Futurismic

Here’s a 500-page airport potboiler novel ripe for the writing… a number of Central American nations are looking to meet their energy demands by harnessing their unpredictable neighbours: volcanoes.

Geothermal energy has a high initial outlay, but after that it (theoretically) keeps pumping out current for years to come with very little interference. All well and good… but just add some Deepwater Horizon-style corner-cutting, skate over a few safety margins, write in a few scenes featuring the POTUSA, and bam! Topical technothriller with an exotic setting.

Of course, I’m a little too busy to write it myself at the moment, so if you’d like to make me an offer for full rights on the synopsis as it stands, please get in touch…

21st September 2060; New Southsea, Disunited Kingdom

September is the old man’s favourite time of year. This morning New Southsea basks in the upper twenties as the summer sear fades out, and the high tides leave less silt in the streets. “Shorts weather, young lady,” he mumbles around his post-breakfast smoke, smiling in the sunlight as the post-grad girl clears away the crocks, boots up the base-unit for his ancient spex and helps him over to his scarred thriftwood desk. “Great day for an etymological celebration, I reckon.”

She can’t help but agree; he’s a grumpy old bastard a lot of the time, but his enthusiasm’s infectious when it takes him. Someone somewhere in New Southsea celebrates some marginal anniversary or festival every day of the year, but as obscure temporal landmarks go, today might take some sort of award. She’s surprised by how much she’s been looking forward to it… though again, she figures she’s just tuning into the old man’s vibes somehow. The reason seems inexplicably unimportant. Continue reading “One hundred years of cyborg solitude”

An interesting personal-reflection post from Adam “Everyware” Greenfield on his formative experiences with cyberpunk. In a fresh refingering of the “we live in that fictional world now” riff, he wonders if anything could possibly strike such a powerful chord for him again:

[This graffiti'd Chinese shipping container] struck me as occupying an amazing position in material-semantic possibility space, the polemical-made-real. Running past it was something like listening to a digital file of Brazilian speedmetal, or having a woman you meet at a party nonchalantly introducing you to her wife, in that everyday life seemed to have more or less effortlessly remolded itself around tropes which once, and not so very long ago, dripped with futurity.

And a world filled with such objects is in some way almost beyond commentary, or critique. Maybe this is why William Gibson’s own last few books, delightful as they remain — the brand-new Zero History being the most recent case in point — read as yarns told about people we (quite literally) already know, capering through places, scenes and contexts we know all too well. It’s competently constructed entertainment, resonant enough of our moment, and is amusing as something to play the roman-à-clef game with. But it’s not (and cannot be?) revelatory. I’m having a hard time imagining anyone having their ass kicked by Zero History the way mine was by Neuromancer.

I know what Greenfield’s talking about here, but I suspect that personal subjectivity has a lot to do with it; Justin Pickard crops up in the comments to point out that, as a younger reader, he got something of the same gutpunch from Gibson’s Pattern Recognition reproducing the world he recognised from beyond the book’s covers. Just like the books we read, we’re products of our own milieu… atemporality is rarer than it might appear from inside our favoured goldfish bowl.

I can easily imagine the inquisitive teens of today seeing themselves and their world in Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland, or in the more recent works of Ian McDonald and (to a lesser extent, because as much as I feel he tries earnestly to capture the world as-is, he can’t help but Disney-fy it at the same time) Cory Doctorow. But thinking about sf from this angle, it feels to me like there’s a real paucity of works that seek to engage the world on political and economic terms in the way that cyberpunk grappled with the Eighties…

… or perhaps that’s what’s going on in the world of YA urban fantasy (or whatever we’re calling it this week). Which might possibly explain why I just don’t understand the appeal of that stuff whatsoever. *shrug*

Internet serendipity strikes again… a Twitter friend mentioned their discovery of the word ‘sousveillance‘ the other day, and I remarked that I’d not mentioned it here at Futurismic for some time, despite it being one of my multitudinous minor obsessions. And lo, a few days later, two state-of-the-street-art sousveillance items crop up in my daily feed trawl*!

First up is the Lookxcie, a little head-mounted camera that stores the last thirty seconds of footage it captured at the press of a button [via Shira Lipkin's Google Buzz feed]:

Loop the Looxcie over your ear and go about your day. If you see anything you think may be worth saving, hit the button and the previous 30 seconds are saved, and even uploaded to your selected social networking site to be instantly shared, or you can watch and edit the video first if you prefer. And it stores up to five hours of video!

The Looxcie is a pretty cute little gizmo (and seemingly straight out of an early cyberpunk novel), but there’s an obvious flaw that renders it less useful in certain, ah, high-tension scenarios, let’s say. But other, more robust options are available: BoingBoing points to a column at Reason that covers smartphone apps that are ideal for videoing law enforcement and/or “freelance security” types who might subsequently arrest your device and make the footage disappear while it’s in their care:

Qik and UStream, two services available for both the iPhone and Android phones, allow instant online video streaming and archiving. Once you stop recording, the video is instantly saved online. Both services also allow you to send out a mass email or notice to your Twitter followers when you have posted a new video from your phone. Not only will your video of police misconduct be preserved, but so will the video of the police officer illegally confiscating your phone (assuming you continue recording until that point).

[ Just-in-time activism! ]

Neither Qik nor UStream market themselves for this purpose, and it probably would not make good business sense for them to do so, given the risk of angering law enforcement agencies and attracting attention from regulators. But it’s hard to overstate the power of streaming and off-site archiving. Prior to this technology, prosecutors and the courts nearly always deferred to the police narrative; now that narrative has to be consistent with independently recorded evidence. And as examples of police reports contradicted by video become increasingly common, a couple of things are likely to happen: Prosecutors and courts will be less inclined to uncritically accept police testimony, even in cases where there is no video, and bad cops will be deterred by the knowledge that their misconduct is apt to be recorded.

And to those who say that we shouldn’t feel the need to video the police, I respond with the tired and logically flawed aphorism that’s supposed to make us all feel better about ubiquitous closed-circuit surveillance: if they’ve done nothing wrong, then surely they have nothing to fear, right?

[ * Coincidence? Synchronicity? The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Your guess is as good as mine... ]

Another piece slots in to the mind-machine interface puzzle: via George Dvorsky comes news that University of Utah neuroboffins have decoded individual words from embedded electrode scans of brain activity.

The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them.

Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time.

As always with this sort of story, though, it’s early days yet:

When they examined all 10 brain signal patterns at once, they were able to pick out the correct word any one signal represented only 28 percent to 48 percent of the time – better than chance (which would have been 10 percent) but not good enough for a device to translate a paralyzed person’s thoughts into words spoken by a computer.

“This is proof of concept,” Greger says, “We’ve proven these signals can tell you what the person is saying well above chance. But we need to be able to do more words with more accuracy before it is something a patient really might find useful.”

So you’ll have to wait a little longer for that comfy little skull-cap that’ll read your as-yet-unwritten novel straight out of your head (worse luck). But proof-of-concept’s better than nothing, especially for a technology that – even comparatively recently – was considered to be pure science fiction.