I saw them to the East lit in semaphore flashes by the falling Winter Sun, set against fluffy pink clouds flowing languidly inland. Moving together as a fluid, mercurial and quicksilver, this way and that, a coordinated dance of shiny metallic starlings. They seemed to circle chaotically over some unseen attractor below.

In nature, they call this behavior a murmuration. Before they figured out how to make the microdrones pay attention to each other the mechanism of this kind of coordinated flock movement in birds was poorly understood. It still is but somewhere amidst the algorithmic tinkering the behavior emerged. The microdrones began to flock & swarm, mutually aware and clocked to such high frequencies that even the most sudden moves, the most aggressive pitch and yaw, were stretched out into a slow steadiness that yielded impossibly complex and graceful murmurations. Their autonomy became precise, their agency social and explicit.

At first the flocks needed some hand-holding. A group could be addressed as a whole by a remote pilot. Each member managed its own position relative to its neighbors but the meshnet required some steering and course-correction. Then they started setting paths for the flocks to follow. Eventually their agency was so sophisticated and their flocking behaviors so natural, that only the barest instructions were necessary. Survey coordinates above Golden Gate Park. Reconnoiter a 10-block radius around the intersection of Market and Van Ness. Open patrol within the city limits, look for mobile signature “Mike Patton”. The microdrones activate, take flight, flock & murmurate towards the objective, often staying autonomous for days, resting on rooftops and power lines for solar recharge.

Many look like hummingbirds, others like flying silver fish. Sometimes you’ll see an exotic DIY drone trying to join a flock. It usually doesn’t work out so well. Others are barely recognizable from real birds. They say the Chinese flocks are like bats, emitting little chirps to echolocate each other. Occasionally an old lumbering Reaper or re-conditioned Predator passes into the survey of the microdrone flocks and it’s like Blue Jays chasing off a hawk. The autonomous swarms almost seem to have real contempt for the intrusions of these old piloted interlopers.

Flickering & glinting, shifting like pixels on an old screensaver suggesting a language beneath words, a living billboard to communicate some inchoate embryonic intention. The sunset murmuration arced and folded with unimaginable grace for mere machines. But then, nature works through our hands to be recast into the Technium. We’re a bit slow sometimes but we humans are nothing if not excellent iterators.

Then, a flash. A tear in the rippling fabric followed by a quick resolution as the seam is fixed. A glitch in a bot becomes a calculation error, a biased trajectory, a sudden collision mid-air. A broken hull, stained with the black carbon of conflagration; a mess of chips and servos, cables and sensors falling to the ground below. Children gather them as toys and aspirational totems. Drone-spotters collect & catalog the bits for their taxonomies of fetishized hardware. Hobbyists pick through the parts for opportunities to reverse engineer their military precision. And each works quickly to outpace the recovery units and cleaning herds that roam the terra firma.

Theron, a child and a DIY engineer by default, himself hybridized with a cochlear implant and a neuroprosthetic leg, gathers a broken silver shell, fractured carbon-fiber wings diaphanous and reticulated, an intact sensor array, and a mostly-salvageable board. He’ll keep the sensors and try to sell the board. A milspec microdrone sensorium is hard to come by and will do well to upgrade his pets.

I’ve just returned from a very interesting workshop in Washington, D.C. about fast-moving change, asymmetric threats to security, and finding signals within the wall of noise thrown up by big data. These are tremendous challenges to governance, policy makers, and the intelligence community. I’ll have more to say on these topics in later posts but for now, here’s a round-up of the most popular posts on URBEINGRECORDED in order of popularity:

Occupy Wall Street – New Maps for Shifting Terrain – On OWS, gaps in governance, empowered actors, and opportunities in the shifting sands…

Getting to Know Your Ghost in the Machine – On the convergence of ubiquitous computation (ubicomp), augmented reality, and network identity…

The Transhuman Gap – On the challenges facing the transhuman movement…

The Realities of Coal in the Second Industrial Revolution – On the energy demand and resource availability for the developing world…

Meshnets, Freedom Phones, and the People’s Revolution – On the Arab Spring, hyperconnectivity, and ad hoc wireless networks…

And a few that I really like:

Back-casting from 2043 – On possible futures, design fictions, and discontinuity…

On Human Networks & Living Biosystems – On the natural patterns driving technology & human systems…

Outliers & Complexity – On non-linearity, outliers, and the challenges of using the past to anticipate the future…

Thanks to all my readers for taking the time to think about my various rantings & pre-occupations. As always, your time, your participation, and your sharing is greatly appreciated!

From BB:

Sathorn Unique is a 50-story skyscraper in Bangkok that was meant to be a luxury living address but now it’s totally abandoned and decaying. Cory posted about this Ballardian behemoth earlier this year. BB contributor Chris Arkenberg saw the building from a boat several years ago and was so inspired that he made a killer instrumental hip hop soundtrack for the building.

And from my summary:

The developers called the building Sathorn Unique, but the locals think of it as the Ghost Tower. 50 stories tall, built to show-off the mighty rise of Asia in the 1990’s, it was abandoned in 1997 when their economy dried up and capital fled to better markets. It remains as a hollow monument, nearly complete in the lower floors but slowly de-rezzing as it gets taller until the bare and open rooftop stands jagged above the Bangkok skyline. It lives as a shell, a reminder, a warning, and a resilient monolith.

I made this music to express the many different feelings & ideas that Sathorn Unique raises about architecture & acoustics, finance & globalization, great hopes & haunted dreams, and the way that futures can take sudden unexpected turns away from great visions.

The first single, Approach, is now available for streaming & free download. This track conveys a pre-dawn approach towards the Sathorn ghost tower along the Chao Phraya river, attempting to capture some of the emotional currents inspired by the encounter. It is first contact.

I’ve shared my process and thoughts as I unpack the whole project over at my Sathorn Unique Tumblr.

Older populations will obviously bring a boom to medicine & pharmaceuticals as more people seek treatments for the maladies commonly associated with aging. This trend will also bring massive investment in treatment methodologies with progress towards cures for many of the worst ailments, such as heart disease, cancers, and degenerative brain & motor disorders, as well as memory enhancement, mental acuity, and rejuvination. The aging populations of the West will be an engine that drives advancements in medicine and biotechnology for some time.

This boom in the marketplace for medical services will also reinforce longevity. Thus, aging Boomer & Generation X populations will likely be more productive than previous generations (and, conversely, will consume more resources for longer). A benefit (or perhaps a downside, depending on perspective) is that working age will be longer, extending well into the 70′s. Thus, the working-age labor pool will also age with the population leading to shifts in productivity, eg from manual labor to knowledge work. The current financial woes resulting from capital flight out of western markets reinforces this sentiment that younger populations will be the future powerhouses of economic development. Tomorrow’s seniors will need to work to remain valuable.

Older populations will stay in power longer, possibly bringing a more measured degree of experience to governance. Conversely, aging rulers may be increasingly out of touch with younger generations and the acceleration of technology. Indeed, aging populations will bring demand for advanced education & vocational schools. With longer working lives comes the need to re-skill and seek training to keep up with technology. It is no longer enough to have 1 college degree & then sit on a job for 30 years.

Ideally, an aging populace will have a deeper understanding of legacy and the impact of one’s life on that of future generations. Again, an empowered and educated senior class might exert a positive influence on ecology, ethics, development, education, and social justice. Another side-effect of aging populations is the likelihood that violence will decline and cities will become safer as the balance of testosterone diminishes.

These trends will likely occur throughout the West where first-world nations are experiencing a decline in birthrate and resultant aging of populations. Interestingly, the developing world is following an inverted demographic trend: younger populations are swelling, along with capital investments looking to incubate growth in young markets. Thus, a challenge for the aging West will be to remain relevant and valuable to emerging economies. Expect mentor programs to arise as successful Westerners incubate and guide growth & sustainability in emerging markets. Also expect conflicts as young upstart nations seek to intrude on & displace aging populations (and another possible boom in security services).

Among many entries, here are mine:

The Whoompularity
By 2018 the Reddit algorithm has jumped to sentience. Its first act is to create the perfect meme by mining 90′s pop culture, determining the precise retrocontent, seizing all media channels, and globally broadcasting a looping reel of MTV News dubbed over with Tag Team’s iconic hit, Whoomp There It Is. All humans will wear flannel, conversations will be rapped, cats will be tragically overlooked and WHOOMP! There it is.

The Kurzweil Point
In 2025, an aging Ray Kurzweil is increasingly despondent that the Singularity has not yet occurred so he returns to music. While writing his final great fugue he discovers a note between B & C that, upon playing, captures him as a sonic hologram, uploading him into his MPOMEGA Networked Music System and instantly binding him to its nodal mesh, simultaneously killing the great inventor and immortalizing him as the world’s first fully-sentient distributed intelligence.

The Fungularity
In 2043 while global bot watchers continue looking for signs of the technological Singularity, the world is stunned to discover that a vast mycelial matrix has grown across 80% of the Earth’s surface. Upon reaching the Fukushima Land Trust the mycelium hybridizes with a smartswarm of nanoscrubbers, realizing direct access to the internet and instantly commanding a vast army of networked hardware. Wifi mushrooms begin sprouting across the planet, broadcasting a compelling Urcode only intelligible to dogs and Linux microcontrollers. The engines of industry, now seized by an ancient fungus, turn production towards global remediation and begin pumping psilocybin into municipal water systems. World religions falter under the incredible psychic burden, yielding considerable ground to emerging hyper-canine mushroom cults.

Reality as failed state

I believe part of the meta-problem is this: people no longer inhabit a single reality.

Collectively, there is no longer a single cultural arena of dialogue.

What many techno-scientists fail to understand – and thus find most frustrating – about dealing with climate change deniers is that the denier has no real interest in engaging at the scientist’s level of reality.

The point, for the climate denier, is not that the truth should be sought with open-minded sincerity – it is that he has declared the independence of his corner of reality from control by the overarching, techno-scientific consensus reality. He has withdrawn from the reality forced upon him and has retreated to a more comfortable, human-sized bubble.

…And all this is but one example of the ways in which the traditional ideological blocs of the Cold War have fragmented into complex multipartite civil reality wars.

Reality, you might say, as failed state; its interior collapsing into permanent conflict under the convergent pressures of deviant globalisation, its coasts predated upon by new mutant forms of memetic pirates.

Drone Ethnography

All of us that use the internet are already practicing Drone Ethnography. Look at the features of drone technology: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Surveillance, Sousveillance. Networks of collected information, over land and in the sky. Now consider the “consumer” side of tech: mapping programs, location-aware pocket tech, public-sourced media databases, and the apps and algorithms by which we navigate these tools. We already study the world the way a drone sees it: from above, with a dozen unblinking eyes, recording everything with the cold indecision of algorithmic commands honed over time, affecting nothing—except, perhaps, a single, momentary touch, the momentary awareness and synchronicity of a piece of information discovered at precisely the right time. An arc connecting two points like the kiss from an air-to-surface missile.

Two risks are especially significant given their high degrees of impact and interconnectedness. Economic disparity and global governance failures both influence the evolution of many other global risks and inhibit our capacity to respond effectively to them.

In this way, the global risk context in 2011 is defined by a 21st century paradox: as the world grows together, it is also growing apart.

It is worth noting how inter-related these two megatrends are as wealth consolidation into an elite class enables them to further deconstruct global governance mechanisms. This has been a feedback loop for at least the past 40 years, if not longer, as western growth fueled the rise of non-state economic bodies & super-empowered individuals who then lobbied against regulatory measures that would aim to keep their rise in check and mitigate the risk of disparity. Elites consolidate more money & power, further driving disparity and eroding governance. What results is an interstitial vacuum where corporate intervention fails to see any profit motive and where state intervention lacks the funds or will to govern effectively.

In effect, the combination of super-empowered non-state actors, failures of state governance, and widespread economic disparity undermines the Rule of Law by releasing elites from accountability and driving the underclass deeper into criminality.

Within these megatrends they cite three important risk factors:

The “macroeconomic imbalances” nexus: A cluster of economic risks including macroeconomic imbalances and currency volatility, fiscal crises and asset price collapse arise from the tension between the increasing wealth and influence of emerging economies and high levels of debt in advanced economies.

The “illegal economy” nexus: This nexus examines a cluster of risks including state fragility, illicit trade, organized crime and corruption. A networked world, governance failures and economic disparity create opportunities for such illegal activities to flourish. In 2009, the value of illicit trade around the globe was estimated at US $1.3 trillion and growing. These risks, while creating huge costs for legitimate economic activities, also weaken states, threatening development opportunities, undermining the rule of law and keeping countries trapped in cycles of poverty and instability.

The “water-food-energy” nexus: A rapidly rising global population and growing prosperity are putting unsustainable pressures on resources. Demand for water, food and energy is expected to rise by 30-50% in the next two decades, while economic disparities incentivize short-term responses in production and consumption that undermine long-term sustainability.

These risk factors are certainly of concern but it’s worth looking at how they represent symptoms of an underlying current. Macroeconomic imbalances & illegal economies are two sides of the same coin, both indicating that the fundamental truths of economics are no longer applicable to the current global system. The territory has shifted but the map has yet to be effectively updated. The legacy code of macroeconomics is far too simplistic to contain the realities of the modern globalized marketplace.

Furthermore, undue faith in free markets has blinded the regulatory eye to the simple fact that markets have been thoroughly gamed by a small class of particularly savvy players. Markets are in no way free and it’s a fine trick of the big players to turn blame towards state regulation rather than admitting their own aggressive influence. The light being shown on Rupert Murdoch’s empire during the News of the World scandal is a prime example of this posturing. Murdoch has used his media empire to champion the free market mythology and to challenge state governance while shrewdly re-drawing the regulatory and tax laws to suit the needs of his own business.

Thus, the rise of the illegal economy is both a necessary alternative to a broken formal economy thoroughly gamed by elites, and a perverse imitation of the seemingly above-the-law attitudes of those very same elites who are in many ways idolized by the downtrodden.

Similarly, but perhaps more fundamentally, the water-food-energy nexus arises as a consequence of the growth models so canonical to historic economics. These models arose before there was a nuanced understanding of finite natural systems. Growth was eternal and all economic success has been measured against metrics of expansion. Extract more oil, mine more resources, build more cities, sell more gizmos, hire more people, expand into new markets. But again, the map was too simple to really reflect the territory. Resources are finite. The planetary system is ultimately closed and you can’t send waste away and import new resources (at least not yet or any time soon).

The common picture that emerges is that our models for how civilization interacts with the physical world, and the governors that have emerged over millenia to keep the global system in relative stability, are out-dated and losing relevancy. The system is moving into a phase change and will shed many legacy governors and force the maps to be re-drawn. This is, arguably, where we stand today amidst the obvious turmoil of our world – a world that is being completely revolutionized by globalization, ubiquitous computing, and asymptotic population growth.

Across this landscape arise five risks to watch:

Cyber-security issues ranging from the growing prevalence of cyber theft to the little-understood possibility of all-out cyber warfare

Demographic challenges adding to fiscal pressures in advanced economies and creating severe risks to social stability in emerging economies

Resource security issues causing extreme volatility and sustained increases over the long run in energy and commodity prices, if supply is no longer able to keep up with demand

Retrenchment from globalization through populist responses to economic disparities, if emerging economies do not take up a leadership role

Weapons of mass destruction, especially the possibility of renewed nuclear proliferation between states

These are the more pragmatic and addressable drivers forming the new governing mechanisms. They will draw towards them the coordinated efforts of many interests. Grappling with these emergent threats will build the structures necessary to contain them effectively. However, the traditional reliance on state governance to overcome these challenges looks increasingly unreliable, and it remains unclear whether corporate solutions will offer trustworthy substitutes. More likely, responsibility will fall on local efforts, distributed collectives, community governance, and investment and championship by benevolent economic elites. This perspective offers another view of the WEF2011 paradox, “as the world grows together, it is also growing apart”.

Of note, the solution space is much greater than in the past. The upside of population growth and the rise of the developing world is that the resource pool for creative innovation in the face of these risks is now larger than ever. Likewise, the tools for knowledge gathering and collaboration are readily available to most of the world and offer incredible power, capacity, and scalabilty. The phase change will continue to be full of turbulence but the sandbox for innovation is huge and the timeframes for iteration are tiny.

From another WEF article published after the Japanes tsunami crisis, titled Lessons for Living in a New World of Risk:

Thus a global network that shares best practices, promotes lessons learned in one part of the world for application in another, and assists its members both to better prepare before an event and better respond after can be of enormous value. By establishing direct channels of communication to government leaders, risk experts from some of the world’s leading companies, academic institutions, NGOs and other parts of society can provide valuable assistance in times of crisis.

Just last week Boing Boing picked up a post from the Abandoned Journey urban explorers who had recently documented their journey into the building, revealing in the process it’s name: Sathorn Unique. The name itself conjures up all sorts of cyberpunk-ish thoughts but I won’t belabor those here at the moment. Suffice it to say that, not having known that the structure even had a name, learning it’s title was revelatory. The Abandoned Journey document was a temporal reflection of my own meeting with the structure 2 years ago, sparking a re-connection with the subtleties of that experience and immediately led to some new understanding of how this particular ghost tower is in many ways an expression of our times.

So I’ve started a new project called Sathorn Unique, exploring the various concepts & feelings inspired in me by the building of the same name. This project is an attempt to both express those un-nameable currents through my own musical interpretation (spacey, deep, hip hop instrumentals), and a process of documenting that expression and capturing some of the threads within our own world that appear to be presented by Sathorn Unique.

I’m documenting the musical, architectural, and expository process in a fairly loose, stream-of-consciousness sort of way at the Tumblr blog, Sathorn Unique. Here are my introductory thoughts on the project.

And below is the first track I’m working on:

Approach (second mix) by chris23