Futurismic

Those of you who follow the Double-Boing may have noticed that they’ve started getting guest bloggers on board again. This week sees a visitation from Douglas Rushkoff; there are few thinkers and writers that I would recommend without reservation, but Rushkoff is one of them. [image from biography page of Rushkoff's website]

He’s written (sometimes with great influence) on politics, cyberculture, religion, ethics, finance, viral marketing, reality hacking and all sorts of other stuff, and he never fails to come up with something challenging. So if you’re not a regular BoingBoing reader, I’d suggest grabbing the RSS feed, if only for this week. Here’s a snippet from his ‘Open-Source Democracy’ post:

Back when everyone was thinking about digital democracy as some sort of voting scheme or mass feedback polling operation, I wrote a short book called Open Source Democracy in an effort to extend people’s thinking beyond elections to include participation in civics. Yes, we have representatives, but they’re only good as their ability to respond to the needs that come from the bottom up.

Rushkoff’s a blogger in his own right, and a novelist too. More recently he did an excellent comic-format series on DC Vertigo called Testament - Old Testament fables meet dark near-future corporate dystopia. Recommended.

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We live in such a media-saturated age it’s rather surprising that we don’t have shared dreams more often. Because it’s Friday afternoon where I am, here’s a link to a Slate.com’s Your Dreams (and Nightmares) About Sarah Palin: She hands you a $20 bill. She marries you. She tells you to kill all the animals in the zoo. She’s your barista.

It’s a highly nonscientific (a-scientific?) survey of dreams readers have had since — Sweet Gene Vincent, was it only a week ago?  (Disclaimer: I have not had a dream about Sarah Palin.) My favorite from the Slate article (hardly the most Freudian of the batch, either):

“In my dream, I was with a group of people watching the election results on television. However, pundits weren’t announcing the results. Both candidates and their VP picks were sitting on two couches in a room full of journalists/pundits. McCain and Palin were on one couch, and Obama was on his couch with his VP pick, but it wasn’t Joe Biden, it was a woman in an emerald-green ball gown. In a way she resembled Doris Kearns Goodwin. What stood out to me is how insignificant McCain appeared. All attention, a spotlight even, was on Palin. It was like McCain was a sad old man on a park bench, and Palin was just soaking up all of the energy in the room. She seemed to be a magnet for all of the energy in the room—a bit like a Dementor from Harry Potter. Obama and his Doris Kearns Goodwin look-alike VP were also relatively insignificant, but not as much as McCain. Obama smiled graciously the entire time. At some point, Tim Russert’s disembodied head appeared through a doorway in the room where I was, and I started to cry. Tim didn’t say anything, he just floated there observing the group. One of the journalists/pundits in the room was overheard whispering, ‘It’s McCain!’ It wasn’t an official announcement, but he let it slip, and it was true—McCain won the election.

“But McCain just sat there not moving. Palin stood up and started queen-waving. Obama got up to shake her hand—graciously—and Doris Kearns Goodwin sat on her couch, as I was sitting on my dream-couch, crying.”

[Sarah Palin in Kuwait by asecondhandconjecture]

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One of the biggest cultural gaps between me as a teenager in the nineties and my parents was our understanding of how music worked as a diverse cultural landscape. To them, the Top 40 charts told you what was best, what was universally popular. To me, the same chart was a pretty good guide to what a certain demographic thought was best - a deluded demographic that certainly didn’t include me. Ah, the arrogance of youth… [image by Jono Rotten]

And this was long before ripping and burning, iTunes, Napster and MySpace, of course. So little wonder, then, that you can count the number of people who find the old-fashioned chart run-downs relevant on the fingers of one hand. Stepping into the void are IBM and the BBC, with a plan to make music stats more detailed, accurate and interesting to individuals with different tastes. Take it away, TechDirt:

Rather than assuming there’s just one single chart to rule them all, the system lets you create custom lists for a better understanding of more niche-targeted music. So, say, if you wanted to know who’s hot on YouTube and Last.fm in the indie and punk worlds among US listeners between the ages of 20 and 30, you can create just that list. Or, as per Will’s suggestion, you could find out what female Emo fans between the age of 15 and 20 are talking about on Bebo — and get that list.

Technologically this is just another web2.0 data mash-up, but I think it’s interesting from a cultural point of view because it derails the still-common complaint that the world is developing into a homogeneous monoculture, and demonstrates that narrowcast media like the internet encourages diversity rather than suppressing it.

Of course, you could argue that the tribal nature of music fandom is symptomatic of a Balkanisation of culture, in much the same way as genre fiction fandom… in which case we should probably go to a gig together and have a very drunken argument about it.

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Blasphemous Geometries returns, like a surly postal worker on a rainy day.

This time Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at tropes - the riffs, clichés and plot enablers that form the backbone of much genre literature. Are tropes subject to abuse and overexploitation in the same way as any other limited resource? Continue reading “The Life-Cycle of a Trope - Science Fiction’s Tragedy of the Commons?”

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For this edition of Future Imperfect, Sven Johnson has been grasping towards something which may or may not be there to grasp.

If you spend any amount of time straining through global news and pop culture, you’ll probably have had a similar sense of unseen patterns waiting to be discovered. But, Sven asks, what exactly occurs the moment before trend recognition? Continue reading “An Exercise in Trend Recognition”

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Of all the rumours coming in from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this year (my complimentary tickets for which obviously got lost in the mail somehow, worse luck), I’ve been most intrigued by Quinn Norton’s talk - and I’ll bet we’ll be hearing a lot about it from the transhumanist bloggers in the next few days, too.

Apparently Norton discussed the potential of new cognitive drugs and body augmentation to produce a “second Enlightenment” - a global stimulation of intellectual pursuits that might encourage seditious thoughts and behaviour, much to the consternation of repressive governments. [image by ninjapoodles]

I can see what Norton is saying, and I have a certain sympathy. But it’s hardly a new idea, though; look back at rave culture in the late eighties and early nineties here in the UK, or Douglas Rushkoff’s early books, and you’ll see similar ideas being advanced. But the internet wasn’t even out of its infancy at that point, so things are arguably different now - if only at a the level of global interpersonal communication.

What do you think - is Norton a harbinger of change, or a wide-eyed techno-utopian?

[ PS - if anyone finds an audio recording or YouTube video of Norton's talk, please send Futurismic the link via the Contacts page and we'll put it up here for everyone to enjoy. ]

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Richard Morgan, author of a number of excellent cyber-noir sf thrillers (the most recent being the excellent Black Man, or Thirteen as it was titled in the US) was asked by Index On Censorship Magazine to write an essay about the future of the internet, which is now available on his website. [Image by Meyshanworld]

If you’re familiar with Morgan’s books, you’ll know not to expect rose-tinted panglossian speculation from him. I’ll freely admit that I get carried away with techno-utopian visions from time to time, and it’s good to have writers with Morgan’s incisive intelligence to bring me down to earth:

“The future of the internet, then, is not going to be too much of a shock for anyone who knows much about human nature and whose eyes are open. In fact, regardless of the technical innovations that we may or may not see in the next few decades, virtual reality looks as if it’s going to conform pretty ordinarily to the existing human tendencies we so know and love.”

Go read! [Props to Ariel for the tip.]

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While frequently dismissed as a frivolous diversion (which, to be fair, it is to some), Second Life has the potential to be much more than just “IRC with graphics”.

The technological uses are the most obvious, and already being investigated by companies like IBM; Second Life is an ideal environment for large-scale data visualisation, for example.

Recent mainstream media stories have suggested that Second Life is a haven for terrorist recruitment and money laundering. While the potential is arguably present (and the actuality overstated), the flip-side is that virtual worlds provide a space where more positive forms of cultural exchange can occur - like a Muslim investigative journalist being able to experience a service in a virtual synagogue. [Image by RykerBeck]

The cynic in me suggests that we will export our human propensity for divisiveness wherever we go, be it into outer space or the inner space of the metaverse. But perhaps the lower barriers in virtual worlds will make it easier to overcome the old hatreds … by allowing us to see “behind the veil”, to coin a phrase.

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In an example of interstitial existence that sounds like it leaped straight from the pages of a William Gibson novel, the Japanese government has announced that there are over 5,000 “internet café refugees” eking out a living at the bottom of the social strata, taking what temporary work they can and dossing down in 24-hour internet cafés in the absence of a home of their own. Even in the shadow of our ubiquitous technologies, the same social issues that have existed for centuries are following us into the future … [Image by Kai Hendry]

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A survey suggests that, as a demographic, British women in their late twenties and early thirties actually spend more time online than men of the same age group. I wonder what effect this will have on the sort of adverts we see deployed on popular sites, especially as it’s becoming increasingly plain that television is losing its former status as the preferred media platform for many people? But if further evidence of this ongoing trend is needed, I humbly submit the phenomenon of people registering domain names for their children long before they’ll be old enough to bash out their first blog post.

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Fear not, folks - Elton John is here to save us from the impending degradation of culture! Because, you see, the reason there’s so much rubbish music and art about these days is because we all spend too much time on the internet. It’s a relief to know he’s worked out why his own contributions to global culture have been so unilaterally appalling over the last decade or so … though I can think of numerous artist and musician acquaintances whose work has been enhanced or expanded for the better by their use of the internet, be it for networking or acquiring new tools or ideas. Clay Shirky agrees, too - destroying limits liberates creativity, as opposed to stifling it. But it also destroys the culture that went before it … which is probably what has Sir Elton so worried.

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