spite of obvious turbulence in past performance the forecasts assume typical, linear economic growth out to 2035.

While such linear approximations offer hope of anticipating and, hence, preparing for the future, to some degree they represent a logical fallacy of projecting linear trends onto complex, non-linear systems. Living systems like weather patterns, anthills, and global economics are approximately non-deterministic. That is, they’re so complex and have so many feedback mechanisms that they’re mostly unpredictable (weather predictions are still only more-or-less valid for about 5 days out). Much of this complexity arises from the turbulence generated by feedback loops and interconnections across every scale of the system. The power laws underlying dynamic systems take small values and iterate them over time into very large values. This is the mechanism underlying the oft-mentioned Butterfly Effect and one of the drivers for outlier events. Imagine a dust devil spinning up on an otherwise calm desert floor…

Nature seeks homeostasis – a dynamic equilibrium around a point of stability. The counterpoint to runaway feedback loops and suddenly emergent outliers are the damping effects of control elements. In climate, the tendency for hot & cold to equalize will usually mitigate a storm and return clear skies. The dust devil gives up it’s angular momentum to shifting pressure & temperature gradients. Looking at our current affairs we see that total economic collapse has (so far) been averted through aggressive attempts to dampen the turbulence by injecting massive amounts of state capital into the financial system. These interventions & market regulations are control structures put in place to govern for relative economic homeostasis. When they work and things are relatively quiet, they keep those trend projections nice & linear.

Linear projections help us continue to get things done based on fairly reliable expectations. But avoiding the next economic catastrophe requires a deep study of the many threads & amplifiers that drive black swan events. Outliers occupy the thin edge of statistical possibility yet almost always have tremendous consequences. They are, by nature, entropic & disruptive, shifting the territory and demanding new adaptations. To return to the global energy domain, what outliers might be slowly iterating to challenge the forecasts of 50% growth in demand? What catastrophic black swans might be lurking off the radar? What scientific breakthroughs and game-changing innovations might be weaving together towards a complete re-orientation of power requirements, transport, or industrial fuel?

Studying a system for outliers and looking for the signals & trends that might lead to the next Black Swan, as well as examining the conditions that have led to previous outlier events, can inform forecasts that are much more attuned to resiliency and adaptation.

[Update: The mobile phone is a great example of a high-impact outlier with a small physical footprint that achieved global ubiquity within 10 years. The pace & breadth of it's adoption suggests that interventionary technologies can rather quickly have major impacts, challenging heavily invested and entrenched businesses. Imagine an energy outlier with a similar device profile that enabled people to generate & store enough power to run a small home or drive an electric car 100 miles...]

Bios Asserts Itself Through Human Systems

[This is a rough outline I'm working with to frame a forthcoming article series...]

The Industrial Revolution emerged from a mechanistic world view and a scientific method that focused on isolated, ideal systems. This clockwork methodology enabled the rapid construction of the modern world yet masked the systemic impacts of industrial growth. The consequences of this mechanized, replacement-part philosophy have been wrought across living systems, eroding the natural environment and threatening human welfare, often to the reward of the most aggressive and self-serving. Yet the unavoidable effects of industrialization have forced humanity to evolve it’s awareness, turning our philosophies of nature and industry towards a more holistic & intentional understanding of living systems. We’re quickly learning the need to look beyond the immediately observable bounds of our creations and place them within larger contexts of community, society, environment, and legacy. This logical shift from Cartesian mechanism to relativism and holism is changing the way we design our world. Whether we’re aware of it or not, our evolving nature is deeply informing our human systems and crafting emergent solutions that look much more biological than mechanistic. Yet, this transition is extraordinarily chaotic as the foundations of civilization are re-examined and upgraded to the new paradigm, concurrent with a massive explosion in human population, a rapidly shifting global energy landscape, new classes of super-empowered actors and collectives, a global information network, instantaneous non-local communication, and a increasingly unpredictable natural environment. It may seem that we’re racing against our own technologies to save ourselves and the planet… Or perhaps Gaia & Technos are co-evolving and seeking homeostasis through their interplay with humanity.

The Realities of Coal in the Second Industrial Revolution

“Roughly speaking, we can think of the OECD as the oil users, and the Non-OECD as the coal users.”

This quote from energy investment analyst, Gregor MacDonald, should be deeply considered, particularly given the realities of world energy use and demographics. Simply put, the West is getting older and it’s growth has slowed considerably. Meanwhile, the developing world is seeing rapid population growth, now contributing almost 5 billion people to the global register. The ten largest cities in the world are mostly non-OECD* and as they further industrialize and pull more people out of the slums, they’ll need more power to drive their growth. With economic disparity choking access to petroleum, reinforced by much higher oil prices, the developing world is rising on coal-fired utilities and marching towards it’s own industrial revolution.

Source: Gregor MacDonald, 2010.

It’s my sense that these realities are not being deeply considered by many of the people involved in the debate about climate, energy, and sustainability who seem to be focusing primarily on China and the developed world. Yet population growth, industrial activity, and energy use has slowed to nearly flatline across Europe and the United States over the past 10 years, and their rate of population replacement is now negative. While coal use is a reality that may be declining in the West, it’s on the rise across the rest of the world. The other half of the planet is industrializing rapidly and it’s doing so by burning massive amounts of coal**. China, with a population of approx. 1.3 billion, gets a whopping 68% [adjusted to 2009] of it’s energy from coal. India, with aprrox. 1.1 billion people, derives about 60% of it’s energy from coal. While considerable efforts are being made to build out renewables the sheer size of these populations and the rate of their growth ensures many years of coal use before solar & wind will substantially offset their energy requirements. Likewise, countries heavily invested in coal exports, like Russia & Australia, are incentivised to promote it’s use for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the World Coal Institute would have us believe that there’s enough coal to last 130 years at current rates of production.

Given that coal use is so large and embedded as a global energy resource and financial commodity, it is imperative that the coal industry and it’s technologies are upgraded to reliable clean coal and carbon recapture solutions. These are, in my opinion, some of the most important developments that the climate discussion should be pressing for, amended as pre-requisites to World Bank and IMF funding. Western industrialism is cooling. Capitol is moving to the developing world and the second industrial revolution is beginning. We have the opportunity to try and intentionally design it to avoid the pitfalls of the western path. Whether or not we accept anthropogenic warming we know that burning coal is dirty and bad for living things.

Believe me, I don’t want to say this. And I know the proclivity of the coal industry to promote less-than-marginal solutions disguised as “clean coal”. But it’s critical that we accept the abundance of coal, it’s presently-irreplaceable energy intensity, and it’s ongoing use across the world so we can focus on real solutions to making it cleaner over the next 20 years while we build out the necessary renewable infrastructure.

* Tokyo – 35,676,000; New York-Newark – 19,040,000; Ciudad de Mexico – 19,028,000; Mumbai – 18,978,000; Sao Paulo – 18,845,000; Delhi – 15,926,000; Shanghai – 14,987,000; Kolkata – 14,787,000; Dhaka – 13,458,000; Buenos Aires – 12,795,000 (2007) [Note that non-OECD countries often have census numbers lower than actual population size, due to under-reporting across slums.]
** For more details & numbers on rising coal use in non-OECD, see: EIA International Energy Outlook 2009 for coal.

Free New Music: Western Rains EP

I’ve been on a music production bender since the new year. The results have come together in a new free EP I’ve released through Bandcamp: Western Rains. It’s wet and devotional, a sort of dubstep electro platter featuring eastern vocals and world percussion. Give it a listen. If you like it, please share!

My older music is at N8UR. I’m always interested in collaboration (or licensing!) opportunities…

KedgeForward: KTLS: The Future of Transhumanism

The foresight & strategy group, KedgeForward, has featured me in their first KTLS: KedgeForward Thought Leader Series. They’re doing great work – check out their Holoptic Foresight Dynamics series, as well as their excellent presentation on Food Systems in 9 Minutes. I’m honored to be included in their list of Thought Leaders.

The question they pose:

“Do you see a transhuman species emerging? If yes, what present drivers are catalyzing this meme and evolutionary movement? If no, what ideas or emerging trends are discouraging or disrupting such a movement?”

And my answer:

“In strict terms, a species must be capable of passing on it’s adaptations to offspring through sexual transmission. In as much as transhumanism is proceeding through genetic engineering, it may be possible that enhancements to longevity, health, and physical & perceptual structures could be transmitted along the germ line, though there remain significant challenges to such deep modification, least of which are the attendant moral & ethical questions…” (continued at KedgeForward)

Stop Anthropogenic Warming: Design Human Behavior

I followed COP15 pretty closely and, though I was hopeful, I didn’t really expect any major consensus among the G20. The differentials between the cooling western arc of history and that of the developing world in the East, coupled to the uneven distribution of natural energy resources across the geo’s, ensure that many conflicting interests will dominate the world chess board for some time. Carbon markets will likely build some dampening feedback into the global system by tying energy use & emission directly to the balance sheet but their successful adoption really depends on convincing Goldman Sachs et al that there’s tons of money to be had, not on getting the G20 to agree on a universal treaty.

The simple fact is that the scenarios show climate change accelerating more quickly than global markets. Given the inability of nations to set terms, as well as the fundamental folly of trying to manage such a huge globalized system as a top-down exercise in governance, it has become incumbent upon business and communities to drive the real behavioral change necessary to shift the economy of production and consumption to a more sustainable posture. The necessary bottom-up compliment to a systemic marketplace and/or governance scheme is the intentional re-engineering of human behavior. The tension between the global dialog of governance and the overlooked role of designers in social change is creating a new breed of sustainable systems engineers. The growing class of systems & social designers are building the next operational structures of civilization that will work to mitigate environmental & social destruction by engineering more efficient, sustainable, and holistic solutions to the diverse needs of our world.

As a note of criticism, while we arguably need rapid change, I feel that the environmental movement has erred in orienting it’s brand message around anthropogenic warming. The science may be sound but the position is not defensible against the psychological tactics of the opposition. The models simply aren’t good enough yet to prove beyond a doubt that humans are directly responsible for warming the planet. I believe intuitively that we are but no model or network of models is yet capable of effectively running that simulation. There are too many open holes that the masses will never understand. It’s just too big of a message; too scary. What we do know is that plastics are bad, energy should be conserved, pollution hurts living things, fossil fuels are dirty, and waste and over-consumption are a tax on the future. The environmental movement should focus on these known’s to continue the really applaudable work they’ve done to grow conservation efforts and bring awareness to the deep impact of our industrial economy, extending these efforts to encourage life-cycle analysis, triple-bottom-line accounting, and cradle-to-cradle planning while working directly with designers to intentionally engineer human behavior and ideology towards a more holistic and biomimetic relationship to the planetary ecology in which we live.

Breaking Open the Cloud: Heads in an Augmented World

This past Saturday I worked with Mike Liebhold, Gene Becker, Anselm Hook, and Damon Hernandez to present the West Coast Augmented Reality Development Camp at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, Ca. By all accounts it was a stunning success with a huge turn-out of companies, engineers, designers, makers, artists, geo-hackers, scientists, techies and thinkers. The planning was mostly done virtually via email and phone meetings with only a couple visits to the venue. On Saturday, the virtual planing phase collapsed into reality and bloomed on site into AR Dev Camp.

As an un-conference, the event itself was a study in grassroots, crowd-sourced, participatory organization with everyone proposing sessions which were then voted on and placed into the schedule. To me, it was a wonderfully organic and emergent process that almost magically gave life and spirit to the skeleton we had constructed. So before I launch into my thoughts I want to give a hearty “Thank You!” to everyone that joined us and helped make AR DevCamp such a great experience. I also want to give a big shout-out to Tish Shute, Ori Inbar, and Sophia for coordinating the AR DevCamp in New York City, as well as Dave Mee & Julian Tate who ran the Manchester, UK event. And, of course, we couldn’t have done it without the help of our sponsors, Layar, Metaio, Qualcomm, Google, IFTF, Lightning Laboratories, Web3D Consortium, IDEAbuilder, MakerLab, and Waze (and URBEINGRECORDED with Cage Free Consulting contributed the flood of afternoon cookies).

So first, just what is Augmented Reality? There’s a tremendous amount of buzz around the term, weighing it down with connotations and expectations. Often, those investing in it’s future invoke the haunting specter of Virtual Reality, doomed by it’s inability to live up to the hype: ahead of it’s time, lost mostly to the realm of military budgets and skunkworks. Yet, the AR buzz has driven a marketing rush throwing gobs of money at haphazard and questionable advertising implementations that quickly reach millions and cement in their minds a narrow association with flashy magazine covers and car ads. Not to diminish these efforts, but there’s a lot more – and a lot less – going on here.

In it’s most distilled form, augmented reality is an interface layer between the cloud and the material world. The term describes a set of methods to superimpose and blend rendered digital interface elements with a camera stream, most commonly in the form of annotations such as text, links, and other 2 & 3-dimensional objects that appear to float over the camera view of the live world. Very importantly, AR includes at it’s core the concept of location mediated through GPS coordinates, orientation, physical markers, point-clouds, and, increasingly, image recognition. This combination of location and superimposition of annotations over a live camera feed is the foundation of AR. As we’re seeing with smart phones, the device knows where you are, what direction you’re facing, what your looking at, who & what is near you, and what data annotations & links are available in the view. In this definition, the cloud is the platform, the AR browser is the interface, and annotation layers are content that blend with the world.

So the augmented reality experience is mediated through a camera view that identifies a location-based anchor or marker and reveals any annotations present in the annotation layer (think of a layer as a channel). Currently, each of these components is uniquely bound to the AR browser in which they were authored so you must use, for example, the Layar browser to experience Layar-authored annotation layers. While many AR browsers are grabbing common public data streams from sources like Flickr & Wikipedia, their display and function will vary from browser to browser as each renders this data uniquely. And just because you can see a Flicker annotation in one browser doesn’t mean you will see it in another. For now, content is mostly bound to the browser and authoring is mostly done by third-parties building canned info layers. There doesn’t seem to be much consideration for the durability and longevity of these core components, and there is a real risk that content experiences may become fractured and ephemeral.

Indeed, content wants to be an inclusive, social experience. One of the core propositions underlying our motivation for AR DevCamp is the idea that the platforms being built around augmented reality should be architected as openly as possible to encourage the greatest degree of interoperability and extensibility. In the nascent but massively-hyped AR domain, there’s a growing rush to plant flags and grab territory, as happens in all emergent opportunity spaces. The concern is that we might recapitulate the Browser Wars – not intentionally but by lack of concerted efforts to coordinate implementations. While I maintain that coordination & open standardization is of necessity, I question my own assumption that without it we’ll end up with a bunch of walled gardens. This may be under-estimating the impact of the web.

Through the lessons and resultant standardization of the Browser Wars, it’s become a best practice (and indeed, a necessity) to design specifically to the most common standards. Arguably, the move from Web 1.0 (essentially a collection of static billboards) to the social interactions that characterize Web 2.0 established and deeply reinforced the fundamental requirement that we’re all able to share information & experiences in the cloud. This social commons necessarily requires an architectural commonality. Thus, we all agree that HTML, JavaScript, PHP, JASON, MySQL, and now RDF, OWL, and SPARQL are the core components of our data service models. Since we understand that AR is primarily a location-aware interface layer for the cloud, it’s very likely that independent implementations will all speak the same language. However, the point of AR DevCamp and similar gatherings is to challenge this assumption and to reinforce commonality by bringing everyone together to press flesh & exchange notes. The social dynamic in the natural world will determine the level of cooperation in the virtual.

Yet, this cooperation and normalization is by no means a given. Just about every chunk of legacy code that the Information Age is built upon retains vestiges of the git-er-done, rush to market start-up midset. Short-sighted but well-meaing implementations based upon limited resources, embryonic design, and first-pass architectures bog down the most advance and expensive software suites. As these code bases swell to address the needs of a growing user base, the gap between core architecture and usability widens. Experience designers struggle against architectures that were not able to make such design considerations. Historically, code architecture has proceeded ahead of user experience design, though this is shifting to some degree in the era of Agile and hosted services. Nevertheless, the emerging platforms of AR have the opportunity – and, I’d argue, the requirement – to include user research, design, & usability as core components of implementation. The open, standardized web has fostered a continuous and known experience across it’s vast reaches. Artsy Flash sites aside, you always know how to navigate and interact with the content. The fundamentals of AR need to be identified and agreed upon before the mosaic of emerging code bases become too mature to adjust to the needs of a growing user base.

Given the highly social aspect of the web, place-based annotations and objects will suffer greatly if there’s not early coordination around a shared standard for anchors. This is where the Browser Wars may inadvertently re-emerge. The anchor is basically the address/location of an annotation layer. When you look through an augmented view It’s the bit of data that says “I’m here, check out my annotations”. Currently there is no shared standard for this object, nor for annotations & layers. You need the Layar browser in order to see annotation layers made in it’s platform. If you only have a Junaio browser, you won’t see it. If you annotate a forest, tagging each tree with a marker linked to it’s own data registry, and then the browser app you used to author goes out of business, all those pointers are gone. The historical analog would be coding your website for IE but anyone with Mosaic can’t see it. This is where early design and usability considerations are critical to ensure a reasonable commonality and longevity of content. Anchors, annotations, & layers are new territory that ought to be regarded as strongly as URL’s and markup. Continuing to regard these as independent platform IP will balkanize the user experience of continuity across content layers. There must be standards in authoring and viewing. Content and services are where the business models should innovate.

So if we’re moving towards an augmented world of anchors and annotations and layers, what considerations should be given to the data structure underlying these objects? An anchor will have an addressable location but should it contain information about who authored it and when? Should an annotation contain similar data, time-stamped and signed with an RDF structure underlying the annotation content? How will layers describe their contents, set permissions, and ensure security? And what of the physical location of the data? An anchor should be a distributed and redundant object, not bound to the durability and security of any single server. A secure and resilient backbone of real-world anchor points is critical as the scaffolding of this new domain.

Earthmine is a company I’ve been watching for a number of months since they presented at the IFTF. They joined us at AR DevCamp to present their platform. While many AR developers are using GPS & compass or markers to draw annotations over the real world, Earthmine is busy building a massive dataset that maps Lat/Long/Alt coordinates to hi-rez images of cities. They have a small fleet of vehicles equipped with stereoscopic camera arrays that drive around cities, capturing images of every inch they see. But they’re also grabbing precise geolocation coordinates that, when combined with the image sets, yields a dense point cloud of addressable pixels. When you look at one of these point clouds on a screen it looks like a finely-rendered pointillistic painting of a downtown. They massage this data set, mash the images and location, and stream it through their API as a navigable street view. You can then place objects in the view with very high accuracy – like a proposed bus stop you’d like to prototype, or a virtual billboard. Earthmine even indicated that making annotations in their 2d map layer could add a link to the augmented real-world view. So you can see a convergence and emerging correlation between location & annotation in the real world, in an augmented overlay, on a flat digital map, and on a Google Earth or Virtual World interface. This is an unprecedented coherency of virtual and real space.

The Earthmine demo is cool and the Flash API offers interesting ways to customize the street view with 2d & 3d annotations but the really killer thing is their dataset. As alluded to, they’re building an address space for the real world. So if you’re in San Francisco and you have an AR browser that uses the Earthmine API (rumors that Metaio are working on something here…) you can add an annotation to every STOP sign in The Mission so that a flashing text of “WAR” appears underneath. With the current GPS location strategy this would be impossible due to it’s relatively poor resolution (~3-5 meters at best). You could use markers but you’d need to stick one on every STOP sign. With Earthmine you can know almost exactly where in the real world you’re anchoring the annotation… and they can know whenever you click on one. Sound familiar?

Augmented reality suggests the most significant shift in computation since the internet. As we craft our computers into smaller and smaller mobile devices, exponentially more powerful and connected, we’re now on the verge of beginning the visual and locational integration of the digital world with the analog world. We’ve digitized much of human culture, pasted it onto screens and given ourselves mirror identities to navigate, communicate, and share in this virtual space. Now we’re breaking open the box and drawing the cloud across the phenomenal world, teaching our machines to see what we see and inviting the world to be listed in the digital Yellow Pages.

So, yeah, now your AR experience of the world is covered in billboards, sloganeering, propaganda, and dancing dinosaurs all competing for your click-through AdSense rating. A big consideration, and a topic that came up again & again at AR DevCamp, is the overwhelming amount of data and the need to filter it to some meaningful subset, particularly with respect to spam and advertising. A glance across the current crop of iPhone AR apps reveals many design interface challenges, with piles of annotations all occluding themselves and your view of the world. Now imagine a world covered in layers each with any number of annotations. UI becomes very important. Andrea Mangini & Julie Meridian led a session on design & usability considerations in AR that could easily be a conference of it’s own. How do you manage occlusion & sorting? Level of detail? What does simple & effective authoring of annotations on a mobile device look like? How do you design a small but visible environmental cue that an annotation exists? If the URL convention is an underlined text, what is the AR convention for gently indicating that the fire hydrant you’re looking at has available layers & annotations? Discoverability of the digital links within the augmented world will be at a tension with overwhelming the view of the world itself.

When we consider the seemingly-inevitable development of eyewear with digital heads-up display, occlusion can quickly move from helpful to annoying to dangerous. No matter how compelling the augmented world is you still need to see when that truck is coming down the street. Again, proper design for human usability is perhaps even more critical in the augmented interface than in a typical screen interface. Marketing and business plans aside, we have to assume that the emergence of truly compelling and valuable technologies are ultimately in line with the deep evolutionary needs of the human animal. We’re certainly augmenting for fun and art and engagement and communication but my sense is that, underneath all these we’re building this new augmented reality because the power & adaptive advantage mediated through the digital domain is so great that we need it to integrate seamlessly with our mobile, multi-tasking lives. It’s been noted by others – Kevin Kelly comes to mind – that we’re teaching machines to do many of things we do, but better. And in the process we’re making them smaller and more natural and bringing them closer and closer to our bodies. Ponderings of transhumanity and cyborgian futures aside, our lives are being increasingly augmented and mediated by many such smart machines.

DARPA wasn’t at AR Dev Camp. Or at least if they were, they didn’t say so. There was a guy from NASA showing a really cool air traffic control system that watched aircraft in the sky, tagged them with data annotations, and tracked their movements. We were shown the challenges to effectively register the virtual layer – the annotation – with the real object – a helicopter – when it’s moving rapidly. In other words, the virtual layer, mediated through a camera & a software layer, tended to lag behind the 80+ mph heli. But in lieu of DARPA’s actual attendance, it’s worth considering their Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization (ULTRA-Vis) program to develop a multimodal mobile computational system for coordinating tactical movements of patrol units. This program sees the near-future soldier as outfitted with a specialized AR comm system with a CPU worn on a belt, a HUD lens over one eye, a voice recognition mic, and a system to capture gestures. Military patrols rely heavily on intel coming from command and on coordinating movements through back-channel talk and line-of-sight gestures. AR HUDs offer simple wayfinding and identification of team mates. Voice commands can execute distributed programs and open or close comm channels. Gestures will be captured to communicate to units both in an out of line-of-sight and to initiate or capture datastreams. Cameras and GPS will track patrol movements and offer remote viewing through other soldier’s cameras. But most importantly, this degree of interface will be simple, fluid, and effortless. It won’t get in your way. For better or for worse, maximizing pack hunting behaviors with technology will set the stage for the future of human-computer interaction.

After lunch provided by Qualcomm, Anselm Hook led an afternoon session at AR DevCamp titled simply “Hiking”. We convened in a dark and hot room, somewhat ironically called the “Sun Room” for it’s eastern exposure, to discuss nature and what, if any, role AR should play in our interface with the Great Outdoors. We quickly decided to move the meeting out into the parking lot where we shared our interests in both built and natural outdoor environments. A common theme that emerged in words and sentiment was the tension between experience & distraction. We all felt that the natural world is so rich and special in large part due to it’s increasing contrast to an urbanized and mechanized life. It’s remote and wild and utterly disconnected, inherently at peace in it’s unscripted and chaotic way. How is this value and uniqueness challenged by ubicomp and GPS and cellular networks? GPS & cellphone coverage can save lives but do we really need to Twitter from a mountain top? I make no judgement calls here and am plenty guilty myself but it’s worth acknowledging that augmented reality may challenge the direct experience of nature in unexpected ways and bring the capacity to overwrite even the remote corners of the world with human digital graffiti.

But remember that grove of trees I mentioned before, tagged with data annotations? Imagine the researchers viewing those trees through AR lenses able to see a glance-able color index for each one showing CO2, O2, heavy metals, turgidity, growth, and age. Sensors, mesh nets, and AR can give voice to ecosystems, cities, communities, vehicles, and objects. Imagine that grove is one of thousands in the Brazilian rainforest reporting on it’s status regularly, contributing data to policy debates and regulatory bodies. What types of augmented experiences can reinforce our connection to nature and our role as caretakers?

On the other hand, what happens when you and the people around you are each having very different experiences of “reality”? What happens to the commons when there are 500 different augmented versions? What happens to community and society when the common reference point for everything – the very environment in which we exist – is malleable and fluid and gated by permissions and access layers or overwrought with annotations competing for our attention? What social gaps could arise? What psychological ailments? Or perhaps more realistically, what happens when a small class of wealthy westerners begin to redraw the world around them? Don’t want to see other people? No problem! Just turn on the obfuscation layer. Ugly tenements ruining your morning commute? Turn on some happy music and set your iGlasses to the favela paintshop filter! Augmentation and enhancement with technology will inevitably proceed along economic lines. What is the proper balance between enjoying our technological luxuries and responsibly curating the world for those less fortunate? Technology often makes the symptoms look different but doesn’t usually eradicate the cause. In the rush to colonize the augmented reality, in the shadow of a wavering global economic system and deep revision of value and product, now is the best time and the most important time to put solutions ahead of products; to collaborate and cooperate on designing open, robust, and extensible systems; and, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, to “work on stuff that matters”.

At the end of the day, pizza’s arrived (Thanks MakerLab!), beers were opened (Thanks Layar & Lighting Labs), and the buzzing brains of AR DevCamp mingled and shared their thoughts. Hearts alit, I’ll be forgiven some sentimentality to suggest that the Hacker Dojo had a soft, warm glow emanating from all the fine folks in attendance. Maybe it was like this around the Acid Tests in the 60’s (with more paisley). Or the heady days of PARC Xerox in the 80’s (with more ties). That growing inertia and sense of destiny at being at the right place at the right time just at the start of something exceptional…

Special thanks to Andrea Mangini for deep and ranging discussions about all this stuff, among many other things.

Local, Regional, National, Global: A View of Current World Trends

[The following is an unedited, stream-of-thought for a Sunday afternoon, summing up in fairly broad strokes many of the trends in socioeconomics and geopolitics that I'm currently tracking. This is a rough forecast for the next 3-5 years.]

The present arc of instability & change is driven by massive shifts in economy, ideology, connectivity, and trust. Many deeply entrenched behaviors and the institutions built on them are grinding up against social & environmental feedback, bloated bureaucracy, unsustainable growth models, and the interface of global transparency and closed power structures. On the global stage the myth of America is fading, it’s dematerialized information economies eroding it’s own industry, having financed the rise of it’s greatest competitors. The center of economic power is shifting to the East, into the EU and China, though it’s reasonable to suggest that the center itself is distributing across the primary northern actors. The perceived decline of the US may simply be the effects of capital normalization in a globalized world.

American governance continues to lose it’s ability to effectively manage the needs of it’s citizenry. This will shift governance to local and regional bodies mixing public sector legislators, corporate leaders, and empowered citizen groups & lobbies. Loyalties will trend towards those organizations most capable of meeting the needs of people, eg. stable employers, effective community groups, capable local civic leadership, familial & tribal affiliations, and gangs & insurgencies. As top-down national management weakens, corporate NGOs will play an increasing role in managing civil and socio-economic development.

For better or for worse, Google is a good example of an emerging NGO world leader. Google is financially strong, employs thousands, and is actively engineering & underwriting the development of a more prosperous and sustainable future in both it’s information and energy operations. For it’s employees, it’s business partners, it’s ecology of developers, and the many CSR organizations Google works with, they are a more reliable and trustworthy patron than the State of California or the US Gov. Likewise for Microsoft or, more specifically, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that has sent billions of dollars to help African poverty and fight AIDS (as with Google, questionable strategic intentions and pragmatic implementation failures aside). In an age lit with corrupt politicians and bankers, it’s easy for corporations & NGOs to look good by spending money on non-profit causes. In some ways, the market is more effective at getting things done than government these days. Expect to even see investment firms making similar overtures to social and environmental responsibility as capital begins to redistribute in emerging opportunistic investments. The new titans of the information, green tech, and biotech industries will continue to be the powers that are most capable of managing change effectively, though this posture will be both at tension with and an outcome of their need to manage growth and profit for their shareholders. Local and regional investments will inevitably be balanced against the global workforce. Corporate loyalty and integrity will only go so far as outsourcing draws jobs and money away from the locals.

As states risk bankruptcy through bloated bureaucracy, mismanagement, and endless partisan deadlocks, regions & local communities will organize & collaborate to pick up the slack or else decline into economic and social turmoil. This pattern is reflected at the level of national governance, increasingly beholden to global financial centers, extended across the globe in multiple unfavorable & expensive conflicts, and crippled domestically by oppositional bickering in Congress. All these trends reinforce the gap between State & Citizen, Wall St. and Main St., further de-legitimizing traditional governance. With spiking unemployment and the growing commercial credit crunch, the street-level effects of the Great Recession will continue to deepen for some time in spite of Wall St. indicators trying to stoke a rally back to an outmoded growth model. This effect will not be universal but unevenly distributed, reflecting the distribution of innovation, resources, capital, and climate.

For California, some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, are poised to maintain strength and innovation, particularly in the new information economy but also, perhaps more importantly, in the coming biotech revolution. Meanwhile, Fresno, Riverside, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles counties will deteriorate further. Fresno’s fate as it resets against failed housing speculation will be determined primarily by shifting weather patterns. If the region dries, expect even greater flight. Riverside and Bakersfield will likely follow the lead of Los Angeles which seems to be destined for greater chaos, particularly if water supplies are threatened. Expect continued regional migration into LA as extended families draw together to fight unemployment, and job seekers are drawn on hopes of legitimate and criminal financial opportunities. Gang violence will rise as illicit drug and weapons networks stake out territory, increasingly mixing with Mexican and Salvadorean criminal networks. LA and San Diego demographics will continue into a Hispanic majority as people flee a Mexico torn apart by it’s own narco-insurgency. But again, great opportunities exist in the San Francisco region provided the high cost of living and salary requirements do not scare away the most able and potentially benevolent corporate kingpins. The California Bay Area is one of the most innovative and productive centers of US business and will continue to build the information age for the foreseeable future. If not for deeply intractable water issues, one could imagine a Northern California statehood.

Nevertheless, Asia is leading the global economic recovery, not America, underscored most recently by China’s founding of its own NASDAQ-styled ChiNext market, as well as its recent ASEAN attendance. Increasingly, Asian economic bodies are calling for lessened reliance on Western markets, supplementing their currency investments with Euros, Yen, and RMBs. These two features of marked Asian economic growth and increased global currency diversification will inevitably soften the national power of the US, itself holding on by it’s handful of primary innovation centers (increasingly isolated from and at odds with middle America and the south), as well as its absolutely indomitable military force. While it is not in China or anyone’s interest to dump US debt and cause a dollar collapse, it will be interesting to see how an economically weakened and politically fractured America will rely on its military to save face as the global economy becomes more evenly distributed towards Asia & the EU. Similarly, India’s contribution to the region remains unclear as it tryies to resolve it’s hunger for modernization with a huge population mired in poverty and caste culture. Caught between the US & China, India’s primary role in the foreseeable future is to put pressure on Pakistan, forcibly enough to encourage the Pakistani military to put down the Taliban, but subtle enough not to provoke an all-out Pak-India conflict.

However one regards India’s contributions, the rise of Asia will not be easy. There are huge populations but their level of industrial & technological education still lags behind many western nations. Likewise, their financial centers (and political focus) will continue to be challenged by the much larger depressed rural populations still struggling out of feudal poverty. Any attempt to form an Asian counterpart to the EU will be challenged by such vast inequity across many proud and nationalistic cultures that have been traditionally very averse to cooperation. Asia has been at war with itself in some form perhaps as long as the Middle East. Indeed, the rise of the EU was only possible in a post-WW2 reunification towards cooperative economics (and against a rising USSR), and this cooperation remains tenuous at best. Russia itself is a major wildcard sitting between Asia & the EU & the Middle East, economically and politically crippled but still heavily armed with ICBMs & natural resources and making regular overtures to get the Soviet band back together. While the US is only slightly concerned about its southern neighbor, Asia is beset on all sides by nuclear powers, militant Islamists, and strategically-critical but highly chaotic regions. America travels to its conflicts while Asia need only look in its own backyard. Thus, the rise of Asia will be significant, primarily due to the inertia of China (itself in large part buoyed by unsustainable business trickery) and the flocking multinational business interests attracted to its present shininess, but any coherent China-JPN-ASEAN strategy will be beset by many challenges. Indeed, Japan itself will remain heavily dependent on the West, both economically and militarily, with everyone in the region hoping the US will keep North Korea in check. (As an aside, the US military is the *only* military capable of deploying 100,000+ troops anywhere in the world. No other country can move forces globally, control the world seas, and reach any nation with a nuclear strike.)

Either way, there will continue to be a fractured US polity, a weakening dollar, and a lackluster system of state and national governance. Some regions will descend into chaos and become truly feral (eg Detroit, parts of LA), while others will route around bureaucratic impotence with community co-ops, participatory local governance, regional corporate sponsorship, and virtualized global information & content cooperatives. The tensions between neighboring regions will be amplified by ideological and socio-economic differences arising from their respective abilities (or inabilities) to provide for their populations, as well as the presently unforeseeable impacts of climate change and pandemics. One neighbor’s fecundity is another’s reason to migrate or invade.

None of these shifts will radically alter business as usual, in that trade of goods and services will persist. The current global financial paradigm will not likely come crashing down though it will be forced to evolve towards greater transparency & liability. Wall St. can post great numbers but if communities are wracked by unemployment, crime, and dying lands, so-called economic recovery won’t make much difference, especially as the anticipated uptick in business sees more global outsourcing and contract work with diminishing quality of life for the expensive regions. In the near-term, these trends will put pressure on many local communities to fend for themselves (or align with corporate, government, and/or military interests in the region) though some will be uniquely positioned to build local resiliency and self-reliance while remaining highly competitive in a dematerialized global information marketplace.

The next stabilization will likely come on the back of green industry, dematerialized technology, and new energy abundance, all of which will emerge from a deepening understanding and engagement with natural systems & the biochemical world. The present instability is a direct result of an unsustainable resource model kicked off by the industrial revolution. The shift we’re in is driven by the necessity to bring human systems in line with living, natural systems. This is a deep, deep evolutionary priority working it’s way through the human species in ways we don’t even see. But in short, things are shifting quickly. The idealistic paradigms of How The World Is are changing before us on the tide of globalization and instantaneous communication connecting all corners of the Earth. Yet, change is typically not monolithic but is scattered and unevenly distributed. There are many more players on the board now and the myth of US dominance and the ideal of Democracy is challenged on many sides. The system is unlikely to crash but it’s certainly entering a phase of high instability. But don’t under-estimate the collective effort to keep things moving forward. The interconnected web of globalization may actually be the saving grace against system collapse, tying all nations together in mutual reliance.

Joseph Matheny Interviewed Me For Alterati

It’s a wide-ranging discussion around technologies and their impacts on culture, consciousness, the species, and what may become of our futures. In spite of the picture above, there is no discussion of advanced techniques for elevated goat farming. We had to save that for a later episode.
G-Spot interviews Chris Arkenberg.