Futurewear

It seems to be a commonplace that having one’s first child means crossing a threshold, from entertaining a relatively abstract interest in the longer-term fate of the world, to being genetically invested, having skin in the game, so to speak.

I don’t have any children yet myself, but over the past few years, as various relatives and friends a few years my senior have begun nesting in earnest, I am increasingly intrigued by a key tension inherent in becoming a parent. On the one hand, there is a sense in which a new parent’s focus narrows as their child’s well being assumes paramount importance; on the other hand, that same well being depends ultimately and inescapably on the state of the wider world the youngster inherits.

So I thought it could be interesting to provide a way for people with very young children to be prompted to cast their thoughts forward to a specific date in which their child has a concrete stake. This would be a gesture towards reconciling parental concern, responsibility and love for their offspring, with a commensurate interest in the bigger picture.

In the photo above is Andrew, born 6 July 02010. Other things being equal, he should graduate high school in the (Northern Hemisphere) Spring of ‘28. Thus he sports the inaugural ‘Class of 2028’ onesie, lovingly, if incompetently, decorated by me, at his parents’ baby shower last June.

This may be a meme worth spreading. So, get your ‘Class of 02028’ and 'Class of 02029' paraphernalia here at the Futurewear Cafepress shop. I'll donate any proceeds to The Long Now Foundation.

Update (16mar11): In line with Long Now convention, the designs on sale now use five digit dates.  Also, 'Class of 02027' has been added, enabling the current generation of toddlers to take advantage of this exceptionally wonderful line of merchandise. Cheers, Zander.

Note: Of course, a precisely correct prediction is not the point, but it's not a bad idea to think about it. So, a baby born today would most likely be 'Class of 02029' in the U.S. (a calculator to help the confused). In Australia, where the calendar year is in sync with the school year, you'd add 17 or 18, depending on your state's convention, to the year of birth.

(Thanks Sara, Mike and Andrew!)

Immaculate extinction

Another gorgeous post-people sunset at London's Tower Bridge
Image: Chris Stocker for BBC Focus #191, July 02008

"What if we all vanished overnight?" That's the question posed in the current edition of BBC Focus magazine ("The world's best science and technology monthly") in its cover story about "Earth Without Man" (which inside, is labelled with the rather more PC, less portentous "Earth Without Us"). Written by sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, the article offers, garnished with a few words about London for the British audience, a generic account of the post-human trajectory with which readers may already be familiar, if not from Alan Weisman's World Without Us, then perhaps from either of the two identically-themed TV programs that have appeared on screens so far this year.

We have visited this topic before at t.s.f. Back in January, I posted Mondolithic's imaginative renderings of New York City succumbing to the march of time in the absence of human intervention. The only distinctively British visual accompaniment to this BBC magazine story was the one on the cover (see above), but it started me wondering whether others had perhaps been produced to adapt the post-humanity idea for a local audience.

An article in the tabloid Daily Mail included the following shots...

"Washed away: Harrods, London's premier department store, rots among derelict double-decker buses in flood waters caused by the bursting of the Thames barrier"
Image: Life After People (via Daily Mail)

"Crown and out: Buckingham Palace sinks into decay"
Image: Life After People (via Daily Mail)

...which turn out to be culled from a filmmaking effort to turn this oddly popular thought experiment into a feature-length thriller.

Life After People screened on Channel 4 in the UK, but was produced for the History Channel in the US. I watched it online this week, via a low-resolution, though adequate, version archived at Google video.

I'll start with what I liked about it. It's great that the History Channel can take a sufficiently broad view of history and documentary (both of which are, often enough, pretty ponderous enterprises) to carry out quite a fanciful, extended thought experiment in prime time. It seemed that by far the majority of shots were dreamed up from nothing, and a lot of the CG visuals were pretty cool, up to a point.

But on the whole I found it an overblown and self-important excuse for a bunch of thunderous effects, more or less on a par with The Day After Tomorrow. So much sound and fury, even after the last poor player has quit the stage. Percussive action-thriller music and smarmy narration were incessant. A sample from the script, to be intoned in a gravelly American movie-preview voice: FIVE YEARS AFTER PEOPLE, THE ROADS OF THE WORLD ARE DISAPPEARING BENEATH A GREEN MAT THAT SPREADS LIKE SOME RELENTLESS MONSTER. THE ADVANCE OF NATURE KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES. The topic appeared to serve mainly as a pretext for animated sequences looking at how cities, particularly U.S. cities, and even more particularly U.S. cities with towering iconic structures that look good collapsing in slow motion from various angles, would fare. By the end of an hour and a half, frankly, it was wearing thin.

The National Geographic Channel's tilt at the same premise, Aftermath: Population Zero (which can also be found online, posted in five parts by a thoughtful netizen) is less tabloid, attempts to spend approximately equal time destroying U.S. and European capitals, and divides attention more evenly between the ecological and engineering aspects of the post-people scenario. It also doesn't feature talking heads, which in Life After People are handled with utmost cheese by zapping interviewees in and out of the frame -- see how they disappear! Playing to a traditional NatGeo strength, Aftermath also illustrates the reassertion of non-human ecology with some cleverly orchestrated predator-prey scenes.

Image: Post-something London
as imagined in Aftermath: Population Zero (National Geographic Channel)

So, what are we to make of all this?

I'm tempted to take back my earlier, perhaps too-optimistic notion that the spate of interest in post-human Earth could be seen as "positive evidence of a sort of coming of age". While this could still be the case, the way the subject is handled in these TV movies lends rather more weight to the unflattering alternative, that "we're narcissistically obsessed with our own demise".

But it's an interestingly empty demise: we all suddenly, a propos of nothing, ascend into heaven? This conceit of the impromptu disappearance of the entire human race, with everything else remaining untouched, is a telling piece of fantasy, I think. In Australia some years ago, there was a non-alcoholic beverage called Claytons, marketed as "the drink you have when you're not having a drink". Here we have Claytons eschatology: the idle contemplation of the end times that you engage in when you're not up for considering genuinely frightening possible futures. It's an apocalypse the whole family can enjoy. Velvet Revelations. An immaculate extinction.

Last week on BBC World News, I caught a report [video] highlighting the massive reliance of the U.K. economy on imported Chinese goods. The point was illustrated graphically by several shots panning across a typical home, wherein they magically zapped out all the household items originating in China. Without them, things looked pretty bare. Now, you wouldn't take that experiment as evidence that, without China, we would literally have next to nothing in our homes. Historically, things would develop elsewise; we might be doing without certain items, while making other things ourselves, or importing them from elsewhere. But the point was simply to dramatise, visually, how reliant we presently are on one exporting giant by taking its products out of the picture.

The two films in question could, similarly, be explained on the basis that they're not intended to be read literally, but simply to show, by simulating our absence, how much impact humanity has upon the world. Fair enough. But the thought experiment about what "could (however qualified) happen" is prone to being misinterpreted as "coming soon". Many futurists I know make a distinction between a forecast (tentative if-then statement) and prediction (confident assertion about what will occur), but as sensible as this may be, such distinctions tend to get lost in public fora. The Daily Mail headline introducing images produced for Life After People: "Revealed: what the world will look like when we've gone".

A counterfactual "how the world could look if humans had never existed" would presumably be equally effective for the purpose of illustrating, by subtraction, our collective impact: but by starting from the present day, the films invite being (mis)understood as a possible, or even probable, future.

The emphasis on spectacle also helps put to rest suspicions that they can be expected to substantially improve scenaric thinking. Going back to our China products example; suppose the roof had been held up by Chinese-made dry wall; the news segment might have been a lot more dramatic had the walls vanished so the house caved in. That approach isn't far off the one adopted in Life After People and Aftermath: taking an absurd premise -- instantaneous, cause-free disappearance of humans -- to its (il)logical, if spectacular, conclusion. It would be disingenuous to claim that we're merely being given an creative, accessible depiction of human impact on the world: we're also getting Armageddon Lite.

And, it's worth noting that Life After People was apparently the most successful broadcast ever for the History Channel: 5.4 million viewers watched the show in January (Washington Post).

It is not trivial, I think, to wonder about the refusal to posit a mechanism, in both films, by which the disappearance could happen. It is certainly not because we lack the means to destroy ourselves -- for evidence to the contrary, Baxter's article refers the curious to Nick Bostrum's veritable catalogue of existential threats. Of course, I understand the spirit of the experiment, that the story is not supposed to be about those threats; we are asked simply to grant the assumption and see what follows. But why should we? That elides too neatly the single most important thing about the prospect of human extinction -- that it's almost certain to be our own damn fault. And, arguably the second-most important thing about it, too -- that it would in all likelihood be neither instantaneous nor painless.

One of the possible criticisms of Children of Men, a near-future feature film praised at this blog not long ago, was that the backdrop of the story (worldwide infertility) was never explained in the film. Still, the movie worked wonderfully as a document of, and metaphor addressing, an epochal confidence crisis -- today's -- and its emotional plausibility is preserved partly because that plot mechanism, which isn't the point of the story, is deliberately denied rational scrutiny. That film unflinchingly showed how people's lives might play out under such circumstances, and it's a profoundly human piece of storytelling.

For another comparison, I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and if you can get into the mannered prose, you find an intensely atmospheric description of what it could be like in a hellish -- drastically diminished, close to post-human(e) -- world. Children of Men and The Road both come from a kind of "last man standing" genre of apocalyptica; in contrast, I appreciate the (rapidly diminishing) novelty of the no-more-people-whatsoever approach, but I'm wondering to what kinds of useful conclusions it leads, vis-a-vis present action. Because Life After People and Aftermath entirely avoid the biggest questions they raise: Life after people why? Aftermath of what? The fact that they do so deliberately and up-front hardly makes it any less of an omission. Who, literally, could give a damn what happens to the world's landmarks 300 years, or 10,000, after the last of the landmarkers has departed? It's a matter of profound -- no, towering -- unimportance. We all disappear, without cause or human consequences, then our toys slowly fade away too. So what?

Meanwhile, the starting point of these explorations, namely, humanity suddenly ending its tenure on this planet, is -- when considered as genuine future-historic potential -- surely the ultimate tragedy in the fullest sense of both those words. By tragedy I don't mean simply "very sad occurrence" (there's plenty of room to doubt that), but the Aristotelian arc; a protagonist's dramatic reversal of fortune from triumph to downfall, brought about by a persistent characteristic that turns from strength to fatal flaw.

In other words, it's a hell of a story. These films have found a roundabout way of raising the topic in polite society, without confronting the central issue. And it's terrifically difficult, I suppose, to address such grandiose possibilities without being, or at least seeming, either pathetically self-congratulatory (the cockroaches will miss us) or misanthropic (good riddance). Yet there's an inescapable air of the masturbatory about this no-more-people genre -- as a thoughtful Washington Post article on the phenomenal popularity of the post-people line of products put it: "there's the unstated human ego at work here, navel-gazing and overstating our importance."

However much they have in common, though, these two films are not interchangeable, and they're both worth a look. One of the differences between the pair is that Aftermath, where Life After People goes for the Jerry Bruckheimer jugular, has a somewhat more meditative element to it. The concluding, salutary sentiment is as follows: "Earth is resilient. In time, it cleaned up every mess we left behind. All we had to do was get out of the way."

Hmm. What "getting out of the way" might entail -- not as a magical fait accompli, but as a voluntary process engaged over time -- could make an interesting premise for a film.

Or a civilisation.

Posthuman New York

"If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."
~Jonas Salk (attrib. by Sir Ken Robinson, TED, Monterey, February 02006)

2 days: New York City subway system floods
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

2-4 years: Weed covered streets cave in
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

300 years: New York's suspension bridges have fallen
Timeline: Scientific American Image: Mondolithic

Image: Mondolithic

Wending its way to me through the US Postal Service as I type is Alan Weisman's 02007 book The World Without Us, described by Bill McKibben (quoted in a spooky animated intro to the book's website) as "one of the grandest thought experiments of our time" -- in principle, right up the proverbial alley of the sceptical futuryst.

The book imagines "what would happen if the human species were suddenly extinguished [...] a sort of pop-science ghost story, in which the whole earth is the haunted house" (from a New Yorker review extracted at Amazon). When I first heard about it, I assumed for some reason that it was a picture book, which turns out not to be the case. But these days a compelling bit of apocalyptic fantasy doesn't seem to be confined to text for long, and in July 02007, an interview with Weisman appeared in Scientific American accompanied by a series of illustrations envisaging the gradual decay of New York City. These were produced by Mondolithic Studios, an illustration and design firm in Vancouver with a strong record in futuristic and science fiction imagery.

On the basis of this work, report the artists, an additional image along the same lines was commissioned by Expresso magazine in Lisbon, Portugal, depicting the city's 25 de Abril Bridge, to lend local flavour to their coverage (see below). It was incorporated into a slideshow at the magazine's website posted 26 October 02007 (and featuring the theme from Blade Runner as background music!)

Lisboa e a ponte 25 de Abril vistas de Almada, 300 anos depois
Image: Mondolithic

I'm fascinated to learn that a feature film adaptation of The World Without Us is in the works, slated for release in 02009 (there's a pdf prospectus at the book's website). It's being scripted by Michel Fessler (March of the Penguins) and directed by Jacques Malaterre, who made a three-part documentary series called A Species' Odyssey (review) about the evolution of humanity.

I'll reserve judgment on all this until I actually get a chance to read the book, but I want to say I find The World Without Us phenomenon interesting for two reasons.

The first is the fact that this "thought experiment", though initiated in text, simply begs to be manifested visually. Regular readers of t.s.f. will be thoroughly unsurprised that I see here an example of my usual contention; that good quality futures thinking wants to be more visual and visceral than it has been hitherto. This is the way to get through to people. I hope, of course, that the film version manages to deliver on the tantalising promise suggested by these eerily beautiful images dreamed up by the artists at Mondolithic. What impact the film might have, if any, I can't really say anything meaningful about for now.

The second point I want to make -- as much a bookmark for my own future reference as anything -- is that, while addressing what may seem a rather morbid theme, its popularity suggests a resonance with what I see as our contemporary mood of pop existentialism, associated with big-picture threats such as climate change. (The book has spent several months on the NY Times best seller list, and is currently #25.) I can't do justice to this line of thought here, but in short (and contrary to the pejorative reading it may invite -- "we're narcissistically obsessed with our own demise"), I wonder if this couldn't more helpfully be regarded as positive evidence of a sort of coming of age. There may be, it seems to me, a long delayed and long denied -- especially in callow Western culture -- collective realisation of our species' mortality, akin to the experience each of us has in our childhood or youth of awakening to the prospect of our own death, out there on the horizon. It's the same thing I think about when I consider Jared Diamond's bestselling book Collapse -- that these kinds of salutary thoughts are gaining currency might be seen as signs of emerging maturity.

Maybe.



(From the movie outline:)

Given the rapidly increasing human population and the phenomenal reach of our technologies, humankind has been become a real force of nature. Human activities have shaped our planet for better or for worse. We are involuntarily changing the climate; alerting, polluting and eradicating ecosystems; and driving evolution as other organisms struggle to adapt to a new human-made world. So, what if humankind suddenly vanished?

The Blog of the Long Now

I've recently started contributing to Long Views, the Long Now Foundation's weblog about long term thinking, art, and ideas. There you can find Stewart Brand's excellent summaries of the monthly Seminars About Long-Term Thinking, as well as other news and insights from what may the only organisation in the world specifically dedicated to fostering long-term responsibility.

My first few posts:
The Long You (3 July)
"The Iraq Gamble" (4 July)
Catastrophe a good bet? (6 July)
Slow Art (9 July)

Like the above, future posts from me are likely to revolve mainly around the Long Bets project (my current focus as Research Fellow at Long Now), and media, notably Long Shorts -- films exemplifying long-term thinking or a longer perspective.

If they buy in, are you selling out?

While at The Long Now, I had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues there about the curious nature of the organisation's mission, which is to encourage long-term thinking and responsibility. There aren't too many places with such a bold, and yet abstract underlying goal. The long and the short of it was, we agreed, that we were ultimately in the business of marketing a way of thinking -- about time, change, history, responsibility, and other things.

Now, consider the conventional understanding of what marketing is and does. It tends to begin with a product (a dish soap, a pair of jeans, a drink, a make of car...) and the marketing aim for the company producing it is to figure out a strategy for associating a way of thinking, behaving, looking and so on, which taps into what people want, so they'll decide to buy the product as a result of their attraction to the associated image. This much is basic, even trite knowledge, in that field.

But what happens when you invert or reverse that process? When you start with a desire to promote a way of thinking, rather than a physical product? This is the situation at The Long Now Foundation (re. long-term thinking) and certainly, at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, we have a similar aim (re. pluralistic, alternative futures thinking). Here the challenge might be seen as how to embody that thinking in a product, how to make it tangible or real to people, how to give them something to buy, touch, do, experience -- which both expresses and elicits that kind of thinking. This is what the Clock of the Long Now does (as an article in today's San Francisco Chronicle explains). This is also what, in a sense, what we've been doing at HRCFS through our efforts to develop experiential scenarios -- watch this space for more on that -- and futures audio tours; trying to make futures thinking compelling to people, with something they can really get their teeth into. Concretising an abstraction, if you will, rather than abstracting from the concrete; or inventing a product to promote a message, instead of the other way around.

Now, in today's New York Times Magazine, there was an interesting article entitled "The Brand Underground", by Rob Walker, focusing on the current phenomenon of sometimes highly profitable and prestigious microbrands, typically founded by trendsetting twentysomethings who regard themselves as anti-corporate, even while embracing the practice of making and selling products (notably, but not exclusively, clever t-shirts).

These enterprises can be seen as Internet-commerce-era answers to the question, phrased by Walker: "How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?" Which we could easily paraphrase as, "How can I make a living doing what I care about?" or "How can a live a life in harmony with my values?" A central question for anyone who cares to examine the life they lead.

Some quotes from the article:

One reason an underground brand sounds nonsensical is that countercultures are supposed to oppose the mainstream, and nothing is more mainstream than consumerism. But we no longer live in a world of the Mainstream and the Counterculture. We live in a world of multiple mainstreams and countless counter-, sub- and counter-sub-cultures.

[M]ost of us think of branding as a thoroughly mainstream practice: huge companies buying advertising time during the Super Bowl to shout their trademarked names at us is pretty much the opposite of authentic or edgy expression. But branding is more complicated than that. It is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

Of course, companies don't go into business in order to express a particular worldview and then gin up a product to make their point. Corporate branding is a function of the profit motive.

Many of [the microbranders] clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.

For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.

Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.

This is the quintessence of the postmodern brand rebel, hopscotching the minefield of creativity and commerce, recognizing the categorization, satirizing it, embracing it and commoditizing it all at once.

When [one such entrepreneur] declares that his project is part of a "revolution against branding," what he really means is not the snuffing out of commercial expression but an elevation of it.

Even in a world where the mainstream is less than monolithic, every subculture sooner or later has to reconcile itself with the larger cultural forces around it.

The author dwells on the apparent paradox of advancing a counterculture, or at any rate a self-consciously mainstream-rejecting subculture, through so thoroughly a conventional avenue as branding. And he makes a good point, for there is surely there a risk of compromising certain values the business ostensibly intends to represent. (That's got to be a risk, if you happen to regard corporate identity-building, and particularly, the commodification of dissent, as problems.)

And frankly, I'm not particularly interested in or compelled by the worldviews of a bunch of t-shirt jockeys. Although some of them may have really deep messages to convey, my feeling is that were he alive today, strangely enough the t-shirt might not have been Voltaire's chosen medium. The bigger question resonating beneath all this is, for me, where ought any serious challenger of the prevailing paradigm to begin -- completely outside the box, and let the box come to you; or is it better to work for your hoped-for changes from within the existing framework, using its structures, living on its dime? Here's a fundamental dilemma for anyone interested in promoting social change, or even thought about social change. Do you try to beat them outright, or do you join them, in the hope of beating them from the inside? To use the tools of a morally bankrupt money-driven corporate culture to comment subversively on that culture; is that knowingly postmodern ironic genius, or just selling out?

Depends on what you're trying to challenge, of course. But it's a basic dilemma if you're interested in having people entertain the possibility of deeper, longer stories of the future that go beyond corporate and capitalistic models concordant with prevailing assumptions and social arrangements. You don't have to have a single-minded prior ideological commitment to bringing down the system no matter what (I don't) in order to see the tremendous value in being capable of perceiving its dimensions and tendencies, and questioning its longevity, usefulness, and ultimate worth (I do). But who will pay you to think about problems, or solutions to problems, that don't yet exist, and might never exist? Who will pay today for you to entertain doubts about the "hard realities" of nation states, corporations, and other well established interests?

Such are the bigger questions about the commercial viability of "critical futures" that I've struggled with, and that this article touched off in my mind. For to speak of the commercial viability of an idea, is another way of talking about whether you can survive while living out its values.

A good friend of mine insists that money is the best measure of someone's commitment to something. Words are cheap, he would say, but when a person pays for something -- ah, you know they really value it, you find out what it's worth to them. His reasoning in this area leads him to the conclusion that an enterprise that can't turn a profit is, by definition, not valuable, not worthwhile.

I have a problem with that. It seems to me that the "messages" of foresight and long-term thinking being "marketed", so to speak, by organisations such as The Long Now Foundation and the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, are something like the advice of a wise older relative to a headstrong teen. It may not be seen as useful (may in fact be largely perceived as irritating and irrelevant) at the time, and might take a while to sink in; but eventually its value will become apparent. The fact that long-term or divergent futures thinking is not universally recognised as useful right now does not preclude it from planting seeds that may germinate and bear fruit in due course.

(Incidentally, I would have liked to make the above point without the patronising tone suggested by this old-young analogy; but I can't. I think a culture, corporate or otherwise, that rejects foresight, is actually immature, and will probably have to learn the hard way that the assumptions propping up its current interests and successes are not set in stone.)

Meanwhile, we continue to search for ways to embody and concretise those messages, and to make the long-term value we're betting on, capable of being appreciated, and thus acted upon, and to some modest extent rewarded, today. Wisdom has probably always been a tough sell, but it's no less valuable because of that.

Why the language of design must enter law and politics (part two)

/Continued from a previous post.../

In law school, the first class I ever took was called Torts and the Process of Law. We were introduced to the arcana of "legal storytelling" (my term, not theirs) in which episodes of people's lives -- usually horrific, depressing, or bizarre, or some interesting combination of those three -- were boiled down, and their legal essence extracted for infusion into the body of common law. These are anecdotes with teeth: the moral of every legal story is its ratio decidendi, whose binding authority carries on down through years, decades or centuries of later cases. The 01932 case, Donoghue v. Stevenson, is one that stands out in memory. It was a landmark in the development of the tort of negligence, about a ginger ale bottle with a snail in it, which was served to a woman in 01928 and led her to experience a nasty bout of gastroenteritis. The key legal concept here, and countless others since, was that of "duty of care": a person will owe a duty of care not to injure those who it can be reasonably foreseen would be affected by their acts or omissions.

Now, this principle is well and good for products, like snail-containing soda bottles, which have a specific provenance, because any adverse consequences are traceable back to the source. This legal mechanism, the tort of negligence, can serve as useful negative feedback to make amends for and rectify negligently designed products, or manufacturing processes. But what about at a larger scale? What about legal or political systems themselves, and their emergent properties, their systemic consequences? There, it's difficult to hold anyone accountable, even in theory, let alone in a court of law.

Take war, for example. Trying to hold a specific government to account for the massive damage sustained in a military encounter, or the specific consequences for one person, family or even a whole group of people, is one strategy. And it's a strategy that some, understandably, seem very keen to adopt. But, whatever the merits of the argument against (say, the US administration's present entanglements in Iraq) might be; through the macroscope, this rather appears to miss the point, like the drunk who lost his keys in the dark but searched for them under the streetlight because the visibility was better. This government, like many others, is simply acting out what it is in its nature to do. (Of course, the governments themselves in any given conflict blame each other; but it's the logic of the pattern that's the problem, not so much the logic of the participants, which takes on the aura of inevitability once it's in train.) The key is not, then, ultimately to be found under the light of apparent motives, it's in the shadows -- of structure and the broad sweep of history -- where we don't usually think to look. The proximate reasons (of contemporary circumstance) are less significant than the ultimate ones (of big-picture history).

Cambridge law professor Philip Allott once gave an address in 01999, during NATO's bout with Serbia over Kosovo. (The paper, which I believe was called "Kosovo: A psycho-philosophical deduction", was unpublished, and I'm relying on memory of a handout my colleague obtained at the event, so some of the details may be off.) In any case, Allott's analysis of the situation was sobering. Looking past the details of that particular conflict, he was able to see it as "merely" another tragic entry on the extensive, ever-growing list of destructive military engagements dating back centuries, in which the interests of people as people are subjugated to those of an abstract political entity or goal. In short, he regarded Kosovo as a manifest instance, or symptom, of an international system-wide case of macropsychotic behaviour. Now, this concept does not appear to have caught on (I've checked several times, and down to today no variation of this term has never returned a single google hit, though that really ought to change).

To illustrate; George Orwell, in a 01941 essay entitled "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (see this collection, p. 56), may be cited in support of Allott's view of this decidedly odd situation -- in which we humans repeatedly find ourselves -- wherein apparently rational individuals can make decisions which are rational in the narrow context of their circumstances, but whose net effect is a pattern of mutual destruction that is decidedly sick.

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are "only doing their duty", as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.

On cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty.

Can we imagine designing a way out of this trap? Seems like a worthy project, I feel. In my opinion, Allott's take on this is compelling, and its implication for the discussion at hand is this: macropsychosis requires macrotherapy. What would that large-scale, systemic solution look like? I don't have a definitive answer to that, but I'm pretty sure it's the right kind of starting point.

Turning to a more current example, at John Rendon's talk for The Long Now Foundation on 15 July, "Long term policy to make the war on terror short", I posed the following question: At some point in the future, the concept of America's national interest, or indeed any national interest, evaporates into absurdity. How can we govern for that timeframe? Rendon's obtuse answer suggested either that what I had asked was unclear, or that he had missed the point (or both). In any case, this to me is one of the design questions that we would do well to apply in our rethinking of the political process; not just in one country, but in any, or all of them. How ought we to govern for the long term?

It is abundantly clear that current political arrangements virtually preclude the consideration of long term consequences. Rendon called it "the tyranny of real time". His presentation (controversial as it may have been, and whatever suspicions motivated vocal interruptions from a handful of audience members) was essentially a plea from a strategic insider for the audience members themselves to explore and encourage governance and policy for the long term, a mindspace that appeared all but impossible to broach, for him and his colleagues, and others like them. Now, the fact that he offered his time, and his neck, to the audience, was admirable -- he was bold and honest enough to identify and attempt to address this structural limitation -- although he may not have done so to the satisfaction of all concerned. I think it's this limitation which encapsulates the essential challenge for redesigning governance; that is, law and politics, in our time.

Stewart Brand, who moderated that discussion with John Rendon, once wrote what can be read as one of the founding statements for the Long Now:

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.

The Long Now's 10,000-year clock is the mechanism and myth at the heart of a mind bogglingly ambitious attempt to correct, or at least to begin to mitigate, a problem that is admittedly vast in scope -- it's civilisation-wide. It therefore represents the beginnings of a monumental effort to provide cultural reprogramming; macrotherapy. But at some point sooner or later, this species of inspirational culture-level intervention must, it seems to me, get down to brass tacks and lead to a tangible change in system parameters. A Clock of the Long Now is one thing. But can anyone imagine the institutional blueprint for a Politics of the Long Now?


/To be continued in part three.../

On the scalability of small opportunities

I have been thinking recently about the mindblowingly complex issue of how to usefully map possibility space (the hyperdimensional expanse representing all the theoretical states things could take -- the way things could be -- through which we weave an infinitesimally narrow thread of lived reality by a combination of chance events and decisions). Yes, it's a tricky one.

But an interesting insight has arisen around the way unexpected "windows of opportunity" are made and used through the confluence of emerging technological affordances and good old fashioned ingenuity.

There are two nice examples which might help firm up this rather woolly notion. Both revolve around the time-honoured obsession with getting rich.

There are, presumably, many ways to make a million bucks. I spend considerably less time than I probably should exploring what those ways are, and like most people, considerably more of my time blundering across far less lucrative terrain. (Being a malnourished student, in fact, it's arguably more a matter of progressively discovering just how broad, wide and apparently inescapable the intersecting possibility spaces of poverty, chastity, and despair can be.) But there are others who have been emboldened and empowered by the increasing, vastly interconnected pools of supply and demand online; to great effect.

So the first example is of a young man in England who seized upon the clever notion of selling one million pixels of advertising space at one dollar each, with a view to funding his undergraduate studies in business management. (As far as I can tell, this is his own original idea, and although one might imagine it would be difficult to pull off more than once, that has not apparently deterred others from borrowing the business model: google million pixels for other examples.) Aesthetically, the product of this effort comes off like a Las Vegas nightmare. Conceptually, from a business point of view, however, it's sheer brilliance. The minimum purchase is a 10x10 block, costing $100, which is certainly rather small but is enough visually to serve as a practical, iconic hyperlink to the advertiser's website. The novelty is sufficiently great that people -- such as myself at this very moment -- catch themselves propagating the story for its sheer audacity, directing a widening audience back to the site, and thereby vindicating the whole scheme on the basis of increased returns via the Internet attention economy.

The second example is of a guy from Canada who has, through a series of bartering encounters, traded up from a paperclip to -- so far -- a house in Saskatchewan, during a period of one year. This progressive scavenger-hunt up the value chain has a touch of inspired lunacy about it which appeals to me a great deal.

Both of these Internet microbusinesses depend on the playfulness and novelty of the ideas, and on the disproportionate levels of attention that they have consequently been able to garner. There's a kitsch, Warholesque "fifteen minutes of fame" aura around the tales of both these entrepreneurial individuals -- but they're getting where they want to go, and everyone seems to be enjoying it, so more power to them.

What's interesting here is the fact that from humble beginnings, these ambitious one-man business propositions, buttressed and fuelled by media attention, have been able to connect their founders to sufficiently large audiences that the former has sold a million in pixels to several hundred advertisers (perhaps several thousand, I didn't count), and the latter has substantially increased the return on his investment through a series of "right trades" upward along the value chain. (Lots of little payoffs: get rich slow.)

So yes, perhaps their time could have been better spent in some respects, but that's not the point: these stories are groaning with the freight of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Internet culture. Spotting the right opportunity has long been a key to wealth, fame and fortune. The echo chamber of new media opens up large-scale successes to small-scale ideas. Of course, the postmodern kicker in all this is that what they're really selling is their own unlikely success stories, and by attending to them we make them happen, like clockwork. Attention is where the money is: tell a compelling story -- the story of the story you're telling -- and your fifteen minutes of fame could reward you handsomely. Which, to me, underlines that perhaps the most powerful elements in navigating our possibility space are the (distinctly analog) stories we tell ourselves about where we've come from, where we are, and where we want to go next.

Product to service: a cultural shift?

A few months back, when the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies did a small project for the South Korean government on construction and transportation, I was put in mind of a service I'd heard about in London, involving pay-as-you-go access to cars scattered around the city (sort of halfway between a taxi service and car rental, but automated). I didn't know the business name then, and couldn't locate a reference, but today I stumbled across a neat link on it. Arguably, this exemplifies a trend from ownership to access (or products-->services). Why own something outright if a more limited arrangement will suffice?

Another, deeper way this trend manifests, I'd say, is in the Bill McDonough-Michael Braungart (Cradle to Cradle, c.f. sustainability) concept of "products of service", whereby non-consumable, hard-wearing products like TVs, cars and carpets are seen as "rented" rather than bought from the manufacturer, which takes responsibility for the fate of those molecules when the product reaches the end of its life cycle. (Consider the European Union directives which apply this notion of producer reponsibility to products including vehicles and electronic goods.)

If this represents a taking of greater responsibility for, or internalisation of, what economists used to be pleased to call "externalities", could it, in turn, be seen to speak of a gradual deepening in our understanding of time? (The "longer now"; a tendency toward what we could call "temporal holism" -- and applaud.)

Let's see: there may be interesting higher-order implications here... On realising that physical products, and the consequences of manufacturing them, outlast their human "owners" by many, many generations, the traditional conception of ownership comes to seem a rather absurd conceit. Life's short! A quote from the film Crocodile Dundee (01986, dir. Peter Faiman): "See those rocks sitting up there? Been standing there for six hundred years. Still be there when you and I are gone. So arguing over who owns 'em is like a couple of fleas arguing over who owns the dog they're living on." (See also this post about The Rocks video which makes more or less the same point.)

Optimistically, then, perhaps our callow Western civilisation is edging towards recognition of the wisdom of what I understand to be the Australian Aboriginal relationship to land -- that people belong to it, not the other way around. Granted, this kind of radical inversion of current "common sense" may seem a far cry from D.I.Y. car rental -- but in light of the above, we could venture to say that they may be not so far apart after all.

Prediction will eat itself

Since early May, I have been working with the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking and responsibility, as research fellow on the Long Bets project. Long Bets is based on an ingenious, simple idea. If people want to make predictions about matters of long-term social or scientific importance, let them put their money where their mouth is. Stakes placed on bets, involving two contrary views of the future running head to head, are held in a long term investment fund, and when the matter is settled, perhaps years, decades or more down the track, the money goes to the winner's chosen charity. Money is also put up in support of predictions (one person's statement about the future, no opposing view necessary), which goes towards maintaining the service. The point is that all this behooves participants to think carefully about how posterity will judge their prognostications, and their audience benefits from the availability of relatively well thought-out, succinct supporting arguments.

Four years after the project was launched, the key to what I've been trying to do at Long Now recently is to take what is clearly a long-standing human interest in prophecy -- call it a predilection for prediction -- and leverage it into a more complex and nuanced appreciation of multiple possibilities. (Hence my preferred title for the field I'm in: futures. The "s" is for plurality, multiplicity, unpredictability. This condition is what makes choice possible.) Why would I want to do a thing like that? Because I believe prediction, without more, to be an inherently limited, and often erroneous, if not dangerous, stance towards the future.

A London Financial Times article (subscription required) was sent around at Long Now by Board of Directors member Peter Schwartz last week, on a recent book called Expert Political Judgment. Author Philip Tetlock is a psychologist "who has spent 20 years asking pundits to predict who will win elections, what countries will acquire nuclear weapons or enter the European Union and how the first Gulf war would end. He has tested 30,000 predictions from 300 experts against outcomes. Mr Tetlock finds that his respondents are not very good. They do better than a chimp who answers at random, but not much, and worse than simple forecasting rules based on extrapolation" (John Kay, "The world needs more foxes and fewer hedgehogs", Financial Times, 20 June 02006; see also this excellent review of Tetlock's book by Louis Menand, "Everybody's an Expert", The New Yorker, 5 December 02005).

For those who expect the future to be predictable, assuming that in principle it can be known but that they simply don't quite have the expertise, tools or funding to get at it, this conclusion may come as a surprise. GBN's Jay Ogilvy has made the point well: "modern planners have often assumed that, with enough Enlightenment science in the budget, the future can be predicted and/or controlled. Scenario planning is based on a contrary assumption, that the future cannot be predicted..." (Creating Better Futures, 02002, p. 12). And it's not just "modern planners" who hold this mistaken view; in my experience it's far more widespread than that. Yet, for many of the things that are most important to us -- social, human-level things like our families, communities, workplaces, and countries -- the future is in principle and by definition unpredictable; partly because the predictions themselves feed into the change process.

Tetlock's findings, which indicate that even experts aren't much good at prediction -- that those who ostensibly know the future best, in fact know no more than the rest of us -- are, however, very much in accord with one of the main lessons taught by a long-time academic futurist, Professor Jim Dator at the Hawaii futures program, where I study. Dator's First Law of the Future is, "The future" cannot be "predicted" because "the future" does not exist.

Now, if you're convinced that the future is predictable, you're not going to change your mind here (...I, er, expect). Fine. But stay with me for a moment. Assuming for the sake of argument the basic contention here is sound, what would this mean for Long Bets, and predictive discourse generally? Based on many, many conversations I've had on this point, at this stage quite a few people start to wonder what the hell is going on with a self-proclaimed futurist who believes there's no future to study. As well they may. What we look at, since the future itself is perpetually unavailable for comment, is images of the future. These are the beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, intentions, fantasies, expectations and, yes, actual images of one sort or another, that people carry around in their heads, and express in their art, stories, and above all their decisions; thereby bringing "the future" into being from among the countless possible futures that might have been. Returning to the question above, what this means for predictive discourse is that predictions can make a useful, interesting point of access into futures-oriented discussion (constituting, as they do, a major example of images of the future, albeit a conspicuously overconfident variety). It also means that predictions should not be mistaken for statements of fact about things that have not happened yet. Simply put, what people predict is a useful guide to what they believe and how they plan to act, but one of the dangers of prediction is that, while you're arguing over what the future will be, you're missing the more important discussion about what it could be, and other people may be making the crucial decisions without you.

What this means for Long Bets, as I see it, is that there's an important challenge in diverting some proportion of the prodigious amount of energy that people seem to devote to figuring out what the future "will be", and redirecting it into the exploration, invention and pursuit of what they would like it to be. Dator again: "The point is not to try to predict a better future, but to strive to create one." Similarly, sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling once said in an interview, "Future is not a noun, it's a verb." Long Bets version 2.0 should, then, be a useful broad-based resource featuring all sorts of different images (predictive expectations) of the future, which at first exploits the apparently timeless allure of "the future will be thus and so", but which deepens the discussion unexpectedly and problematises the predictive stance. People may come expecting a noun, but will end up getting verbed.

Wish you were now

FutureMe.org allows you to send yourself a letter to the future; an email to be delivered at some specific date up to 30 years ahead -- a bit of friendly advice from the past, a reminder, an announcement, an impassioned soliloquy, or whatever. It's a pretty nifty -- and incredibly simple -- communicative time capsule. You get exactly what you wrote (fidelity) and don't have to remember to do anything about it it (autonomy). A nice added feature on the site -- again, ludicrously simple -- is that you can opt either to make your message wholly private, or public but anonymous. So any of the public entries are available to browse, which is really interesting. Some examples I encountered at random:


Dear FutureMe,
This is a crude example of time travel
(written Sat Dec 31, 02005, sent Sun Feb 19, 02006)
--
Dear Princess Diana (FutureMe),
On this day, August 23, 2009, it's your 27th birthday. I'm sure you are happy and satisfied with what the good Lord has given you. . . . Your youngest brother is in college. You, look at yourself, you are so beautiful and long-haired lady now. Strive hard to take care for your family and be a good wife and mother someday. I love you and God bless... keep smiling!
Your past self(December 19, 02005)
--
Dear FutureMe,
Hey. What's up? This is the furthest I could send this right now. I wonder what things are like in the future while you are reading this. It really crazy that i at 18 can send this to you, who is really me at 48. 30 years in the future. Can you even beleive that you made it this far. Fuckin nuts isnt it.
(written Fri Mar 24, 02006, to be delivered Wed Dec 31, 02036)
--
Hola! It's You here, from "the past". . . . Anyway, you need to play the lottery from time to time. I have 2 sets of numbers scheduled for a fututre delivery to you. When you get these numbers in this future message, play them on the very next / upcoming drawing. Write them down & put them in your wallet, & make another copy or 2, & put them in other safe places. Then, on occasion, schedule other future messages reminding you to play the numbers. Can you do this? This is an experiment. Unfortunately you can't message ME from the future, & send ME numbers back here in the past. THAT would rock! So we'll try it this way. When you get the numbers, play them.
(written Thu Jun 2, 02005, to be delivered Wed Sep 9, 02015)


I'm intrigued by the idea of communicating over long timespans. Especially with oneself, which adds a layer of existential depth that's playful and serious in equal measures.

This would be a useful pedagogical tool for futures classes; not just the exercise of figuring out what you might like to tell yourself at various times in the future, but also the chance it affords to see how others have thought about it. It's a kind of barometer for attitudes to the future at a personal level.

Of course, with the passage of time, spanners might be thrown into the works at either the receiving end (say, when your email address changes) or the sending end (in the form of a disruption to the service itself). See this December 02005 article from Forbes.com, which is conducting its own experiment in "e-mail time capsules", for further reflection on these kinds of issues. At FutureMe.org, if you sign up, you can update your destination email address, which lets you deal with the former problem and puts the ball back in their court to deal with the latter.

In any case, it's ingenious, and I like it a lot.

At this moment, on the site, a line at the bottom reports "282,607 letters written to the future and counting..." Drop yourself a line sometime.

Long-term thinking rocks

This short Oscar-nominated animation, The Rocks (Das Rad, Germany, 02003, dir. Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel & Heidi Wittlinger: official website; IMDB listing) recommended by my Long Now colleague Alexander Rose a few days ago, whimsically but ingeniously evokes thinking about the difference between time on a human scale, and a geological perspective.

Another perception-shifting exploration of scale, but with a spatial rather than temporal focus, is the classic film Powers of Ten (official website; interactive Java tutorial; Simpsons couch gag). I think I first saw it at an exhibition at the John Hancock Building in Chicago, in 01998. The bird's eye view of the city afforded by that impressive structure's observation deck -- or indeed any aerial view of almost anything -- has a more or less similar appeal to the systems-oriented mind. What Powers of Ten is uniquely able to do, even if it shows severe signs of age stylistically, is to take you from the microscopic to the macroscopic in a vertiginous, brilliantly simple eight minutes of film. It's also a great insight into the power of logarithmic scale.

There is tremendous beauty and endless intrigue in this, as I rediscovered after downloading Google Earth a few months ago -- couldn't stop exploring, skipping between places I've lived in and visited over the last ten years.

Explore and enjoy.