Adam Rothstein just posted a fantastic essay on near-future fabbing over on Rhizome that should be mandatory reading for anyone who is a regular here.

On the other hand, there will be a new set of object hackers, who will be spending all their free time online, discussing the precise interior dimension ratios of the new set of Target glassware (which, they have discovered, is almost exactly equivalent in volume to a very famous American glass company’s 1940 catalog). Their forums will be filled with discussion of the best way to minimize wind resistance on custom bicycle fenders, while still maximizing spray blockage. Drug paraphernalia will be designed for maximum efficiency, with a willing and ready test market. A new hacker vernacular will be filled with implicit understandings of the integrals of surface area and volume, of curves and angles, of phase change curves and stress tolerances. One more set of bright kids will take a hard tangent outward from the common understanding matrix of “mainstream society”. But if you’re nice to them, perhaps they’ll fab you a custom iPhone case for Christmas.

Via Rhizome: The Shape of Shaping Things to Come

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something – the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high – we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.

…

We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.

What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.

Paleo-amen!

Read the whole thing! (via Cat Vincent)

Here’s an updated, and suitably bold, plan from Open Source Ecology, the team behind the The Real Life Civilization-Building Kit:

Sing with me and find the key:

“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

Here’s Chairman Bruce just a few days ago at the STRP Festival, once more describing our immediate situation and near-future in terms we can then build on and discuss with:

Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia.

From the Guardian, where it appears Flannery is updating the Gaia hypothesis:

Tim Flannery argues that humankind is evolving into a ‘super-organism’ where interdependence has profound consequences for the individual.

Look for an expansion of this in his Long Now seminar.

This is a long, dense piece.. it’s Jamais Cascio’s speech to his Institute For The Future colleagues at their recent annual Ten Year Forecast event. It’s written in their native Futurist vernacular, but I’ve largely cut that in choosing the parts I’ve quoted here. I trust you’ll agree from this though that it’s well worth taking the time to digest and absorb it all:

..Now, I said a moment ago that this “unstable instability” is likely to last for at least another decade. I’m sure we could all spend the next hour coming up with reasons why that might be so, but one that I want to focus on for a bit is climate disruption. In many respects, climate disruption is the ultimate unstable instability system.

Climate disruption is something that comes up in nearly all of our gatherings these days, and I don’t think I need to reiterate to this audience the challenges to health, prosperity, and peace that it creates.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few Ten Year Forecasts looking at different ways we might mitigate or stall global warming. Last year, we talked about carbon economies; the year before that, social innovation through “superstructures.” In 2008, geoengineering. This year, I want to take yet another approach. I want to talk about climate adaptation.

I say that with some trepidation. Adaptation is a concept that many climate change specialists have been hesitant to talk about, because it seems to imply that we can or will do nothing to prevent worsening climate disruption, and instead should just get ready for it. But the fact of the matter is that our global efforts at mitigation have been far too slow and too hesitant to have a near-term impact, and we will see more substantial climate disruptions in the years to come no matter how hard we try to reduce carbon emissions. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to cut carbon; what it does mean is that cutting carbon won’t be enough.

But adaptation won’t be easy. It’s going to require us to make both large and small changes to our economy and society in order to endure climate disruption more readily. That said, simply running down a checklist of possible adaptation methods wouldn’t really illuminate just how big of a deal adaptation would be. We decided instead that it would be more useful to think through a systematic framework for adaptation.

Our first cut was to think about adaptations in terms of whether they simplify systems – reducing dependencies and thereby hopefully reducing system “brittleness” – or make systems more complex, introducing new dependencies but hopefully increasing system capacity.

Simplified systems, on the whole, tend to be fairly local in scale. But reducing dependencies can also reduce influence. Simplification asks us to sacrifice some measure of capability in order to gain a greater degree of robustness. It’s a popular strategy for dealing with climate disruption and energy uncertainty; the environmental mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is a celebration of adaptive simplification.

Adaption through complexity creates or alters interconnected systems to better fit a changing environment. This usually requires operating at a regional or global scale, in order to take advantage of diverse material and intellectual resources. Complex systems may have increased dependencies, and therefore increased vulnerabilities, but they will be able to do things that simpler systems cannot.

So that’s the first pass: when we think about adaptation, are we thinking about changes that make our systems simpler, or more complex?

But here’s the twist: the effectiveness of these adaptive changes and the forms that they take will really depend upon the broader conditions under which they’re applied. We have to understand the context.

…

Adaptation can take multiple forms, but more importantly, the value of an adaptation depends upon the conditions in which it is tried. Just because an adaptive process worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will be just as effective next time. But there are larger patterns at work, too. If you can see them early enough, you can shape your adaptive strategies in ways that take advantage of conditions, rather than struggle against them.

But here’s the crucial element: it looks very likely that we’re in a period where the large patterns we’ve seen before aren’t working right.

Instead, we’re in an environment that will force swift and sometimes frightening evolution. Businesses, communities, social institutions of all kinds, will find themselves facing a need to simultaneously experiment rapidly and keep hold of a longer-term perspective. You simply can’t expect that the world to which you’ve become adapted will look in any way the same – economically, environmentally, politically – in another decade.

As a result, you simply can’t expect that you will look in any way the same, either.

The asteroid strikes. The era of evolution is upon us. It’s now time to watch the dinosaurs take flight.

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for decades, but the Powers That Be have done little to stop it. Carbon trading won’t save us, no framing of it as a purely economic problem will. The sooner we start radically adapting our societies to face this new reality, the more hope we have. To use the terms in my recent essay, it’s past time for the Rescue Mission to begin.

Presenting the final transcription, the longest excerpt from Bruce Sterling’s closing speech at SXSW, which takes us into the third chunk of it’s rough recording.

I hope it moves you, like it moved me.

[After much deserved ripping on the Catholic Church..]

The population sits on the couch and plays video games. Terrified.

The US.. come back from Europe, hanging out in the US.. first thing you see in the US is obese people. It’s calamitous. And they weren’t like that in 1975… but imagine if the Statue Of Liberty looked like that? You came in to New York Harbor, Staten Island.. the Statue of Liberty was clocking in at around 350 pounds. Maybe she had a Wii exercise bat instead of a torch. It brings out one’s inner Bill Hicks, ladies and gentlemen. God bless the guy, where ever he is, if he was looking down at Texas right now he would not be a happy man. He’d be scolding you worse than me.

So, you know, it’s pretty bad and it’s sleazy and it’s kind of frozen and crazy and we all know that and we pay no attention to it and kinda hope it just goes away on its own. That’s the one attitude Americans fully share with Italians now and that’s what worries me. What worries me is the response to things that really require courage and focused effort and Passionate Virtuosity to carry out.  Like, say, earthquake rescue.

Just go read what happened to L’Aquila. The small, beautiful, medieval town that was leveled by an Italian earthquake. Italians, they know what earthquakes are, they know what volcanoes are, they even know what tsunamis are.. the one massive horror the Japanese have named for everybody else, ’cause they get more of it than everybody else. At least they know what to do when it happens. L’Aquila happened, nothing much went on.. TV appearances.. cheer leading.. the place is still a wreck.

And for us it was that BP offshore oil mess. Freaking nothing happened. Government did nothing. They were not capable of doing it. They pretended to be able to do something. Suppose it had been ten times worse? You think there’s another government somewhere, that was gonna help people from the consequences of an industrial catastrophe like that? So clearly outlined, and there’s nuclear things happening in Japan.. they’re in there working around the clock. Who would save us from a BP?

They’re incapable of rapid, decisive action. The world sometimes demands that of people. You can’t sit on the couch eating chips and maneuvering, verbally, all the time. Like a Gothic Mansion, like a Vampire Geyser, instead of a President.

There’s infinite wars on Abstract Nouns. Wikileaks and Facebook, which freaking didn’t even exist as entities maybe 5 years ago, they’ve got more political clout on the planet right now than the State Department and the Pentagon combined! It’s a weird situation and it’s not something to applaud [as they audience starts applauding and quickly stops] but everybody knows it. They’re all reading the State Dept cables going “this is awful.. I can’t believe they’re so helpless.. why does no one listen to them? They have no class” The calamity. It’s like Gothic torpor in a coffin of earth.

So what? They pretend to govern, we pretend to obey. Italians do that now.. Americans do that now.. Soviets used to do that.. that’s what they were great at, maintaining the pretense that it was alright.

Who’s the real.. who are the real victims of a decaying status quo? Who suffers when your society is incapable of focused action or intentional innovation? It’s young people. It’s people under 25 who are the victims of a decaying status quo. It’s a Gerontocracy. The demographics are easy to predict. Nobody ever looks at them, because nobody ever wants to get old. One of the main reasons these guys can’t do anything, they’re too damn old, ladies and gentlemen.

Berlusconi and his crowd are people in their 70s and they’ve got the younger people outnumbered. The reason Egypt won, is it’s a huge number of kids.. they were just able to outnumber and beat up the cops in the street.. they threw Mubarak out because they had the numbers game on him. That’s not what happened in the Developed World. They are.. the people under 25.. unemployed people.. you know ‘em, you may be them.. they’re a minority, they’re a disenfranchised minority now. AND I WANT TO FORMALLY DECLARE MY PASSIONATE SOLIDARITY WITH THE MILLENNIALS! Boomers, SHUT THE HELL UP!

…

What’s left of our Civil Rights that you campaigned for? The one thing you might brag about, death of Totalitarianism and national governments. All national governments are weak now, yours is weak.. everyone else’s is weak for [the] same reasons. That’s alright, Totalitarianism.. seeing that off is a great achievement.  1989, your high water mark. Get the heck out of the way. Pack it in Boomers!

What you should be studying right now? Collaborative Consumption. Technomadism. De-materialize people. Vanish! Let it go, give it away. Share it or stop it. Stop clinging to your entitlements. You’re like some kind of Dickensian, Gothic creatures now.  You’re turning in to Miss Havisham, with a wedding cake covered with spiders.

You’re top-heavy with age. You’ve got the votes and the money, you’ve got no conscience. Get out of the way. Over the long term your attitude is fatal. You must support younger people. Who is going to feed you? Who is going to supply those entitlements? What medical care will you have? What pension? What security?

Precarious employment for people who’s excess wealth is supposed to be underwriting your security? It’s built on sand! You are not looking in the longer term there. You are sucking the blood of your children! You’re like those Twilight guys. This Edward, 110 year old character, still hanging out in High School. Hitting on this moody, Mormon High School chick. There’s a reason why that’s the fable of your times, it’s like you.

Get the fuck away!

You need to take power, Millennials. I’ll vote for ya. I’ll do it! I’m groovy. I’ll sleep on the floor with ya. I’ll live out of a backpack. I’ll be precarious. Proud and pleased to do it, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to adulthood.

You know what you guys need? A global youth movement, good old fashioned style. You need a general strike. They’re not gonna employ you, get the hell away from them. See if they can wash their own dishes, flip their own burgers.

Move to Austin. Leave wherever you are, move to Austin. Take over the town.. take over regional governments. Just withdraw from places that are top heavy with the elderly people, they can’t stop ya. Make friends with the Army and the Cops.. you are the Army and the Cops! You’re not gonna see any 60 year old guys who are in the Army and Cops, they’re not gonna hit you with sticks. They’re all guys your own age, beating you up in order to disadvantage themselves.

And don’t listen to any grey-haired professors explaining why change is impossible. This is an era of Organized Deception, where it takes tremendous effort just to speak factually about simple consequences of our real life. The incompetence of the Powers That Be hangs over your future life like a shroud…

Days of Rage, baby!

Continuing my transcription of Bruce Sterling’s excellent SXSW closing speech. Here are excerpts 2 and a bit:

[Discussion of Craig Venter's visit to SXSW, Drew Endy's work with igen and how it's funded by Exxon Mobil's 600 million donation brings us to..]

He [Drew Endy] makes no bones about global warming. He went to great pains to point that out, that his techniques may in fact suck carbon out of the air and, you know, avert or at least delay a colossal calamity.. that Exxon Mobil has just spent three decades lying to us about it, all the time. These guys are the personification of corporate evil in the world today.. Exxon Mobil, I mean if anybody’s board of directors belongs in prison for Crimes against Humanity, it’s these guys. They didn’t force us to put a tiger in our tank. But the tiger they unleashed with these emissions ate Brisbane this year. They’re not the only malefactors, they’re just the best politically connected and he’s making them pay weregild for that.

It’s an allegiance between these malefactors and this visionary. Now the blood of drowned and parched and starving people is gonna be on the hands of those guys in that organization and their fellow travelers on K Street and around Washington, DC. It’s just a fact, nobody can say it out loud. Here,  yeah. In every area where they control the means of expression, hell no.

Just look at HB Gary, if you want an example of the kind of guys… You’re hackers, OK, you don’t care about this, but I bet you care plenty about Wikileaks and Anonymous… These guys are sitting there with heaps of sock-puppets attacking free expression for their corporate masters, and denying global warming by the way, because that’s what pays these cyberwar mercanaries.

Now, if we had it together, the population would give the guy [Endy] 600 million dollars. We’d be in the streets demanding that he be funded… we’d watch him like a rockstar, everywhere he went. We’d know about his girlfriend, his boyfriend, whatever. We’d just be on top of this, because we had it together as a society to recognise our best interests and carry it out politically.

If Texans understood this, they’d be in the street for wind power right now. Oil’s at $325 a barrel and two nuclear power plants just caught fire. And people do freaking nothing about it! You could go out there and make your relatives in West Texas rich over this; Texas has fantastic wind power. Nobody gets out of their seat to do a damn thing about it. Where is the popular pressure for this? Why aren’t social-networks abuzz with this?

Why don’t you take to the streets and paralyse Austin, Madison, Wisconsin-style? ‘Cause that’s your sister city and they’re coming for you, ladies and gentleman. They’re coming for you, get ready!

…

I was in this place, it happened to be Google’s corporate headquarters, their lobby headquarters in Washington, watching people.. exquisitely well informed, brilliantly educated, Washington mandarins. People from industry and government, as if there’s a difference any more. And they were discussing, you know, the potential implications of this thing. Their air of utter helplessness and detachment was shocking to me. I mean, really, 15 year old kids from Cairo could have kicked these guys to the curb.. they could’ve taken their lunch money. That’s how ineffectual they were. And god help them if that building caught fire; they would issue a whitepaper.. before the exacuation. So, that’s pretty bad..

Since there isn’t a decent recording online, and as a gift to the Future, I’ve started the process of transcribing key chunks of Bruce Sterling’s closing speech at SXSW, which I’ll post over the coming days, as I complete them. This is taken from this rough recording and maybe a better recording will surface soon, but here you go for now, because he’s saying a lot of stuff here that needs to be said:

It’s very difficult to talk about politics, because all the political language has been rendered toxic. It’s just decades of Culture War now.. reduced all the nouns and verbs to rubble so, you know, it’s either ‘blood sucking bankster[?] moguls’ or ‘socialists punishing success’ and everybody in politics has learned how to deploy this kind of polarising ‘brand management.’ Culture War there is just all over the place.. [The] US has a very bad case of this, but not the worst case in the world, ’cause I’ve seen it worse and we’re gonna get into that.

So I’d like to talk about politics from the point of view of the Design Critic, really.. ’cause I am a Design Critic.. generally I criticise stuff that doesn’t exist yet, that’s kind of a metier for me, as someone that’s a Futurist science-fiction writer. Of course I’m interested in things that have one foot in fantasy and maybe a toe in reality, stuff like Augmented Reality, Generative Art, Design Fiction. Are they good or bad? Are they interesting or boring? Are they cool ideas? I spend a lot of time accumulating cool ideas. I’m a zealot for this. If you want cool ideas, like cool, political ideas.. techno-political [ideas], here you go, World Changing 2.0 is just out.

It’s great, it’s got thousands of ideas. They’re pre-sorted, almost kind of practical, cool out there, fabulous, well illustrated, beautifully designed, nifty keen.. an endless parade of ‘em. But from the point of view of a critic, like a culture critic, are they really good ideas? It’s not enough that there are huge numbers of them. Cause that’s just kind of a sci-fi notebook approach. What you really need to have critical success it’s pretty simple and it’s Passionate Virtuosity.

It took me a long time, I had to read a bunch of boring critical stuff to figure that out, but that’s really what it’s about in the Arts or Design. And what does that mean? Well first you gotta find someone who really cares about what he’s doing and he’s capable of higher than average performance (she is), and that would be Passionate. Then they’ve gotta be really, really capable of doing it, they’ve mastered the minutiate of it, just on top of their game, performance wise, and that’s Virtuosity.

So typically in a writer’s career, any creative person really, you’ve got the opening period where they’re super passionate, full of burning things to do, sometimes they actually set fire to stuff.. wild rebels.. eager, hard charging, youth fervour there. Then at the end of their career they’re very much masters of their field, but they don’t really feel like doing much. They’ve found their favourite easy chair, they like to make wise-cracks about younger people.. and somewhere in the middle there, is Passionate Virtusoity. Where they still really want to do it, and they’ve got some kind of burning energy and motivation and they’re also really great at it..this are the works that are the peak of their whatever.

[Bruce holds up WorldChanging 2.0] So the ideas in this thing kind of lack Virtuosity, ’cause they’re speculative. They’re not gone into in great detail. So though there’s a lot of passion in the book, it lacks people who have been able to pick it up and deploy it. Now, if these ideas and approaches and tools in this book were actually deployed in our society, our society would improve radically and it would be better by almost every metric. But we’re not getting there because we don’t have the political will and we also don’t have the organisational skill and also we’ve just got a series of problems that are poorly recognised.

The passage of time turns Cyberpunks into Design Professors, or in the case of my pal Rudy Rucker, a Mathematics Professor, and we end up practicing a lot of Attention Philanthropy; bring attention to stuff as critics rather than creatives. Teaching in design school, rather than designing stuff, so forth and so on. Politically in our society, we don’t have any Passionate Virtuosity. If you look at it objectively, as a political situation, it’d be the polar opposite of Passionate Virtuosity. If there was a term for that, it’d be Disgusted Incompetence. It’d be a good term for what’s going on..

Here’s Adam Greenfield‘s excellent, thought-provoking keynote at the recent Cognitive Cities conference in Berlin – On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City

Related:

• Incidental Media vs Invasive Advertising

Your Friday Afternoon Movie for this week…

…yes, I AM stealing the “Friday Afternoon Movie” from COILHOUSE - we’ll keep it between us, right?

Your Friday Afternoon Movie for today is: Transcendent Man: the Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil.  Long time readers will know that I’m not the world’s biggest cheerleader for Kurzweil, but this documentary is still very much worth a look, even if you’re a grumpy old creature like myself.  The film is 9 parts on youtube.

Reader Leet Ninja Pirate writes “An interview with Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report. Subjects include a wider gaming audience, Urgent Evoke, and the phrase “epic win.” McGonigal addresses just about all of the major issues brought up by Colbert about gaming as a worthwhile pursuit.”

Gamification of life is a very interesting strategy, and I’m very much loooking forward to reading Reality Is Broken. For more details, try Cory’s review on BoingBoing.

Video of Lepht Anonym‘s presentation at 27c3, mentioned earlier, is now online.

Wired Threat Level has recently posted a quick profile on Lepht Anonym, a Grinder and practical transhumanist:

Anonym’s vision of the transhuman is rather different. Less visionary, possibly, but more realistic. What she does is “grinding,” with homemade cybernetics and an intimate familiarity with medical mistakes, driven by a consuming curiosity rather than a philosophical creed.

She does her own surgery, with a scalpel and a spotter to catch her if she passes out, and an anatomy book to give her some confidence she isn’t going to slice through a vein or the very nerves she’s trying to enhance.

“The existing transhumanist movement is lame. It’s nano everything. It’s just ideas,” she says. “Anyone can do this. This is kitchen stuff.”

While we’ve mentioned Lepht here, before, the article is quick, and very much worth a read - especially to anyone interested in biohacking and homebrew enhancements who thinks they might be alone in poking at these boundaries.

[Via: Wired Threat Level]

Acasa have released this video showing their plans to use 3D printing technology to print out new homes for the “over one and a half billion people worldwide [who] reside in substandard housing” in a few years.

This is something that’s been talked about for years, but should finally be possible soon.  It’s a fantastic thing.  Drop a massive 3D printer off to a devastated region and watch it go to work, using local materials.

Here’s two pieces in two formats from two of the smartest people I know of. The subject: The Future. How it’s been shaped and will be continue to be shaped.

First we have Cory Doctorow, writing today on BoingBoing, riffing off an old clip of H.G. Wells predicting The Death of the Newspaper. What Cory’s delivered is Modern Futurism 101. I’m tempted to just blockquote the whole thing, but I’ll be a good blogger and just pull a few paragraphs:

..it’s wrong in a way that futurists are often wrong: it assumes a clean break with history and the positive extinction of the past. It predicts an information landscape that is reminiscent of the Radiant Garden Cities that Jane Jacobs railed against: a “modern” city that could only be built by bulldozing the entire city that stood before it and building something new on the clean field that remained. Every futuristic vision that starts with a clean slate has a genocide or an apocalypse lurking in it. Real new cities are build through, within, around, and alongside of the old cities. They evolve.

…

The experiment that we are presently conducting as a society is aimed at discovering what kind of information and transactions are really and truly “newspaper material” and not material that we stuffed into the margins of a newspaper because we needed it and newspapers were the only game in town. It may be that there’s nothing left when we’re done, that there’s a better way of delivering every word and every picture in the newspaper than to print it on broadsheet and fold it in eighths, in which case, newspapers may die, or they may end up being the territory of newspaper re-enactors, the equivalent of hobbyists who knap their own flint or re-enact the Battle of 1066.

Or it may be that newspapers do have a small and important and moving clutch of information and stories and images that really, really are better on paper. Maybe the audience for that will be too small and specialized to support a large business, and maybe the audience will club together and treat newspaper like a charity, the way that opera (another medium that lost a lot of its stories to more popular and hence cheaper successor media) functions today. Or maybe the cost of producing a paper will dip so low that we won’t particularly need a business to support it (Clay Shirky: “Will we still read the New York Times on paper in the future? Sure, if we print it out before reading it”).

Or maybe there is a large and substantial and popular insoluble lump of newspaperstuff that no successor medium is better at hosting, a critical mass of popular material that sustains newspapers in a diminished but substantial niche, perhaps like vinyl records.

Now, it’s worth getting meta here and pointing out that BoingBoing’s origin was as a zine. It migrated to the web and has grown so successfully it’s now known to some as the Great Big Blog.

As evidence as to what the ‘future of the newspaper’ is, we have this video from Activate 2010, where Jamais Cascio speaks about “the dynamics of internet evolution”, hosted by The Guardian.  (Gen Y kids mightn’t know this, but The Guardian started, and is still available, as a newspaper.)

How clever is Jamais?  In just fourteen minutes he takes a quick look back at how technology has been, and still is, marketed to us, and tells us what’s really happened and how it will look going forwards.

There you have it. Two general overviews of how society evolves. Read/watch them, study them.. understand them and you’re a Futurist too.

(Continued from Brands, Prosthetic Identities and the Batman.)

What if you could opt-in to a prosthetic identity like Batman’s or Kanye West’s?

What if you could Be Batman?

Mentioned here (and everywhere else on the internet) this week, J-Pop star Hatsune Miku is a fictional android, a sex symbol, a popular product spokeswoman, and the output of a vocal software package.  As such, “she” is not just a saccharine-sweet corporate-operated pitchwoman but also a prosthetic identity that anyone with access to her software package can participate in the c0-creation of.  It was arguably this open feature of “her” prosthetic identity that allowed her to become so popular.

However, I’d like to approach this notion a bit more directly – after all, this is a blog addressing self-upgrading culture, innit?

There’s been a lot of talk about Real Life Superheroes this week thanks to a recent incident in Seattle that returned the idea of the RLSH to web-consciousness after KICK-ASS vanished from the theaters.   Is the idea of putting on a costume and leaping into action on the streets of The City so strange?   Well, probably, but that hasn’t stopped a surprising number of people from doing it regularly over the past decade.  Existing long before KICK-ASS (in fact the book KICK-ASS’s first bit of viral promotion was a video that made the Myspace Real Life Superhero rounds before leaking into the internet mainstream) there was a loose network of folks in costumes in cites around the world.

With the World Superhero Registry serving as one of a handful of internet hubs, real life superheroes do everything from patrolling the streets and paying parking meter fines, to cutting the blocks off cars with an angle grinder.  Many do little more than visit hospitals to talk to kids and champion various causes.  Never let it be said that volunteering with kids at a hospital is a bad thing .

The problems with this approach are legion.  Even the crime-patrolling supes are doing little more than what citizen vigilante group the Guardian Angels has been doing for years – just in cooler gear.  On the other hand, Guardian Angels have died at the hands of police and criminals and they’ve suffered the problems that any vigilante organization does.   The only place I’ve actually seen the Guardian Angels in action personally is post-Katrina New Orleans where they were almost universally loathed by the residents I spoke to.    Replace the capes and tights fetishism with a desire to play soldier, and you’ve got the ideologically troubling Minutemen who patrol the United States’ border with Mexico – often armed.

The flip side of KICK-ASS’ “rocket launchers and jetpacks” fictional real-life superheroism is Brian Bendis’ SCARLET which tells the story of a Portland teen, who when her boyfriend is killed by corrupt police, begins killing cops and organizing a community of like-minded people to fight institutionalized corruption.  It’s a story that showcases how Real Life Superheroism could could veer into armed vigilantism:  What if I want to be the Punisher or the Boondock Saints instead of Batman?

Still, the current of what I call autosuperheroism has been running pretty strongly through media recently.  I love superheroes and a lot of folks do as well; there’s a reason the movies do well and the books are the life-support of a sick publishing industry.  Superheroes are awesome, especially when divorced from the fascist power fantasies and stripped to a core of “we can do extraordinary things if we try”.  (The “auto” part comes in from embracing the idea that nobody else is going to rescue us – we’re going to have to do it ourselves.)  It could be just a thing from my personal sample-group and the cross-section of the internet I live in – where activism, comics, social-justice, sustainability and futurism cross-over – but there really seems to be an autosuperheroic vibe out there right now.

“Something is going on there, a strange collapse. Like you said, more and more people want to become superheroes, even as comic-book writers and filmmakers have spent the last 10 years trying to make superheroes much more real, relatable and convincing.”

We can all be Batman?

As I said elsewhere, the transformation of Batman into Batman, Inc allowed the Batman brand to act where Batman was not present.  I compared it to MEND in its ability to self-organize and be embraced by previously unaffiliated entities.  There’s a core to that mobility and the ethos that a “Batman, Inc” would propagate that I believe can be adopted in a very real and practical way that is strangely far more literal than dressing up as a bat.

While traditionally visible mostly to marginalized subcultures and groups, the collapse of infrastructure in the Western World (especially America) has been increasingly visible over the last few years.  Here in the US, we got to watch a city drown while the government watched and did almost nothing to intervene as well as other glaring examples of the people “we” were told would “save us” not being there when needed.  In the medwest, cities like Gary and Detroit start to wither on the vine as “we” watch.  So many people I know suddenly had the idea, even if it was one that didn’t blow their minds, that in the event of an emergency there may not be anyone to save them.

Meanwhile, everyone’s 15 minutes of fame continues to be parceled in 10-second bursts and the participatory panopticon becomes the norm of the interconnected world, offering media prosthetics in exchange for perpetually being in a low-watt spotlight.    It’s a confluence of media influences and environmental stresses that could just make taking pages from the four-colour playbook look like a good idea.

In a world where prosthetic identities are commonplace, we can all be rockstars – and superheroes are rockstars that help people.  Being something bigger than ourselves isn’t a superhuman feat in a world where Twitter lets you crowdsource solutions in seconds behind an @-handle that may be more recognizable than your birth name.

Geek culture helps birth Maker culture.  Suddenly “makerspaces” are viable community resources.  Highly-networked organizations like Burners without Borders, Geeks Without Bounds and various Worldchanging spin-offs can leverage that networking to react quickly to problems and use local resources to help solve problems when infrastructure, for whatever reason  fails.   People who couldn’t give two tugs about Bruce Wayne are able to use their media footprint and digital prosthetics to organize in a way that stands to have real lasting impact on actual human lives.  The lesson from Batman, Inc becomes:  The ability to mobilize along the lines of 4th Generational Warfare – even, or especially in non-combat circumstances - is a superpower.

I have friends who are Street Medics; tossing on colorful tough clothes to go out into violent situations and help the wounded.    Wikileaks, love them or hate them, is a team of people (many with secret identities) that manages to keep whole governments on their toes using volunteers, donations and support from the crowd milling about the internet.  (Sadly, that description fits terrorist networks such as Al-Quadea, as well.  The same technologies and social structures that allow a previously unthinkable ability to leverage distributed resources – often in spite of geography – are also the things that allow wide-scale disruption and crime.)

The same current that gives us real life superheroes trying to help others spawns variants when it hits other spheres of interest.   Zombie lovers teach preparedness  in the US while the LARPers at a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. event in Russia get lessons on firearms handling and wilderness survival. (And those very real people who make their living within the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone take on the name “Stalkers” co-opting the parlance of the movie and the video games.)   Tactical fashion slides into mainstream consciousness via William Gibson’s Zero History.  I can’t be the only one who sees in the “gear queer” fetishism an acknowledgement that the normal trappings of military lifestyle are associated with a machine that is ill-prepared for the world around it.  And if the military is losing its legitimacy – then we should do it ourselves, right? (Or at least look like we could.)

In the end, stripped of the technical language and self-upgrading futurist posturing, the idea that we can all be Batman if we want to is a valid one.   Batman is a man who took the darkest thing in his life and turned it into a superpower – who here doesn’t have a loss or tragedy that they wouldn’t like to weaponize or utilize to improve the environment?   Superheroes are a secular pantheon that instead of sitting above us unattainably, move through our lives as stories and challenge us to emulate them and join them.  They are an artistic transmission vector for the program of a finer world.  Batman will be punching things long after we’re all dead or uploaded; Batman, Incorporated or no Batman, Inc.  A brand is a story – a story that is often used to disenfranchise humans and  make the world a little less than it could be, sadly.  The idea of Batman as a brand is the idea of the narrative of Batman being able to help others in the absence of a Physical Batman.  Just like the prosthetic identities and micro-brands we use and generate ourselves are stories.   Just as I hope the story I tell in order to feel out the interconnected world is one that might help someone, somehow – the story of Batman is that of someone using their broken heart to help the person standing next to them.

We’ve all got broken hearts, and we’re all standing next to people who could use help.

We can all be Batman.

You can even wear the cape, if you want.