Permission Culture

This video is a future artifact, designed to evoke a possible future for copyright. The scenario it manifests is an increasingly ubiquitous, invasive and granular regime for policing intellectual property -- leading ultimately to what we've called "Neural Rights Management".

A number of us in UH-Manoa's Department of Political Science produced it for fun, with Jake Dunagan at the helm, and a budget of zero, for a 48-hour film competition in Honolulu at the start of March 02007. I posted the final edit at YouTube shortly after that, so it's been online for about 20 months, gradually accumulating a little over 1000 views -- waaaay back in the long tail of online video content, some instances of which attract millions of viewers in just a few days.

Just after midnight on 1 November, I received this automated email from YouTube:

Dear futuryst,

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video Neural rights management, Hawaii-style. The audio content identified in your video is Pretty Brown by Elvin Jones. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Replace Your Audio with AudioSwap

Don't worry, we have plenty of music available for your use. Please visit our AudioSwap library to learn how you can easily replace the audio in your video with any track from our growing library of fully licensed songs.

Other Options

If you think there's been a mistake, or you have other questions, please visit the Copyright Notice page in your account.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

This was interesting, for a few reasons.

One. Before this I had not, at any point, actually been aware of the name or source of the piano piece. With just two days to organise, shoot and edit the film, locating a suitable instrumental accompaniment to this playful IP riff on the MasterCard ads had been delegated to our friend Noah, a music lover and himself a musician. All I knew, as I worked on the final edit the following week, was that he'd come through with this great find, a match with the jaunty tone of the video. The YouTube email was helpful in this respect: now I know the music was cut by jazz drummer Elvin Jones, half a century ago.

Two. I'd been only dimly aware of the scope of YouTube's efforts to police copyrighted content. Certainly I knew that entire TV shows or movies, brazenly posted at user-powered video sites, had raised the ire of media companies, who in response have been becoming more aggressive about deterring copyright infringement. What I hadn't realised was that teams of people and/or robots had begun scouring the back catalogue for one minute long, zero-budget video clips with miniscule audiences, searching for unauthorised music in their soundtracks, and sending midnight emails to announce the suspension of said clips.

Three. The film we made, intending to warn about overzealous copyright enforcement, has been blocked due to overzealous copyright enforcement. I relish such ironies as much as anyone, but even though the video makes the point in a fun way, the kernel of the scenario is quite serious. This development for me is not, then, a welcome one. In his excellent and extremely important 02004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig gave us a language for understanding what's at stake in these questions:

[W]e come from a tradition of "free culture" -- not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
...
[The] rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased. The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history -- between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission -- has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

~Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 02004, original emphasis. [The top quote is from the Preface, p. xiv in the print edition, or para 9 in the online/html version; the lower quote is from p. 8 in print or para 49 online.]

I don't mean to argue with those who would point out that the copyright in "Pretty Brown" persists, or that it was used in the video without anyone paying a licence fee (we didn't have any money for our 48-hour effort, but of course, neither have we earned anything from it). I'm grateful for the opportunity to tip my hat to Elvin Jones, and his brother Hank on piano, for a great little tune (that I've had stuck in my head periodically for the last year and a half). However, I don't currently have time to re-edit the video, and frankly, remain puzzled as to the argument for doing that.

So, in the meantime, internauts everywhere; for however long or short a time, enjoy.

This post is dedicated to my modest but seemingly forlorn hope for a Free Culture -- somewhere out there, an increasingly imperilled and improbable future.

[Below, for the record, are our original credits, now vanished from YouTube together with the video.]

In the future, experience itself could be regulated on a user-pays basis... A short film from the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS). Produced for the 48-hour "Showdown in Chinatown" short film challenge in Honolulu, March 2007. The theme was "the last chance", required line of dialogue "...of course you are...", and a tree and a car were required props.

The newlyweds - Amanda McCann & Lorenzo Rinelli
Concept - Stuart Candy & Rohan Kalyan
Director & cameraman - Jake Dunagan
Co-director - Rohan Kalyan
Editing - Aaron Rosa & Stuart Candy
Music provided by Noah Viernes

Related posts:
> Futures video clips from HRCFS
> In memoriam
> The Darfur Olympics

Tangible futures

Victor Lombardi is a design strategist, consultant and lecturer, trained in journalism and music technology, and based in New York City. For a couple of years already, in his consulting practice and at his blog Noise Between Stations, he has been tracking the development of what he calls "tangible futures" -- a cousin concept to future artifacts, experiential futures, ambient foresight, and other ideas at the intersection of design and futures thinking that regularly feature here.

Borrowing an idea from my friend's old column at Salon.com, Mr Rheingold's Neighborhood, I decided to ask Victor four questions via email, which he graciously agreed to answer, after introducing himself...

Victor Lombardi: Stuart, thanks for inquiring about my work. I want to make progress in the world by making technology easier for people, and I try and accomplish that through design, business consulting, and teaching. Lately my focus has been creating educational materials for designers.

SC: How do you define "tangible futures", and what's your history of that idea?

VL: If I remember correctly, the term was coined by Christina Wodtke, a friend of mine. We were partners in a business design consultancy and were exploring ways of helping our clients manage more effectively through awareness of their strategy.

It was around then, in 2004, we saw other firms in our space delivering their recommendations as the proverbial binders of reports, and we didn't think this way of engaging managers significantly changed performance. We saw a lot of fascinating work in the field of futures studies that wasn't on the management radar at all. And we were aware of the work of people like Jeanne Liedtka, from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, who pointed out that strategy is too cognitive; it rarely exists outside of our minds. A purely cognitive expression of strategy makes communication and understanding difficult across an organization.

So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, "How can we help managers *experience* futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?" The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.

Around this time we saw others like The Institute for the Future coming to similar conclusions and developing what they called Artifacts from the Future. This was validating for us.

SC: What are your favourite instances of tangible futures in practice?

VL: Here's two historical examples I love. Imagine it's the mid-19th Century and there are no skyscrapers, much less the giant city skylines we have today like in Manhattan where I am writing this. There are a plethora of issues in helping people understand what a future could be like when we live and work high above the ground. Elisha Graves Otis was responsible for communicating a key part of this vision, that riding in elevators could be safe. He accomplished this through performance...

...during P.T. Barnum's Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York, marked the first time Otis demonstrated his "safety elevator." The invention enabled elevators to travel safely up and down by employing a special spring device that locked in place automatically if the hoisting ropes (later cables) broke. Today's elevators, while far more sophisticated and safer, continue to rely on the same principle.

During the Crystal Palace demonstration, Otis rode a lifting platform up an open shaft. When he reached the top the hoisting rope was cut. The crowd gasped, expecting the elevator to come crashing down, but the safety device held fast. "All safe, gentleman, all safe," he announced.

from http://www.otis.fi/news/newsdetail/0,1368,CLI1_NID16925_RES1,00.html

Another facet of this challenge was helping architects, city officials, business owners, and citizens visualize what those buildings would look like, taking into account building designs, materials, and zoning laws. Hugh Ferriss illustrated these structures through dramatic perspectives and stunning lighting effects to communicate both the architectural details as well as the emotional effects such changes would bring.

See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery/da/ferriss.html

SC: What role does this kind of practice play in a typical organisation, and how can it perform in an ideal situation?

VL: Organizations who do this now are the ones you already know about. The city planners in places like Dubai who need to plan decades into the future and do so by building physical models and simulations. And it's the companies that have already mastered the tangible aspect of this practice, design-dependent companies like BMW. For example, they recently created a concept car covered in stretchable fabric that allows the car to change shapes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

As opposed to a product development concept that directly influences what is made in the near-term, this sort of vision concept connects the long-term strategy with the attitudes and practices of the organization. As officials from BMW said, "It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production. Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

As rapid prototyping tools become more accessible -- from software frameworks to 3D printing to video editing tools -- more people will naturally adopt them to tangibly express futures and strategies. But, as is so common in media today, individuals may widely adopt the practice before organizations do.

SC: Why do you think this concept has emerged now, and where do you see it going?

VL: Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll refer you to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang at the Institute for the Future who blogged about five ways that their Artifacts from the Future are valuable:

1. artifacts reach some people who don't feel they have time to closely read long reports
2. their tangible, specific nature forces us to think hard about what we really believe
3. thinking about artifacts makes you think hard about the interrelationships of technological, social, economic, and cultural factors
4. the shift to artifacts reflects our own sense that design is going to be a critical strategic skill in the future
5. many of our clients actually make things. They already communicate with each other in a language of prototypes

http://future.iftf.org/2006/06/artifacts_from_.html

Many thanks, Victor, for sharing your thoughts with us.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Design fiction is a fact
> Where futures meets experience design

Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror

The Iraq War is over, Bush has been indicted on charges of high treason, the PATRIOT Act is to be repealed, the economy will be restructured, and public universities are now free.

Film at eleven.

Image via Gawker

I awoke this morning to emails from two New York colleagues about a marvellous and painstakingly planned guerrilla futures intervention today in the Big Apple.

A "special edition" of the New York Times has been produced, to convey, through a detailed set of carefully crafted articles and advertisements, a near-future scenario in which progressives' dreams for the United States have all come true. And 1.2 million copies of it have been distributed for free around the city by a network of volunteers.

Alongside the print edition, a counterpart website has been launched where all the stories are available in full. Both paper and electronic versions are rendered impeccably in the newspaper's signature style, and are dated 4 July 02009 (Independence Day next year).

In scale, this is certainly the most impressive guerrilla futures campaign I've heard of, and I heartily congratulate all those concerned for pulling it off. (It seems -- according to Gothamist, citing Gawker -- that the volunteers were assembled via becausewewantit.org and the effort is being attributed to the Yes Men, guerrilla performance artists supreme, whose astonishing Dow Chemical/Union Carbide interview on BBC World was previously featured here.)

Now, we can expect that some disgruntled newspaper recipients or onlookers may accuse the folks behind this terrific intervention of leading people, shall we say, up the garden path. Such accusations will be missing the point.

Adopting the Times dress is not about hoaxing people; it's a way of calling authority to the vision. As well as being a proprietary media business, its actual status in our media ecology as an authoritative source of news, an idea which belongs to everyone even if the newspaper itself does not, is recruited to lend verisimilitude and weight to the cause.

As Jake Dunagan and I were recently discussing in another context, one of the many devices which makes the Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane so successful is its intermittent cutting to newspaper headlines that help tell the story. (Now, like any novel and effective cinematic trope, this has since become cliche, but this original fictional biopic application, referencing newspaper's authority to help put a frame around plot points in the biography of a larger-than-life newspaper tycoon, makes perfect sense.)

No one addressing more than the most cursory scrap of attention to the actual content of the articles will fail to notice that they are fragments of an "impossible" dream, even if a profoundly noble one: the wholesale transformation of U.S. political culture. Post-election euphoria notwithstanding, the kinds of change described in the "special edition" don't tend to happen overnight, if at all. But the paper quite deliberately calls precisely that into question -- why not?

Similarly, Professor Steve Duncombe recently said in his presentation at HRCFS on Dreampolitik:

These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'

This Dream Newspaper is, to use Duncombe's term, an "ethical spectacle" par excellence.

Here's an in-scenario video about the campaign, also from the Times SE site:

Again, kudos to those who orchestrated this highly thoughtful, lovingly detailed, and timely piece of future-jamming. The sceptical futuryst doffs his virtual hat to you all.

Update (19/11/08): On Monday, my own copy of the New York Times Special Edition arrived in the mail.

It brings me so much joy to hold in my hands that it's almost embarrassing.

The difference between hearing about or seeing images of an impossible object, and experiencing it tangibly, is immense.

There's a colour-printed cover; National, International, Business and New York sections; political cartoons; and reports announcing massive legislative and social change around topics ranging from bicycle lanes to corporate criminality. The details in content, graphics, and layout of the 14-page publication are thoroughly splendid -- starting with the slogan "All the News We Hope to Print" on the header. It is, in short, a beautifully wrought artifact of the near-future.

The Yes Men's hallmark "identity correction" strategy is everywhere in evidence: the U.S. government recall notice for all gas-powered cars; advertisements reflecting drastic changes of strategy (or heart?) by companies such as oil giant Exxon Mobil and diamond merchants De Beers; a contrite farewell from pro-invasion columnist Thomas Friedman; and a Corrections section addressing repeated editorial lapses of judgement on the part of the Times itself.

For those unfamiliar with the strategy I mean, the following comes from a book manuscript about the Yes Men's infamous WTO intervention [pdf]...

As many readers will know, "identity theft" has become a major problem on the internet: scoundrels intercept personal information like your date of birth, residence, and credit card numbers, then have all kinds of fun at your expense.

What we have done is the opposite: we have found people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone else's expense, and have assumed their identities to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction.

~The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, 02003, p. 6.

Their future newspaper manages to communicate sincere, blue-sky idealism not through earnest moralising or shrill propaganda, but through wit, irony, political satire, and the indisputable thereness of the physical medium whose mantle and idiom it borrows. A preferred future performed, with aplomb. Injected into everyday life, 1.2 million times over, for your consideration. This is one hell of a feat.

Even better, it strikes me as being part of something bigger, of which the Obama campaign and election was a more formal signal. That is, a coming of age, in terms of self-awareness and tactical savvy, of the American left. An answer to the call made in books like Don't Think of an Elephant and Dream.

But this particular effort deserves to be recognised as a landmark, an ingenious, street-level dissemination of one particular vision for American politics. It was a normative intervention more powerful, interesting, and just plain fun (why not, dammit?) than any number of pamphlets or TV advertisements; as outrageously ballsy as calculatedly logical. And one repaid handsomely in the true currency of human communication: attention. "The amount of media coverage the Fake New York Times stunt received was staggering. It spread to news outlets all over the globe like wildfire." (Urban Prankster, 14 November 02008)

It's true that these newspapers have been fetching quite a bit on eBay over the last week, but my copy is safely in the archive. One piece of a laudable future-jamming effort of unprecedented magnitude, which -- and I mean this in the most flattering possible way -- I hope will be outdone, many times over, as soon as possible.

I'm extremely grateful to Steve Duncombe for sending it (our man in NYC, who helped arrange the intervention). Thanks Steve!

Jim Dator catches up on next year's news

Related posts:
> Future news-flash: your vote counts
> Manifesting vision
> Tomorrow's headlines
> Dreampolitik
> Found futures

(Thanks Jason and Victor!)

Design led futures

MARK: a digital feedback "biomarker" to manifest internal bodily processes
Image by Michael Fyfe for Kardia Project, Design-Led Futures 02007
(see Kardia workbook, pp. 132-154)

A fabric-based, personalised interface for music collections
Image by Dan Scudder for Stitch Project, Design Led Futures 02007
(see Stitch workbook, pp. 17-25)

X-POSE: diagnostic imaging plaster for user-friendly sports medicine
Image by William Carlson for Velvet Project, Design Led Futures 02007
(see Velvet workbook, pp. 47-56)

Each year, students in the School of Design at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, have an opportunity to apply their design training to dreaming up future product lines for a partner company.

The Design Led Futures (DLF) program was established at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design in 2004. ... The DLF program offers companies visions of the future. It explores possible scenarios for ten years into the future. It attempts to expand the range of possibilities that a company can see by challenging what the company currently does. It entices companies to take risks by offering believable future scenarios. Partner companies have included Fisher & Paykel and Methven from New Zealand, and currently DLF is working with Nike.

Companies have seen DLF as an opportunity to develop visions of the future with two main purposes in mind. The partners do not expect to develop intellectual property out of the projects. Rather, they use them to challenge their own teams into thinking beyond their comfort zone. Secondly, the concepts proposed by DLF are used by companies as promotional tools. The concepts serve the same function as 'concept cars'. They are not intended to go into production, but they help companies create an image of themselves for the public. This is useful in the sense that the company can express a sense of innovation without necessarily producing the concepts.

~Edgar Rodríguez Ramírez, Ross Stevens, and Simon Fraser, 02007, "Design-Led Futures: Emotional and Behavioral Response to Radical Future Concepts" [pdf], paper presented at Connecting '07, the World Design Congress, San Francisco

In March last year, Pantopicon's Nik Baerten succinctly described the three projects DLF had produced up to that point (a post reproduced at experience design consultancy Experientia):

• Domestic Bliss: students were required to create a new understanding of the role that appliances (such as fridges, washing machines and cookers) might play in the architecture and culture of the home [link; set in 02014; working with appliance company Fisher & Paykel]


• Inside-Out: project on the theme of outdoor living and the role that appliances might play in making this possible and pleasurable [link; set in 02016; again with Fisher & Paykel]


• Energising Water: project to explore and create a new understanding of the base material of water by creatively applying existing or new, specifically developed technologies [link; set in 02015; partnering with Methven, a shower and tapware manufacturer]

Each of these resulted in a string of Flash-animation presentations (reachable via the project links above) describing a series of hypothetical product lines. There's a lot of content in total, and it's well worth exploring.

However, I want to highlight the most recent project completed through DLF, a collaboration with the sports-brand giant, Nike. The 02007 cohort's collective output has its own self-contained website, hello_cybernetics, which at the time of writing seems to have received startlingly little attention online.

The three sets of design concepts offered up for Nike's future are called Stitch (based on digitally-responsive fabrics), Velvet (based on projecting images on the body), and Kardia (which, I'm delighted to see, goes way beyond the usual ten-year horizon to a post-Singularity vision for the brand, as far as 02087). Each project has a short introductory film wherein the product concepts are shown off and explained, and a downloadable (pdf) "workbook" (presentation booklet of sorts) is also available for each of the three. The production values are great, and some of the ideas are quite ingenious. (Images at the top of this post come from the workbook documents for which I couldn't find separate URLs, because they're linked from a Flash page.)

I very much like the fact that the students seem to have seized the opportunity to elaborate their personal ideals for what the brand could become, which importantly, allows room to deviate from the corporate vision. This makes it a particularly interesting case of inerweaving commercial and educational agendas; it's certainly far more enlightened than simply using trainee designers as a low-cost source of labour, toiling to legitimate the conceptual confines of an Official Future. And it makes learning possible on both sides of the partnership. From the Design-Led Futures initiative's website:

On the one hand, we want to empower students. As course coordinator Ross Stevens says, "If we cannot demonstrate to students that they can initiate meaningful change – then, as educators, we have failed".

On the other hand, we want to help industry to harness this creative energy and direct it into commercially successful business infrastructures and outcomes. In this respect, we are committed to an active leadership role – one of collaboratively developing industry, rather than the traditional role of simply serving industry by following its directives.

On his profile page, Stevens adds:

I personally believe that design fills a unique role here, first by generating creative, diverse and challenging possibilities, and then making these visible and tangible to others outside of the design profession. Through this process, a broader debate is created that draws people with different skills and perspectives together to create answers that are economically, socially and ecologically considered.

Resonant sentiments.

Overall I'm impressed by what strongly comes across as a highly resourced, pedagogically thoughtful, and institutionally well-connected program. For an initiative named "Design Led Futures", of course, from my point of view it would be great to see a deeper awareness of the futures dimension -- concepts and methods from the futures field that could be extremely useful in this setting -- and there are other aspects of the program that I'd like to look at more closely another time (such as its organisers' research on emotional engagement through future artifacts). But for now, it's great to have found another active player at the intersection of futures and design practice.

Check it out.

Related posts:
> Future-jamming 101
> Object-oriented futuring
> Greener Gadgets
> London after the rain
> The MacGuffin Library

Manifesting vision

In addition to the exploratory role of future artifacts frequently described here -- adding experiential dimensions to our map of alternative futures -- they can also be applied in a more targeted way, to persuade an audience of the credibility and desirability (or otherwise) of a particular vision, within a company for example. Not a huge conceptual leap, of course, but this post is about an example of precisely such an application.

The story comes from graphic designer Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram and author of Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and was recounted by Ryan Freitas (formerly at Adaptive Path, now with Plinky), at his blog second verse back in April 02006:

Having been charged with naming and creating the identity for United Airlines' low cost operator ("LCO" in industry jargon), Pentagram created a presentation that walked the client through their creative process and arrived at their recommendations on the name and brand direction. The deck was intended to get "everyone nodding at the same time," according to Michael, and included something I thought was brilliant:

They actually mocked up FAKE articles from the WSJ and put them in the deck. The first was a reminder of just how late United was entering into the market against established LCOs like Southwest and Song. The second was after they'd presented their recommendation - an article lauding United for it's [sic] bravery in pursuing a compelling and unique identity in the LCO space.

Those articles were almost as compelling as the direction itself, and I’m certain they had quite a bit to do with how well the idea sold within the organization.

Not long thereafter, in an email conversation with Adaptive Path president Peter Merholz, Bierut elaborated on the mockup strategy:

Being able to make vivid counterfeits is one of the joys of being a graphic designer, and one that we don’t take enough pleasure in. One of my partners in London once mocked up a whole issue of Fortune to help a client see his business differently.
...
I never talk about "educating the client." I hate that phrase. Almost always it's the designers who need the education, not the client, not the audience. Yet designers and clients both tend to recede into their areas of expertise, and it takes work for us to wrench each other out of it. Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool. Those fake Wall Street Journal articles were supposed to do exactly that: remind a client who had spent six months showing themselves Powerpoint presentations that there was a real world out there filled with people who didn’t share their fascination with their business strategy or, actually, care at all whether they succeeded at all. It's a good reality check, and it helps to shift the design work from an internal exercise that’s done for management approval, to work that’s done because you’re seeking results with real people in the real world.

Apart from a slight distaste for the phrase "the real world" (probably my own sensitivity owing to hanging around universities, a category of institution widely thought to be entirely unrelated to said reality), I think this point is marvellous and bears repeating: Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool.

Yes indeed. I'd be interested to hear from anyone with similar experiences to share.

A parting thought: curious how it takes a "fake" artifact to bring the "real" back into view.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Findability features FoundFutures
> Reality prototyping

Think about it

Today, a possible future to consider on the eve of the U.S. Presidential election.

a FoundFutures meme | artwork: Matt Jensen
concept: Jesse Arneson and Stuart Candy

Update (05/11/08): Yesterday morning, before the vote counting had begun, and perhaps to do his part to restore some political (or karmic?) balance to the McCain future shown above, Matt forwarded to me an unusual future artifact in the form of a "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America", produced by Focus on the Family Action. This is an evangelical Christian organisation that I'd never heard of, but apparently it's quite the operation, with radio broadcasts reaching some 220 million listeners daily in 160 countries.

The letter deploys a strategy elsewhere used for purposes more thoughtful than wildly emotive (e.g., in James Fallows' 02016 memo to the incoming U.S. President, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 02005). But this 02012 piece of apocalyptica is an unabashed right-wing propaganda item, warning of a frankly Orwellian transformation of the U.S., within just four years of an Obama Administration. The piece is as impressively inventive as it is hysterical in the detail and scope of its vision. A USA Today report on 28 October sums it up:

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts.
...
The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the final stretch and polls show the Democrat ahead.

Although hard-edge attacks are common late in campaigns, the tenor of the strikes against Obama illustrate just how worried conservative Christian activists are about what should happen to their causes and influence if Democrats seize control of both Congress and the White House.

The 16-page polemic culminates in a fully-fledged anticipatory guilt-trip for anyone considering straying from the Republican flock:*

When did all this start? Christians share a lot of the blame. In 2008, many evangelicals thought Senator Obama was an opportunity for a "change," and they voted for him. They did not realize Obama's far-Left agenda would take away many of our freedoms, perhaps permanently.

The 02012 future-letter affords a morbidly fascinating view of an extreme species of supposedly religious ideology that seems to have enjoyed considerable high-level influence in America in recent years, but is still so far removed from my own generally reasonable experience of everyday life in the U.S. that -- as for many both inside and outside this country -- its viability and appeal remain a source of puzzlement.

Enough said; interested parties may peruse the document in full here [pdf].

By the way, Obama won.

Related posts:
> Future news-flash: your vote counts [*The hell-on-earth scenario above compares interestingly to the playful guilt-inducing gambit in this pro-Obama mailout from MoveOn.]
> Death of an ex-President
> Found futures

(Thanks Jesse and Matt!)