In a forbidden recess of the cave there is the footprint of an eight year-old boy next to the footprint of a wolf. Did a hungry wolf stalk the boy, or did they walk together as friends? Or were their tracks made thousands of years apart?

There’s a rule futurists use: go back twice as far as you wish to predict forwards. I have a new theory though, that’s hinted at by the popularity of Atemporality: the further we progress with our technology, the more all of time itself can (effectively) exist at the same time.

Pleistocene Rewilding, for instance, is one of the better strategies I’ve seen to help ‘fix’ climate change (by preventing the release of methane in the arctic tundra). And as the Chairman himself noted in the Art+Enviroment conference keynote, this Anthropocenic period increasingly resembles the Pleistocene.

Which is why Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams is near mandatory viewing. The above quote is one of the more mind-boggling parts. As is the evidence that two adjoining cave paintings were made FIVE THOUSAND YEARS apart. Just hold that thought in your mind, instead of wondering what’s in the next iPhone.

For a glimpse, here’s the experimental archeologist Wulf Hein playing a flute carved from the arm of a vulture (wearing the skins of reindeers, thought to be the ‘fashion’ at the time). This is the music of 30K B.C.:

We can’t honestly consider the future of humanity, without looking honestly back at its beginning and assessing how we got this far to begin with.

BONUS CONTENT:

Joseph Campbell on the Origins of Man and Myth:

BONUS LULZ:

• a very on-topic SMBC

Here’s the current title holder of the Comedian’s Comedian, Mr Louis CK explaining the mess that is Civilisation and what The Fall of Man amounts to:

Note: NSFW

During the Enlightenment the state of the human being was critically re-examined, and compared to it’s imagined origin, in a ’natural state’ (ie. pre The Fall). Of particular note here is Rousseau and his Theory of the Natural Human; consider these words from its entry in the GreatWiki (emphasis mine):

Society corrupts men only insofar as the Social Contract has not de facto succeeded, as we see in contemporary society as described in the Discourse on Inequality (1754).

In this essay, which elaborates on the ideas introduced in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau traces man’s social evolution from a primitive state of nature to modern society. The earliest solitary humans possessed a basic drive for self preservation and a natural disposition to compassion or pity. They differed from animals, however, in their capacity for free will and their potential perfectibility. As they began to live in groups and form clans they also began to experience family love, which Rousseau saw as the source of the greatest happiness known to humanity. As long as differences in wealth and status among families were minimal, the first coming together in groups was accompanied by a fleeting golden age of human flourishing. The development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property, and the division of labour and resulting dependency on one another, however, led to economic inequality and conflict. As population pressures forced them to associate more and more closely, they underwent a psychological transformation: They began to see themselves through the eyes of others and came to value the good opinion of others as essential to their self esteem. Rousseau posits that the original, deeply flawed Social Contract (i.e., that of Hobbes), which led to the modern state, was made at the suggestion of the rich and powerful, who tricked the general population into surrendering their liberties to them and instituted inequality as a fundamental feature of human society. Rousseau’s own conception of the Social Contract can be understood as an alternative to this fraudulent form of association. At the end of the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau explains how the desire to have value in the eyes of others comes to undermine personal integrity and authenticity in a society marked by interdependence, and hierarchy. In the last chapter of the Social Contract, Rousseau would ask “What is to be done?” He answers that now all men can do is to cultivate virtue in themselves and submit to their lawful rulers. To his readers, however, the inescapable conclusion was that a new and more equitable Social Contract was needed.

Where Nietzsche speaks of his transcendant Übermensch being Beyond Good & Evil, as a counterpoint we have Rousseau’s “Natural Human” being Before Good & Evil. This is what Terence McKenna speaks of as the Fall into History.

But the situation in this new Anthropocene Era leaves us with no ‘natural state’ left to return to. This is the subject of Bruce Sterling’s Art+Enviroment conference keynote, finally extending upon the seed of an idea he left dangling in DISTRACTION (aka “the book that predicts Occupy Wall Street”):

via THINKPROGRESS, which has some handy bonus quotes.

Which leads us where?

• Next Nature as an internet of animals.
• “Bioengineered RFID-tagged stags roam Roundup Ready forests in search of their neural-networked doe harems.” ~ @claytoncubitt
• …
• PROPHET

See also:

• ReWilding
• Involuntary Parks
• TEDTalk: The Anthropocene

• 2011 was a damned weird year. At least it was around here. Coldest winter ever, the deepest snow ever, the hottest summer ever, and my first earthquake. Was that just a prelude to 2012 or will the coming year be mercifully quieter? (not including politics) -Anon

  m1k3y: Unquestionably the weather is only get to be more extreme, with peak heavyweather lying somewhere far over the horizon of 2012.What genuinely frightens me is the interaction with man-made/created disasters. What happens if Japan gets another tsnuami, because that whole reactor zone is t.ro.u.b.l.i.n.g. Or a Cat-6 hurricane tears up the containment cap on the Mexican Gulf oil spill? Or, more likey, some horrible new disaster we never thought could happen occurs, some corner case not in the manual: say, North Korea mistaking the radar signature of the forced migration of birds (due to flooding of their usual seasonal habitat) for a stealth attack from South Korea/US/Japan. A young, paranoid ruler at the helm? (Hell, they were worried enough about the immediate succession, remember.) And something the whole globe is mostly unprepared for still, massive solar storms. Go read about the last one, then imagine it happeneing tomorrow with all our unshielded infrastructure.Nature’s back, and she’s pissed.

• While something of an unanswerable: do you see any potentially disruptive technologies on the horizon? will 2012 be the year of drone deployments or ramped up ubicomp? Further breakthroughs in citizen science equipment or personal manufacturing? -amkelly0

  m1k3y: open source artificial general intelligence – mixed into EVERYTHING. specifically the Open Cog project. I saw Ben Goertzel speak at the local Singularity Summit, and I was very impressed.

  Kevin: Again, I think it’s a toss up between 3d printing/rapid fabrication and drones.  And you can obviously see the point where those circles overlap to make a sexy self-replicating Venn diagram.   This will be the year a horrible act of police/state brutality is captured by citizen-operated drones, as well as the year that the idea of downloading and fabricating items sneaks in the mainstream.  And if you think “piracy” gets people pissed off now, you haven’t seen anything yet.  It’s not post-scarcity by any means, but it’s going to be disruptive nonetheless.

• What are the team’s top three most-anticipated Grinder Films of 2012? -Wolven

  m1k3y: Nothing leaps out as a fave, so I’d have go with the blockbusters: Bane in the new Batman, and the GI Joe sequel (the first one is pure mech&HUD pr0n, and I only expect the sequel to have *moar*. And third… um? GOOD QUESTION WOLVEN! Instead, let me list the the great transhuman films of 2011: Hanna, Limitless, Captain America, In Time and you could say Thor too.

  Kevin: My vote is for the above-mentioned drone atrocity video because fuck Hollywood. I love movies, truly I do, and I really want to see Dark Knight and Avengers and Ghost Rider and Prometheus and…   *sigh* But the tug-of-war between my desire to see the latest adventures of whatever franchise and my knowledge that every red cent spent on these films goes directly to facefucking the future of media, free speech and humanity is really getting to me. Every penny you spend on mass media, goes directly towards backing anti-speech, reactionary, narrow-minded bullshit like SOPA.

  Whew. Okay. Back to playing The Old Republic while loading my Fire with the latest Hickman comics.

  Shit. Rumbled.

• What can those of us fortunate enough to have jobs and are time-poor but not money-poor (but certainly not rich enough to buy-up aquifers, or even arable farm land), do to improve our personal resilience? Particularly WRT shocks that aren’t total collapse. – Klint Finley

  m1k3y: Keep a month’s worth of food on hand. Get a good first-aid kit, and learn how to use it. Being physically fit won’t hurt either, and also some self-defense skills won’t..Become a node, not the end of a tree. We’re talking solar panels and rain water tanks. We’re talking having bikes, and a hybrid car. In short, we’re talking a gradual detachment from the status-quo, as it existed prior to the GFC. If you’re really brave run simulations. Take a weekend and pretend the Grid is dead. Test, learn, adapt.Last, and most of all… know your neighbourhood, meet your neighbours. Learn where the nearest fresh water supply is, that sort of thing. Generators, appropriate clothing for all weather conditions, optimal thermal effeciency for your dwelling (which will save your money and have the added bonus of surviving a heat wave or cold snap sans grid power).

  Neil Strauss’s book Emergency is a nice, general introduction to this sort of thinking.

  Kevin: I’ll definitely second the nod to Strauss’s Emergency as a good guide to this sort of thing. It’s the book that led me to getting a mess of Red Cross certifications. All of which ended being ridiculously useful skills out on the road or in Occupied Oakland.

  I agree that knowing your neighbor is key. Free-floating nodes that can become a network on the most practical scale are key. Me? I find that thinking post-disaster is a useful train of thought. What would you need if the Collapse happened last week?

  Become a street medic. Learn to grow something. Learn 1st aide. Learn to collect moisture.  Teach others. And I’ll say it again because that’s how important it is: Become a street medic or get the training. The black and scarlet clad, masked medics of Anon Medics are the point where “real life superheroes” really emerge into the world of the practical or the “real”.  (Also, throwing out a nod to the New York Initiative who seem more focused on forming resilient communities than the “one man vs. crime” antics of Phoenix Jones and company.)

• How has your view of the future shifted during the last 4 years on grinding.be? -Anon

  m1k3y: I’d say I’m much more optimistic, and that was before the Occupy movement (following on from Tahir Sq and the Indignado movement and so on) sprang up. Part of that is through maturing my worldview, to step back from the purely technological and look at the political, economic, cultural, legal and moral aspects. These changes are happening in part because people are more educated, and connected to each other. Propaganda is just another meme. History is interchangeable with conspiracy theory once you realise that there is no objective position. More and more people are “waking up”, then turning around and illumating their friends. I don’t think anybody expected Enlightment to go viral.

  I really don’t think the so-called ‘global over-population problem’ is a bad thing. It means this is the greatest sum of human mind that has ever existed. That a connected humanity is the greatest supercomputer we’ve never dreamed off. And now we’re adding an increasingly autonomous robot ecology as part of Next Nature.

  Likewise, the majority of people are in urban environments now. Which is the native habitat of the civilized human. With everyone in cities, and more people interconnected globally the ability to adapt and upgrade infracture and tools only increases.. which, grey goo disasters aside, can let the land and sea outside the cities’ domain revert (back to Next Nature). And slowly the climate can stablize again.

  I don’t see challenges anymore, I see opportunities. Humanity’s gonna make it through this dark period and what comes out the other side might way be a whole new species (or two).

  None of which I’d ever have said four years ago.

  Kevin: We never did get as much sex on here as I’d have liked.

  Beyond that, when I started writing here, I was a lot more concerned with theoretical approaches to practical transhumanisim.  Talking about how we’re all already cyborgs, how pre-existing technologies can be applied towards life extension, how the world is a lot more science-fictional than most people give it credit for already.  Now I’m a lot more concerned with practical approaches to theory.  How do Debord and Deluze and Guattari look when applied to resistance or a running fight with riot police?   (And that’s not an idle speculation, either.  Just as the IDF has taken to using tactics from a re-conceptualization of urban space against Palestinians; the Occupiers pulled techniques almost right out of the Situationist playbook — for example the “Portland Snake”.)

  Honestly, I’m just a lot more interested in nitty-gritty practicalities.  I think in part because I now believe the Collapse is unavoidable — but I’m pretty okay with that.  Just like Utopia is a moving target, Collapse is a process and one state does not cancel out the possibility of the other.  In other words:  Shit is going to get really bad before it gets better — and you could argue that it has to get really bad in order for it to get better.  I’m not interested in taking up fiddling lessons while Rome burns, though, I want to make sure that the damage can be minimized and that the cost in real, living breathing human lives is as minimal as it possible.  The system is going to collapse, and I don’t want any of us to be underneath it when it does.

• Who would you suggest as people to consider as life coaches (such as sex advice, health & fitness, tech predictors worth paying attention to)? Lets affix a number to that and say 5 people. – Atomdari

  m1k3y: … Tim Ferris maybe? I don’t really dig on the whole life-coach deal. What I would recommend instead is the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

  Kevin: If we could crossbreed Tim Ferris with Magpie and feed the resulting uberchild the secret drug stash of Terence McKenna, I think we’d be getting somewhere.  Ferris is a Grinder-par-excellence, powers of self-promotion aside. The man has a runaway best-selling book that discusses extreme body hacks, black market biological experimentation and off-label installation of medical diagnostic electronics.  And a lot of the things in his book work and work well.

  That said, the best “Life Coaches” are the people whose names you usually don’t know. Don’t look for a compass rose burred in a TED talk — look for people around you who are good at something or who have a knack for enacting their dreams and schemes.  I’d suggest less tech predictors and more tech producing. Less sex advice, and more shagging that good looking person’s brains out.  I can almost guarantee you that every life skill you desperately want to posses or master can be cracked or taught by someone you know.

PS – it turns out Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2012 is a happening, jump in there too!

PPS –  I’m hoping ours has a lot more sweary bits.

Behold the awesome storms of Saturn, shown here by NASA in false-colour rendering.

The head of the storm is beyond the horizon in this view. Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from 12 images taken in near- infrared light through filters that are sensitive to varying degrees of methane absorption. Red and orange colors in this view indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors, most noticeable near the top of the view, indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze. The rings appear as a thin horizontal line of bright blue because they are outside of the atmosphere and not affected by methane absorption.

via acidic.

These four photos aren’t from a Worth1000 competition, they’re just some of the striking images of Thailands ongoing, slow-moving flood hitting Bangkok.

See if you can guess the captions before checking out the full gallery.

EARTH 2.0™ – Re-establishing a harmonious relationship between humanity and nature, using art, science and digital creativity.

Despite their need to trademark the phrase Earth 2.0, and the heavy post-production, the content in the following videos is spot-on. To soften the blows a bit further, I’ve added some matching quotes from my own unfinished writings on these subjects.

What our cities need today to survive in the midst of climate change and increasingly heavy weather is Aikido Infrastructure.

Any sufficiently advanced engineering is indistinguishable from nature.

via BoingBoing

Executive Director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, Professor Will Steffen, takes us on a journey through the science measuring humanity’s effect on the planet. Using tangible, real measures, Will shows us the profound change in the planet since the Industrial Revolution and argues that now, more than at any other time, humanity is the single most influential factor in global changes; so much so that we should recognise that now is the age of mankind – The Anthropocene.

Unfortunately, this is unlikely to sway a climate-change denialist, but regardless, it’s an excellent overview of this important theory.

That’s just edge of the reactor plant, taken from Martyn Williams’s posterous blog. More photos there and a translation of an appendix released from the investigation into this tragedy; key sentence being: “We did not consider the effect of disastrophism.”

From nejlon (Several more images there), via @liamosaur

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..

..is the provocative title of another interesting talk from 27c3.  It does a great job breaking down a lot of the problems we’re facing and, while I don’t agree with all the conclusions and suggestions, there’s definitely some pragmatic ideas in there that are food for thought. It does get very technical in a few places, but don’t let that dissuade you.

Background Material – it’s hard to go past Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. There’s a condensed version in his Long Now talk or an even further condensed version in his TED Talk.

Further reading – John Robb’s blog Global Guerrillas, in particular his posts on: Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.

If you want a preview of life in New York after an apocalypse, check out this manual just released for the legal system, with the rather sedate title Public Health Legal Manual.

Lastly, the title says it all: Cities and Resilience: The Year Climate Started Hurting Politicians.

The following video is Google’s soon to be ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt, presenting to IFA 2010 a vision to create an ‘age of Augmented Humanity’; it also features demos of then new GoogleTV and various new automagical apps for Android. It goes for an hour, if that’s too long, there’s the cliff-notes version over on GIGAOM.

Now I love Accelerando and other such SF novels as much as the next post-cyberpunk, so the idea of my own personal AGI has its appeal. And so long as we don’t up with the world’s most annoying Microsoft Paperclip, I’m cool with that. BUT.. there’s a few holes in this vision, at least the way I see it.

Primarily, that it’s based on a nice smooth vision of the future, projected from an ideal yesterday.

Foremost being that these automagical apps they’re demoing seem to be designed to solve middle class problems. And, if you’re paying attention, the middle class is vanishing. Which leaves the over-educated and/or under/un-employed on one side and the global elite on the other. Neither of which need help buying shoes while visiting Berlin (the example given for Conversation Mode of Google Translate.) The Favela Chic (as Sterling calls them; soon to be, if not already, us) will gladly take the free OSs and services, but won’t be clicking on ads. Nor will the Global Elite (see: The Rise of the New Global Elite, if you haven’t already). If they want translation services, they’ll hire a human with 100% accuracy.

And it’s advertising that Google are and shall continue to use to monetize their system. Maybe I’m the only one that find the ads before popular YouTube clips (and nearly every other video streaming service) highly annoying.. a tax, no less, that I refuse to pay. Just as I never click on the ads that appear in search results or gmail, I don’t even see them. But then I don’t use loyalty cards either, and all of these things are apparently popular. For the moment.

So, point number two. The mythical always on high-speed network, the various flavours of delicious mobile and wired broadband. Which it is. Mostly. In cities (where we’re told the population will continue to centre themselves in). In what we used to call the first-world. Which have largely been under-invested in infrastructure thanks to widespread implementation of economic rationalism. So that a tiny, weany little thing called the weather breaks it. Snowed under, cables freeze and snap. Floods shut off power stations. Hurricanes and tornadoes etc etc. Life in the 21C. All the supercomputers are still there in the Cloud, but inaccessible.. useless. Also, there’s the little thing of being in a country that decides to just shut off the internet. That too.

So, think a few years ahead. You’ve all read about the potential of biocomputing and have been pirating tv shows and movies for years (partly because they have the advertising already chopped out of them) thanks to.. what’s that? Peer to Peer technologies. What if the Favela Chic-types figure out how to homebrew, say in 5years, in DIYbio labs, their own supercomputers and seed their own clouds? Google.. you say? I remember them.

Even this year we could see open-source phones that can create and communicate across their own mesh network; it’s not hard to do this with the Android platform, and the openmoko project also has a lot of potential. There’s a reason WalMart busted ass to be the first help out the victims of Katrina. That because there’s no reason that leaderless, self-organising groups couldn’t themselves pour into the next city or area that is the next victim of heavy weather, with just this tech to distribute, donated from hackerspaces local and abroad. Because everyone’s connected now; if they don’t know someone directly affected, they know someone that knows someones that is.

Now, I’ll jump back into this from another angle, in another post, shortly, but suffice to say: a top-down, device to network to cloud computer and back again, automagical friendly (not in any way censored.. oh no, heaven forbid) solution looks awful nice yesterday; but in today’s world, which is just a preview of tomorrow’s.. it’s already looking like wishful thinking. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but these are increasingly dramatic times.

Third and finally, do we really want to merge with the Googleplex? To become Google’borgs? Because that’s what this ‘Age of Augmented Humanity’ amounts to. Now, believe me, I’m all for the continued co-evolution between man and his tools, BUT.. I’m also, clearly, emphasising the importance of questioning and critiquing this.  And doing it ourselves, with full control.

Fundamentally, it comes down to two questions: how much trust will you place in an Algorithm? and how much is your data really worth? To be continued..

The Ark Hotel is some shiny, shiny design porn courtesy of Russian firm Remistudio (with the assistance of the International Union of Architects’ program Architecture for Disasters Relief).

As more cities are devastated (Brisbane alone is looking at a price tag in the billions after last week’s floods) one thing’s for sure; just rebuilding what was there before won’t be enough. And if billions are to be spent, it should be on structures armored against heavy weather.

This design seems like a good place to start (if malls and hotels are your thing, that is..)

news.com.au has the full details:

Designed as “an integrated energy system with an uninterruptible power supply using alternative energy sources”, the slinky-like Ark Hotel uses solar panels and a rainwater collection system to provide inhabitants with power and water.

The dome-shaped hotel is constructed with wooden arches, steel cables and a “self-cleaning” plastic layer instead of glass.

Further, the 14,000 square metre shell-like construction of arches and cables distributes the weight evenly, meaning it can withstand earthquakes

It has also been designed to stay afloat in the event of floods or rising seas.

It would be built around a central pillar connecting to roof-top wind generators and heat pumps, as well as to energy storage and thermal conversion units below.

There will also be a “tornado” energy generating spiral at the top of the pillar.

Daylight is filtered through to internal rooms due to the hotel’s see-through structure, reducing the need for lighting.

There will be an array of vegetation to aid air quality and provide food sources.

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.

The following is a selection of photos taken from National Geographic’s annual photo caption contest. Actually it’s a sub-selection of the photos Boston.com’s The Big Picture ran.

Regardless, it’s our world and if you frame the photos just right, it’s an amazing place.

A supercell thunderstorm rolls across the Montana prairie at sunset. (Photo and caption by Sean Heavey)

The Serra da Leba Road near Lubango (Huíla, Angola). This is Serra da Leba, a landmark in Angola. A road built in the 70′s, it’s been in the country’s postcard images for decades, but all shots were taken by day. I wanted something different and tried a night shot. But it seemed impossible: pitch dark, foggy, altitude of 1,800m (5,000ft). I wanted no more than 60sec of exposure, max, to avoid digital noise. But a car takes a few minutes to climb or descend this section of the road. The fog was dense and blocking the view! Suddenly the fog cleared, a few cars went down, others went up, they met in the middle in under 60sec… Painting done! (Photo and caption by Kostadin Luchansky)

Pure Elements. I drove my 4×4 over rivers to get a view of the Volcano eruption at “Fimmvorduhals” in Iceland. It was a full moon and strong winds gave me problems standing still outside the truck. I had my camera with me and zoom lens but no tripod, suddenly there was a magical moment, I was experiencing a display of nature rarely seen by man. I found my camera with the zoom lens, rushed out of the truck, trying to fight the strong wind. I pushed the camera on to the hood of the truck trying to stand still, holding my breath, I shot 30 frames, and only one shot was good. (Photo and caption by Olafur Ragnarsson)

Lightning Crashes. A lightning bolt strikes the antenna of The Center building in Central Hong Kong during a storm on September 13, 2009. (Photo and caption by Michael Siward)

Cloud and ship. Ukraine, Crimea, Black sea, view from Ai-Petri mountain. (Photo and caption by Yevgen Timashov)

The archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil is considered a wildlife sanctuary, but today, even in this isolated archipelago dolphins are victims of the bad habits of consumption. (Photo and caption by João Vianna)

Liquid Planet. Another picture from the Liquid Vision Series, which shows a different point of view of waves. An angle that people are not used to seeing. (Photo and caption by Freddy Cerdeira)

The London Futures project is a series of postcards from the future, an attempt to visualize the affects of climate change.

The Camel Guards Parade is just one of “14 arresting images..on display at the Museum of London from 1 October 2010 to 6 March 2011″:

Traditional rituals have altered beyond recognition, along with the climate. Here, on Horse Guards Parade, horses have been replaced by camels – animals that can withstand the heat of the parade ground. The change was controversial but the London Tourist Board argued strongly in favour. Tourism remains important for London’s economy.

From Space Fellowship:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured this view of the fires and smoke in three consecutive overpasses on NASA’s Terra satellite. The smooth gray-brown smoke hangs over the Russian landscape, completely obscuring the ground in places.

The fires along the southern edge of the smoke plume near the city of Razan, top image, are among the most intense. Outlined in red, a line of intense fires is generating a wall of smoke. The easternmost fire in the image is extreme enough that it produced a pyrocumulus cloud, a dense towering cloud formed when intense heat from a fire pushes air high into the atmosphere.

…

According to news reports, 520 fires were burning in western Russia on August 4. MODIS detected far fewer. It is likely that the remaining fires were hidden from the satellite’s view by the thick smoke and scattered clouds. High temperatures and severe drought dried vegetation throughout central Russia, creating hazardous fire conditions in July.