Boing Boing » futurism

Game designer creates a never-played-by-humans titanium boardgame and buries it for play 2700 years from now

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 16:17:31 +0000

Michael McWhertor recounts Jason Rohrer's extraordinary Game Developers' Conference presentation from last March; Rohrer used a set of genetic algorithms to evolve and play-test a board-game that no human ever played, then he milled it out of a piece of titanium and buried it, along with acid-free rules encased in Pyrex, and buried it in the desert for someone to dig up in 2,700 years and play for the first time. It was in response to a design challenge called "Humanity's Last Game," and Rohrer certainly made a run at it.

To accomplish that, Rohrer first built the game in computer form, designing a set of rules that would be playtested not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence. He said he plugged the game's rules into a "black box," letting the AI find imbalances, iterating new rules and repeating. Rohrer showed the video game version of his board game onscreen, but obscured key portions of the board game's layout, so no one in attendance could reverse engineer its mechanics.
Then he set about manufacturing it. Rattling off a list of board game materials that would be unlikely to last the intended passage of time (wood, cardboard, aluminum, glass), Rohrer ultimately decided to make the game from a resilient metal. He machined the 18-inch by 18-inch game board and the pieces future players will use out of 30 pounds of titanium.
Rohrer laid out the game's rules diagrammatically on three pages of archival, acid-free paper, hermetically sealed them inside a Pyrex glass tube — which were then housed inside a titanium baton — and set about burying them in the earth.
The game is now embedded somewhere in the Nevada desert. Rohrer's not exactly sure where, as he plotted out available public land far enough away from roads and populated areas, hoping to find a suitable, desolate location to hide the game. He buried it in the desert himself, he said, turned around and walked away from the game's indistinguishable resting place.

His finale was distributing about a million GPS coordinates spread across hundreds of envelopes, and explaining that it would take one person a million days (about 2,700 years) to visit each site and check it with a metal-detector. However, my money is on this being buried somewhere along the trash-fence at Burning Man.

Game designer Jason Rohrer designs a game meant to be played 2,000 years from now, hides it in desert [Polygon/Michael McWhertor]

(via Kadrey)

Beautiful vintage jetpack-futurist car

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 24 May 2013 01:28:19 +0000

On Super Punch, set of photos of a beautiful, enbubbled, betailfinned Los Angeles land yacht spotted on the 101. Hoo-ah.

Saw a this on the 101 in Los Angeles today. It was caravanning with a bunch of classic cars. …

Will robots take all the jobs?

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:46:26 +0000

In a fascinating installment of the IEEE Techwise podcast [MP3], Rice University Computational Engineering prof Moshe Vardi discusses the possibility that robots will obviate human labor faster than new jobs are created, leaving us with no jobs. This needn't be a bad thing -- it might mean finally realizing the age of leisure we've been promised since the first glimmers of the industrial revolution -- but if market economies can't figure out how to equitably distribute the fruits of automation, it might end up with an even bigger, even more hopeless underclass.

I think the issue of machine intelligence and jobs deserves some serious discussion. I don’t know that we will reach a definite conclusion, and it’s not clear how easy it will be to agree on desired actions, but I think the topic is important enough that it deserves discussion. And right now I would say it’s mostly being discussed by economists, by labor economists. It has to also be discussed by the people that produce the technology, because one of the questions we could ask is, you know, there is a concept that, for example, that people have started talking about, which is that we are using, we are creating technology that has no friction, okay? Creating many things that are just too easy to do.

Many of these ideas came up in this Boing Boing post from January, which also touches on Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, a book that Vardi mentions in his interview.

The Job Market of 2045 (via /.)

Future Tense: Neal Stephenson and Tim Wu talk future, sf and tech

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:58:07 +0000

Slate, the New America Foundation and Arizona State University have kicked off a new podcast called "Future Tense," hosted by Internet scholar Tim Wu. The inaugural episode is an interview with Neal Stephenson wherein Neal and Tim talk about where the future has gone -- why we no longer seem to dream of jetpacks and instead focus on fiddly mobile phones. Stephenson gets some very good points in on the lack of predictivity in science fiction, and what sf really contributes to the future.

There are six installments in all -- coming episodes include conversations with Margaret Atwood and me!

Stranger Than Fiction, Neal Stephenson Edition

MP3 link

(Thanks, Tim!)

(Image: Neal Stephenson Answers Questions, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from jmpk's photostream)

Bruce Sterling on startups' role in helping the global rich get richer

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:09:18 +0000

Bruce Sterling's speech from NEXT Berlin is a blast of cold air on the themes of startup life, disruption, and global collapse. Bruce excoriates the startup world for its complicity with the conspiracy of the global investor class to vastly increase the wealth of a tiny minority, and describes the role that "design fiction" has in changing this.

Bruce Sterling on Fantasy prototypes and real disruption | NEXT Berlin (via Die Puny Humans)

Buildings built by bacteria

David Pescovitz — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:32:21 +0000

Over at Fast Company, our pal Chris Arkenberg wrote about how advances in synthetic biology and biomimicry could someday transform how we build our built environments:

Innovations emerging across the disciplines of additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, swarm robotics, and architecture suggest a future scenario when buildings may be designed using libraries of biological templates and constructed with biosynthetic materials able to sense and adapt to their conditions. Construction itself may be handled by bacterial printers and swarms of mechanical assemblers.
Tools like Project Cyborg make possible a deeper exploration of biomimicry through the precise manipulation of matter. David Benjamin and his Columbia Living Architecture Lab explore ways to integrate biology into architecture. Their recent work investigates bacterial manufacturing--the genetic modification of bacteria to create durable materials. Envisioning a future where bacterial colonies are designed to print novel materials at scale, they see buildings wrapped in seamless, responsive, bio-electronic envelopes.

"Cities Of The Future, Built By Drones, Bacteria, And 3-D Printers"

Debut of the Picturephone

David Pescovitz — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:32:10 +0000

In this press conference, Microsoft finally reveals its plans for Skype.…

Bio-hackers, crime journalism, and socialstructing the future

Marina Gorbis — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 14:19:57 +0000

Boing Boing friend Marina Gorbis is executive director of Institute for the Future, a non-profit thinktank where I'm a researcher. Marina has just published a compelling, provocative, and grounded book about how technology is enabling individuals to connect with one another to follow their passions and get stuff done, outside of large corporations, governments, and the other institutions that typically rule our lives. Marina calls it "socialstructing." I call it making the future better than the present. The following is an excerpt from Marina's book, "The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World." - David Pescovitz

Putting the Social Back Into Our Economy
by Marina Gorbis

My mother never heard the term social capital, but she knew its value well. In the Soviet Union, where she lived and where I grew up, no one could survive without it, and she leveraged her social capital on a daily basis. It enabled her to provide a decent life for her family, even though she was a widow without much money, excluded from the privileged class of the Communist Party. We never worried about having enough food. My sister and I always wore fashionable clothes (at least by Soviet standards). We took music and dance lessons. We went to the symphony, attended good schools, and spent summers by the Black Sea. In short, we enjoyed a lifestyle that seemed well beyond our means.

How was my mother able to provide all these things on the meager salary of a physician in a government-run clinic in Odessa, Ukraine? Social connections were a powerful currency that flowed through her network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle. Even when no meat could be found in any store in the city, my mother was able to get it, along with a wealth of other hard-to-find foods, from the director of the supermarket who was the husband of a close colleague of hers. I was accepted into music school because my mother treated the director of the school in her off-hours. We were able to get Western medicines because a friend was the head of a large local pharmacy.

Our apartment was always filled with people my mother was counseling, diagnosing, treating, and prescribing medicines for. No money ever changed hands; that was too risky. She had lived through the era of Stalin’s purges, and the memory of his fabricated charges against Jewish doctors, who he claimed were trying to poison the Soviet leadership, was still vivid in her mind. She was too afraid to build a private underground medical practice. “With my luck, I would be the first to be caught,” she would say with a nervous laugh.

All those people who regularly visited us, or whose houses she visited to provide care, were my mom’s substitute for money, providing not only food, medicines, and clothes but also intangibles of information, services, and emotional support. When my mother died shortly after emigrating to the United States in 1990, the only material possessions she left me and my sister were her wedding ring, some books, and a few pieces of clothing. But she also left thousands of grateful friends and former patients whose lives she had touched.

Our story was not unique. All around us, amid empty stores, low salaries, dismal productivity numbers, and fraying infrastructure, people seemed to live normal middle-class lives. An economist would have had a hard time explaining our lifestyle by analyzing economic statistics or walking around the stores and markets in Russia in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, visitors to the Soviet Union always marveled at the gap between what they saw in state stores— shelves empty or filled with things no one wanted—and what they saw in people’s homes: nice furnishings and tables filled with food.

What filled the gap? A vast informal economy driven by human relationships, dense networks of social connections through which people traded resources and created value. The Soviet people didn’t plot how they would build these networks. No one was teaching them how to maximize their connections the way social marketers eagerly teach us today. Their networks evolved naturally, out of necessity, that was the only way to survive. Today, all around the world, we are seeing a new kind of network or relationship-driven economics emerging, with individuals joining forces sometimes to fill the gaps left by existing institutions — corporations, governments, educational establishments—and sometimes creating new products, services, and knowledge that no institution is able to provide. Empowered by computing and communication technologies that have been steadily building village-like networks on a global scale, we are infusing more and more of our economic transactions with social connectedness.

The new technologies are inherently social and personal. They help us create communities around interests, identities, and common personal challenges. They allow us to gain direct access to a worldwide community of others. And they take anonymity out of our economic transactions. We can assess those we don’t know by checking their reputations as buyers and sellers on eBay or by following their Twitter streams. We can look up their friends on Facebook and watch their YouTube videos. We can easily get people’s advice on where to find the best shoemaker in Brazil, the best programmer in India, and the best apple farmer in our local community. We no longer have to rely on bankers or venture capitalists as the only sources of funding for our ideas. We can raise funds directly from individuals, most of whom we don’t even know, through websites like Grow VC and Kickstarter, which allow people to post descriptions of their projects and generate donations, investments, or loans.

We are moving away from the dominance of the depersonalized world of institutional production and creating a new economy around social connections and social rewards—a process I call socialstructing. Others have referred to this model of production as social, commons-based, or peer-to-peer. Not only is this new social economy bringing with it an unprecedented level of familiarity and connectedness to both our global and our local economic exchanges, but it is also changing every domain of our lives, from finance to education and health. It is rapidly ushering in a vast array of new opportunities for us to pursue our passions, create new types of businesses and charitable organizations, redefine the nature of work, and address a wide range of problems that the prevailing formal economy has neglected, if not caused.

Socialstructing is in fact enabling not only a new kind of global economy but a new kind of society, in which amplified individuals— individuals empowered with technologies and the collective intelligence of others in their social network—can take on many functions that previously only large organizations could perform, often more efficiently, at lower cost or no cost at all, and with much greater ease. Socialstructing is opening up a world of what my colleagues Jacques Vallée and Bob Johansen describe as the world of impossible futures, a world in which a large software firm can be displaced by weekend software hackers, and rapidly orchestrated social movements can bring down governments in a matter of weeks. The changes are exciting and unpredictable. They threaten many established institutions and offer a wealth of opportunities for individuals to empower themselves, find rich new connections, and tap into a fast-evolving set of new resources in everything from health care to education and science.

Much has been written about how technology distances us from the benefits of face-to-face communication and quality social time. I think those are important concerns. But while the quality of our face-to-face interactions is changing, the countervailing force of socialstructing is connecting us at levels never seen before, opening up new opportunities to create, learn, and share. Consider the following examples of amplified individual who are pioneering this transformation.

Opening Up Biology for the Masses

Eri Gentry always had a strong interest in health and well-being. She read health books and magazines as a teenager and moved on to academic papers on medicine in college. She got hooked on research into aging and life extension, and in the process, discovered the SENS Foundation, a brainchild of the noted British anti-aging researcher and scientist Aubrey de Grey. SENS was located close to where she lived in Arizona, so Eri started volunteering there, doing a variety of tasks, from talking to real estate brokers to helping get visas for overseas scientists visiting the lab. She was dismayed to learn how top-heavy many scientific efforts are and that too often scientists themselves are undervalued and underrewarded. She became a true advocate for scientists. “Such important research should be scientist-driven and have as little overhead as possible,”2 she says. Thus was born her desire to uplift scientists who are eager to do research, often for very little money, and at the same time to make science, particularly biology, more accessible to the masses.

While working at SENS, Eri and a biomedical researcher, John Schloendorn, started a nonprofit company called Livly to pursue research in immunotherapy treatments for cancer. Realizing that Arizona was not the best place for a start-up, the team decided to move to Silicon Valley. Eri looked into renting a biotech incubator space there, but the rents were exorbitant—more than $6,000 per person per month. Instead, she rented the cheapest house with a garage she could find in Mountain View, and she and John moved in.

The team soon turned their garage into a biotech lab. They acquired most of their equipment from biotech companies that were going out of business and were willing to get rid of their gear for pennies on the dollar. Eri and John would sometimes drive to Los Angeles to pick up equipment and attend a biotech conference on the way. Word about their lab spread quickly. Many people came by to visit, among them Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist famous for his early investment in Facebook. Thiel decided to invest in ImmunePath, a start-up created by Schloendorn that specializes in stem cell therapeutics for diseases of the immune system.

Eri took a different path. The community of people interested in doing biology research quickly outgrew her garage and started meeting in larger spaces, including the Institute for the Future (IFTF). BioCurious, as the group became known, evolved into many things: a physical space where people come to learn, share ideas, and collaborate on projects; a place for hackers to come together and apply their skills to biology; a community for interested amateurs to learn about and to participate in biology research. Today the members are a diverse group—scientists, philosophers, engineers, programmers, designers, amateurs and professionals, young and old. Eri sees BioCurious as a “space for people to innovate biology in a world where change is sorely needed.”

One of the projects developed by some of the members of the BioCurious community is an open PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine. A PCR machine is critical for DNA analysis and is a foundational tool for virtually all of modern molecular biology research. Traditional PCR machines cost between $4,000 and $10,000, but two of the BioCurious cofounders, Josh Perfetto and Tito Jankowski, developed a PCR machine that sells for around $600. Along with Mac Cowell, a cofounder of DIYbio.org, another nonprofit dedicated to engaging people in biology research, Josh created another project called Cofactor Bio that sells kits to enable people to do all kinds of genetic and biological testing on their own. You can, for example, specify which genes you want to test for, such as the gene associated with quick metabolization of caffeine or the gene associated with natural marathon-running abilities, and they will send you a kit to do the testing.

After a year of operating out of the garage, Eri and her co-conspirators turned to Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform where strangers can contribute money to underwrite projects in the arts, music, and science. With contributions ranging from $3 to $2,500 and over two hundred backers, BioCurious managed to raise enough money to start a community lab in Sunnyvale, California, where members have access to lab equipment and a community to help them pursue their research interests in biology.

BioCurious and other DIY biology efforts come at an important time and serve a critical role in the evolution of biological research. Disciplines such as synthetic biology and genomics are truly transdisciplinary, that is, they require knowledge from multiple disciplines, including genetics, bioinformatics, chemistry, and biology. In most academic settings, these disciplines are highly specialized. Even in neuroscience departments, researchers might be highly specialized in biological, microbiological, cognitive, and other types of neuroscience. And people with different specializations find it difficult to talk to each other. Meanwhile, the stores of biological and genetic data we are accumulating are growing exponentially. To take advantage of this data and to speed up the rate of scientific discoveries, we need people from different disciplines to talk to each other in a similar language. Communities such as BioCurious provide a place for people to develop a common language and work together. At the same time, tools for doing self-diagnosis, self-tracking, and biological research are becoming increasingly available to individuals. BioCurious encourages and enables people to acquire the necessary knowledge and tools to do such research, to become experts on their own bodies, and to participate in broader research by contributing their own data to a large pool of community information. Eri’s goal is to engage more and more people in biological research—to bring biology to the masses.

Eri also helped shape Genomera, a platform for open-source clinical trials. Traditional clinical trials are lengthy and expensive and are done only by large R&D labs or government organizations. Genomera allows virtually anyone to run a clinical trial. Say you want to investigate whether drinking green tea affects your energy level or cuts down on your food cravings. You can propose a clinical trial to the Genomera community, and Genomera will help you recruit study participants, provide you with templates for running the study, and give you assistance with data analysis. Greg Biggers, the founder of Genomera, envisions it not only as a platform for conducting research but also as a social platform—a place where people can find others interested in similar issues, share research ideas, and help improve methodologies. Far from the way traditional clinical trials are conducted, where subjects never see each other, much less talk to each other, Genomera’s approach is to create a community of participant researchers who are socially connected.

Genomera and efforts like it play an important role in crowdsourcing health information and in enabling highly personalized treatment choices. People are increasingly tracking data about themselves, and genetic testing is becoming routine. Combine that with years of data from doctors and aggregate personal data across thousands, if not millions, of people, and it becomes possible to determine which nutritional supplements would be helpful given your individual profile and which foods, drugs, and treatments are most likely to work for you.

BioCurious, Genomera, and platforms for social production of science open up a much larger terrain for investigation. Right now R&D dollars and investments are directed to a narrow set of discoveries that can produce large monetary payoffs for pharmaceutical companies and R&D labs. However, there are many questions that need answers but may not have a huge monetary payoff even though they could make an extraordinary impact on individuals and society as a whole. Efforts like BioCurious and Genomera democratize what we investigate and who does the investigating. At the same time, they drastically reduce the costs of running clinical trials—that is, the costs of innovation. The cost of running a clinical trial with Genomera is close to zero. And here is another benefit of Genomera and open platforms like it: the data they collect is available to anyone to review, analyze, and add to.

There are now hundreds of community labs such as BioCurious and Genomera around the world. Think about the collective impact of their efforts on research!

Combating Global Organized Crime

In 2001 Paul Radu, a young Romanian journalist, got a press fellowship from the Alfred Friendly Foundation to work on an investigative team at the San Antonio Express-News. While at the newspaper, he embarked on an investigation of a transnational group involved in helping Americans adopt children from Eastern Europe, including Romania and Ukraine. His investigation specifically focused on Orson Mozes, the head of Adoption International Program, based in Montecito, California. Paul pored over court records and IRS filings, searched adoption forums, and conducted interviews in Eastern Europe and the United States. He uncovered numerous unsavory and sometimes illegal practices, including failure to disclose medical problems of adopted children, mistreatment of and threats against prospective parents who complained or asked too many questions, and separations of siblings without disclosure of that information to the adoptive parents.

Paul had completed the investigation and was ready to publish his exposé in September 2001, but his story was pushed aside by the events of 9/11. Few people were interested in adoption scams involving Eastern Europe. When the story finally appeared as a lead article in the San Antonio Express-News in October 2001, it didn’t garner much attention. Nevertheless the experience taught Paul the value of local information and sources, the importance of doing painstaking and often boring forensic reporting work, and the long life that archived online stories can have, with direct impact occurring possibly years after a story is published.

For seven years after its publication, Paul’s article on Mozes was posted and reposted on adoption bulletin boards and in discussion forums. Parents who were looking for children and those who had had direct experience with Mozes kept bringing Paul’s article back into the conversation. Finally, in 2008, Mozes was arrested for the crimes described in the 2001 article. It took a long time, but publication of the article disrupted Mozes’ ablity to do business as usual. “What’s more important is not that he was arrested,” says Paul, “but that for seven years he tried moving his business to Azerbaijan and to various places, and these people, these local journalists, would always find my story. Or some parent who was interested in adopting would find it. So then I realized that archived information has a lot of power. If it’s proper information, if it’s sourced correctly, if it’s put in a good form, if it’s backed by documents, then it can have impact for a very long time.”

Paul and his colleagues apply these lessons in a new journalism venture focused on creating a truly global investigative journalism platform. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is a virtual organization that brings together journalists with local knowledge and local connections from different parts of the world. Members of OCCRP collaborate online and in person to decide which investigations to launch. They allocate small amounts of money to groups of reporters, and sometimes citizen journalists, to conduct research in their locales. Working on shoestring budgets, these journalists interview people locally in their native language, go through bank records and company registrations, and collect reports from local media sources. That is, they do the same kind of work Paul was doing in Texas. They understand that organized crime is a global business representing millions of dollars in profits, with a huge network of people and assets.

Organized crime operations use familiar business structures— companies, banks, networks of employees—to conduct illegal activities. They thrive on exploiting jurisdictional boundaries— differences in regulatory, legal, accounting, and cultural norms— often setting up operations in areas where illegal activities can be well hidden from authorities. Unfortunately, because of these jurisdictional differences and constraints, it is often difficult or impossible for local authorities to uncover the whole network and see the larger picture. For example, during a drug bust in Argentina, the authorities might be happy to seize millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine and arrest a few people. However, the culprits are likely to be part of a much larger network that involves people in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. “The criminal enterprises of today represent a multibillion-dollar set of networks that prey on every aspect of global society, distorting markets, corrupting governments, and draining huge resources from both,” says Paul. “Criminal syndicates have unprecedented reach into the lives of ordinary people, and journalists need to do a better job of putting the transnational puzzle together and of presenting to the public the threat posed by such criminal enterprises.” This type of globally networked criminal activity can go unnoticed and unchallenged in today’s media environment. In many Eastern European countries and other parts of the world, oligarchs and corrupt officials own most of the media outlets. In the United States, drops in advertising revenues have led many mainstream media outlets to cut funding for serious investigative journalism. With slow economic growth and falling government revenues, there is also less money for regulatory authorities to conduct in-depth investigations.

This is where organizations like OCCRP can fill the void. The OCCRP global network of journalists is able to weave together fine-grained hyperlocal knowledge into a high-resolution view of global crime and corruption. Such organizations will increasingly assume the role of de facto regulators and drive demand for greater levels of transparency in political and financial systems.

A case in point is an OCCRP investigation in 2010 that uncovered shady offshore business practices popular in Eastern Europe among corrupt politicians, criminal elements, and wealthy individuals eager to avoid paying taxes. Journalists from the United States, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, and several other countries came together to investigate one individual, a Romanian businessman named Laszlo Kiss, who was helping many such individuals set up companies in Cyprus, the Seychelles Islands, and Delaware. Among other things, the investigation made transparent how some of the key political figures in Romania were funneling government projects to offshore companies in which they had direct interests. Around one month after the report was released, Laszlo Kiss was arrested; nine months later, his associate Ian Taylor was forced to halt operations. As a result of the OCCRP investigation the New Zealand government shut down over one thousand companies belonging to the network. Not a small accomplishment for a handful of underpaid journalists! The reporters who worked on the project ultimately won the Daniel Pearl Global Investigative Journalism Award for their work.

The creation of archives, databases, and software tools is a big part of the OCCRP effort. Paul’s hope is to establish a global information resource that will make it easy for not just skilled investigative journalists but also citizen journalists and others to participate in disrupting global organized crime. As he puts it, “For many years organized crime has been successful in exporting crime all over the world. Ponzi schemes, trafficking in persons, value-added tax fraud, carbon credits fraud, credit card skimming, and many other crimes have been exported from country to country while law enforcement and citizens were not prepared to confront them because they didn’t have enough information. Investigative journalists and databases created by investigative journalism organizations may act in a preemptive way in order to stop the migration of crime. This can be done through the construction of databases where [information on] individuals, organizations involved in crime, and emerging crime models would be stored and indexed so that crime syndicates would not be able to conduct business as usual.”

Paul’s first lesson from Texas has proven invaluable: when information is properly archived, sourced, and indexed, it will have a lasting value in disrupting corruption.

image: "Barn raising in Lansing," circa 1900-1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock, the Boing Boing interview

David Pescovitz — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:55:52 +0000

Over twenty years, ten books, and multiple PBS documentaries bOING bOING pal and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has proven himself to be a provocative pattern seeker with a mastery at connecting the dots between popular culture, technology, and the complex underpinnings of modern society. Inspired by the likes of Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan, Robert Anton Wilson, and Neil Postman, Doug's message has always been about the empowerment of the individual. He is a quintessential happy mutant. Whether he's writing about social contagions, video games, advertising, religion, or the Occupy Movement, his focus is on how narrative can be used by Control to coerce, and as a tool of resistance. William S. Burroughs once wrote, "Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes." And therein lies the secret to undermining it. Doug's new book is Present Shock, about how everything is happening now. Right now. As Doug said, "It is kind of panicked, untethered sensation that comes with living a real-time, always-on existence without past or a future, origins or goals. Just the present."

BB: The book's title is a riff on Alvin Toffler's classic 1970 book "Future Shock." He used that phrase to describe the feeling of "too much change in too short a period of time." What is present shock?

Rushkoff: Present Shock is what happens when the future Toffler described finally arrives. It's the initial human reaction to living in a world where everything is happening now…

In one sense it's the first response to a digital media environment - or, more specifically, the digital temporal environment. While analog time (itself just one kind of representation) had a continuous, almost narrative quality as the second hand swept through one minute and into the next, digital time just sits there poised at 3:23, 3:24. We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day. But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.

In the other, bigger sense, though, it's about reaching the end of the millennium. We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot com boom, the long boom and all that. It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived. People stopped thinking about what their investments might be worth in the future, band began to consider what they were worth right now. And the market crashed. We came to realize the expansion was over - at least in the colonialist way we understood it. Obama told us we are the change we had been waiting for.

So between those two related shifts, we arrived in a present. Only instead of seizing this new "now," we tend to get disoriented. Instead of using digital technology to time shift our schedules to our real preferences, we respond to the insistent pings of our devices as if we were 911 operators or air traffic controllers. We chase the moment they offer, and forget that we are the ones in real time, and the devices (and the corporations behind them) are chasing us.

But "present shock" is also as simple as the botox addicts on Real Housewives of Orange County, desperate to lock in the moment when they were 29 years old. All succeed in doing is paralyzing their faces in a poor imitation of that moment, and making themselves unavailable to the social moment in which they are living. They can't register emotions on their faces, which is why they never believe one another. They are "overwinding" the present moment.

The book is broken up into five "symptoms" of present shock? Can you give an example of each?

Narrative collapse is what happens when we no longer have time to tell a traditional story. Whether it's remote controls or DVRS that allow us to break the trance of a story, or simply our inability to grasp a story when we no longer have linear time in which to tell it. In one way it's great thing, because it disables the kinds of stories that were used to pull us out of the moment, and fix our eyes on some future goal. We can't be fooled into destructive, ends-justify-the-means battles because we don't do things for the ends, anymore. It wreaks havoc on brand mythologies and origin stories, alike.

At first, the response was television like The Simpsons and MST3k, which seemed less about whatever story was being told, and more about the individual associations we make along the way, comparing a scene with some other moment in media. The satisfaction wasn't getting to the end, but making all those connections.

Then we see video games as an even more presentist response, giving the user a real-time experience of making choices instead of watching some character move through a story that already happened. We get "infinite" games, where we play not to win and end the play, but in order to keep the play going.

Digiphrenia is a digitally induced mental confusion. I've never had a problem with information overload. Where I think we run into trouble with digital technology is its ability to make copies. Human beings don't copy well - but I've got i don't know how many "instances" of myself functioning independently at any moment. My Twitter account, my email inbox, my Facebook profile (well, I surrendered that one), all act on my behalf, sometimes when I'm not even there. Especially when Zuckerberg decides to market something using my likeness, or that of someone who has chosen to "like" me.

The promise of digital technology was that it would give us more authority over our time. Remember those early conversations on the Well? We got to sound smarter than we were in real life, because we had all the time in the world to respond. They were asynchronous conversations, fully consonant with the asynchronous character of digital technology. When we strap this stuff to our bodies and respond to each vibration, we are turning them into something very different.

Digiphrenia is also simply mistaking digital clock time, and its seemingly generic quality, to the very contoured and specific qualities of human time. Biologically, psychologically, and culturally, we are guided by all sorts of cycles that make one time different from another. Emerging research (cited in the book) seems to indicate that we are collectively biased toward a different neurotransmitter during each week of the lunar cycle. No, it's not new age weirdness (though I bet most aboriginal cultures knew this - the early Jews certainly did). Digiphrenia is a disconnection and devaluing of these underlying rhythms for the illusion of chronologically equivalent pulses. We lose our coherence, because we're no longer in synch with our most basic biological clocks.

Overwinding is trying to shove really big time scales into tiny little presentist moments. When I read Stewart Brand's The Long Now I was inspired by the idea of thinking of things in 10,000 year spans. But for me, that experience felt less like a long now than a short forever. It was just too big a scale, too big a sense of responsibility to throw onto each moment. At the very least, it was a hard argument to make in a presentist culture with no sense of long-term goals and impacts.

Overwinding is the effort to get long-term effects out of immediate actions. It's happening most clearly on the stock market, where people want to make money not by investing, but on the trade itself. They buy Facebook in the morning of the IPO and are disappointed when they haven't made a profit fifteen minutes later. It's the ultra-fast trading algorithms that make money by trading in your future.

Fractalnoia is when we try to make sense of things in the present moment, rather than having a cause-and-effect chain of events through which to understand how something happened. It's making sense of a static picture. Like CSI. Drawing connections and making equivalencies between things that are essentially unconnected and definitely not equivalent.

I took the term from fractals, of course, because so many of us seem to make the error of mistaking self-similarity for being exactly the same. We need to develop pattern recognition, which is a softer and less exact skill than finding true congruence. Fractalnoia is also the panic at trying to parse feedback. Our feedback cycles have gotten so tight in a presentist society that it's really hard to parse causes from effects. All we hear is the screech of the microphone in the speaker.

Finally, Apocalypto is our intolerance for living in an interminable present. We are so used to beginnings and endings, that many of us would rather imagine a zombie apocalypse or human-obsolescing singularity than try to carry on sustainably into the future.

When you started writing this book, you told me you thought it was your most important one. I've never heard you say that before. Do you still feel that way now that it's done? Why?

In some ways I feel like it's my last book. (Don't applaud - that's not polite.) It certainly brings me to the end of the journey I began with Cyberia in 1994 (a book that got canceled by its commissioning publisher because they thought the net would be "over" by the original 1993 publication date). I wrote that "time was speeding up" and that we were "on the event horizon of the strange attractor." It was heady and optimistic, but it was also Mondo and Boing Boing.

It didn't seem to me I was writing about something that was coming, but something that had arrived. This was it. The tools were in our cyberpunk hands, and we could create what we wanted, exchange it directly, build a peer-to-peer culture and economy, and liberate ourselves from centuries of time-is-money industrial corporatism. The digital age seemed to be the great release from the yuppie nightmare, and the ultimate generator of slack.

But then Wired got ahold of it, and all of sudden the digital age wasn't something with us, to celebrate; it was something on the horizon. Louis Rosetto wrote in the editorial to the first issue of Wired that we were facing a "Bengali Typhoon." Like it was this big wave that was about to happen and you better watch out. And you better read this magazine (and hire some digitally inspired futurists) to do some scenario planning so you don't' get wiped out.

And from then, digitally seemed less about transcending the industrial age economy, and more about preserving it. Internet companies were going to save the Nasdaq. And, sure enough, we used digital technology largely to make us into better consumers. And our applications - the way so many of them take our time instead of free it, make us work round the clock instead of when we want, or convince us that we have to tend to them night and day - they exacerbate the worst sorts of time-is-money principles of industrialism.

So when I started this book, I realized I had (at least for me) come upon the essence of our relative power in this situation: Time. We are witnessing yet another iteration of the age old interplay between Chronos, or clock time, and Kairos, which really means timing. Timing is the human part - the indefinable aspect of time. A kind of readiness. What's the best time to tell dad you crashed the car? 5:02? No, that's chronos. It's not a time on the clock. It's after he's had his drink but before he's opened the bills. Kairos.

And all my work has really been about this - from Playing the Future, which was about the breakdown of cause and effect narrative, to Nothing Sacred, which was about Jewish continuity as less of a thread to some historical past and more about the willingness to engage with fresh eyes today.

So this book is less about a particular thing, and more about the whole thing.

For years, you and I joked that you were like an "optimism engine," always able to find the brighter side of any negative situation. I'm not sure if you've become less optimistic, but you are certainly less positive about the present. Why?

Well, I'm still really hopeful. And I play the optimism game to this day - where I take an awful phenomenon and try to recast it in a positive frame. It's a bit harder now that I have a kid and I think about the world she'll inherit. But I'm still hopeful.

The only negative side of Present Shock is that we're mostly in shock rather than true presentism. But that's to be expected because this is brand new, and we have a good five hundred years to go before presentism becomes something else. These things last millennia. And there are some great example in the book of people and groups who are embracing presentist, steady-state models. From Occupy to time dollars, Makerbots to spiritually inspired social activism, we see the emergence of some terrifically, post-industrial post-narrative approaches to life. We are finally ready to look at less climactic, more sustainable solutions to the world's problems.

Contending with a society biased toward the present is just going to take some time.

One of the most soundbitey bits in the book is the statement "I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people than what people are choosing to do to one another through technology.” What does that mean?

I accept that technology has biases. Guns don't kill people, but they are much more biased toward killing people than pillows. Digital technology has biases, too, but I don't think they are biased toward taking our time, fracturing our awareness, and making us anxious. I think they are more biased toward doing the opposite. The thing that gets me anxious is not the email piling up in the inbox - it's the expectations of the people on the other end of those emails. It's the expectation that I'm supposed to respond in seconds or minutes. It's the boss who thinks a computer is a good enough reason to watch every one of his worker's keystrokes.

But you see, the only reason the boss thinks that is because he's back in the industrial age mentality of believing that he has bought your time. Digital technology should be giving the worker more choice of how he uses his time, not the boss more authority over that time.

Since at least 1998, and most recently in your Good post, you've ranted that "futurists suck." As you know, I'm a card-carrying futurist myself with Institute for the Future, an organization that you've expressed a desire to associate with more closely. So I need to ask, how do you define "futurist"?

Well, "why futurists suck" was a bad headline on an otherwise heartfelt little piece. I've gone and apologized for it on my blog. It's no excuse - particularly for me - but I was in a bit of present shock, myself, when I was going back and forth about it (typing on a smart phone during an NPR station break on publication day, correcting for a snafu that had delayed the piece) and I wasn't paying proper attention to how it was going to be framed.

The title actually came back from the past - a talk I gave at SXSW in 1997 (you were there!) called "Renaissance Now!" (satirically subtitled, "or why futurists suck"). It was meant as a humorous swipe against the long-boom-boosters I saw turning the internet from a real-time, p2p2, Maker phenomenon into the poster child for NASDAQ. It was aimed at a particular, digerati-style of consultants who I believed weren't genuinely looking to figure out what might happen; they were propagandizing the net as a market phenomenon in order to extend the lives of the corporations to whom they were consulting. Their purpose was not to usher in the digital age, but to perpetuate the industrial age by digital means.

And then they necessarily went off in really dehumanizing directions, envisioning information's inevitable transcendence beyond humans in its own quest toward greater complexity. People were only valuable to the extent they could enable information's evolution. To me, this has the medium and the message reversed.

Writing Present Shock finally taught me what it was I was ranting about back in 1997 but not fully understanding. This really isn't about the future; it's about the now - in more ways than one.

As for real futurists - and science fiction writers - I love them. I'm probably one, myself. But futurism today means being truly grounded in the present, and then building possibilities from there. Those are the only possibilities that are bound by nothing but the human imagination.

Douglas Rushkoff will talk about Present Shock at San Francisco's City Lights Books on April 4 at 7pm and Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore on April 11 at 7pm.

The power of the swarm

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:20:25 +0000

At Wired, Ed Yong has an incredible long-read story about the researchers who are figuring out how and why individual animals sometimes turn into groups operating on collective behavior. That research has implications far beyond the freakish, locust-filled laboratories where Yong's story begins. Turns out, bugs and birds can teach us a lot about the brain, cancer, and even how we make predictions about our own futures.

Bruce Sterling's closing SXSW keynote: disruption and destruction

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:50:11 +0000

In Bruce Sterling's barn-burning closing keynote for SXSW 2013, he confronts the realities of disruption -- that disruption leads to destruction. Our wonderful things destroy other wonderful things. The future composts the past. We roast the 20th century over our bonfire, let's not shamefully pretend that we did it by accident. Let's eat our kill.

Important stuff.

Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW2013

Los Angeles is not full of self-driving pod cars (and other disappointments from a 1988 view of 2013)

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:30:01 +0000

In April 1988, the LA Times Magazine published a cover article predicting what the spring of 2013 would look like for the typical Angeleno family. In a story that is bound to give you disconcerting flashbacks to Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains", a family of four (and their automated house full of whirring robots) goes about a full day — from mandatory staggered work times beginning at 5:15 am, to 11:00 pm, when the lady of the house sits down with her laser disc of The Collected Works of Jackie Collins. (Creepily, the story ends with the house catching fire. I'm not kidding about the Bradbury shout-outs.) Not all the predictions were totally off base, but, as a whole, it's definitely a neat example of how hard it is to look at current technology trends and correctly extrapolate them out to the future.

PDX event for "Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:14:13 +0000

Hey, Portlandians! Brian David Johnson and James H Carrott are doing a talk and signing for their new book, Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology, a fascinating look at the historical significance of steampunk, and an exploration of what the popularity of steampunk today's means about tomorrow's technology, at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell's on March 25 at 7PM.

Steampunk, a mashup in its own right, has gone mainstream, with music videos from the likes of Nicki Minaj; America’s Next Top Model photo shoots; and Prada’s Fall/Winter menswear collection featuring haute couture, steampunk style. Some steampunk fans revile this celebrity. But James H. Carrott, co-author of Vintage Tomorrows, says that’s just how cultural change happens. “Things get appropriated; they affect the culture in some way or another, and the people who are at the heart of trying to make that change move onto the next key idea.”
So what is steampunk, exactly, and why should we care? Carrott, a cultural historian, says “steampunk is playing with the past.” The world that steampunk envisions is a mad-inventor’s collection of 21st century-inspired contraptions, powered by steam and driven by gears. It’s a whole new past; one that has a lot to say about the futures we want to see.
In Vintage Tomorrows, Intel’s resident futurist Brian David Johnson (@IntelFuturist) joins Carrott (@CultHistorian) in a globe-spanning journey to dig beyond definitions and into the heart of this growing subculture. Through interviews with experts such as Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, and James Gleick, this book looks into steampunk’s vision of old-world craftsmen making beautiful hand-tooled gadgets, and what it means for our age of disposable technology.

Vintage Tomorrows Book Signing at Powell’s Books Cedar Hills Crossing

Growing up in the future

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:18:52 +0000

When Veronique Greenwood went to college in 2004, she took a laptop with her ... and a videophone. In an engaging essay at Aeon Magazine, Greenwood writes about what it was like to grow up with a Futurist for a mom, particularly a futurist who, in retrospect, seemed to be more interested in premature technologies than in the sleek, widely adopted versions that eventually succeeded in the marketplace. Greenwood's mother loved the videophone. When Skype came along, free of dedicated hardware, she lost interest.

TWA Moonliner atop an office building in Kansas City

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:28:16 +0000

A replica of the TWA Moonliner II -- centerpiece of the TWA Moonliner at Disneyland's Tomorrowland from 1955-1962 -- sits atop the old TWA headquarters in Kansas City, MO, at 1795 West Baltimore Ave. This is an important fact that no one brought to my attention in a timely fashion when I was in KC on the Pirate Cinema tour, for which I blame all of you.

Google Maps (Thanks, Dan!)

Richard Sherman and lucky disnephile sing "Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow"

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:11:47 +0000

It's the 50th anniversary of "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," the theme from they Disney Carousel of Progress (which debuted at the 1964 World's Fair in NYC). Keith met Richard Sherman, part of the Sherman brothers songwriting team responsible for the song.

He sez, "Last month I had the great pleasure of singing 'There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow' with Richard Sherman at his home. After we were done singing, he said to me, 'That's the first time I did that since Walt and my brother.' And yep, I filmed it! Coolest moment of my life. Wanted to share it with the whole world, basically."

There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow 50th Anniversary (Thanks, Keith!)

Soviet futuristic illustrations of the 1970s

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:11:41 +0000

On IO9, Vincze Miklos rounds up some of the finest sovkitsch futuristic imagery from three 1970s issues of the Soviet YA technology magazine Youth Technics (1, 2, 3) and other sources, presenting a gallery of streamlined jetpack socialism.

Some of the most famous images of Soviet futurism come out of the 1920s and 30s, when the Revolution was young and propaganda posters were like stark works of realist art. But the nation continued to produce works of incredible futurism throughout its reign — including during the trippy period before the Iron Curtain fell in the late twentieth century. Here are some visions of tomorrow, from the USSR in the 1970s.

The groovy socialist world of 1970s Soviet futurism

Walter Cronkite on the office of 2001, from 1967

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 02:09:37 +0000

From the March 12, 1967 episode of Walter Cronkite's CBS show "The 21st Century," a short clip illustrating the home office of tomorrow, with satellite news summaries and consoles that bring the work to us. Paleofuture has a great post about the whole episode:

This equipment here will allow [the businessman of the future] to carry on normal business activities without ever going to an office away from home.
This console provides a summary of news relayed by satellite from all over the world. Now to get a newspaper copy for permanent reference I just turn this button, and out it comes. When I’ve finished catching up on the news I might check the latest weather. This same screen can give me the latest report on the stocks I might own. The telephone is this instrument here — a mock-up of a possible future telephone, this would be the mouthpiece. Now if I want to see the people I’m talking with I just turn the button and there they are. Over here as I work on this screen I can keep in touch with other rooms of the house through a closed-circuit television system.
With equipment like this in the home of the future we may not have to go to work, the work would come to us. In the 21st century it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.

3D-TV, Automated Cooking and Robot Housemaids: Walter Cronkite Tours the Home of 2001 (via Kottke)

Brad Bird's new movie is called "Tomorrowland"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:43 +0000

A terse Disney press release announced yesterday that the new Brad Bird movie will be called "Tomorrowland," and star George Clooney. It's not clear what it'll be about, but I have hopes for something gloriously, Gerbackianally retrofuturistic.

The Walt Disney Studios has announced that its live-action release previously known as 1952 will be titled Tomorrowland. The film will be released domestically on December 19, 2014. George Clooney (The Descendants) is set to star.
Tomorrowland is written by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird from a concept by Lindelof and Jeff Jensen. Lindelof (Star Trek, Lost, Prometheus) will produce and Bird (The Incredibles, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) will produce and direct.

Brad Bird’s movie now titled Tomorrowland

Play a forecasting game about the future of civic engagement

David Pescovitz — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:13:31 +0000

My Institute for the Future colleague Jake Dunagan is hosting a 24-hour online forecasting game to imagine the future of government services and civic engagement. It's called Connected Citizens and there are still a few hours left to play!

The near future holds epic opportunities for rapid innovation in government services. New civic technologies will be built with open data, ubiquitous cloud connectivity, and real-time sensing. Connected Citizens is a global conversation about how connectedness will change the relationship between citizens and governments, and how government services will be designed and delivered in the future.

Connected Citizens

The Future, as imagined by Hollywood

David Pescovitz — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:39:45 +0000

Eclectic Method's awesome montage of the future as seen in film. (Thanks, Jason Tester!)…

Nexus: fast technothriller about transhuman drug crackdown

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:21:14 +0000

Ramez Naam's debut novel Nexus is a superbly plotted high-tension technothriller about a War-on-Drugs-style crackdown on brain/computer interfaces. Kaden and his friends are Bay Area grad students who've hacked Nexus 3, a recreational party drug that nano-infests its users brains and makes them weakly telepathic while they dance the night away. What Kaden and his fellow bio-hackers do is build a Turing-complete virtual machine on top of this platform, port a lightweight version of GNU/Linux (or fictional analog) to it, and start running software on their own minds, arranging for strongly telepathic, hive-mind-style linkups.

This turns out to be a completely prohibited activity in the USA, where enforcement of a convention against posthuman and transhuman enhancement has spawned a DHS-on-steroids (heh) that can render its arrestees to internment camps without trial. The enforcement apparatus is nominally aimed at fighting neuroslavery, ghastly human trafficked sexbots, and apocalyptic cults whose followers are infected with god-viruses that make them worship the leaders as messiahs and render them pliant to their will. But the convention doesn't distinguish between hackers who conduct legitimate scientific inquiry and slavers and terrorists. Any advance in this sort of technology represents an existential threat to the human race, and it is not permitted, period.

Nexus tells the story of Kaden's kidnapping and blackmailing by the anti-trafficking enforcement side, who have the power of life and death over his friends and their wider circle of pals/experimental subjects. He is turned into an intelligence asset, charged with militarizing his research, and sent to entrap one of China's leading neuroscientists.

What follows is a beautifully plotted thriller, one that is full of delicious, thoughtful moral ambiguity. The power and cost of technology is thoroughly examined, turned over and peered at from every angle, and even the worst bad guys have at least a colorable claim on our sympathy at one moment or another. Naam is a hacker-turned-futurist who's run a nanotech startup, so the nerdly stuff all has the ring of truth. This is combined with excellent spycraft, kick-ass action scenes, and a chilling look at a future cold war over technology and ideology, making a hell of a read.

Nexus

Free Kindle preview of first three chapters

A letter from PKD after first seeing a TV preview of Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:06:53 +0000

"Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day “reality” pallid by comparison."—Philip K. Dick writing to Jeff Walker at the Ladd Company, after watching a TV preview of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the film version of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (Dangerous Minds)

Monsanto House of Tomorrow: better living through plastics

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:01:25 +0000

Here's a 15-minute industrial film promoting the Monsanto House of Tomorrow, an all-plastic house shaped like a wheel of gouda, which guarded Disneyland's Tomorrowland for many years, starting in 1957. As John Frost notes on The Disney Blog:

There was a time when Disneyland’s Tomorrowland positively reeked of futurism. Mass transportation, space exploration, and the benefits of scientific research were all put on a pedestal for the American public. One of the most famous examples of this was a partnership with Monsanto, MIT, and Imagineering to build a home made of plastics.
The home sat at the entrance to Tomorrowland, where the Pixie Hollow meet & greet is now, from 1957 to 1967. Touring inside the “House of the Future”, you would find a variety of innovations each with the promise of making living easier and more comfortable. From plastic furnishings to a microwave oven or electric dishwasher guests were wowed with what the future would bring. At least for a few years before these things actually did start to make it into the common household.

House of the Future Video

The Jetsons: 50 years later

David Pescovitz — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:39:13 +0000

Fifty years ago this week, The Jetsons premiered. It only lasted 24 episodes (not including the mid-1980s "revival"), but it truly embodied the tech optimism of the time. In the world of professional futurism, The Jetsons (like a lot of science fiction) can be a great provocation for discussion. For example, every episode is filled with examples of futuristic tech that never happened, at least in the way that we imagined them in the 1960s. (Roomba vs. Roomba!) Clips of The Jetsons are also a fun way to draw out insights about the history of the future and why certain visions of tomorrow caught on at specific points in history. Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak is has launched a series of posts titled "50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters." His introductory post and recap of the first episode ("Rosey the Robot") are fantastic. From Paleofuture:

“The Jetsons” was the distillation of every Space Age promise Americans could muster. People point to “The Jetsons” as the golden age of American futurism because (technologically, at least) it had everything our hearts could desire: jetpacks, flying cars, robot maids, moving sidewalks. But the creators of “The Jetsons” weren’t the first to dream up these futuristic inventions. Virtually nothing presented in the show was a new idea in 1962, but what “The Jetsons” did do successfully was condense and package those inventions into entertaining 25-minute blocks for impressionable, media-hungry kids to consume.
And though it was “just a cartoon” with all the sight gags and parody you’d expect, it was based on very real expectations for the future. As author Danny Graydon notes in The Jetsons: The Official Cartoon Guide, the artists drew inspiration from futurist books of the time, including the 1962 book 1975: And the Changes to Come, by Arnold B. Barach (who envisioned such breakthroughs as ultrasonic dishwashers and instant language translators). The designers also drew heavily from the Googie aesthetic of southern California (where the Hanna-Barbera studios were located)—a style that perhaps best represented postwar consumer culture promises of freedom and modernity.

"50 Years of the Jetsons: Why The Show Still Matters"

Critiquing the flying car in 1944

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:42:59 +0000

During World War II, a time when most manufacturing was concentrated on the war effort and Americans were living with ration books and scrap metal drives, advertising became a very strange thing. Companies wanted to make people aware they still existed, even though they weren't currently offering much for sale and unnecessary consumption was being discouraged. More importantly, the companies wanted Americans to associate their brand name with the promise of life after the War. So, what you got, were a lot of advertisements touting what this or that company was going to do just as soon as the Germans and Japanese were defeated.

The image above comes from a 1944 advertisement by the Association of American Railroads. That room is actually the lounge car on a train — or, rather, the hypothetical lounge car on an imaginary train that might be built after the War is over (provided the development of air travel and the construction of the interstate highway system don't doom the train industry to a slow decline). Basically, you had a lot of time when companies had little more than dreams to offer, so the dreams just kept getting bigger and bigger.

At the Paleofuture blog, Matt Novak writes about this ad as part of a larger trend, and offers up some examples of how the tendency to make big promises about the future of technology was being heavily critiqued even as it happened. Novak's posts help make sense of some of the more-ridiculous branches of midcentury futurism. For instance, by 1944 techno-dreamers were already beginning to imagine a future with a flying machine in every carport. At the time, it was helicopters, but it's not much of a leap to catch up to the more-iconic flying car.

The trouble — as pointed out in a 1944 issue of Science and Mechanics — is that owning a flying machine comes with safety and social concerns that make it a hard sell in the real world:

A helicopter in your back yard? The picture is bright. You go out behind the apple tree, give the rotors a whirl, and whizz!—you’re on the office roof. At the end of the day, whizz!—and you’re back in Suburbia, tending your delphiniums. Beautiful picture, isn’t it? But you’ll probably have to keep your machine in perfect condition, to be passed on by some safety agency, and it won’t be the perfunctory windshield wiper and horn test, either. The neighbors may not care if you crack your own skull, but they won’t want you doing it on their sun porches. So for some years after the war is over, the first helicopters, and other airplanes for that matter, will be flown by people who can scrape together enough money to insure: (1) a machine in perfect condition; (2) maintenance that will keep it that way; (3) expert training in the operation of the machine. The designers say helicopters are harder to fly than airplanes.

Read Matt Novak on World War II train advertising.

Read Matt Novak on early critiques of mid-century futurism.

Archie comic from 1972 about 2012

David Pescovitz — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 15:28:28 +0000

Reportedly snipped from an Archie comic from 1972 in which he time travels to 2012. Even if the 1972/2012 bit is off, it's a great panel anyway. (via @coseyfannitutti)…

William Gibson explains why science fiction writers don't predict the future

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 21:03:01 +0000

William Gibson speaks with Wired's Geeta Dayal about his new book Distrust That Particular Flavor (my review), and particularly the idea that science fiction sucks at predicting stuff.

Science fiction writers aren’t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. Fortune tellers are either deluded or charlatans. You can find science fiction writers who are deluded or science fiction writers who are charlatans — I can think of several of each in the history of the field. Every once in a while, somebody extends their imagination down the line, far enough with a sufficient lack of prejudice, to imagine something that then actually happens. When it happens, it’s great, but it’s not magic. All the language we have for describing what science fiction writers and futurists of other stripes do is nakedly a language of magic.
I’m having a week where some well-intentioned person on the internet describes me as “oracular.” As soon as one of the words with a magic connotation is attached — I know this from ongoing experience — as soon as someone says “oracular,” it’s like, boom! It’s all over the place; it’s endlessly repeated. It’s probably not bad for business. But then I wind up spending a lot of time disabusing people of the idea that I have some sort of magic insight…. You can also find, if you wanted to Google through all the William Gibson pieces on the net, you can find tons of pieces, where people go on and on about how often I’ve gotten it wrong. Where are the cellphones? And neural nets? Why is the bandwidth of everything microscopic in Neuromancer? I could write technological critique of Neuromancer myself that I think could probably convince people that I haven’t gotten it right.
Because the thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all! It’s something; I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something. I somehow managed to convey a feeling of something. Curiously, that put me out ahead of the field in that regard. It wasn’t that other people were getting it wrong; it was just that relatively few people in the early 1980s, relatively few people who were writing science fiction were paying attention to that stuff. That wasn’t what they were writing about.

I published an essay with my take on this in Locus: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future.

William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong

(Photo: Jason Redmond/Wired)

Warren Ellis on life in the science fiction condition

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 20:57:55 +0000

Warren Ellis has posted a transcript of "How To See The Future," they keynote he gave at the Improving Reality conference in Brighton, England this week. Ellis works his way through McLuhan's statement that "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He's onto something -- our world is a strange admixture of the mundane and the fantastic, and as usual, Ellis's acerbic wit and vision is a bracing tonic that wakes us from our perambulatory slumber:

Imagine living in a Martian culture for a moment, where this thing is a presence in the existence of an entire sentient species. A mountain that you cannot see the top of, because it’s a small world and the summit wraps behind the horizon. Imagine settlements creeping up the side of Olympus Mons. Imagine battles fought over sections of slope. Generations upon generations of explorers dying further and further up its height, technologies iterated and expended upon being able to walk to within leaping distance of orbital space. Manufactured normalcy would suggest that, if we were the Martians, we would find this completely dull within ten years and bitch about not being able to simply fart our way into space.
Now imagine a world where space travel to other worlds is an antique curiosity. Imagine reading the words “vintage space.” Can you even consider being part of a culture that could go to space and then stopped?
If the future is dead, then today we must summon it and learn how to see it properly.

How To See The Future

Space Mountain construction advertorial

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 01:11:27 +0000

The Vintage Ads LJ group is having a theme-park ad theme-week, and as you might expect, this pleases me greatly. It's no surprise that the redoubtable Man Writing Slash has come through with some of the best submissions, including this smashing Space Mountain construction advertorial.

Amusement Parks in Ads