At this year’s DICE 2010 Expo, Carnegie Mellon’s Jesse Schell gave a fantastic presentation that starts with why Facebook *shouldn’t* work in the way that it does and extrapolates forward into a half-creepy and half-inspiring vision for the embodied internet, the network of things, the culture of games and the SPIMEworld to come.
In preparation for February’s Association of the US Army Winter Conference, Lockheed Martin has released a promotional video of the company’s proposed HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) powered exoskeleton.
The HULC is a completely un-tethered, hydraulic-powered anthropomorphic exoskeleton that provides users with the ability to carry loads of up to 200 lbs for extended periods of time and over all terrains. Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and upper-body lifting. There is no joystick or other control mechanism. The exoskeleton senses what users want to do and where they want to go. It augments their ability, strength and endurance. An onboard micro-computer ensures the exoskeleton moves in concert with the individual. Its modularity allows for major components to be swapped out in the field. Additionally, its unique power-saving design allows the user to operate on battery power for extended missions. The HULC’s load-carrying ability works even when power is not available.
[Via Defense Tech]
I know, you’re probably sick of AR this and AR that by now, and the technology is only in its infancy, but this? Too awesome not to post.
In a mashup between some of my favourite sexy technologies, Qosmo and architects teradadesign have transformed Tachikawa’s N Building into a QR-branded, augmented, fishtank of an building.
The building’s facade is imprinted with QRCodes that when scanned with a AR program allows viewers to peek inside the building and see animated versions of the movements and activities of those inside. People inside the building are tracked via GPS and their tweets are transformed into thought balloons hovering over their heads.
N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.
[Via Creative Applications]
The Israeli Ministry of Defense recently licensed ArmyTec, an Israel-based technology development advisory firm, to mass produce what they call “the Thunder Generator” for military use. Based on a technology developed to scare birds away from crops, the Thunder Generator uses liquefied petroleum, cooking gas and air to deliver massive sonic shocks.
Much like the wall of speakers at a Butthole Surfers show, the Thunder Generator is disruptive at long ranges (30-100 meters) but likely fatal at the sub-10 meter range.
Developed and produced for the agricultural industry by PDT Agro, a small firm based in Herzliya, Israel, the system detonates a mixture of common liquefied petroleum (LPG), cooking gas and air to generate a series of loud, stunning shock waves.
Using a patented process involving Pulse Detonation Technology (PDT), the system feeds the gas-air mixture into one or more so-called impulse chambers or cannon barrels, where the burning fuel detonates and intensifies in force as it travels through the chamber, exiting in a rapid-fire succession of high-velocity shock bursts.
A small battery-powered control system - about twice the size of a pack of cigarettes - measures fuel pressure, temperature and flow rates while monitoring the continuous intake of the air-gas mixture.
According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.
The resulting shocks create a double deterrent to rioters and potential intruders, developers here say, by the extreme air pressure and sonic boom effect generated once the mixture propagates and expands through the air. One standard 12-kilogram LPG gas canister (retail cost: about $25) can produce up to 5,000 shock bursts.
Being a very cheap and simple weapons platform, how long will it take for this to go from active deployment in the field to something you can build as a weekend project with stuff from Home Depot?
[Via Defense News.]
The above picture is from Ariana Osborne’s blog, where she lays down some solid ranting regarding the “opposing” disciplines of Art and Science.
I remember reading a scan of an old real print comic once. The character in it was railing against the imaginary people of his imaginary world, taking them to task about their dissatisfaction with the future they lived in. But it was really aimed at the stupid people who wanted their stupid little futures and who were too stupid to see that the future is now. It’s always now. Except it isn’t anymore. The TITANs changed that. The future is now yesterday, and last week, and ten years ago.
–ECLIPSE PHASE
In August of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rob Boyle and Brian Cross - two of the minds behind the post-singularity, transhumanist horror Role-Playing Game ECLIPSE PHASE. We covered a lot of topics — from details about the game and the game world to the singularity, technology’s influence on politics, reputation economies, anarcho-transhumanism and more.
(Also? Creative uses for bacon in the dark post-singularity future.)
You can listen to the interview (recorded August 7th, 2009 in a noisy bar during the GEN CON gaming gaming convention in Indianapolis, Indiana) here:
(Or you can download it in a podcast format from here.) As a minor warning, there are some setting spoilers in the interview.
ECLIPSE PHASE comes out this week in the US and elsewhere from bookstores and gaming retailers. (Or in PDF format from Drive Thru RPG.)
Wikitude, the AR browser for Android and iPhones, hot on the heels of Layar, has added 3D objects to its functionality. And to demonstrate this, they built an AR WTC memorial:
Wikitude Augmented Reality: WTC - Its not there but its there from Wikitude on Vimeo.
In a display of how times are changing in regards to visual representations of the differently able as well as the mass-media relationship with prosthetics and those who use them, athlete Sarah Reinertsen graces the cover of this week’s ESPN Magazine.
Reinersten was the first female leg amputee to complete the Ironman World Triathlon, she was also featured in The Amazing Race 10. More NSFW pictures from the shoot can be found on ESPN’s site as well as within the magazine, which was released Friday, October 9th.
Last year, Grinding did a cross-promotion with Esozone, the Portland-based “unconference”. This year we can’t offer a reduced ticket price because this year Esozone is free. For those Grinders looking for something to do this weekend in the Portland area, Esozone once again promises to bring in a mix of people and interests. Last year there was magick, marketing, and fringe technology.
This year there’s going to be an Ignite Esozone, music, Radical Therapy for Radical Minds, tantra, more marketing, psychogeography, data modeling and an Ex-Occultists Support Group and all sorts of general high-weirdness and possible upgrades for your mind.
ESOZONE 2009 takes place OCTOBER 9-10 in Portland, and it is mutant friendly and free to all.
The latest installment of the “Did You Know” video series. This time on the topic of Convergence.
See also: Did You Know 3.0, and Did You Know 2.0.
Social Media Blogger Sarah Dopp has some things to say about how we can remove the Suck from the Internet. I tend to agree with her, vehemently.
I believe that all web-based interactions operate on the same principles as in-person interactions.
I believe in social karma. I believe that all people deserve to be respected and treated with kindness, and that whenever you choose not to do this, you set yourself up to suffer consequences, whether directly or indirectly. I don’t care how much they pissed you off. You still have the choice to be nice. (”Smile from the wrists down.” -@Gwenners)
I believe in social capital. I believe that if you have something to sell or promote, your existing relationship to a community determines your ability to get what you want when you ask for favors or put things in front of people. I believe that if you want your community to support you, you need to first support your community.
I believe that your web presence is an extension of your offline presence, and that the sum of all your parts make up you as a complex human being. I believe it’s okay to represent different personas online as long as you can face the fact that they’re allparts of you.
…..
I believe that sucking at the Internet is both voluntary and optional.
I believe the Internet is awesome, and that it is worth getting excited about.
I believe that we are awesome. And we are worth getting excited about.
Check out the whole thing here.
It is 4:46am, I can’t sleep, and I have a question.
The future, as seen by the internet is often expressed by gadgetry, and there’s a particular trap involved in writing about outbreaks of the future in that gadgetry is often really shiny.
And if you’re writing about the future, chances are pretty good that you really like shiny objects.
But, gadgets are not the future. Look at the iPhone.
The iPhone is a fantastic bit of gadgetry, but it’s not the future - no matter how many proto AR apps get developed for it, there’s no way to escape the essential limitations of the device. The iPhone is simultaneously fiendishly useful and completely useless at the same time. It’s filled with a lot of really useful little apps and features, but it’s still handicapped from reaching a certain horizon of real productivity. Without extensive hacks, the iPhone is unable to connect to a variety of external devices for both input and output. It is extremely limited in what programs it can run.
It is essentially a closed system, and the reason for that is that it is designed by a company that holds true to a business and design philosophy that states that you do not own the product that you purchased. While a pervasive business philosophy in many fields (you don’t own your iPhone, you don’t own your music, your movies or your books, your food is made from genetically modified or patented seeds that are never actually owned by the farmers who grow it) it’s not future friendly — or to be more specific, it is a design philosophy that is friendly to a future that is, simply put, a retail opportunity.
The iPhone’s use to any sort of a future worth having is in changing the way that many people relate to technology. It’s now cool to have a computer in your pocket. It’s cool to be on the internet (via 3G and EDGE and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) 24/7. In the countries where the iPhone has been able to saturate the market, it’s instigated a real sea-change in the way that people react to electronic mediation of their relationship with their environments. Unfortunately it has come with the baggage of corporatization and loss of ownership that is also as pervasive as the new environmental relationships is helps negotiate.
I say that the iPhone is not the future, but what I mean by that is that the iPhone is not representative of a future I want to see. The future is not just a retail opportunity and a finer world is not built entirely of consumer goods. I’m not keen on a future where the major technologies of environmental and social mediation are owned and controlled by corporate ideology. As AR creeps closer and closer, the question of who gets to plant a flag in the liminal space of a technologically re-mediated environment becomes a more pressing concern - with new horizons there are always new forms of colonialism.
The question is, or at least my question is: How do you separate the positive technological and sociopolitical advances of the iPhone and its ilk from the anti-open source, anti-democratization, future unfriendly ideology that they bring with them?
Jamias Cascio drops violent wisdom over here at The “End of Politics” Delusion.
You have my express permission to kick the next person — especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement — who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid “politics.” Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goals.
He’s right, you know. But I tell you, sometimes I do wish there were no politics and people could pull their heads out of their asses long enough to do the right thing. And yes, all of that is code for “Dammit, why doesn’t everyone think like me?!”
I’m not proud of the times when I think like that, but there you go. I tend to call those my “Magneto Days”.
I agree that there are a lot of technophiles who express either a desire to be “above politics” or who believe that technological advances will free us from politics, but I think a lot of technophiles are really looking for an out of politics as we experience them today. And that IS something I think technological advances can pull out us out of.
Speaking as an American, embedded squarely in the middle of American media and politics, what we refer to as “politics” bears little or no resemblance to any rational form of communication or discourse. Of course there is no “golden age of politics” to look back on. Politics, being the interaction of various levels of power, has always been an affair that has been ugly and has brought out the worst in people. So long as there are power differentials between people or groups, there will be politics. The technological Singularity has more potential for creating power disparity as it does for levelling the playing field.
And keep in mind that the last major Political movement that had a goal of moving beyond conventional politics was the Neoconservative movement, whose experiment in national myth-making is in part responsible for the wreck of the political system we’re witnessing today. The technofuturist “End of Politics” is no more upon us than the Neoconservative “End of History” was when Francis Fukuyama declared it was imminent.
But…
Technology does have the potential to change how politics are perceived and performed. Right now, in the US, the political discourse is a screaming match between two major factions that only agree on one thing: theirs are the only voices that should be heard. There’s no readily visible relationship between the left and the right in the US save one of antagonism. The right is against the left and the left is against the right, no matter what shape that debate takes.
One of the main reasons for that, of course, is that Politics as it visibly manifests in the US is mediated and shaped by corporate media. The 24 hour news networks and their various other media limbs, in order to sustain and grow their business model, sell a purely oppositional narrative. The system insures that the lack of a national dialogue on any sort of important issue translates directly into profits for the corporations that run mass-market media. This is why what should be a national discussion about a health care system that no one really likes (save politicians who get kickbacks from insurance companies) has turned into a screaming match with bold-faced lies and national coverage of supposed politicians ranting incoherently about “Death Panels” and telling people on national news that the old and infirm will be euthanized.
What technology could do is make it easier for people to escape from the “us” vs. “them” mentality that drive the media machines and give them the power to come to their own educated conclusions. It seems like a long shot, most days, but technology has the potential to infuse the volatile political landscape with knowledge, non-media mediated discourse and hopefully a little bit of compassion. Technological mediation has the potential to create a more permeable membrane between “them” and us”.
No, I don’t think that we can ever escape politics for good or ill, but what we have, is the potential to forge politics tempered by knowledge, compassion and real human needs.
io9’s Charlie Anders reports on Worldcon’s ”The Singularity: Are We Getting Any Closer?” panel.
Some highlights:
Wilson pointed out that if the Singularity really is coming, then it’s inevitable — so there’s no need for people to be cheerleaders for it. He compared it to “telepathy or dianetics,” science-fictional ideas which some people adopted “with religious fervor.” A core question in science fiction is “where is our technology going, and what can we do with it,” noted Wilson. “The Singularity is just one answer.”
…
“The question I sometimes ask myself is, How would the Singularity work in Darfur?” says Wilson.
Interesting stuff, and questions well worth asking even if you’re not a Sci-Fi fan. Me? The only sci-fi stuff I read tends to either be so near-future that calling it Sci-Fi is just pointles genre-pigeonholing (like say Spook Country ) or transhumanist stuff. But, by and large that’s because tranhumanist-themed books seem to be where the heirs to Cyberpunk ended up.
Iran is right, it is a conspiracy.
Only it’s the kind of conspiracy that Iran can’t or won’t understand. The word “conspiracy” comes from the Latin “conspirare”, which means “breathe together”. When people conspire through internet mediated means, their conspiracies, from going to the movies to spreading the word about a corrupt regime, take on the qualities of the medium. The internet “routes around censorship as though it was damage”, and net-mediated conspiracies are learning the same trick.
The ruling Iranian government tried to silence dissent via traditional methods, only to find it as easy catching ghosts. So now they are trying to make a case for aggressive foreign intervention and sabotage, (a so-called “soft overthrow”) because they can’t acknowledge what really happened. Any nation-state admitting that hundreds of thousands of self-organized people with cell-phones can go toe to toe with an army, for even a moment, is tantamount to admitting that the age of the nation-state is over. Even if the lumbering, fear and hate-mongering Iranian government does have a grasp on what really happened, it can never admit it.
This is what I’m talking about when I say that social-media can change the world.
The next time something like the Twitter-based uprising against the rigged Iranian elections happens - and it will happen again, somewhere - the reaction will be faster and more widespread and even harder to pin down and silence. And again, and again.
There IS a vast conspiracy against the Iranian government. It’s not exclusively driven by heads of state and corporations. It’s driven by people who are learning that tyranny is something to be routed around as though it were damage.
There are people undergoing mass trials right now in Iran, because the Iranian government needs to be able to blame someone. It’s a horrible thing to see people have their lives on the line for speaking truth to power, and it’s an uglyness we’re all too used to seeing. So I think it’s important to remember that there is a conspiracy.
It doesn’t require secret meetings, or government financing, and it’s open to everyone who is willing to put aside their fear to try and make, if only in small part, a better world. It’s a conspiracy that is learning to make itself heard even when its voice is silenced. I’m a member, you could be a member, even the Ayatullah Ali Khamanei could be a member if he wished. It’s a conspiracy that in some part succeeds by the simple act of being recognized as existing.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Welcome to the human conspiracy.
(My thoughts go out to those on trial and those who have been abused, detained, injured or killed in the attempt speak truth to power in Iran or anywhere else.)
So a while back comrade-in-arms David Forbes wrote this: This time, let’s get it right…
…in response to our very own M13KY’s It’s Going to Get Worse, Before it Gets Better.
M13KY followed up with this, which led to David posting the next part of what was now being called The Grinder Dialogues, a weekly back and forth between the Grinding staff and Mr. Forbes. This was… err… much longer than a week ago.
But now we’re back, and I’m taking M13KY’s spot in the ring with the next part of what really will be a weekly thing.
Starting with the implications of the arrest of the French anarchist collective known in the press as the “Tarnac 9″:
A communal set-up of their particular variety can be useful, even quite admirable, but it’s hardly futuristic. Indeed, as a solution, it’s generally proven to be rather limited, because larger communities quickly break into factions.
I’m not even sure a media blitz of the kind you, M13KY and I are probably imagining would even be necessarily beneficial to their “cause”. Sure, they could get people behind their identity as simple-living anarchists and parts of a small, thriving rural community, but that sort of thing jars with the main example of their communicated agenda: The Coming Insurrection. Certainly it’s not the most dangerous book in the world as pundits like comedian Glenn Beck like to paint it, but it portrays an active form of self-reliant anarchism similar to French and Italian anarchist texts of the 70’s or some of CrimethInc’s work that finds little purchase anywhere in the mass-market media.
I’m not sure how they could sell it, you see. And sadly, as you later point out, the always-shifting illusory culture/counter-culture divide is based on the language of capitalism. ”Make it cool and they will beg to join” generally means figuring out how to get the “overculture” or what have you to buy in. The only way to “win” is to play the game you’re trying to not play.
The maxim should be “any port in a storm and any friend in a fight.” This is everyone’s future, not just ours, and it’s long past time to stop falling prey to the old assumptions and strategies.
I couldn’t agree more. And while there are groups within what we generally refer to as alt-culture that still haven’t grasped that, there are many groups who are certainly are thinking of new way to network and new ways to be heard and influence “the system”. Look at the ridiculous Tea-Bag events in the US, recently. A strange collation of conservative Christians, atheist Libertarians, hippie Ron Paul supporters and UN-fearing-militia-types all united in a mostly grassroots effort that encouraged major media support from, not just FOX but many major outlets. What do all of those groups have in common? They all see themselves as an oppressed minority in the face of a relentless “socialist” overculture. In their eyes, they are the alt culture, and they are more than happy to have an oppressive “them” to rail against.
Do I think that the Tea-Baggers claims and demands were ridiculous? Yeah, but they were effective. The questions in my mind are: “Can they keep up that sort of organizational effort, or will they fall back apart into their normally divided factions?” and “Can the astroturf, pseudo-grassroots organization which they seem to have inherited with their success be as organized as the actual bottom-up version?”
Their success, however brief, though illuminates the difficulty of grassroots organizing. How do you get people invested in something NOT framed as “us” vs. “them”? I think social media helps with awareness (look at all the support for people in Iran from quarters that saw them as ‘the enemy’ a few years ago) but awareness rarely translates into action.
To bring this back to the Tanrac 9, they have a lot of really valuable things to say, but how do you pitch radical self-reliance and removing yourself from a capitalist society, without pitching it as “us” vs. “them”. Especially in a case like this where the Government was all-too-willing to take on the role of “them”. (Screaming in the back of my head is the voice that used to work in marketing that says “getting arrested was the best thing for their cause” — and looking at the T9 inspired collectives springing up in their wake, I can’t disagree.)
I fervently don’t believe in “them versus us”, it’s useless outdated thinking. Everyone’s “them” is someone else’s “us”. But what I’ve never quite figured out is how to organize without the “other”. I can’t rage against the machine, because I am the machine. My personal philosophy has always been one of trying to make any changes you want to affect work out in your own life. I’m not closeted about being a pagan or queer, I write under my own name when talking about controversial issues like cognitive liberties and drugs and I don’t hide my identity on the internet. All of that was done after very careful consideration, simply because I figure the best way to show people that something works is to show it to them. And to a certain extent that’s the same tack the T9 were taking… and it didn’t work out too well for them in the short term.
Technology is not going to put that away, just like it didn’t 100 years ago when revolutionaries were prophesying that industrialization would finally level the playing field. Today, tech and its attendant networks still relies on some measure of industrial structure to produce it, experts to fix it and financial structures to provide the cash. Any social group of sufficient size is going to develop a modicum of hierarchy. The question is: what does a better one look like?
Ironically, the current managerial class is its own worst enemy, but for political and class reasons. By eliminating much of the meritocracy and turning management into a dumping ground for scions of the rich, many corporations have become grossly incompetent.
The danger now is this: by ignoring the pitfalls to which all social creations are vulnerable, by assuming they’ll disappear because of technological change, those old demons will only be worse when they emerge, and they will face movements ill-prepared to deal with them.
It would be the worst kind of horror to see the just-born future shackled to the lash.
All technologies have just as much or more inherent utility as a tool of oppression, as they do as tools of liberty. The wonderful social media that lets people share information and thoughts and generally increase intrapersonal transparency are also the backbone of a marketing and data collection effort of staggering complexity, depth and penetration. The tools of liberty and knowledge help make their participants into better consumers. I can’t deny that, I don’t think anybody can.
Hell, one of the great liberating qualities of the technologies that are blossoming today is its ever-expanding capabilities to generate cognitive surplus. But on the other hand, that cognitive surplus can just as easily be consumed by the same technologies that generate it. Television made information distribution much more efficient in many ways compared to print media, but it also (according to Clay Shirky) consumes over two hundred billion hours of thought per year in the U.S. alone. That’s dropping, but iPods, video games and TMZ.com are taking up the slack.
And speaking of cognitive surplus, let’s not forget that the first technology that created a massive amount of free-brain hours and allowed massive societal and technological innovation was slavery.
All futures are born facing the lash.
In my mind, the only way to cope with that is to take new technologies (or in my particular pet-project, old technologies that were discarded in Western Society) and open them up. Make art with them, break them, inject them, repurpose them, break them again and fuck them. Because I know of no other way to take these things - every one of them a loaded gun - and to show people that there is another way. Because every new future already has one hand in shackles.
And sometime it works. Look at the internet. Sure it’s the greatest marketing tool of all time, but it was a comparative Wild West for a while. The 60’s acid culture became techies, the techies made the net, the net was newborn and despite being made of defense industry money was in the hands of the freaks for a long time before it got domesticated. If it wasn’t for the early experimenters who created the infrastructure and the ethos that the net should “route around censorship like it was damage” who knows what it would look like today? Probably something akin to the endless expanse of walled gardens that Gibson foresaw and that corporate interests are still trying to generate.
And even then, the future’s a strange beast. I don’t think anyone predicted the current generation of kids that were raised with the net and are comfortable with an unparalleled degree of transparency in their lives. They continue to see the internet as a more integrated and libratory tool than previous generations while that same transparency makes them a more streamlined and illuminated form of consumer.
This isn’t even taking into account the permutations that take place as new technologies pass through various cultural, social or class membranes. SMS is seen as a money-making addon and a tool of “kids” here in the US to a large extent, while it’s a major draw and an effective tool for social organization and information dispersal in parts of Asia, South America and Africa.
In other words, I don’t know if the other Grinders agree with me, but I think that every new piece of tech has destabilizing and calcifying potential. Me? I want to see these things actually used to help create new social structures that allow humans to get on with the business of being better humans. I don’t know of any other way to do that other than to push it, play with it and do awesome things with it, before it becomes too set in stone what the “proper” and “cost effective” ways of using it are.
But I’m more than open to ideas, because despite my utopianist leanings, the future might really suck if “we” don’t get “our” collective acts together.
In other, related, news, Apple claims that Jailbreaking your iPhone encourages terrorism.
If you need proof that “Augmented Reality” is here, and that like many tech-related buzzwords, trendy ad agencies are racing to milk it for all it is worth, look no further than than the upcoming Blue-Ray/DVD release of Star Trek.
According to a recent Variety article, the new release will come with Paramount’s own version of “augmented reality”:
With the packaging feature dubbed “augmented reality,” consumers will be able to hold their disc packaging in front of any standard webcam to unlock an interactive hologram on the computer screen, through which they can tour five cabins on the Enterprise, even shooting enemies from the ship’s deck.
Users will have to log in to a website to access the feature, but they control the hologram by holding the disc packaging.
“If you took the visual cue in the package and turned your hand, then you’re turning the ship,” Paramount homevideo senior VP of brand marketing Bob Buchi said.
So, with AR taking off, will limited applications like this drive consumer interest in the technology or burn them out before the tech reaches furition, much like Web X.0?
Oh, and if you want to try an early version out for yourself, check out the Enterprise Experience, which was launched as a companion site to the international release of the film.
[Via Variety]