Every month, I spend about a week with an ear to the news, specifically sifting for ideas for this column. I like to plan around something that resonates with me. This month, I’m sick at heart about the catastrophic oil spill. It feels like death. But there are already a lot of people writing about it. Besides, it would make me sad to research it extensively. So I turned my attention to the oceans in general. I was surprised to find out how much they feel the same as the oil spill. But I’m going to write about them anyway. I normally hope you’ll enjoy my column, but in this case, I think I just hope you read it. It’s tough to feel enjoy news about our oceans right now. Continue reading A Most Fundamental Substance: Oil and Oceans
Monthly Archives: June 2010
Read blogs, scan Twitter, predict the future… profit?
So much for the nay-sayers, blog critics and Twitter h8rz: economic researchers reckon that keeping a weather eye on the internet Zeitgeist by scanning blogs and tweets for keywords could help predict stock price changes and other market behaviours!
Which is all very nice, so far as it goes. But given the events of the last few years, I think I’d rather hear stories about economists trying to discover how the global economy actually works as a system by analysing historical data, rather than trying to guess what it’ll do tomorrow by reading the internet’s tea leaves…
… yeah, I know, wishful thinking. Scratch a futurist, reveal an embittered utopian optimist. *shrug*
Why do devices still have power cables?
I mean, it’s not like we don’t have loads of other fancy and elegant options for transferring power and data to our gadgets and machines, right? But as this piece at Wired points out, power cables are cheap, versatile and simple to produce by comparison to all the more advanced solutions – and that’s why we still have ’em.
It’s a good concise example of something that searching out stories for Futurismic has taught me over the years: that innovative new technology may not actually be as revolutionary as it initially appears, and that the “gadget of the future” may remain a marginal gimmick long after its fanfare’d launch at some trade show or another. Pragmatism and profit margins are very important factors in forming the shape of the future.
Of course, this is one of the arguments that favours the medium-term survival of the dead-tree book, even as the ereader manufacturers shape up for a price war. For the (possibly mythical) average consumer who reads a couple of books a year and no more, buying them as paperbacks will make a lot more sense… and there’s a lot more of those average consumers than there are rabid readers, I’m guessing.
Making a game of disruption politics
More from John Robb: rewiring agitprop and non-violent protest movements as open-source games.
… in modern western societies, this elite group and their specialists are able to dissociate themselves from jobs when it comes to their private lives. They live unencumbered within our impersonal society. This window of vulnerability creates a yawning opportunity for innovative forms of disruptive non-violent protest. One that pierces the organizational and societal veil of anonymity for these individuals by turning them into systempunkts (vulnerable nodes within the targeted organization’s network that would cause the most damage if disrupted).
Essentially, if you can successfully deter/coerce individual decision makers in this decision making group, you will win (and quickly).Early work on this type of protest can be seen in the work of 4Chan’s Anonymous and China’s human flesh search engine. Both of these open source movements have shown to be surprisingly powerful at targeting single individuals (and poor at disrupting organizations).
An aside: I find Anonymous fascinating, because (whether deliberately or not) they’ve created a fluid non-identity that can be picked up by anyone anywhere for any purpose. It’ll be one of those names that haunts the sidebars of news sites for decades, if not longer… and there’s always the possibility of a schism or interfactional split, which should be fascinating (and doubtless horrific and hilarious) to watch from the sidelines.
But back to Robb:
… any online group of sufficient size could launch an effort like this. However, to really zoom the effort and turn it into a coercive tool, one modification should be made. It should operate as an online game.
Well, pretty much everything else operates as an online game, even democracy itself. [/snark] More seriously, though, using the reward structures of games to entice people toward certain real-world behaviours has been proposed (and put in to action) by others, and has a certain resonance not only with the times we find ourselves in, but also our nature as homo ludens. Indeed, Robb himself proposed a kind of real-life Farmville to spread permaculture farming, but I suspect the amount of real physical work needed to achieve those sorts of goals will deter all but the most tenacious.
That said, science fiction writers got there first: Stross’ Halting State, and Walter John Williams’ This Is Not A Game, for instance. Maybe human society was always a game, and we’re only now waking up to a fact that politicians and uber-entrepreneurs have always understood instinctively?
Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy available as a free download
Regular readers will be aware that I’m a Rudy Rucker fan, and hence will understand how stoked I am that his Ware Tetralogy – heretofore hard to find in decent condition – is being republished as a single (immense) volume. It’s now sat on my wishlist, awaiting a moment when I have the money spare to buy a copy… but until then, there’s a free-to-download PDF version of the Ware Tetralogy available on Rucker’s website. There are commercial ebook versions in the pipeline, apparently, so that download may not be there forever – scoop it up now, and feel the gnarl!
(That said, the PDF and RTF versions are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be passed around with impunity. Send one to a friend!)