• What is your opinion on merging spiritualism and deity worship with science and technology in the future? It seems to already be happening to a small extent, so what are the implications?  –Anonm1k3y: I consider myself a neo-Pythagorean. It’s a path through the future, but not for all.

  Kevin: I think it’s unavoidable simply because of the nature of technological development.  A large portion of spirituality involves dealing with the invisible landscape – heavens, hells, the spirits of places, personal histories – the intangible connections between things.  The general thrust of developing technologies seems to be invested in the same things — making data rich genius loci, creating an internet of things, making the implicit connections between things and people explicit.   In much the same sense that I consider most spirituality on par with a Graphical User Interface for consciousness, I think that we definitely will see new combinations of deity worship, spirituality, religion and the data-rich environment.    (A good example of a new spin on this is the sort of exotropic emergent godhead that Kevin Kelly calls the Technium and details in his book What Technology Wants.  There’s also the oft-cited rapture-style eschatology of the technological Singularity.)

• Now that it has made me sign in, let’s see if this goes through… Humans are notoriously short-sighted and focused on their lives here and now. How would you ‘elevator pitch’ such a person to open their eyes to the necessity of understanding the future? –JaymGatesHumans are notoriously focused on the present. Why should the average person care about futurism, not as a fun SF theory, but as a science/belief/way to shape the world? –Anon

  m1k3y: When the sea of change becomes a tsunami, when infrastructure collapse piles on instituational collapse, piles on social change… people will be treadying water, looking for a narrative to explain just how they came to be almost drowning. SF theory then becomes srs bsnss. Especially when the alternative is nationalistic resurgence or exceptionalist denialism.

  Would it be that surprising if strange, new (techno) religions flower when more happens in the first month of 2012 than all of 2011. Just trying explaining this year to your 2010-pastSelf.

  The present will be a tiny blip of time. Now may last 10minutes.

  The result of a 100years of SF’nal thinking will help give shape to the chaos, and that will make all the difference. Its memes will turn victims into survivors. (It was always a rescue operation.)

  Kevin: I’m of the opinion that 99.9% of “futurism” has nothing to do with the future at all, and is simply about understanding the present or the recent past.   The idea that it is focused on the future seems to simply be some slight-of-mind to soften the ontological blow that comes with the dual facts that yes, people are focused on the here and now and that they very rarely understand it.  That’s certainly the case with futurism as it manifests in the corporate world.  Douglas Rushkoff has made an excellent career of explaining the world as it was 10 minutes ago to corporations and business audiences under the guise of the “next big thing”. And that’s not a dig, either, there’s a serious need for that sort of social prestidigitation.

  Science Fiction and its forward-looking kin is a vehicle that allows artists to essentially rapid prototype and testbed futures — and if successful begin to manifest them. The space race was driven by rocket jockeys who were also often SciFi geeks — be they writers or fans. William Gibson’s vision of cyberspace informs and shapes the conversation about information technology to this day. At its best, Sci Fi is a vehicle that allows the artist to pluck things from the future so as to terraform the present.

  My elevator pitch would strangely be a sports metaphor:  ”If you don’t keep your eye on the ball, you’ll never hit anything.” And that’s really what it boils down to.  Without understanding today enough to have an idea of how to deal with the future. And I think that’s key, right there;  the ability to develop strategies for dealing with future events is vastly more valuable than the ability to predict future events.  Without understanding that, you’re just swinging blindly. Life without context is just a big mess of sound and fury and noise.  And that is no way for anyone to live their life, much less for a culture to try and navigate through the world.

• Where do you think the latest round of political protest in America and the UK (to narrow it down a bit) is heading? –DavidForbesm1k3y: The states will still exist, but UK faces further instabiliy and likely overreactions from polices. Nights of riots will return, for longer. Obama will look even worse by then, and will probably be forced out by Hildawg for re-election. For the populations, things will get ever more political, but in wildier directions. We’ll see more insane versions of Tea Party and other nationalistic manifestatians. Tactical, flash occupies, increasingly surreal, and permanent encampments as they ally with friendly pre-existing institutions (say, liberal churchs for instance).

  Equal parts new instabilities in old areas, and fresh, unanticipated cohesions at the edge of the new and the old.

• If 2012 gives us a general contraction of economic growth, the potential collapse of the Euro and a general all-around shortage of available cash, what sort of things can we be doing to minimize negative impacts? How do I buy jetpack without cash? –amkelly0m1k3y: detach, or at least insulate, yourself from the mainstream status-quo such as it existed before the beginning of the GFC.

  time rich, money poor; you mightn’t have a (full-time) job, but you will have time to pool resources with fellow travellers, scrap together equipment. start a neighbour market garden on vacant or adandoned land. swap equipment, get maximum benefit from the resources of the group using (something like) http://neighborgoods.net/. and above all else – LEARN/STUDY/PLAY.

  the further you live into the future, the more valuable you’ll be as a guide to those that follow you. (don’t buy a jetback, build a peer2peer jetpack factory)

  Kevin: Don’t concentrate on buying a jetpack, concentrate on establishing resilient sustainable communities that have the ability to construct jetpacks en masse.  Hosnestly, I think resilent sustainable communities are the key to progress in the face of  global financial collapse and the increasingly maddened anti-ethical actions of collective Large Actors (aka megacorps).  I’m not saying that you have to go off the grid into rural France a la the “Tarnac Nine“.  I mean, that’s an option, sure. But community building, even in the sprawling urban environments is key.

  The tricky part is — well, one of many tricky parts — that self-sufficiency usually looks like Crime in the eyes of the State. (And it looks like competition in the eyes of the Corporation.) Look at some of the Occupy enclaves — where it seems like their major infraction was having the gall to show that different types of urban communities were possible in front of the public.

• What new tech are you most excited about in 2012? What trend! –Anonm1k3y: Hardware and software being used, adapted, created by the independant citizens of the Ocuppy movement. Such as this new SNS http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/occupy-facebook/all/1. Definitely the emergant Drone Culture; kinect hacked quadcoptors vs predators. And DIY BioGen, something interesting should surely come from there.

  Surprise trend.. even more apocalyptic cults and new strange techno-religions flowering.

  Kevin: Drones, 3D printers that print 3d printers, the next BitCoin. If I were to be so presumptuous to declare 2012 “The Year Of…” something, I’d have to say it’s “The Year of the Superempowered meeting Outlaw Economies.”  2011 has arguably been the year of the Superempowered, starting with Wikileaks really exploding in the end tail of 2010 and steamrolling through the penetration of Anonymous into the mass culture, Arab Spring, Occupy, etc.  I think this is when groups like those and other hyperempowered individuals will really latch onto — or construct — new economies that operate parallel to state economies.  Sure, these shadow economies already exist, just ask militant hyperempowered groups like Al-Qaeda or anyone in the drug trade. But even though its future is murky, I think BitCoin was a huge sea change. While it became notorious for five minutes as the way to buy drugs online and then faded into obscurity as soon as the currency started bleeding value, BitCoin showed that a digital parallel economy could be established with an ese that probably spooked the hell out of some Nation States.

  Just like in the days when MySpace was king and it was obvious that someone was going to manage to actually do social networking right. (And hate them or love to hate them, Facebook seems to have gotten the magic formula at least mostly right.)  It’s just a matter of time before any of the groups attempting to build on BitCoin’s success manage to find a solution that sticks. And then, you’ve got hyperempowered individuals and groups who have the tools to move resources around on an unprecedented global scale.  This will put bombs in the wrong hands, and it’ll put food and resources in the right hands at an unprecedented rate.

  And to give that context, the “global black market” — or as economist Robert Neuwirth calls it, “System D”  — is already estimated at $10 trillion dollars.  Imagine being able to move even a tiny percentage of that in the form of a borderless, stateless, non-currency. If Neuwirth’s projections are right, System D already possibly represents the second largest economic system in existence. Now I’m far from a Capitalist, but the ability to render a consistent, value-retaining, non-physical, stateless currency into the hands of stateless non-hierarchical, rhizomatic organizations and collectives — a.k.a. Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, “The Protester” — seems like the very definition of a disruptive technology.

  The elevator pitch being “What if Anonymous had access to millions of dollars that were untraceable and never had to touch a bank?”

  Also:  Cheap and reliable drones.  I’m guessing there’s a 50/50 chance that “Drones” will be Time’s next Person of the Year.

• Mecha-Sterling vs GodzEllis. Who will emerge victorious? –AnonKevin: I think it’s like the tagline for the Alien vs. Predator film:  ”Whoever wins, we lose.” Or something like that. I love when Ellis writes about technology. He tends to explore things with a journalist’s eye and a romantic’s heart.  Sterling has a knack for generating likely science fictional scenarios and learning lessons from then as if they were dispatches from the near future. My favourite Ellis book is Frankenstein’s Womb and my favourite Sterling book is Shaping Things. (The latter of which is pretty much mandatory reading.)

  m1k3y: In the final seconds, when all seems lost, they will unwittingly perform a ninth level, interlocking power move summoning the transcendant object from beyond spacetime: BARBELITH.

It’s been an annual tradition for Chairman Bruce (and others) to have an extended Q&A over on the ancient and venerable The Well message boards. Bruce Sterling’s State of the World has long been an annual highlight of the season for us here at Grinding. But since it seems it’s not going to happen this year, there’s no long rambling thread of information laying out an exquisite cartography of exactly how fucked we are.

Well screw that, we say.

Here’s the deal. Ask us anything — anything at all — via our formspring account here: http://www.formspring.me/Grinding We will then answer your questions in a hopefully entertaining manner. It would be nice if some sort of intelligent conversation manifested as an emergent phenomena from this experiment, but we’re perfectly willing to let a cascade of dick, fart, and Tea Party jokes roll us into 2012.   (No, we’re not. I’m just trying to sound cavalier.)

Remember to use the Formspring account and not the increasingly compromised comments system for this. That’s http://www.formspring.me/Grinding — stay anon if you want or not. No topic is off limits, but things involving Grinding, the future, or whatnot would probably be a good idea.

Come, let us reason together! Alternatively, let us party like it’s the end of the world!!!

Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist (who we’ve interviewed here) has produced this excellent dictionary of terms for her field.

For those who came in late…

Cyborg Anthropology is a way of understanding how we live as technosocially connected citizens in the modern era. Our cell phones, cars and laptops have turned us into cyborgs. What does it mean to extend the body into hyperspace? What are the implications to privacy, information and the formation of identity? Now that we have a second self, how do we protect it?

This text covers various subjects such as time and space compression, hyperlinked memories, panic architecture, mobile technology, interface evaporation and how technology is changing the way we live.

But wait, there’s also cute illustrations by Maggie Nichols, like this one for Hyperlinked Memories:

I just bought mine, perhaps this is why you should cash that cheque from the Chemical Bank your nan put in your holiday card?

Brazil just passed the UK to become the world’s 6th Largest Economy. Keep that in mind as you read this story; Five Years After Banning Outdoor Ads, Brazil’s Largest City Is More Vibrant Than Ever:

Imagine a city of 11 million inhabitants stripped of all its advertising. It’s nearly impossible when the clutter and color of our current urban landscapes seem inextricably entwined with the golden arches of McDonald’s or the deep reds of Coca-Cola.

Yet for the residents of São Paulo, Brazil, this doesn’t require imagination: city dwellers simply have to walk down the street and look around to see a city devoid of advertisements.

…

Before being enacted, the law triggered grave alarm among city businesses and other economic constituents. Critics worried that the advertising ban would entail a revenue loss of $133 million and a net job loss of 20,000. Fears that the city would look worse without the mask of the media alarmed residents. Despite the concerns, the law passed and the 15,000 billboards cluttering the world’s seventh largest city were taken down.

Five years later, São Paulo continues to exist without advertisements. But instead of causing economic ruin and deteriorating aesthetics, 70 percent of city residents find the ban beneficial, according to a 2011 survey. Unexpectedly, the removal of logos and slogans exposed previously overlooked architecture, revealing a rich urban beauty that had been long hidden.

…

No longer covered in homogenous and imposing signs, the unique character of São Paulo was able to resurface. Admittedly, not all of the revelations proved beautiful: shantytowns that pepper the city’s streets, once hidden under massive signs, revealed gross inequalities. But bringing the situation to light incited residents to improve conditions and begin discussing solutions. No longer could actual problems be masked by artificial solutions.

This short documentary (via the above article) made in 2007, as the ban was being passed, elaborates on its history and motivation:

Meanwhile, elsewhere in South America…

For some residents of the Colombian city of Medellin, a trip to the city centre meant a long and dangerous trek through one of the city’s most violent areas.

Ascending 384 metres, a new escalator project has changed that.

Al Jazeera’s Gerald Tan reports.

“The copyright war was just the beginning…” Watch as Cory Docotorow extends the copyright struggle into a 100year battle. Stay for the extra QnA (30mins in) where he addresses many of the issues of the day.

via BoingBoing

See Also:

• Charles Stross draws the lines – accurately – between #SOPA and the Coming Insurrection

* title borrowed from Mark Pesce‘s tweet linking to Stross’s blogpost.

Here is Charlie Stross’s ‘view of contemporary US politics’ / flame-war bait. Watch him link SOPA and ‘the Coming Insurrection‘ in eight easy-to-follow steps (some steps not shown):

1. The USA is already a functional oligarchy. (Or, more accurately, a plutarchy.) It has been functioning as such for some time — since 1992 at the latest, although the roots of this system go back to before the Declaration of Independence — it’s a recurrent failure mode. Historically such periods last for a few years then go into reverse. However, this time the trend has been running since 1980 or even earlier. What we’re now seeing are the effects of mismanagement by the second generation of oligarchs in power; the self-entitled who were born to it and assume it to be the natural order of things.

3. Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich (by using their accumulated capital to go on acquisition sprees for assets being sold off for cents on the dollar by the near-bankrupt state). But public austerity is a huge brake on economic growth because it undermines demand by impoverishing consumers. Consequently, we’re in for another long depression. (The outcome of this new long depression will be the same as that of the first one: the main industrial power — then it was the UK; now it’s the USA — will lose a lot of its remaining economic lead over its competitors and be severely weakened.)

7. Modern communications technologies (including the internet) provide people with a limitless channel for self-expression (not to mention distraction— endless circuses without the bread). They also provide the police state with a limitless flow of intelligence about the people. Note also that it’s possible to not merely listen in on mobile phone calls, but to use a mobile phone as a GPS-aware bugging device, and (with a bit more smarts) to have it report on physical proximity (within bluetooth range — about 20 feet) to other suspects. The flip side of social networking is that the police state knows all your acquaintances.

8. So I infer that the purpose of SOPA is to close the loop, and allow the oligarchy to shut down hostile coordinating sites as and when the anticipated revolution kicks off. Piracy/copyright is a distraction — those folks pointing to similarities to Iranian/Chinese net censorship regimes are correct, but they’re not focussing on the real implication (which is a ham-fisted desire to be able to shut down large chunks of the internet at will, if and when it becomes expedient to do so).

Read the whole thing, and stay for the comment war.

photo from artofthestate, graffiti by BANKSY

UPDATE – Moar BANKSY for your [local unit of attention currency], from unurth:

Recently, retail clothing chain H&M has caught a great deal of flack for using computer generated bodies in their online catalog. And while there is something to be said for looking critically at the introduction of computer-generated “perfection” into an industry already psychotically obsessed with unattainable standards of physical beauty, Coilhouse’s Nadya Lev has some relevant re-contextualization to share:

Also, this foray into the uncanny valley brings us one step closer to the age of the idoru. With teenage pop idol Aimi Eguchi, whose face is a composite of six different singers, and vocaloids (singing synthesizers) such as pigtailed holographic superstar, we’re almost there — in The Future.  And even though H&M’s online catalogue conforms to the same beauty standard as any other big fashion retailer, this technology actually has potential to subvert the paradigm altogether.

See the rest over at Coilhouse.

[See also: Building a Better Pop Star, and Building a Better Pop Star II]