Futurismic

Hi folks;

If you noticed that Futurismic was unreachable for a large part of the last twelve hours or so, please accept my apologies – unexplained downtime is just one of the many extras that come bundled with our web hosting service! Everything appears to be back to normal now, though (touch wood).

If you didn’t notice Futurismic was down… well, you can pretend you never saw this post, right? Right.

Normal service – as normal as it ever gets round here, anyway – should be restored soon… just about as soon as this hangover clears up, in fact (this really hasn’t been the best Friday ever). Thanks for your patience.

Science fiction heavyweight Kim Stanley Robinson crops up in the current edition of New Scientist to sing the praises of British sf… and of sf in general. In addition to presenting flash-length pieces by a handful of big names – Ken MacLeod, Geoff Ryman, Justina Robson and more – he has a lengthy article decrying the blinkered tastes of the juries for awards like the Booker Prize:

… it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn’t read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

This is hardly a new complaint – fandom has always muttered darkly into its real ale about the shunning of science fiction by the literary establishment, and this year saw some Guardian book bloggers attempt to redress the imbalance by running an open-nomination “Not The Booker” Prize (only to see all the genre titles swiftly voted out of the running, natch) – but to have it appear on the pages of New Scientist is an interesting development. Indeed, NS seems to be quite deliberately aligning itself with a science fictional/futurist mindset of late; perhaps the editorial team are equally convinced of sf’s didactic and educational powers as Robinson is?

Personally, I’ve always felt that prizes and public acceptance are overrated, and that science fiction does itself a disservice by chasing after them; Robinson appears to me to be taking a similar stance. I’ve never picked books because they won awards; personal recommendation has always carried far more weight, ever since I was quite young.

And if we truly believe that science fiction has the power and potential to open minds (and change them), isn’t the sincere recommendation of a book from friend to friend the best form of evangelism? To use an analogy with science itself: many of the greatest scientific innovators achieved their leaps of progress in spite of great public opposition and the opprobrium of the establishment; rather than kowtow and beg for crumbs of approval, they just knuckled down and got on with it, fueled by their own defiance, converting their few faithful supporters through their unflappable loyalty to their own ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, here: I’d love to see the authors I admire being paid more, or being interviewed as insightful pundits rather than geeky fringe artists who are good for ridiculous out-of-context quotations. I’d love to see science fiction as a powerful and accepted part of modern cultural discourse… but I don’t think it’ll ever achieve that through us pleading for legitimacy on its behalf.

As recent events have shown, hearts and minds aren’t won with shock and awe; they’re won with honesty and sincerity. If you care enough about science fiction that you want to see it read more widely and appreciated as something more than simple escapist entertainment, don’t waste your time storming the ramparts of the crumbling ivory tower of literature, or decrying the inevitably populist results of fan-voted awards. Instead, try to convert one other book-lover. If all of us managed to do that, we’d double the power of the genre almost overnight, and weaken the factional schisms within it at the same time.

Rant over.

Science writer Quinn Norton tests a new sense, that of always knowing what direction North is via an ankle-attached bracelet that indicates true north using vibrations from eight internal buzzers:

The Northpaw is based on the Feelspace, a project organized by the Cognitive Psychology department of Universität Osnabrück in Germany. The principle is simple and elegant. The buzzers signal north to the wearer. The wearer gets used to it, often forgetting it’s there. They just start getting a better idea of where they are through a kind of subconscious dead reckoning.

Quinn has written about similar direction-sensing enabling technologies before.

I recall something like this in Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett. PTerry gifts his elves with “poise” – the ability always to know where they are.

[via Slashdot, from h+ Magazine][image from ★lex on flickr]

Well, printing your way out of your handcuffs, anyway – BoingBoing points us to a story of a Dutch hacker type who has used a 3D printer to duplicate a working version of the master keys for the handcuffs used by the Dutch police force. [image by stevendepolo]

And you thought filesharing was a threat to the fabric of society! How long before we can print Yale lock keys from photographs taken 200 feet away? Erm, actually, that was possible late last year…

Will technology render all physical security essentially useless, and if so, how soon? How will we protect property if we have no way of securing it? Is this how the notion of property will die?

Cory Doctorow is the latest to join the hallowed ranks of science fiction authors whose ideas have become reality, though not for some cool gadget or super-weapon. The Whuffie Bank is a non-profit start-up that has taken its name and concept from Doctorow’s Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom novel – a currency based entirely on reputation. [via pretty much everyone, though I saw it first from Chairman Bruce]

The startup is hoping to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency. The service will monitor your activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more. When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. The company hopes that as we use the web more and more in our day-to-day life this positivity will extend beyond the web.

[...]

The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted. You can make offers to other users using Whuffies as payment (for example, I could ask someone to help me draw a logo, offering 100 Whuffies as payment).

It’s a fascinating idea, and running it as a side-supplement to regular currency is far more likely to succeed than a pure reputation economy… indeed, the way The Whuffie Bank are pitching it, it’s more like an attempt to formalise the invisible transactions of kudos that already occur in the web’s interlinking clades and cultures.

But it’s still pretty deeply flawed, I think, because the metrics it’s using are too easily gamed, and have hugely diffferent values from group to group. Think of how the web PR shills on Twitter constantly retweet each other like some acoustically-perfect echo chamber, or how some people in your Facebook network will blithely click the “Like” button on every Mafia Wars announcement they see. I think the problem is one of scale: a reputation currency can only work across a group that’s small enough to have a real idea of who and what every participant is and does. Trying to make it global – or even national – is probably a doomed enterprise; it might work for small city-states or large towns, though, alongside a time-based currency like LETS.

That said, I still believe there’s a useful idea at the core of the Whuffie concept – it’s something I’ve been kicking around ever since reading Down And Out…, and when I finally start squeezing some fiction writing time back into my schedule, a modified version be appearing in my own stories. What do you think – is reputation quantifiable? And how could we measure it accurately enough to trade on it?