21st century divination

This video was shot right after a workshop, devised and run with experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, called New Divination Techniques for Generating Alternative Futures.

It was part of a large collective effort mounted by the international futures community late last year at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation).

The Global Futures Literacy Design Forum took place at the organisation's headquarters in Paris and consisted of more than two dozen "learning-by-doing labs" curated, organised and facilitated by top futures researchers, teachers and practitioners from Oxford to Jamaica.

The event was open to the public –– I'm not sure of the final number of attendees, but some 600 folks registered –– and was explicitly aimed at demonstrating, celebrating, and extending futures literacy humanity’s capacity to imagine and use the future(s) in all sorts of contexts, for all sorts of purposes.

I was also involved in another session; Imagination and Creativity: Gaming the Future of Migration and Climate Change together with my fellow futurists John Sweeney (Qazaq Research Institute for Futures Studies), Anisah Abdullah (Strathclyde Business School), and Daniel Riveong (Futures Centre).

Thanks to the head of futures literacy at UNESCO, Riel Miller, I've collaborated with the organisation several times before, and I was excited when he approached me last year about the Forum.

Its key objectives were institutional on the one hand and disciplinary on the other: "One is to prepare the ground for a UNESCO Ministerial Summit on Futures Literacy in late 2020 by showcasing and refining a range of already proven techniques for integrating Futures Literacy into government activities. Two is to build awareness and networking related to the development and diffusion of Futures Literacy."

Here's the description of the our workshop on 21st century divination techniques that appeared in the event catalogue:

One of the greatest human foibles is our ability to find patterns in just about anything, imagining that random phenomena carry meaning. Might that trait, technically known as apophenia, also be one of our greatest gifts? In this experimental workshop – prototyped especially for this occasion by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats and experiential futurist Stuart Candy – participants are invited to re-visit ancient modes of divination and also to devise some new ones. Simultaneously playing with and against tradition, our aim will not be convergence and prediction, but to generate new and diverse possibilities for action by collectively exploring and exploiting some of our most powerful psychological quirks.

A note of personal context here: legitimate futures/foresight practice is at times misunderstood as or unfairly conflated with a kind of charlatanry. I've generally aimed to avoid adding any fuel to that fire by eschewing anything that smacks of soothsaying –– tarot, tasseomancy, astrology, and so on (well... except for this one time at Burning Man, when I agreed to play the Oracle... but that's another story).

The low level of futures literacy in the population at large often finds people projecting trope-riddled preconceptions and prejudices about what a futurist's job entails, and particularly assumptions revolving around a misplaced obsession with prediction, and it's already challenging enough getting people to engage seriously in thinking about possible futures without playing into their most unflattering assumptions.

However, I recognise that it's also possible to protest too much, and get trapped by personal policies that can become too rigid. So when Jonathon, a superb conceptual artist, experimental philosopher and writer whose work I've admired for years, proposed a collaboration around exploring the possibilities for 21st century divinatory practices, the spirit of his curiosity –– avoiding wild-eyed faith on one side or blanket disapproval on the other –– got me interested. I took a step towards getting over a long-ingrained aversion. As he pointed out to me in one of our pre-event design conversations, the air of suspicion, and even demonisation, that attaches to these practices in post-enlightenment Western culture might usefully be taken as a cue not to avoid, but to be curious about, what we're collectively avoiding or denying.

Jonathon and I are currently working to bring the process to other participants in other locations, so I won't say too much here in terms of workshop detail, but I think it's worth adding, as COVID-19 spreads around the world, that even those of us who have spent decades helping to prepare organisations for inevitable surprises, are challenged to reckon with the question of how effective, or otherwise, our efforts have been.

It seems about time for a dramatic, collective rethink of how we engage with future possibilities.

The full catalogue of UNESCO's Global Futures Literacy Design Forum is available in English and in French, and a range of additional videos describing other programs at the event can be found here.

Related:
> Barbershop Futures
> Transforming the Future
> La Chose du Futur à Paris
> Where Do You Stand?
> Using the Future at NASA
> When Reality Outruns Imagination (Coral Cross)
> On Playing the Oracle: Foresight 101 at TEDx (video)

The weight of alternatives

Image via.

"History has not reached a stagnant end, nor is it triumphantly marching towards the radiant future. It is being catapulted into an unknown adventure."

- Edgar Morin

***

As the conclusion of the current U.S. election bears down on us, I find myself thinking about an aspect of foresight that doesn't seem to get a lot of attention: the weight of alternatives.

I'm not referring to something exotic about the futures profession, but something much more mundane and widespread, the experience we all have of facing uncertainty in life.

Keeping futures alive means a certain overhead or psychic cost, a subsistence level of care-and-feeding. If you have ever struggled to maintain a connection to the sense of a possibility associated with a job you've applied for, while institutional gears have creaked along for weeks or months, then you know what I am talking about.

Indeed, anyone who has striven to maintain hope in difficult circumstances is familiar with the burden. The greater the felt imperative that a future stay viable, the more it weighs.

This seems a bit different, somehow, from uncertainty's run-of-the-mill spiritual tax. It goes to the costs paid individually in activating or warding off particular critical possibilities.

The mental image this brings to me is a kind of archetypal fantasy-movie climax. It's the vision of some wizard exerting a herculean effort, fluorescent lightning fizzing from the fingertips, to keep open a portal to another dimension until the last critical moment, when the wave collapses and the hero, hopefully, makes good her escape/rescue/restoration of cosmic balance (or whatever).

That's pretty much exactly what it feels like to bear the weight of alternative futures. It comes into focus at some times more than others, but always takes significant human energy to escape the gravity of default settings. The further one's desires depart from the path of least resistance, the more psychic lightning one has to expend.

No doubt investment in imagination can pay off, but it is not without its costs, which may be unglamorous and unpleasant: sleeplessness, stress, depression.

As a case in point, for many at this moment; the internal battle to ward off the Trumpian dystopia threatening to bring tyranny to the United States and grim instability to the wider world (a probability put, at the time of writing, around 25%).

So I do wonder at times if our well-meaning professional arguments for pluralising the future take the human weight of alternatives seriously enough. In this light, declining to take on the burden of alternatives, as many seem to do by insisting on just one possible future, may be an understandable strategy of avoidance.

Keeping possibilities alive within us requires sustained and sometimes heroic effort.

It calls also for self-care, a regard to the personal and internal costs of waging battle with cosmic forces. Even wizards need time to recharge.

Related:
> Investment in imagination (Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise)
> Journalism from the future
> If women ruled the world
> Questioning hyperopia
> Think about it
> The act of imagination
> Stumbling on foresight

Apocalypse for one

Image via.

"If the world ended tomorrow, would you be happy with how you've lived your life?" 

A recent program by British hypnotist and television personality Derren Brown recently made this question the basis for an immersive experience created to convince one individual that the end of the world as we know it had arrived.

Twenty-one year-old self-confessed layabout Steven Brosnan was, unbeknownst to him, selected from among thousands of candidates, primed over several weeks for the outlandish scenario about to unfold, and then thrust into a calculatedly harrowing experience designed to teach him to really value his life. The whole thing was then broadcast on national television in the UK as a two-part special.

A consummate showman, Brown has created a number of ingenious made-for-TV experiments before. Three in particular were previously recommended to me with great enthusiasm - The Heist, The System, and Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette Live - by my friend Jane McGonigal, a designer of what (a few years ago were called) alternate reality games. ARGs are (were?) a class of interactive role-play to which the nifty transmedia narrative stunt at hand bears more than a passing resemblance.

Derren Brown: Apocalypse designs a complex experiential arc around just one person. So evidently a key challenge was identifying the right candidate; someone who, as Brown says: "...currently leads a self-centered existence, and who takes his life, his friends, his family and material comforts all for granted. I'm hoping he'll be able to learn from the meticulously crafted experience I'm going to put him through. And by taking everything away from him, I hope to make him recognise the value of what he has."

The elaborate setup involved getting his entire family to play along, hacking their smartphones and doctoring media feeds to make the signs of impending disaster increasingly frequent, and then finally transitioning the subject into a fully immersive situation which he didn't know was hypothetical. Therefore throughout, amid all the actors and family members involved, he's the only one who doesn't realise he's on camera. Think Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds radio play meets The Truman Show.

I won't describe the whole program blow by blow. If the description appeals, you'll be well entertained and should check it out yourself (video embedded below). Also, my thoughts shared after the break will contain spoilers and may not make complete sense if you haven't seen Apocalypse.

Now, futures as a field, I'd say, shares with education as a whole a common presumption at their heart that virtual experience can be as valuable as real. (Unfortunately, only a small proportion of education encounters are designed for maximum experiential impact. The same could be said of foresight.) Yet, even when carried out according to the most uninspired and dull-as-dishwater of conventions -- chalk-and-talk in the classroom; ploddingly written scenarios in the futures world -- both implicitly have an underlying faith in simulation (or for futures, simulacrum). Put another way, that article of faith is that you can learn from a situation that is constructed, that's not entirely real.

Such is Brown's basic supposition here, too, the plan being to simulate global catastrophe as "teachable moment" for Steven. The idea is that someone's life can be transformed by an encounter that, even though faked or engineered, presents as real to them, and so produces genuine revelation. And that's just what happens, or what seems to happen, in Apocalypse. We might say Brown's goal is to create an experiential learning journey (here, it's explicitly modeled on The Wizard of Oz, a classic "hero's journey" as in Joseph Campbell's mythic/archetypal Jungian framework). It's a thoroughly ingenious concept for a television narrative, and entertaining as all get out to watch. Yet I've also had a creeping sense that it's not entirely successful in the execution, and I've been trying to figure out why that is.

The reason I'm writing about this is because, as a designer of experiential scenarios, I'm keen to learn from these rare examples how to construct better immersions into hypothetical narrative situations, in order to make the practice more effective. What makes experiential scenarios tick, and how might they be improved? (To be clear, then; anything that seems critical about what I say here is part of an attempt to work with these thoughts as a practitioner, rather than gratuitous sniping from the safety of my armchair.)

I found parts of the show, especially the first half, very moving. The setup with the gradual introduction of ersatz news feeds into Steven's bubble, and the staging of a segue into apocalyptic territory is brilliant. For me, one of the best moments comes when the program makers reproduce during a bus ride their (clearly Orson Welles-inspired) radio-based dislocation into catastrophe, and then it ups the experiential ante magnificently.

However, after the apocalyptic bit of the story kicks in, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe. You might find it all terrifyingly realistic; I wanted to, but simply didn't. You might object that it's not our (as audience) credulity that matters. Yet it does, I think. When a hypothetical strains belief, it simultaneously becomes harder to believe that anyone else could buy it, either. The specifics of the apocalyptic narrative and experience that Steven is expected and appears to buy into get exceptionally silly. Without going into detail, having already warned about spoilers, one word really makes the point: zombies. An inspired Truman Show-esque first half morphs into a less convincing knockoff of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that some controversy arose in the UK over the central character of Steve, who was accused of being an actor complicit in the whole deal. These are claims that Brown has denied and debunked, but doubts may remain; based neither on Steve's half-finished acting website profile, nor on his amusing physical resemblance to an actor from a noodle commercial -- but rather on the internal merits and coherence of the program itself.

I won't go into the performances of the questionable actors by whom Steven is surrounded, or some of his reactions which, at times, even if real, felt even less credible. (Perhaps I'm just not a very experienced viewer of reality TV -- and if I watched more of it I'd realise that real people in reality actually behave like the way I consider bad actors act.) As it happens, I'm less interested in establishing the truth here as such than I am in understanding what's at stake for the program in its believability. You see, for the viewer of Apocalypse, its emotional and intellectual impact rely on an authentic deception. We are invited to empathise with Steve, for whom life as he knew it is ostensibly over. If it turned out that Steve were just another actor, there would cease to be anything truly novel or worthwhile about watching him go through this exercise: we've already seen our share of (more highly produced and impressive) end-of-the-world diversions. So the interest here turns entirely on Steven's being unwittingly drawn into a simulated catastrophe, which means it is significant only to the extent that he experiences as real something which is not.

Brown knows this, and makes that very point in his own defence: pretending to all this with an actor at the centre of it would be pointless. Well, yes and no. There's room for a cogent sceptical view here that a sufficiently cynical TV producer could benefit greatly from persuading an audience of millions that they were really putting an unwitting man on the street through armageddon's onset, while in fact orchestrating the whole thing with an insider-actor. This, the sceptic might argue, would obviate the investment risk should a carefully selected actual dupe clue into the subterfuge and suddenly ruin a presumably expensive and logistically elaborate end-of-the-world simulation-for-one. So the question comes to rest on Brown's insistence on his own integrity as an artist.

But here we come to a problem for the audience's experience of the show, one which is built-in, and unavoidable: Derren Brown, the "man behind the curtain", is fundamentally questionable. By no means am I saying I don't like him, or that his work isn't vastly entertaining, thought-provoking and insightful. I do. It is. I'm simply pointing out that a large part of the show's very premise, and part of the basis for our interest in watching it, consists in his charismatic persona and cultivated talent for understanding people and creating situations that play on their foibles. He's a master persuader, hypnotist and manipulator. No pejorative connotation intended; that's his schtick, and it's why we watch. But if Brown is being straight with us, the audience, then he is indeed deceiving Steven monumentally. On the other hand, if Steven's colluding with him (as I - and apparently others - had occasion to suspect), then Brown is deceiving us, his audience. Either way, there's a tangled web, and our charming host is right in the middle of it. Such ambiguity is at the very heart of his profession as an illusionist and mentalist, and shows up in all the situations that he creates. Little wonder, then, that some people question his veracity.

To continue the line of thought above for a moment more: if he were discovered to have been pretending, Derren Brown could still have a workable artistic alibi -- that the joke was deliberately, all along, on all of us, the audience. Maybe there's a meta-point in the offing here around our own susceptibility, but there's a trust we place in him, despite his own "untrustworthiness" which is the premise of our interest -- and if it were betrayed it would be a real pity. Especially amid all the fakery, the grain of truth still matters. 

All of this reminded me of another exquisitely ambiguous viewing experience, Exit Through the Gift Shop, the outstanding film about street art genius Banksy. It presents as documentary but leaves you (or at any rate, left me) wondering whether the central character, Mister Brainwash, was fabricated. He's such an outrageous character, and his commercial success as depicted in the doco such damning evidence of the cynical commercialisation of art, that it all seems too perfectly perverse to be true. A couple of years after watching it, I still find myself on the fence about Exit Through the Gift Shop's documentary status. And that's actually something I absolutely love about it -- and in some ways perhaps I'd prefer not to know the truth -- because it so effectively acts out one of the key questions it raises, regarding the importance of authenticity or truth as a value in the art world.

Now, as irritatingly and gleefully postmodern as some might like to get here, rejoicing - or wallowing - in the unknowability of the truth of it all, let me prepare to draw a conclusion: Exit succeeds because of its ambiguity, where Apocalypse falters. Let's be fair: if the show succeeds, it's despite any doubts about Derren Brown's and his subject Steven's veracity, not because of them. Audience doubt about Brown's truthfulness puts a dent in Apocalypse as an experiential scenario. To the extent that people doubt the authenticity of the deception, so to speak, to that extent the exercise is not quite working.

So much for questions of plausibility, ambiguity and fakery. Now I want to come at this from another angle.

Here's what Brown says about the motivation for staging an apocalypse for his victim. "In an effort to help Steven realise the value of the things he has, like his family, home and friends, I took them all away from him by creating the end of the world, through a deadly meteor strike."

But of course, there's a simpler way to end the world.

By sheer coincidence, just hours after viewing Apocalypse and then having a big group of friends over for dinner, I was revisiting the 1999 classic Fight Club, a testosterone- and irony-fuelled film essentially about living to the full. I hadn't watched it for maybe ten years. (If you haven't seen it, please do; but there are no spoilers below.)

A sequence about halfway through exemplifies the perversely life-affirming spirit of the movie, when the two lead actors, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, conduct what they call a "human sacrifice", whereby the life of a Korean convenience-store owner is threatened, as an existential goodwill intervention. At gunpoint, the hapless shopkeeper is told, "Raymond, you're going to die". He's asked what he wanted to be in life before settling for quik-e-mart drudgery. The answer: a vet. Holding a gun to the poor man's head, Pitt takes his drivers' licence away, telling him, "I know where you live. If you're not on your way to becoming a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead." They let him go.  What was the point of that, demands an exasperated Norton. Replies Pitt: "Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel's life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted."

Here again, almost word for word, is the question behind Apocalypse (quoted at the top). There's a climactic confrontation later on between the two leads, when Pitt's trickster says to Norton's sceptic: "If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?"

My point is simply this -- and thanks, Fight Club, for the reminder: the whole planet need not be jeopardised in order for a person to experience a revelation about their life. If a single moment of staring into the abyss can be used to reactivate a sense of purpose and direction, there's more than one way to get at it.

I'm not for a moment suggesting (however compelling a TV show it might have made) that Derren Brown could or should have made a program based on directly threatening the life of a subject. But from an experience design standpoint, there's a curious quality of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut in Apocalypse. Of course the grandiosity of the simulated experience is all by itself a large part of the point, in terms of televisual entertainment.

But in fact, what I think Brown and his team are doing most effectively here, with this complex exercise in forcing suspension of disbelief, is to dramatise vividly the fact and extent of the constructedness of mediated reality, or  -- if this makes it any clearer -- the mediatedness of our experience of wider systemic realities. Few of us are in a position to register first-hand most big-picture world news stuff, be it economic crisis or volcanic eruption or political upheaval. Almost all comes to us second-hand, through a handful of vectors (devices, sources, individuals) cross-cutting our sensorium. No, this isn't a new thought. But the show is a kind of masterclass in the partiality and manipulability of the tiny straw through which we get to receive only a fraction of a far bigger reality. 

And recognition of the excessiveness inherent in making widespread crisis, rather than personal mortality, the focal point for a "revaluing life" experiment also led to something else I'd sensed was missing from the show. The serendipitous encounter with Fight Club's counterexample helped clarify for me what that something was. 

Brown apparently went to the trouble of spending a couple of months convincing a listless but suggestible young man that his world could end, then went ahead and made that subjective experience "happen". Apart from Brown's skill and showmanship, the other reason to watch this specific program is this: apocalyptic anxiety is a real phenomenon. Not only is there a mounting array of planetary threats - climate change, loss of biodiversity, the ascent of superbugs, the ever-present nuclear spectre, etc - at the time this show was broadcast, the Mayan calendar transition was looming just weeks away at the end of 02012. (It passed by without incident the week before I caught the show on YouTube.)

In the same way that the potency of Orson Welles's radio show, a year before World War II began, channeled and amplified a generalised anxiety in the zeitgeist, Derren Brown: Apocalypse attracted record numbers of viewers because, I think, there was (is) actual and, at some level, valid worry about apocalyptic scenarios. Such power as it had, then, both at the audience (TV-viewership-of-millions) level and at the subject (sucking-Steven-into-the-story) level, draws on real, existential issues and concerns animating our culture at the moment. However, this potent cultural energy is skilfully marshaled only to be squandered; it's used to augment the Oz-like mastermind/puppeteer persona of Brown, but as an engagement with actual and worthwhile issues, either for the audience or for the one-man eye of the storm, it's hard to think of how it could possibly have been more superficial. (In case you've forgotten: zombies.)

So there's a sadly missed opportunity to address a worthy value, a counterpart at the wider social scale to the value of an individual life fully lived. If it were just a matter of making someone appreciate their parents more, or go back to school to become a veterinarian, then a bit of clear and present danger -- say, a few seconds at gunpoint, or even just a good talking to -- may be all that's needed.

By the way, I suspect the two problems I've tried to puzzle out above are related; the implausibility of the scenario in watching it, and its failure to engage in the real issues that bring resonance to apocalypse. They seem to be two sides of the same coin. 

Maybe I'm overthinking a work of pure entertainment. But then I think about the fact that entertainers have a capacity - and to that extent at least a potential obligation - to inform and enlighten, just as those who primarily inform and enlighten ought also to find ways to entertain and engage while they're at it. The mutual exclusivity of those modes is stupid.

There's an unfortunately missed opportunity here, is all.

When I mulled over this stuff around the ethics of deception in experiential scenarios for my PhD a few years ago, I wrote (p. 270), "when it comes to human intentions and perceptions, paradoxically, there are some issues you may not be able to get a clear look at without an element of deliberate, carefully engineered misdirection." After looking into it I ended up saying (p. 286):

[T]he value of enabling someone genuinely to contemplate a compelling alternative future universe -- if perhaps only for a moment or two -- may be profound. Everyone can recount instances in their own life where sudden, contingent insights have led to momentous changes in direction. The value of these interventions and futures perspectives should not necessarily be sought in their enabling a particular or permanent future orientation (although those are conceivable outcomes). Even small glimpses of other worlds may make the effort worthwhile. It is not usually necessary to go to the lengths suggested here, but ontologically pointed strategies are available, and are sometimes needed. As Whitehead reminds us, it is the business of the future to be dangerous -- which makes it our business to be able, at certain times, to conjure with that danger in order to navigate it more wisely.

The point was (and I still believe this) that deception can be a useful tool in enabling certain types of  experiential learning that may be hard or even impossible to get at in other ways. But it's to be used judiciously; downsides and upsides weighed against one another. Serious learning can come from a comparatively minor deception, but a trivial lesson from a major shock (or risk) isn't defensible.

Consider that audience outrage would surely have been universal had the show been about simply threatening Steven's own life personally to cause him to value it more highly (although that's presumably a worthy cause), and yet by contrast the excess of appearing to end the world just for him probably seems okay, even though the selected narrative mechanisms (meteors and zombies) studiously avoid saying anything about the terrifyingly genuine and varied prospects of anthropogenic apocalypse.

Intriguing ethical calculus.

Don't get me wrong. Derren Brown: Apocalypse is a hell of a show, and it plays on ontologically and ethically unstable ground that's often a hallmark of truly interesting art. In his recent (fantastic, highly recommended) book on art forgery, Jonathon Keats writes:

The far side of legitimacy is not necessarily illicit. To act on our anxieties, art must break mores. In some cases, those mores may be enforced by law, yet the full range of human behavior is beyond the imagination of legislators and judges, whose work is essentially reactive. Artists can experiment with possibilities outside our current reality.

Keats is writing on forged artwork, but the parallel's instructive: Brown's experiment with a simulated truth is in principle precisely what makes possible the expansion of layabout Steve's reality. Perhaps, zombies aside, this is the kind of experiential wakeup call that could benefit a great many more of us.

Related posts:

> Refugee Run

> If you want to live you will obey

> Death of a President

> Posthuman New York

The mosquito incident

Bill Gates opens a jar of mosquitoes at TED2009
Image: James Duncan Davidson / TED via MSNBC

At the prestigious annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference held this week, billionaire software mogul-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates presented at a session called "Reboot". His topic wasn't tech, however, but instead the efforts currently being made through his charitable foundation to "reboot" social problems including malaria, a fatal but preventable disease spread by parasite-carrying mosquitoes. Malaria is the scourge of poor countries in warm areas, and according to Gates has 200 million sufferers, with one million lives lost per year.

To help underline his point about the disease being largely ignored by medical researchers because it affects mainly impoverished populations, the man who founded Microsoft took an unusual step to engage the attention of TED's high profile, invitation-only audience. Yahoo! News reported:

"Malaria is spread by mosquitoes," Gates said while opening a jar onstage at a gathering known to attract technology kings, politicians, and Hollywood stars.

"I brought some. Here I'll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected."

Gates waited a minute or so before assuring the audience the liberated insects were malaria-free.

The stunt has generated some controversy, reports Wired blog Epicenter. While some want to accuse him of terrorism, others praise his showmanship, but since the difference between the two is more ideological than intrinsic, either way we may conclude that Gates found a powerful way to make his point.

Still, the misquotation given above, which can easily be read as thoughtless and irresponsible, has added fuel to the fire. Watch the video (embedded at the bottom of this post); five minutes in, here's what Gates actually says:

Now malaria is, of course, transmitted by mosquitoes. I brought some here [opening jar] so you could experience this; we'll let those roam around the, uh, auditorium a little bit [audience laughs]. There's no reason only poor people should have the experience [more laughter, applause]. Those mosquitoes are not infected, but, uh...

I would suggest that some of his critics are either wilfully missing the point, or spoke up before they had seen the clip.

In any case, why -- you may well ask -- is this appearing here at t.s.f.?

Well, the question posed in Gates's presentation is, "How do you stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitoes?" An important part of the answer to that question lies in drawing active attention to the problem. His talk was calculated to do that. As far as I can tell, it worked.

To generate experiential, immersive and affective (as opposed to purely verbal, propositional, or cognitive) vectors for opening alternative futures up to exploration is right at the heart of my current work as a futurist. Gates's stunt is one of the simplest, most ingenious, low-tech ways to spice up a conference talk that I've ever heard of, and it instantly elevates to prominence a cluster of pertinent questions about the relationships between disease, socioeconomic class, and the medical establishment. Naysayers nothwithstanding, the "scare" factor here was minor or non-existent, while the gesture was sufficiently bold, and symbolically potent, to have been newsworthy (although whether it would have been quite as widely reported if instigated by someone other than a former "World's Richest Man" titleholder remains uncertain). In an age of increasingly ubiquitous video recording and web-access, not only TED, but many other events have both a primary audience (those present at the time) and a secondary audience (those who hear about it later and watch online, etc). An effective experiential intervention will actually reach many more people in anecdotal or secondary form (via accompanying metacommentary and distortions), and that's the case here. I (and probably you too) became aware of this speech, and devoted some portion of my attention to as part of the secondary diffusion of a novel primary performance. That's the sense in which it "worked".

Now, just to be clear; this is not to say that I think people should release bugs left, right and centre whenever disease is the topic du jour. Anything that might be (mis)taken, even momentarily, for a hoax, must be handled very carefully indeed. But in any event, novelty is part of the design context, and future duplication of this intervention would almost certainly be a worse idea, not a better one.

The experience must always be tailored to the specific circumstances: topic, audience, location, resources, etc.

Here's another great example, shared on the WFSF listserv last year by a futurist colleague from the Netherlands, Andreas Ligtvoet:

[There] was an exhibition during the Floriade (World Horticulture Fair) 2002 by Hogeschool Larenstein (a higher education institution in the NL). They not only showed a multimedia presentation about the potential flooding of parts of the NL (due to climate change and ice melting), but actually flooded (!) the floor that the viewers were standing on. On the floor was a map of the Netherlands, and the flooding only took place in the western (lower) part. Of course the visitors had to crowd together on the smaller surface of the exhibition hall or get wet feet.

I have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to locate photos or video of this event; but the concept is splendid, and directly confronts the psychological difficulties we face when engaging long-term change processes.

It would be great to hear from anyone else with cases where a future (or otherwise absent, remote, or hard-to-imagine) scenario has been rendered available here-and-now, whether the setting be a conference, theme park, or classroom. But the cheaper, simpler and more ingenious the approach, the better. To my mind, whether the issue is malaria, climate change, or any other significant threat -- or, for that matter, opportunity -- in need of our sympathetic attention and concerted realignment of collective priorities, these techniques themselves are also ideas worth spreading.

(Thanks Jake!)

The future of yesterday

Literally.

Detail from an illustration in Mechanix Illustrated, November 01968

IT'S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper -- which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page....

~James R. Berry, "40 Years in the Future", Mechanix Illustrated, November 01968, reproduced at Modern Mechanix blog, 24 March 02008

So begins a speculative "day in the life" article published exactly forty years ago, in the same month Nixon won the U.S. Presidential election, and the Beatles released the White Album -- and set precisely yesterday, 18 November 02008.

We don't tend to deal much with retrofutures here at t.s.f., partly because others do such a good job of covering them already (such as the blog linked above, and Matt Novak's Paleo-Future). So I don't intend to analyse this in any detail. But if you're interested, read the original (using the page-image reproductions rather than the transcript below them, for a better sense of the original). And see whether we agree on the following two points...

1. To me, the magazine ads are more interesting than the article itself. The garnish trumps the dish. These incidental, textural details of the past seem to afford, or betray, at least as much insight into the passage of four decades than the content which squarely addresses it. (This is not, however, a criticism of the author or publication: the piece was written for the audience then, not today.)

2. There's something weirdly counterintuitive about the inexorable way a specific future date and time, however far away it may be, eventually rolls around. Recently I've been reading about how our minds process time, and I see a connection here to what psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman call Construal Level Theory [pdf]:

The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events (low-level construals).

Or, to render a similar insight in more poetic terms, I'm reminded of a lovely, humbling haiku in Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now (composed in reply to one by poet Gary Snyder, p. 1:64):

This present moment
Used to be
The unimaginable future

Related posts:
> Lost futures
> Today at Tomorrowland

(Thanks, Josh Judkins! | via Rocketboom)

Choose your instincts wisely

A day or two ago I stumbled across this fascinating project, the Alertness Enhancing Device by Susanna Hertrich, an MA student in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, London.

Image: Susanna Hertrich, via we-make-money-not-art

Before/after | Image: Susanna Hertrich

Writes Hertrich:

This project picks on how much today's people have detached themselves from their original animal inheritance. Which of our lost animal abilities do we miss and how would we try to regain them?

It is said that no other generation before has been as anxious and risk aware as ours. Other than animals, we aren't equipped for the challenges of contemporary living. We don't have the abilities to identify the real dangers in a surplus of potential threats and horror scenarios offered to us by mass media. We don't have the right instincts to tell threat from panicmongering.

This device is meant as a physical prosthesis for a lost or missing natural instinct for the real fears and dangers that threaten us – as opposed to perceived risks that often cause a public outrage.
[...]
The device stimulates goosebumps and shivers that go down your spine through microcurrents resulting in your neck hair standing up. You will be more alert and ready for the real dangers in life.

A chart at Hertrich's website illustrates the tremendous disproportionality between statistical risks (below the line) and the issues that actually cause us to worry (above it):

Image: Susanna Hertrich

This is a marvellously clear portrayal of that disjuncture. (I'd like to dig into the data behind each of these misshapen risk-snowmen -- but details notwithstanding, it makes intuitive a rather tricky point, with a whole lot of examples.*) And the Alertness Enhancing Device is a splendidly provocative route toward narrowing that gap.

Adds Régine "we-make-money-not-art" Debatty:

While we consciously know what are the things that really threatens us, we tend to dedicate much more of attention to spectacular disasters with many deaths.

That's when the Alertness Enhancing Device comes in. If you feel dispassionate and bored when reading news stories about another environmental pollution scandal, it's probably time to turn the dial of the device on.

~"Prosthesis for a lost instinct", 21 February 02008

I'm excited about this project, but not on account of the recovery of "lost animal abilities" angle so much. That frame conceals, I think, what's rather more novel here. No animal -- including humanity -- has developed properly calibrated survival strategies, let alone instincts, for such challenges as traffic accidents, cancer, and pollution. These threats (in their present forms) play little or no part in the wilds of the jungle or savannah. They are not the problems we evolved to deal with, even though they have become some of the most pressing risks we now face.

This approach reunites the assertion of animality (if we insist on understanding our embodiedness that way), with highly subtle collective cognitive operation -- in effect, guiding evolution, which is of course what technocultural change is all about (McLuhan: "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us"). What's interesting to me is that the recruitment of the body enables (more) direct feedback loops, expressed in somatic language, which bypasses (or, better yet, compresses into instantaneously "comprehensible" form) the complex conjecture of risk assessment. It also makes available a new take on both future-shock therapy and ambient foresight -- perhaps indeed a counterpart idea; embodied foresight -- concerning the engagement of new risks, in old forms. It's a programmable, strap-on judgment heuristic. Or, if you prefer, prosthetic intuition.

Taking the hypothetical proposed by this device a step further, I should add right away that we ought to be mindful of some of the risks (more risks!) associated with the implementation of such a system. Who wears it, and with what effects, and with what actrivation thresholds, and for what purposes -- all are politically charged questions raised even at the hypothetical level by an intervention of this form. Maybe my hackles are too quick to go up, but there are spectres here of Pavlov's dogs, of psychiatric treatments such as shock therapy, and more broadly speaking, other bodily and neural policing strategies (about which my colleagues Sean Smith and Jake Dunagan, among others, will be able to comment far more intelligently). Still, this activation and fine-tuning of instinctive responses for the purposes of presenting complex risks that provides great food for thought. Perhaps later versions could include specialised and nuanced bodily responses tailored specifically to the issue (so, for instance, riding in an SUV could cause your skin to crawl in a really unique way -- in case it doesn't already).

Commenting on Daniel Gilbert's observations about why climate change is such a tough issue for us to wrap our primate heads around, it was noted here a couple of months ago that...

without a mechanism for manifesting the outcome of long-slow processes here and now, a mechanism for rendering visible the risks and opportunities that are otherwise invisible, we will have no choice but to keep stumbling on happiness and catastrophe alike.

This is a really cool project, I think, because it asks us to rethink and perhaps redesign the coupling of our thoughts and feelings, the unmooring of which have put at serious risk not just our bodies, but entire ecosystems. It suggests how we might choose to render available otherwise abstract and distant thought processes, both immediately and profoundly. So, prosthetic intuition about risk scenarios, both wearable and distributed elsewhere in our informational environments, will now figure more prominently in my ruminations about how we might feel (v. tr.) tomorrow.

* Incidentally, here's a comparable graphic from the National Safety Council (U.S.), of positively Tuftean clarity and elegance, posted by Bruce "Schneier on Security" Schneier:

The future as caricature (part one)

In an episode of the fantastic 01988 TV series The Storyteller, an unkempt beggar is brought in to entertain the royal court. The young prince exclaims, dismayed, "He smells!" To which the beggar replies, matter-of-factly: "I am a beggar, sire. It is my business to smell."

In a similar way, as Alfred North Whitehead once said, "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." That danger lies in its uncertainty, which is its "business" because, quite simply, that's the way it is. Indeed it is more like that the further out you try to look. So the necessary response is to think about the future in a way that is true to and in accordance with its uncertain nature; thinking that is both honest and pragmatic, rather than wishfully precise and overly specific.

Paradox though it may seem, the value of fuzzy thinking has become increasingly clear to me. Bart Kosko makes a strong case for it, but his perspective seems unlikely to put a dent in the defences of the everyday objector. Edward de Bono, a populist philosopher and inventor of an array of ingenious tools for thought, mounts similar arguments. In a book I'm just finishing, Teach Yourself to Think, he gives the following example of why abstract (in the sense of general; non-specific) thinking can be useful:

Some electronic students [sic] were given a simple circuit to complete. Ninety-seven per cent of them complained that they did not have enough wire to complete the circuit. Only 3 per cent completed the circuit. the 97 per cent wanted 'wire' and since there was no wire they could not complete the task. the three per cent had a broad, general, blurry concept of 'a connector'. Since wire was not available they looked around for another type of connector. They used the screwdriver itself to complete the circuit.

~Edward de Bono, Teach Yourself to Think, 01995, p. 30.

I want to use de Bono's story to suggest two points. The first is the one the author intended: general (or "fuzzy") thinking can be superior because it sometimes suits the situation better. The second point goes meta on de Bono's story. Like many of the ostensible real-world examples he provides in his books, this one is anecdotal and may well be apocryphal. Even so, he furnishes particular percentage (97% failure, 3% success) to illustrate the point. He is using specificity -- precision -- in a story about the importance and value of imprecise thinking! But I say he's not contradicting himself: he's showing (by example) that effective thought, and effective communication, require selective use of both precision *and* vagueness, as appropriate to the situation. I believe the story would be less effective if told in terms of "the vast majority of the students" vs "just a few". The specious precision of the letter of the tale helps underline its spirit (the "moral", if you like).

The value of general, broad-brush thinking came encapsulated neatly in a comment I heard at a Long Now dinner last March, following the SALT presentation where archaeologist Brian Fagan took a long view of climate change. Among the dinner guests was activist Mike Roselle, co-founder of Earth First!. Roselle has spent his career, body and soul, committed to raising awareness (and occasionally, hell) for ecological ends. And, commenting on the dire need for inroads into the damaging habits that have brought us to the slowly unfolding crisis of our era, he said:

"We don't need to know True North, we just need to move in a northerly direction."

A light went on for me. On one level, Roselle's neat metaphor had an impact because I had spent so many fruitless hours the year before in meetings about Hawaii's sustainability taskforce; hours in which the general nature of the islands' challenge (its economic precariousness) appeared to be agreed and sufficiently well understood by all, yet to which it seemed no specific policy action could be directed because of lack of concrete agreement on statistical metrics such as "carrying capacity". Policy-makers appear to want to know "True North" before taking any steps at all; not willing to realise that the passage of time drags us along in whatever direction we happen to be facing anyway. Still, regardless of its other payoffs, the despoilation of every ecosystem we touch is, simply put, not the right general direction.

And, the next level up, Roselle's words rang true because of the widespread phenomenon of which my experience noted above is just one example: the inescapable fact of future uncertainty which vexes decision-makers quite severely, to the extent that they become paralysed by it.

As a matter of principle, the further out the time horizon one attempts to look, the more radical uncertainty we face. Unforeseeability is compounded. More time means more moments for contingency and chaos to kick in, and the cone of possibility space radiating from the present moment soon expands to encompass a huge array of hypothetical future states, through which the number of conceivable paths exponentially multiplies.

Lest that should prove a little hard to visualise, let me clarify with an example. The Nuclear Waste Management Organisation of Canada, due to the nature of its domain, needs to consider a longer time horizon than pretty much any other type of organisation in the world today. So, when they hired GBN as consultants to produce an array of scenarios for nuclear waste management, they did so for several different, expanding, timeframes: 25 years (1 generation); 175 years (7 generations); 500 years (20 generations) and 10,000 years (400 generations). From the Introduction to GBN's report:

Scenarios are stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. While it is possible to build such logic with some confidence using a 25 year time frame and with much less confidence using a 175 year time frame, moving beyond is nigh impossible: there are just too many options and too much that is unknown. As a result, deliberations at the 500-year time horizon led to descriptions of what came to be known as "end-points" or short descriptions of sets of conditions but with no attempt to structure a logical story. Furthermore, at 10,000 years, the best that the Team could do with any degree of comfort was to generate a series of short statements describing, "what-if such-and-so might happen?"

The full assembly of future possibilities then took the form of four fairly detailed stories extending out 25 years; 12 much briefer scenarios reaching out 175 years; 16 End-points at 500 years, and a long list of very brief What-ifs for 10,000 years. This distribution of shorter and longer lists of, respectively, longer and shorter descriptions satisfies the requirement that we say with relative precision and confidence what we can about the relatively short term, and to outline very briefly as many possibilities as we can imagine in the very long term.

~"Looking Forward to Learn: Future Scenarios for Testing Different Approaches to Managing Nuclear Fuel in Canada", Report submitted to NWMO by GBN, November 02003, p. 8.

Now, where were we?

Oh yeah. Dealing with an uncertain future.

/To be continued.../

Stumbling on foresight

This happy fellow is Daniel Gilbert | Image: Marilynn Oliphant / Time

/Continued from previous post.../

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert wrote a fantastic book called Stumbling on Happiness which I read last summer. Gilbert is an expert in the field of affective forecasting; how we think we'll feel in response to certain things happening to us. The main argument of his book is that when it comes to these kinds of forecasts -- matters as basic as what will make us happy or sad -- we're frequently wrong. Things we expect to be devastating turn out not to be so bad. Events we expect to transform our lives for the better might not have remotely the impact we thought. And on top of all that, our recollections of what we expected are distorted in hindsight, with the effect of hiding from our own view how wrong we were.

This systematic psychological quirk -- more a quirkplex, really -- is, or at least ought to be, rather a critical concern for this blog, and, I'd say, for futures in general. Because the contention that we should exercise foresight (or, engage in considering alternative futures) more often and more assiduously than we usually do -- an argument I advance with monotonous regularity -- is underpinned by the assumption that such work can make a positive difference to our decision-making. Or, to put it another way, that pursuing preferred futures (individually as well as collectively) is more meaningful and effective than simply meandering along, foresightless.

I realise I may seem to be biting off a lot to chew by raising questions so fundamental to my chosen field in a blog post. (That's probably the main reason I haven't written about Stumbling until now, even though when I read it eight months ago I thought it was terrific, and did not fail to note these troubling connections.) However, though Gilbert's book doesn't say too much about affective forecasting in relation to longer, slower, more systemic challenges, it turns out he has looked at how the problems of affective forecasting relate to such challenges. Specifically, he wrote about global warming (topic du jour here at t.s.f.) in an article for the Los Angeles Times in July 02006, a couple of months after the book was released. I just came across the LA Times piece over the weekend. Here's a shortened version:

No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features —- features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. [...] Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.

The second reason why global warming doesn’t put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn’t force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. [...] The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.

The third reason why global warming doesn’t trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures —- not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes. [...] We haven’t quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we’ve only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

There is a fourth reason why we just can’t seem to get worked up about global warming. [...] Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. [...] Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn’t happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he’d return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem.

~Daniel Gilbert, "If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming", Los Angeles Times, reproduced at Stumbling on Happiness weblog (Random House), 2 July 02006 [emphasis added].

Brilliant, isn't it? Gilbert says, self-deprecatingly, in his introductory comments, "I keep having the odd thought that I will someday look back on this and realize that it was the only important thing I ever wrote." Seems a little downbeat. Everything I've read of his has not only been exceptionally interesting, but has also dealt with some pretty important issues.

Still, the problem he's describing here truly is monumental -- with emphasis on "mental". (Just shoot me.) We have an ingrained, collective psychological blindspot for the types of harm which are most serious and world-changing, and are instead obsessed by patrolling colourful trivialities like sexual preference or things that take out people's eyes.

All this is, more or less, the rationale -- whether the organisers know it or not -- behind efforts such as the Blue Line Project (ha! I told you this was a continuation from the last post). It's very consciously the reason for efforts we've made to put vividly imagined alternative futures into the public domain. It is a reason for developing both future-shock therapy, and its gentle cousin, ambient foresight.

Because without a mechanism for manifesting the outcome of long-slow processes here and now, a mechanism for rendering visible the risks and opportunities that are otherwise invisible, we will have no choice but to keep stumbling on happiness and catastrophe alike.

Our alternative strategy, which it is my aim to help advance as far as I can, is to make available the ingredients for people to stumble on foresight. And thereby to help develop a social capacity for thinking ahead that would make colossal blunders, like unwitting anthropogenic climate change, unthinkable (um, figuratively).

Then, my friends, the world might be safe for democracy.

/To part three.../

The go-to guys for post apocalyptic chaos and destruction

"Nuked York City: An act that seemed unthinkable during the Cold War is now more plausible than ever—and some say inevitable."
Image courtesy Kenn Brown, Mondolithic Studios

In an instant the ship, the container docks, Newark Airport, and everyone within a half-mile radius is vaporized. Seconds later the shock wave smashes into lower Manhattan, knocking the Statue of Liberty off her pedestal and blowing out skyscraper windows in the financial district. Shattering glass cuts down thousands, while a poisonous nuclear squall rises from the blast zone and rains over a 10-mile area. In a microsecond, 15,000 people in New Jersey and New York are killed or wounded, and 200,000 absorb enough gamma rays to keep their doctors counting for the rest of their lives.

The economic damage only begins with the hole blown through the $100 billion annual revenues of the Port of New York and New Jersey. Within half an hour every port in the United States is closed and every container in the global shipping lanes suddenly looks like it’s hiding a potential Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

How likely is this?

Some experts give this or a similar scenario a 51 percent probability over the next 10 years.

"Snatch and Grab: When one man represents millions, his head is priceless."
Image courtesy Kenn Brown, Mondolithic Studios

For an entire week the senator goes off the scope. Nada. Then come the videos. The first appears on an obscure Web site in Yemen. A hooded man with a sword in one hand and the scruff of the senator’s neck in the other peers into the camcorder and says, “We are holding a senator infidel.” Then the screen goes blank. Two days later a second tape surfaces on the Internet, this one in British Columbia. Holding the sword over the senator’s head, the hooded figure gives the president three days to release all Muslim prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

The president offers prayers for the senator and his family and says, “We don’t negotiate with terror.” 60 Minutes does some tech work with the video: In the grainy image, the senator appears to be saying “fuck you” to his captor, a signal that he stands with the commander in chief. The deadline passes. The last video appears on a Web site at MIT that mirrors the home page of the Department of Homeland Security. Somehow the terrorists have hacked into MIT’s system to create the page, and before the rest of the world is entirely clear on whether it’s looking at the real thing or a mockery, the sword swings, the senator is beheaded, and the page gets five million hits. And, yes, Bush’s refusal to negotiate suited Al Qaeda to a terrorist T. What they really wanted was to step up the media frenzy so Americans would be scared to death in front of a TV audience from Casablanca to Jakarta.

Twenty-four hours later a hiker in the Potomac River Valley finds a headless body near the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The next morning an Express Mail package postmarked Leesburg, Virginia arrives at the senator’s office. Inside is the senator’s head, wrapped in a printout taken off the official Web site of the U.S. State Department: Response to Terrorism. “The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty.—President George W. Bush.”

How likely is this?

It’s a miracle it hasn’t happened already.

"Houston Has a Problem: From sea to shining sea, America’s ports remain wide open for the import of a catastrophic terrorist attack."
Image courtesy Kenn Brown, Mondolithic Studios

The Texas fires burn for a week. Under the pall of oily smoke, rescue workers retrieve the bodies of the 12,000 people killed by the flames and toxic gas. ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Shell all close their refineries to search for bombs. A quarter of the U.S. refining capacity is crippled. Oil prices skyrocket, destabilizing the market. Gas station lines grow even longer than they were during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

How likely is this?

No one knows the vulnerabilities of the American oil and gas industry better than the Middle East, and this scenario would be patently Al Qaeda: cheap, effective, and dirty.

"Man with a Missile: On 9/11 our planes were turned into weapons. Soon the weapons may be turned on our planes."
Image courtesy Kenn Brown, Mondolithic Studios

Inside the jet Deborah James, a 32-year-old mother on her way home after visiting family in Costa Mesa, feels a jolt, then looks out her window to see smoke pouring from the port engine.

“What the…” Don Martinez, the plane’s captain, says, but before he grasps the situation the engine explodes, taking much of the port wing with it. The plane rolls violently into a dive as screams fill the cabin.

Martinez and his copilot try to pull out, but with no wing it’s futile. He starts to radio an SOS, then realizes he’s looking at a street corner from an inverted angle at an altitude of about 400 feet. He can see the long morning shadows of a group of kids waiting at a bus stop.

The fully fueled 737 careens into densely populated Balboa Island, engulfing four square blocks in a 2,000-degree fireball. Flying wreckage rips Newport Bay into a froth and tears into bodies a half-mile away in downtown Newport Beach. The pilot, crew, and 162 passengers are lost. Another 40 die on the ground.
[...]
For 12 hours every flight in the United States is grounded while airports check their perimeter security. In the ensuing weeks, commercial air traffic sinks by over 20 percent, threatening every American carrier with bankruptcy and punching a multibillion-dollar hole in the country’s $552 billion travel industry just as it’s promising to regain pre-9/11 levels of revenue.

How likely is this?

You can take this one to the bank. Stray MANPAD attacks have already happened in places like Kenya, Rwanda, and Baghdad. An Al Qaeda sleeper wouldn’t need much training to pull the trigger.

Kenn Brown and Chris Wren are Mondolithic Studios, the design firm which produced the post-humanity images for Scientific American that I recently blogged here. Last week, I was in touch with Kenn about a remark at the Mondolithic blog -- "funny how we are slowly becoming the go-to guys for post apocalyptic chaos and destruction" -- referencing the fact that those World Without Us illustrations were not the first disaster-scenario images commissioned of the artists. Earlier came a set for an article in Maxim men's magazine, "The Second Wave", about possible terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The article, several scenarios from which are quoted above together with the corresponding images, appeared in the June 02005 edition (you know the one, with Jennifer Love Hewitt on the cover? C'mon dude it was a classic!). The web-archived version, however, does not include these illustrations, which Kenn has kindly provided.

The scenarios they were called on to illustrate were based on the advice of Col. David H. Hackworth, "the U.S. Army’s legendary guerrilla fighter and best-selling author". Says Maxim: "Hack came back with five plausible scenarios for Al Qaeda’s next surprise attack. But he warns that these are just a few of the hundreds of equally horrible 9/11-type events that may hit the homeland sooner than we think..."

There was another one in the article, involving an attack on a mall (but no picture) ... no matter, you get the general idea from the other four, above. Now, I'm not criticising Mondolithic at all -- I like their artwork very much. But here's the thing that gets me about these terror scenarios: they're much more salacious than the mag's pinup girls! It's an intriguing form of entertainment, isn't it? Terror porn was the term that sprang to mind, an evocative -- if obvious -- coinage. Googling it yielded the following, from an article in the New York Observer (25 December 02005):

“Terror porn”: It’s a term that surfaced not long after 9/11 to characterize a newly emerging genre embracing both fiction—24’s purportedly anti-terror melodrama—and nonfiction (the Daniel Pearl snuff film, forerunner of later orange-jumpsuit beheading tapes.)
[...]
Terror porn has the same structure of melodramatic arousal: seductive excitement over the mounting threat, so to speak, the heated flush of the build-up, all the techno-foreplay with the super-sensitive buttons and the triggers that will set off the orgy of violence.

I do find it intriguing the way certain types of disaster scenario (frequently, and disingenuously, described as "unthinkable") are in point of fact, not only thinkable but thoroughly, morbidly fascinating, and indeed used to sell pop magazines. How we as a society interact with -- some might say dwell upon, obsessively -- certain fearful possibilities has for obvious reasons become a focal point for political critics in recent years (e.g., documentarian Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and Adam Curtis's excellent three-part The Power of Nightmares). But the flirtation with disaster, with imagining futures that are not only suboptimal but which could fairly be called horrific, resonates with other diverse, curious and yet widespread risktaking behaviours, including playing with fire, riding rollercoasters, watching horror films, and voting.

The question that falls for our consideration: is there any way that preferred future scenarios can possibly match the visceral thrill, the can't-tear-your-eyes-away quality, of the nightmares which seem to have so little difficulty gaining traction? I know, I know. Happy doesn't sell. And until quite recently, even dystopian scenarios unfolding on a longer timeline (e.g., oil scarcity, sea level rise) didn't get too much attention -- probably because it's much harder for these problems to cut the requisite dramatic mustard than explosions and beheadings.

It is not a failure to engage the future or its uncertainties in toto that characterises American public discourse today. It's the (partly unwitting, yet) selective use of fearful images to galvanise public feeling, together with the lack of vividly expressed, preferred scenarios based on anything firmer than dogma or wishful thinking.

So who, really, are the go-to guys for post apocalyptic chaos and destruction?

Nominations are now open.

Questioning hyperopia

A roundup of the year's most interesting ideas in The New York Times Magazine at the end of 02006 included an entry on "hyperopia: an excess of farsightedness".

The piece referenced the research of two scholars at Columbia University, whose findings appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, in an article entitled "Repenting Hyperopia" (available as a pdf here).

Whether the rationale of forgoing pleasure today (for what reasons, the study doesn't discuss) retrospectively contributes to net happiness is a very interesting question. According to these authors, it doesn't. In their analysis, which entailed quizzing subjects about a range of decisions they'd made, the guilt that can result from "myopia" (making decisions for indulgence today) tends to fade over time, whereas the regret associated with missing out due to "hyperopia" (here identified with ascetic choices, described as "virtuous") tended to endure. This, say the authors, contradicts the "classic literature on self-control" which "assumes that consumers regret yielding to hedonic temptations".

An important reason why this could be the case, it seems to me, is because the study contains nothing linking decisions made to consequences experienced. It mainly illuminates the pattern that guilt feelings don't appear to last as long as than the regrets of missed opportunity, which relates to the ways those different types of emotions play out (the former is "hot" and dissipates quickly, the latter "cool" and slow to leave). By contrast, it would be interesting to see a similar study of, say, the retrospective feelings of cakelovers whose repeated choices to eat cake either did (in one group) or did not (in another) lead to obesity and/or heart disease. Similarly, smokers whose daily habit culminated in chronic emphysema might express a bit more indulgence remorse than the one-off decisions made by the groups surveyed in the studies in question. If the incidence rates illuminating the risk associated with "myopic" behaviours (smoking/emphysema; poor diet/obesity) were evaluated against the rate and degree of regret experienced, we might expect to come away with a better sense of how serious a problem "hyperopia" really is.

Also, to bring out explicitly an important point that's implied in my remarks above, one slice of chocolate cake, or one bowl of fruit salad, is hardly grounds for getting worked up. The feelings over time that we experience about single decisions to eat some cake, attend a party, or spend money on winter break (for such is the subject matter of this research) are relatively trivial compared to repeat instances or patterns of behaviour. By and large, we might hypothesise, it's not a one-time indulgence that you'll regret, but the lifestyle. The temporal measure is only superficially about the passage of time per se, what's actually at issue is the accumulated consequences of lots of little decisions.

Turning to the macro scale now; we can see the point more clearly. Global warming is not the result of one car trip. The devastation of rainforest is not caused by eating one hamburger. But multiply these things out by decades, and millions of people, and we all have ample reason to regret those little indulgences. Let's turn it around now. Is it hyperopic not to drive to work on one day because you're concerned about global warming? How about not eating that one hamburger because of the forest?

Agonising over a these minor decisions on a one-off basis might be a symptom of hyperopia. On the other hand, deciding to ride a bicycle to work instead of drive an SUV, or deciding to become vegetarian to avoid the resource intensiveness of remaining omnivorous -- though both evince highly farsighted modes of thought, I would argue they aren't "hyperopic" in a pejorative sense.

In any case, people seem to have some psychological difficulty accepting the cumulative responsibility for incremental negative effects of their decisions; so, research that evaluated the level of their regret as it mapped onto scaled-up consequences (for their health, or that of the planet) could be very interesting. A key issue seems to be whether decision-making effort is expended according to the magnitude of the stakes in question. And that could lead to better measures of myopia and hyperopia -- the extent to which people devote too little, or too much, deliberative effort to the actual risks associated with their behaviour.

One final point, then: in light of the above it's unfortunate that in this research the term hyperopia (literally, "farsightedness") is used here to denote excessive delayed gratification, because it conflates foresightful decision-making (a genus of decision that is made with a view to its potential long-term, including cumulative, consequences) with the problem of overly zealous ascetiscism (a species of largely symbolic rationale with ideological-religious undertones). Their conclusion that "myopia may be farsighted after all" seems particularly susceptible to abuse by anyone who might like to argue that we're better off not thinking ahead, an analogous claim to the one that the market will take care of everything, so there's no need to worry about policy to prevent long-term problems emerging from our collective economic activity. I'm not disputing the research findings as such, but simply pointing out the way they're framed seems consistent with dismissing the value of thinking ahead. That conclusion again: "myopia may be farsighted after all". But surely by definition, myopia is as bad as -- albeit different from -- hyperopia?

So, this research shows that sometimes we're better off, subjectively speaking, indulging ourselves today. I have no problem with that; it certainly comports with my own experience in certain areas (e.g. spending money while travelling). To be able to take that very finding into account, enhances our capacity for looking ahead (as an avenue to choosing wisely), which is in my view an undervalued good in the world of decision-making, and ought to be thoughtfully encouraged and developed. Another term, for the paralysis that can result from thinking too far out -- taking too much long-range responsibility -- is "karma vertigo" (coined by Jaron Lanier); and that's certainly a syndrome we'd do well to avoid in thinking ahead. But I fear that farsightedness is currently in too fragile a state to be given a bad name by dint of semantic carelessness on the part of these researchers. Ironically, this swipe at hyperopia could really exacerbate (what I regard as) already myopic tendencies in society.

Perhaps the problem is simply that their analysis of future orientation in decision-making is missing a category, which is implied but not discussed; the sweet spot between the extremes of excessive farsightedness and shortsightedness: foresight.