Bruce Sterling’s written a great piece in Seed on the Crisis ahead:

Here’s but a taste:

Insurance and building codes. Every year, insurance rates soar from mounting “natural” catastrophes, obscuring the fact that the planet’s coasts are increasingly uninsurable.

Insurance underlies the building and construction trades. If those rates skyrocket, that system must keel over. Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance — because insurance can’t be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions — we’ll find ourselves living in a Planet of Slums.

Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. They live in “informal architecture,” i.e., slum structures. Barrios. Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go.

Unless they’re American, in which case they’ll live in their cars.

But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they have no fixed address? Besides, car companies are coming apart with the sudden savage ease of Enron’s collapse. Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.

His alter-ego, the Italian Futurist Bruno Argento brings the Optimism:

The year 2009 will brim over with senseless affronts toward decent people who have done their best and obeyed all the rules. Well-connected, well-educated, capable people who are pillars of the community will be ruined. It follows that 2009 will be a global banner year for European solidarity.

…

Once we recognize precarity as an existential threat for all, we will find the means to deal with it. A guaranteed annual income would be a good start. Shorter work weeks give us the chance to rejoin civil society, to re-establish trust with neighbors turned strangers, to engage in some convivial joie de vivre over healthy, genuine cuisine, instead of ridiculous cardboard-packaged fast food. You might want to drop by Turin to see how this can work. Here, we have built a global food-heritage industry. It would do you good to see wealthy Indians and Chinese gourmets venturing to sample the cheeses (likely the world’s greatest) available from local producers. Each side is enriched. Italy has been enduring massive tidal waves of tourists for two hundred solid years. Our tourist trade is so old and well established that we should perhaps build monuments to it.

From phrotonda’s photostream, via imgfave.com.

Clothes, handbags, undies or throw pillows, the insane fiber optics from LumiGram will garner attention anywhere.

Link via technabob.com

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

With a bit of luck, we’ll have a new generation that lives up to this ideal; Future Mars Colonists, one and all.

Some good friends of mine opted out of a city life a few years ago and are now completely off-the-grid, yet still working in the same fields as before. If anything, they will thrive in the years ahead. And their daughter will learn to repair solar panels, maintain a garden and build a website.

They are the early-adopters. It should be clear to us all now that the Future involves nested utility systems, not top-down ones. The House of the Future will generate most of it’s power and water, and peer with it’s neighbours to share their surplus.

But we must feel a little sorry for the now hurting Middle Class, that backbone of the Status Quo. They were just blindly trusting the System after all.

From NYTimes:

After all, as incomes rose and gender roles changed over the last 50 years, families have become accustomed to outsourcing more and more of their household chores. No longer was it just the very rich who had “servants,” said Jan de Vries, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

…

“The way households function 20 years from now will probably be sort of surprising to us.”

…

“A lot of the way we’d been living was all an illusion, a fantasy,” said Ms. Spada, who has also been cooking more and bathing the family dog instead of going to the groomer. “We’ve been asking ourselves: Can we replicate some of those specialized services, which normally we would outsource, ourselves?”

Yes you can!

From NewScientist:

The world’s smallest working fuel cell has been created by US chemical engineers, at just 3 millimetres across. Future versions of the tiny hydrogen-fuelled power pack could replace batteries in portable gadgets.

…

The new device has just four components. A thin membrane separates a water reservoir above from a chamber containing metal hydride below. Beneath the metal hydride chamber there is an assembly of electrodes.

Tiny holes in the membrane allow the water molecules to reach the adjacent chamber as vapour. Once there, the vapour reacts with the metal hydride to form hydrogen, which fills the chamber, pushing the membrane upwards and blocking the flow of water (see image, top right).

The hydrogen is gradually depleted, though, as it reacts at the electrodes beneath the chamber to create a flow of electricity. And when the hydrogen pressure drops, more water can enter to keep the reaction going.

This is just genius and shows how much space is left to be explored in joining different bits of technology together.

Presenting Graffiti Radio (Future Pirate Radio):

I found a connection between graffiti and pirate radio.

Both of these art expressions hack into public facilities. In the case of graffiti, the hacker uses the wall. In case of pirate radio, the hacker uses public radio waves illegally. It can be said that pirate radio is sound graffiti and I would like to propose to combine these two methods of graffiti; The artist can spray a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. Then when people who find the graffiti take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone they can find the radio station through the internet.

via MAKE

For those that missed the issues, the trade ships this week:

Image via pronea.com.

See also:

• Transhuman #1
• Transhuman #2
• Transhuman #3
• Transhuman #4

The story uses PICOL – Pictorial Communication Language – icons, to tell the tale. Such humble beginings, to now:

Link and video via core77.com.

Yes Please.

You know you want moar.

via Haute Macabre

Photo via imgfave.com, taken by Sean Bagshaw.

Photo via yarnzombie‘s flickr stream, link via environmentalgraffiti.com.

– photo by ~emimerx

Let’s start this thing off nice.  Firstly, a belated Happy New Year to everyone.  Personally, I had a freaking fantastic NYE, and I hope y’all did too. 2008 was a great year for me, and building on that, personally, 2009 was filling me with optimism.  So many great projects in the works, so much hope for the Future.

And then I turn on the News. Reality is a harsh mistress my friends.

And now I’m going to tell you all the ways in which we are totally fucked.

Firstly, we’ve got the news from NY, which George Rohac was kind enough to alert me to.

The New York Police Department wants to be able to shut down cell phones, in case of a terrorist attack.

Because, you know Mumbai.  The whole attack was apparently coordinated over mobile phones by handlers who were monitoring the Media.

Which you kind of need, given the attackers were allegedly dosed to the eyeballs on LSD and Cocaine. Making the thing sound more and more like a 24 script-writer’s wet dream.

So the NY police want to prevent a similar coordinated attack.  Does this make sense?  Yes and No.

No, because Terrorists analyse and exploit weak points to create maximum carange.  The best way to do this is by making every attack original. That’s why post-9/11′s hellish flight security measures only punishes the masses.  And those guys sure didn’t need mobile phones, did they.

Yes, because Obama. Here’s my first prediction for the year:  Copycat Terrorism is coming kids.

You can bet there’s armed and angry right-wing militias in the States studying every single bit of data they can on the Mumbai attacks. And thinking they can do it one better.  Have we forgotten who the first people to try to blow up the World Trade Center were. And when that was.  The Clinton era.  Those “evil Democrats” who want to take peoples guns away.

Al Qaeda et al have hardened troops from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia. The US has a bunch of pissed-off Vets returning from Afganistan and Iraq.  How many people remember the post-WWII crime waves? We have a lot of trained killers out there again.

But let’s keep moving.  Let me tell you why blocking cellphones and filtering the Internet is the beginning of the end of this phase of civilization.

Corporate Democracy hates you.  Every single Democracy is deeply in bed with and funded by the Corporations.

The US passes the DMCA laws because Disney wants to sell more Mickey Mouse dolls.  Then through “Free Trade” it spreads around the world. France wants to filter the Internet so that Carla Bruni can sell more CDs.  Britain apes France, and Australia apes Britain. But of course they do it in the name of the children and the family.  Please.

It’s about CONTROL.  The State exists to command and control.

We are supposed to Trust in Authority.  But the illusion of Control is being eaten away.

Exhibit A:

The Police, the fists of the State, caught red-handed executing one of it’s citizens.

Has this happened before?  No doubt.  What’s the big difference then? Not only was it witnessed by the train full of passengers, it was recorded by a great deal of them.This clip is just the best of many you can find on YouTube. 

This is evolutionary. If those Cops were more than just brutish thugs, if they had half a fucking brain, they’d have gone onto that train and taken every single mobile phone and video camera away.

As Evidence.

So let’s fast-forward a little.  Because you can bet that the band of brothers, those boys in blue, are mighty pissed off that one of their own had to resign like that. And they’ll be sure now not to go out that way either.  They will confiscate all the phones and video cameras from now on. But some bright soul will have already uploaded photos to Flickr, or even better using Zannel to post it through Twitter. Even better an impromptu citizen-journalist might be streaming the whole affair with Qik or its many clones.

That might work a few times.  Until the Police decide they need to be equipped with mobile cellphone jammers, nominally for the fight against Terror. Then second the shit goes down in front of a bunch of witnesses, on goes the jamming.

But Terrorism is bad, right.  We want to stop that.  It’s all for the Greater Good!

Exhibit B:

Well, let’s wander over to France for a minute.  A bunch of kids decide to drop out and live their own Future in a little village.

There’s a tenuous link to them involving some train derailments.  Trains were hurt, but there were no deaths.  So what happens?

..the French government claims that Tarnac and its small shop are the headquarters of a dangerous cell of anarchist terrorists plotting to overthrow the state. Images of balaclava-clad police swooping to arrest suspects in Tarnac were compared by bewildered villagers to a strange, rural action movie. The government hinted that locals were too gormless to have noticed the terrorist activity in their midst. But after weeks of controversy, supporters are rising up to defend the young people of the village.

Those kids aren’t ETA (the Basque separatists). They’re just saying no to the ‘rat race’ and finding their own niche to live in. Yet they are declared an Enemy of the State that must be crushed.

So let’s go back to the start; to Mumbai.  How did the word get out so quickly?  Twitter and Flickr. What did the Government eventually try to stop happening?  You guessed it.  Would this have stopped the handlers coordinating the attacks? Given they were most likely getting their intel from CNN, no.  Would an immediate Media blackout have prevented this?  NO! Because you can bet your asses they had their own, separate cell watching from afar and reporting in anyway.

I repeat, these are well planned attacks exploiting observed gaps in the defenses of their target(s). 9/11 was accomplished with just box-cutters. The best defense is an armed and knowledgeable citizenry; all this just demonstrates the increasing power of mobile communications technology.

Are you still reading?  Did you think I’d forgotten about the Economic Collapse?  Don’t worry, I’m getting to it.

This is, as a Prime Minister of Australia once said, “the recession we had to have”.  This is the System collapsing. The Governments of the world can’t fix Global Warming; it is, quite frankly, all their fault.  They are agents of the Status Quo.

As Dr Horrible sez: “the status is far from quo”.

The next decade will be very interesting.  These are the Breaking Times. The Post-Industrial future is coming, whether people like it or not. You can look forward to more decaying strip-malls and empty shops in general.  eBay and it’s like will be where everyone shops. As everything slows down, people will be forced to prioritize.  Shopping as therapy will become a 20th relic.

The Future as I see it is peer2peer.  The answer is never Fear, but Love.  So I call for Revolutionary Optimism!

I implore you; skip the Corporations and buy from your fellow man as much as you can. Make your own clothes or buy them on etsy at least. Garden!  Barter! Hang out at local markets.  Cook for your friends.  Skip that crappy Hollywood blockbuster and veg out on the Internet instead.  Or with people in Real Life.

Reality is Fiction;  society is a social construct.  The Future has never been more in our hands. Since our species first stopped hunting and settled down to start Agriculture it’s been all about top-down control systems. But, Internet be praised, we are quite possibly positioned for the first time since then to change this. Technology is what defines us as being human; and we increasingly don’t need the Bureaucracy of the State to manage things for us. Instead, we can engineer and maintain solutions that run fine by themselves.

The State’s days are numbered!  Sadly, this most likely means it will become more violent in it’s death throes. The Evolution is not about burning shit down; it’s about obviating all the crap that’s got us in this mess to begin with.

Power to the People!

Thanks for listening; you’ve been a wonderful audience.

Georgia Tech has announced plans to silence larger UAVs. From theregister.co.uk:

Some robotic aircraft are already very quiet – the small battery-powered aeroplanes, often hand-launched, which are used for infantry reconnaissance and perimeter security are almost totally silent. Electric quadcopters, as favoured in some situations by the Merseyside plods and (it is rumoured) the SAS, are also unobtrusive. Such technology typically causes a stir only when employed in the form of flying genitalia.

But larger machines, able to tool up with deadly weapons and wreak havoc among their puny human opponents, are much noisier. The racket of engines, propellors and whatnot – when at low level – often warns the hapless fleshies beneath, giving them a slim chance to hide or escape.

Gaeta and his colleagues want to take away that chance. The plan is to equip the roving robotic spyeyes and gun-platforms of tomorrow with Blue Thunder-style whisper mode*. The GIT team have apparently visited unnamed “US military installations” for the purpose of examining machines already in operation.

Silent death from above.

- photo via design.philips.com

Via Fashioning Technology, comes the work of Philips Design Probes:

Fractal is a stunning, figure-hugging outfit consisting entirely of huge imitation jewels augmented by pulsing LEDs. By incorporating sensors that measure movement, excitement levels and proximity of others – and using this input to alter the intensity of its integrated lighting – Fractal essentially becomes an extension of the body. It also serves as a platform for exploring emotional sensing. Unlike a cut and sewn garment, Fractal is made using product materials and processes. This opens up the possibility of ‘Hybrid’ forms and new functionalities in the search for solutions in the spaces of traditional apparel functionality – thermal protection, structure and support, water resistance, providing modesty, flesh control, and the ever-changing style calendars.

a photo of the Berlin Wall by tokyololas

This, coming to me from a friend in the middle of one of my own utopian rants about technology making the implicit into the explicit, amused the hell out of me.   Here’s Dan (Shooting War) Goldman‘s meme-collision and little bit of cartoon eschaton immanentization Yes We Will:

More at Tor.com Vote early, vote often, vote machine elves.

Photo via imgfave.com.

Improv’ed poster mash-ups armed with just a razor and his mind; meet Poster Boy:

via MAKE | Wooster Collective

From The Beauty Of Urban Decay, via smashingmagazine.com.

Thanks to LBA for the link!

Based in Europe, EasyWeb is a 3D video projection that creates a symphony of art and technology on the sides of buildings and objects. Check out the clip:

Thanks to Junkforce for the links!