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.

I’ve put together a research brief summarizing my recent work looking at 3 examples of emerging non-state power. These models indicate that many of the technologies enabling rapid, ad hoc global communication & collaboration are being adapted by criminal & ideological groups to grow international supply chains and build sophisticated financial networks. While there are certainly many non-state challenges in the current geopolitical landscape, in this brief I focus on the Mexican narcoinsurgency, the MEND resistance in Nigeria, and the nexus of illicit drugs & terrorism in northern Africa.

From the intro:

Cartels, militias, insurgencies, and terrorist groups leverage mobile communications & rapid collaboration to grow & manage globally-distributed ad hoc networks that overlap in complex international shadow economies.

Traditional state governance is being challenged by the ubiquity of personal technology and the rise of multinational corporate powers, ideological factions, insurgencies, militaries, militias, and criminal groups. Laboring under inefficient bureaucratic structures, over-reaching foreign policy, legislative deadlocks, corruption and co-opted representation, traditional states are less capable of governing in ways that support social welfare. As a result, communities, collectives, and distributed ad hoc organizations are being forced to innovate strategies for resilience & prosperity in ways that increasingly lie outside the conventional models.

These networks have become sophisticated enough to rival many corporations in capital & influence. Yet, unlike most corporations, they are wholly opaque & unaccountable, relying on illicit goods, drugs, and violence to grow their markets and remove obstacles to business.

This report highlights some of the more disruptive methods that not only seek to re-establish socio-economic influence and control in the face of great disparity, but also directly challenge state authority at levels formerly impossible for non-state actors.

Full PDF here (8 pgs).

“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…

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.

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...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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