Futurismic

Here’s an interesting development in the metaverse – Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, have announced the formal launch of their “Second Life Enterprise” platform, which is essentially a fragmented piece of the virtual world that runs on corporate servers behind the firewall. Private, hermetically-sealed virtual worlds, in other words. [image by Daneel Ariantho]

This is important for two reasons. First of all, it’s a major step in Linden Lab’s attempts to turn a decent profit from Second Life, which it has struggled to achieve with the free-to-use business model of the public version. If they can convince some big players of Second Life’s utility as a collaborative business tool, the subsequent inflow of money might enable them to step up the bug-hunt and fix some of the virtual world’s bigger flaws. IBM have been a presence in SL for some time, as have other big corporations (to whom we can now add the US Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command branch, who are financing a “therapeutic space” for amputee veterans using SL Enterprise); the potential for the same tools in a more secure environment (e.g. devoid of flying penis barrages, for a start) may entice more money into Linden Lab’s coffers, and open up the field for competition from other virtual worlds. So now’s the time to set up a business making sharp business suits for executive avatars, I guess…

Secondly, the veil of privacy will doubtless encourage experimentation, and should lead to some new and weird ways of interacting with (and creating within) synthetic spaces. After all, you wouldn’t want to go developing your top-secret big-money idea in public where anyone could see (and copy) it, would you? Imagine for a moment that DARPA decided to set themselves up with an SL Enterprise installation… I’d pay a good big bribe to check out the crazy crap they’d have filled it with after a year or so of getting to grips with the interface, that’s for certain.

And, of course, one can’t help but be reminded of the abandoned corporate virtualities featured in William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, most particularly Idoru. Like the adandonware websites that already festoon the web, sat on some server somewhere, waiting for a rental agreement between two companies that no longer exist to expire, the metaverse could soon become a multimetaverse, with a few vast virtualities with public access and countless little bubbles of digital existence locked away behind firewalls and restrictive protocols. Urban exploration is a growing trend at the moment, but in a decade or so, the adventurous people will be cracking their way into abandoned corporate and gubernatorial realities to see what they can find lying around… and hell knows some of it will be more interesting than rusty old swivel chairs.

I linked to Jan Chipchase in passing when we were talking about in-game advertising the other day, but since then he’s posted more detailed thoughts on the corporate future of contextual advertising and augmented reality. If you don’t believe that the colonisation of augmented reality spaces by relentless barrages of commercial messages and content is inevitable, think again:

Spend enough time around corporate sales folk, whatever the industry, and sooner or later someone will talk about ‘owning’ the customer – where they are so into your brand that the next sales are inevitable. When it comes to visual media its all about owning eyeballs – diverting your gaze to their advertising and content [...]

Ah – nobody’s going to stick an advertising driven augmented reality lens in their eye, right? How about for ‘free’ healthcare monitoring? Or because speed-dating is so much more fun when you have real time sexual preference look-ups on the people you’re looking at? Or simply because the alternative ways of viewing at the world put you milliseconds behind your social network in the connectivity stakes.

Yeah, this reasoning is all so base, ugly, techno-utopian. Sure, it *may* be about delivering the optimal augmented reality experience, but optimal for whom? There ain’t no such thing as (looking at a) free lunch.

Do no evil? To the shareholders!

To quote a band I’m rather fond of, this is the first draft of a worst case scenario – perhaps it won’t work out quite so badly. If we’re lucky. [image by Arturo de Albornoz]

Here’s an interesting art installation that involves some science fictional thinking. Toys by Tomasso Lanza features digital renderings of assets to be sold at auction following the bankruptcy filing of a fictional Enron-like corporation. we make money not art explains:

The quick collapse of the company led to a fire-sale of most of ENT’s assets. In the months following the Chapter 11 filing, the liquidation team split the enormous sale across a number of auction dealers. Lanza created a photographic essay of some of the items surfaced by the bankruptcy auction, some of them perfectly mundane (executive chairs, workstations, gold balls and clubs, luxury cars, a range of sat nav, etc.), others fictitious. They are listed in the catalogue of an auction that dealt with low to mid-valued items and leftovers from previous auctions; despite the low-key of the sale, the dealers got their hands on a few items which were sold at much higher prices than originally expected thanks to their unique nature.

The fictitious items are straight out of a near-future/present day satire of corporate secrecy and hubris.

This lot consists of an off-the-shelf viewfinder, plugged into some sort of digital tuning device with the words FTSE, DAX, HSI, DSM200, PHLX/KBW, MIBTEL, NIKKEI, NYSE, NASDAQ etched on. There is no documentation provided, although it is believed that these devices were secretly owned by a small number of executives and used for monitoring stocks and other financial products too sensitive to be displayed on-screen or retrieved on the company’s computers.

Each U.S. taxpayer now owns a $1,785.71 ownership share in the banks of America, calculates New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman (check his math). So would it be too much to ask for an end to ATM (automatic teller machine) fees?  How about a moratorium on executive bonuses? A-and another thing:

Why not forbid any bank receiving taxpayer money to purchase naming rights to sports stadiums and arenas? Citigroup is handing the Mets something like $20 million a year to call their new stadium Citi Field. Surely, the Mets do not need Citigroup’s money — not to mention yours — to keep failing to make the playoffs.

(Corporations bought naming rights to days, months, and years in one of David Foster Wallace’s novels, if memory of the reviews serves.)

(My favorite proposal, from I forget which obviously unhinged left-wing blogger: Treat bank executives like customers who declare bankruptcy, and make them prove they’ve taken a basic course in finance.)

[Bank recruitment folder, Finsec]

This month’s slice of Futurismic fiction comes from the widely-published Alex Wilson. Dry Frugal With Death Rays is a dark satire of office politics, corporate bureaucracy, thwarted ambition and revenge gone awry – enjoy!

Dry Frugal With Death Rays

by Alex Wilson

The ergonomic cubicle gel came up to Sal’s chin. Five hours of immersion had left the pads of his fingers wrinkled and slimy. He couldn’t wipe his eyes without making it worse. It was the most important morning of his life, and he was stuck in his cubicle corral with a computer that insisted he wasn’t.

“And you’ve looked, right?” Tech support asked, clearly siding with the computer on this one. “At the latch? You’ve tried turning around and looking to see whether it’s open or closed?”

“Yes,” Sal said. “I’ve looked.” He tried emphasizing the urgency with his arms. In training videos, they iterated how body language carried over into the voice, even though Sal found sloshing around in gel more distracting than helpful on client calls.

Continue reading “DRY FRUGAL WITH DEATH RAYS by Alex Wilson”