Feb
22

AWESOME Things To Watch in 2011

After enjoying JWT‘s roundup of radness from their 2011 predictive trendspotting BIZINT department, I inferred a couple of times that they my have missed some things to watch in the coming year. I struggled with whether or not I was going to do a 2011 predictions post of my own (especially with all of the other great [and TERRIBLE] ones out there). As I intimated in the JWT post though, it’s tough to maintain your street cred as an armchair futurist if you don’t make some play calls – good or bad. It’s not like I can go on TV and just fry motherfuckers with my brain like Jamais Cascio:

Image courtesy of orderofchaos.soup.io

Here then is the Must. Be. AWESOME!!! 2011 Predictive Tapdance:

The Elephant in the Room: Islam

For all the loveliness that “hope” and “change” brought us in 2009, 2010 saw a whole lot of retrenching when it came to comprehending and engaging Islam. Look for the debate about what constitutes Islam, Islamism, what various groups of modern Muslims want in today’s world, and popular revolutions in the Middle East to ratchet up. Also keep an eye on what the Muslim Brotherhood does in the wake of Mubarak’s resignation: they will telegraph a lot of the conflict about modern Islam.

More Mashups, More Memes

I don’t care what anybody says: mashups and memes will continue to provide ample entertainment to We People of the Internetz. Look for advertisers to begin capitalizing on meme-trending and mashup-producing. Performance indicators: the next acquisition/website startup from the I Can Has Cheezburger collective AND Wieden & Kennedy after hiring the creator of this AWESOME video–

Cloud Seeding

As gaming continues to seep into the popular consciousness through applications like competitive geolocation (i.e. Foursquare and Gowalla) and passive social gaming (i.e. Farmville), look for more creative approaches to “seeding” the cloud with various types of content. Be it for advertising or grassroots mobilization purposes, effective influence and content promotion campaigns of the future will unfold via a variety of platforms. StickyBits and other QR code scanning apps are good indicators of tactical implementations of a cloud seeding strategy.

Hacktivism Triumphant

If WikiLeaks has taught us anything, masses of anonymous hackers can make or break online footprints. With Anonymous’ mobilization against Amazon and other deniers of service against WikiLeaks, it is apparent that all-out online cyberwar can and will occur at a rate of minutes and hours. Government will continue to play catch-up to the independent entities playing havoc with cybersecurity. DDoS attacks will become typical tools of the trade, and countermeasures against such attacks will demonstrate a new “arms race” in evolving security and attack technology. We will also see cyberwars play out in days between entities if not hours and minutes, the extent of which will run the gamut from mere inconvenience to full-on revolution (there’s a reason why Mubarak shut off the Internet, yo). It is possible that a wild 4channer will crack U.S. cyber defenses in 2011 and perhaps provide a 9/11-like impetus for government to begin getting serious with policy and legislation to operate in the digital age.

Nobody Cares About Public Diplomacy

Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech demonstrated that the U.S. government will continue to centralize public diplomacy initiatives in the White House, leaving State Department assets twisting in the wind as hollow emperors in the field. U.S. legislators will increase the depths to which they could give a shit less in 2011 about PD because PD does not create jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, 20th century institutions of public diplomacy like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors will continue to wither and die in the digital age as on-the-minute social reporting and citizen journalism make them further irrelevant. Funding for PD initiatives will continue to stagnate while implementers will find more creative methods of achieving strategic PD goals, mostly via the private sector tech sector and citizen diplomacy organizations. China and some European countries will continue to lead with non-obvious but concerted national efforts in global influence, the effects of which will remain undiscovered by their targets (i.e., US) for years.

Passive Social Gaming EXPLODES

Related to my concept of “cloud seeding,” 2011 will see an explosion of social games in the vein of Farmville. Already, 2011 has seen Zynga publish a suster game to its masses-tranquilizing hit called Cityville. Transmedia, alternate reality gaming, and other episodic social gaming entities will experiment further with audience acquisition, retention, and profit conversion this year. Advertisers will cash in on these mechanisms en masse, driving ad-tired audiences from game to game and forcing ad strategists to begin thinking in different ways about social advertising. We will also see a continued harmonization of transmedia and ARGs cross-platform, online and offline, for social gaming experiences that will, for example, weave in and out of Facebook, Twitter, iPad and other mobile apps, and in-person performance art. More and more people will join longer term games socially as new genres are introduced on social networks. Performance indicator: keep your eyes peeled on LinkedIn for a business-based social game that trains executives in a number of administrivial and professional functions.

Location-based Services Get Profitable

Also related to “cloud seeding,” location-based app services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will rapidly get profitable this year. While many detractors continue to ridicule the small audience size these services carry, their growth will continue by orders of magnitude in 2011, so much so that advertisers and marketers for brick-and-mortar businesses will pay oodles of dough to access their users. Look for more unique rewards for users who check in to local places and events as well as the beginning of an actual value system based on fictional goods (i.e. Gowalla’s items).

People Begin To Realize All This Social Stuff Really IS Creating Socialism 2.0

Marx said it would take capitalism to run its course and fall out of favor before true socialism could take hold of the world. Macro-philosophers and economists will slowly begin to see that that is happening on a mass scale in 2011. Group buying services like Groupon and Living Social, crowdfunded charity programs, realtime crowdsourced news reporting, and near-realtime media curation will continue to prove that power really is all about the people. Democratization of content and price will, therefore, produce The New Socialism or Socialism 2.0. This will freak out conservatives and create performance indicators on conservative news networks that decry not only a socialist presidency but a socialist economy beginning to develop. Look for influencers that combat these conservative perceptions as the emerging leaders of the Socialist 2.0 movement (which in and of itself will never be referred to as an organized, network movement with a solid objective… it will just happen). Parallel to this, fortunes will begin to change hands as sales for various product areas crash: for example, the comics industry will continue to lose sales in print as consumers demand more digital, interactive content.

We Need a New Narrative

No more Harry Potter. No more Lord of the Rings. No more Star Wars. What’s the next big franchise? 2011 will see experimental repurposing of old ideas into new franchises. My money is on Thor and Captain America to be the starting point for a huge Avengers movie franchise in 2011 and 2012 (with reams of associated multimedia content) while Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon tank.

What Do You Think?

Got some predictions of your own? Think I’m off-base about some of these things to watch? Let me know in the comments.

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Jan
27

JWT’s 100 Things To Watch in 2011

I got quickly overloaded by the abundance of “2011 predictions!” posts, white papers, and other internet ephemera that started spouting before the turn of the new year. As an armchair futurist and a self-described Challenger of the Unknown, I have to pay attention to a lot of the thinking bubbling up from the cesspool of teh Interwebz just to maintain a reputable degree of “cocktail party talk.”

No single source really jumped out at me as AWESOME in the 2011 prediction glut until I came across JWT‘s 100 Things to Watch in 2011 presentation on Slideshare (embedded below for your reading pleasure). What really struck me about this preso were a couple things:

  1. JWT leads with its track record. Not a whole lot of people out there honestly self-assessing their prior predictions. I can respect companies and people who are willing to include the credential of their work, positive or negative, before making predictions about the future. How accurate was JWT about 2010? Two words: BACON EVERYWHERE.
  2. They call Foursquare a “mobile gaming app.” This is the most accurate description of what Foursquare really is and how it works. Most netizens like to describe Foursquare as a geolocation social media tool, which completely misses the point. What makes Foursquare special is that it’s competitive, and that’s how you bring back users time and again.
  3. The preso’s author, Ann Mack, is credited as Director of Trendspotting. That is the BADDEST-ASS title I have ever encountered from a PR firm.
JWT: 100 Things to Watch in 2011

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence.

For these reasons alone I ascribed enough of a degree of credibility in JWT to actually consider their projections for 2011. Here now are the ones I found most AWESOME:

Auto Apps

I’m very intrigued by the integration of social and smartphone-type apps to vehicles of the future. The obvious one that JWT identifies is Pandora, which is the internet nerd’s answer to mobile radio. But think about where this goes: Security systems that tweet your iPhone when someone jacks with your car. Shutdown options for stolen cars. Intelligent maps that ask you if you’re interested in stopping at some AWESOME attraction while on your road trip. Lot of potential here.

Biomimicry

Design that takes inspiration from naturally occurring shapes and constructs? Love this concept. Sounds very posthuman to me.

Breaking the Book

Glad JWT sees that redefining the way we read is going to explode even more in 2011. They briefly touch on the future of publishing with Kindle Singles and the concept of serialized e-publication, but I think there’s more to it than that. With the advent of the tablet market, I think books are about to be redefined as a medium en toto.

Detroit

Everyone knows how sad of a story Detroit has become since the economic recession of the past few years. JWT proposes that Detroit is in for a turnaround this year, an idea I find curiously sticky given my sudden fondness for Detroit-set TV shows like Hung. Could Detroit become the playground for a new Silicon Valley-type creative ecosystem? We’ll see.

Group-Manipulated Pricing

I think this is a gimme just based on the data we all saw in late 2010. Things like Groupon are going to become more and more popular because it’s a social enterprise that crosses online and offline worlds. While people will gravitate to services like these to get monetary and consumer deals, I think they’ll become more popular because of the social act the service brings. People ENJOY saving money together, and this may even cross the geo-location boundary at some point when people get better deals by checking in somewhere as a group. The even more amazing facet of this phenomenon (which JWT missed, surprisingly) is how democratizing prices in this fashion looks VERY similar to a socialist economy.

Ignorance Is Bliss

JWT posits that if information becomes ubiquitous, as it seems to be doing via internet-age enabled apps and services, more people will simply stick their fingers in their ears and choose not to care. I identify with this to some degree because I do it all the time: do I really care that much if everyone on the planet knows I just checked into Samuel Beckett’s Irish Gastro Pub? Blow that up to the next logical question: If no one cares, are we bound for a sudden slingshot backwards in technology and progress?

Nanobrewers

I know TONS of people in the DC area that brew their own beer. The idea that these folks can sustain their own businesses by doing something they love is totally rad. The larger question, I think, is what’s the magic number that turns your hobby into a sustainable business? People will always want to drink a cold beer, but how well is that helping other more esoteric businesspeople (see Etsy).

Near Field Communication (NFC)

This concept is similar to RFID in that it involves the exchange of information between mobile and other devices within a four-inch zone. JWT sees utility in this for ticket purchasing, wallets, etc. Once that proves out as a useful method for data transfer (and it will), I’m more interested in the propensity for NFC-enabled wetware in humans. Why carry ANY device when you can embed it subcutaneously and turn your body into a digitally transmitting wallet?

Objectifying Objects

Love the idea of “fetishizing” – as JWT calls it – obsolete physical objects into decorative accouterments or other re-purposeable items. My wife and I buy things like this from the French Market in New Orleans all the time. She has two clocks up in her office that were made from old vinyl records painted in new artistic ways. I’m real interested to see new expressions of this “recyclable” art form this year.

Odyssey Trackers

JWT’s example is more extreme than mine, but this concept involves the aggregation and broadcast of all social and personal media information from people who go out to explore the world. I’m looking into some innovative storytelling uses of this when I trek across the country in a few weeks.

Older Workforce

I dont actually think this is AWESOME as much as it is alarming and shitty. My dad always told me he expected to work until the day he died and I should too. Data is clearly indicating that there is no way national entitlement programs will be able to satisfy their constituents without immense tax increases (something our already bloated deficit can’t handle). So the alternative is to continue to work past your retirement age. After all, what the fuck am I gonna do with $265 a month from the Social Security Administration when I’m 70?

Social Networking Surveillance

We’re living in a post-Wikileaks world now, people. If you don’t think there are little nondescript buildings at Fort Meade where tons of poorly-paid federal contractors are poring over your social media output, think again. Take it from a guy who’s participated in studies of social media and social networking in more oppressive societies (like Egypt): there is no more privacy.

Social Objects

Love love LOVE the concept of making THINGS social: attaching personal information, reviews, or other data to objects to advance the knowledge of a community of consumers. I thought JWT was going to miss the emergence of “cloud-seeding” in 2011 (I’ll talk more about this in a subsequent post) but their identification of this phenomenon coupled with apps like StickyBits makes it all better.

Space Travel Goes Private

FUCK. YES. It’s about fucking time. It’s the 21st century, for Chrissakes.

Storied Products

Transmedia Producers

JWT describes the first concept as something that involves consumers demanding more of a personal connection to brands they love. I actually think these two things on JWT’s list are interconnected in such a way that they deserve to be together. Transmedia producers have had a really hard time finding mainstream access and recognition beyond mere marketing effects (see the “Why So Serious?” campaign instituted for The Dark Knight). The more studios and companies blur the lines between marketing and production, the more transmedia’s reach will be seen. In the meantime, I actually think we’ll see more transmedia pros find better paying and better recognized work creating transmedia experiences for products on behalf of brands.

Temporary Tattoos Go High-End

According to JWT, there are places in Dubai that sell temp tattoos in actual gold. I actually think upgrading temp body art to designer levels (e.g., Chanel) is a new form of posthuman body modification. Up till now, I’d seen body mods as purely utilitarian and ability-expanding instead of cosmetic or vanity-inspired. So combine the functional with the fashion and what could you get? Solid gold Prince Alberts that deliver electrical shocks during sex? ZING!

Tintin the Movie

JWT’s calling this the next big franchise, possibly the new age replacement for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. With Spielberg AND Peter Jackson at the helm, I don’t doubt that it could be HUGE. But I’m not sure it hits the imagination highs required of big summer tentpole films like Harry Potter or Star Wars. Unless of course Spielberg and Jackson do some reinterpretations of the original source material and Tintin fights a robot zombie or something.

What Did They Miss?

Despite how great and how comprehensive this 2011 list is – and I encourage you to check out the entire preso – I actually think there are a lot of things JWT and other futurists missed. We’ll explore those next in a subsequent post.

In closing, I’d like to point out that this report is published annually by JWT Intelligence. Key in on the italicized word there and think about that for a second. From my experience, having worked in what many consider “real” intelligence (i.e. the U.S. government Intelligence Community), I find fascinating how many communication and public relations companies are choosing to characterize their future endeavors in the vernacular of intel. The term “business intelligence” has been around for quite some time, but I think its use in commercial enterprises like JWT implies another, more sinister intelligence-related word: espionage. So if this report compares as an intel assessment for JWT’s 2011 operations, what do you think its competitors and their communities of interest are doing with it?

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Jan
05

TRON and Digital Posthumanity: We Are As Unto Gods…

Whole lot on my mind since seeing Tron: Legacy. Screw the haters– this is an AWESOME movie. Beware: spoilers to follow.

In the film, Flynn (Jeff Bridges) describes how the artificial, digital world he built – The Grid – suddenly evolved on its own to produce isomorphic algorithms: digital lifeforms with purported original code to solve many of humanity’s problems in the real world. I am perpetually intrigued by the concept of digital emergence, particularly that built by a simulation that humans have created to solve some problem.

Screenshot: TRON Legacy Trailer

Image by Stephen R. Gilman via Flickr

Could such simulation act as the foundry in which humans become posthuman? Is this the raw matter where future posthumans will take on godlike qualities? Flynn, for example, displays a Neo-like ability to alter the source code of The Grid in Tron, despite being trapped in the simulation. He is regarded in many scenes as something of a creationist deity. If we look at posthumanity as the evolution of man into God, it becomes much more likely if you consider posthumans’ digital creations (to include their own digital representations or identities) as “God’s children.”

{An aside: For as much of a Matrix fanatic I am, I must admit to growing tired of the frequent invocations of that work in discussions about posthumanity, transhumanism, and the future. Not because I hated the film(s); quite the opposite- I loved them. However, I tire of armchair pop philosophers invoking The Matrix as the sole philosophical and emergent inspiration for discussions about a posthuman future. Even if it were the end-all, be-all of human evolutionary parables, I would still be sad that no other human entertainment has been able to capture or build upon the ideas the Warchowski Brothers developed in their epic. Posthumanism, after all, is about building upon the evolutionary potential of the present and creating the future humanity we want.}

Say what you will about Tron: Legacy‘s entertainment value and story (I thought it was AWESOME all around), the idea of digital isomorphic lifeforms is interesting… especially when viewed as creations of man. There’s a great conversation going on over at Science 2.0 about isomorphism, where Samuel Kenyon reminds us that:

…since isomorphisms produce meaning in simple formal systems (they act as the link between symbols and real world objects) they might be behind all meaning in humans. [Douglas] Hofstadter [who wrote a 1979 book on isomorphism] says:  ”In my opinion, in fact, the key element in answering the question ‘What is consciousness?’ will be the unraveling of the nature of the ‘isomorphism’ which underlies meaning.”

In this conversation, the idea emerges that man can only become posthuman by experimenting in digital, simulated worlds with creationism itself and that that very act of creationism is more about redefining consciousness and our perceptions of digital reality versus what we see, hear and feel every day. As technology progresses more and more toward integrated realities where the divide between the world and fictional or simulated worlds blurs, I think this concept provides the impetus for us to begin looking at ourselves as gods.

More to follow on this…

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Dec
29

eReader Showdown: The Kindle Experience

Much has already been written about the Kindle and its evolutions. I, however, have a found a lack of attention to the increasing levels to which Amazon designs new versions of the premier e-reading device. Instead of tricking out new Kindles with new bells and whistles, apps, and other distractions, Amazon seems to have hyper-focused on the Kindle’s simplicity, portability, and cost. The result: a super AWESOME e-reading experience in the Kindle 3.

Amazon made an interesting choice with the Kindle 3 by choosing not to compete along the same evolutionary path as Barnes & Noble‘s nook or other multi-screen, multipurpose e-readers. In the submarine sonar war that is the modern e-reading technology competition, Amazon’s Kindle is the cheapest device on the market. For a mere $139, you can get the lightest, most unobtrusive, and simplest of e-reading experiences. The abundance of these devices has made it easy to lower prices and market them to the Everyman, something I think is missing from other e-reader companies’ offerings. Sure all of these companies WANT to sell everyone their own e-reader, but Amazon has lowered the most barriers to purchase for consumers of all types.

What does this mean for future Kindle sales strategies? Consider these scenarios:

  • Organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development purchase hundreds of thousands of e-readers for developing communities in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Senegal, etc. The effect: instant access to learning material in a variety of languages.
  • Green movements force more and more companies to quit printing technical manuals to new devices and instead transmit those manuals to buyers’ Kindles upon purchase. The effect: Kindle sales emerge into more retail chains.
  • Auto-makers include Kindles with new car purchases (perhaps cars that generate wifi) not only for easy technical manual access but also for emergency communications. The effect: drivers have more easy-to-find aid in emergencies.

We’re already seeing a trend towards disposability in Kindles. At ever decreasing price points, these devices will become more and more ubiquitous as time goes on. As the pioneer in E-Ink technology application, Amazon knows that this device can revolutionize several different private and public sectors. They key to that success is continued innovation and design excellence along the Kindle’s main value areas: ultra-portability, ultra-simplicity, and super-affordability.

I believe that within the next two years, we’ll begin seeing Kindles move into more retail chains like Target. It’s not inconceivable that you’ll see future versions for sale on the paperback rack in the checkout line at the grocery store. Because the Kindle experience is so unlike other e-readers and so appealing to a mass consumer audience, get ready to see its hyper-ubiquity instituted all over the world.

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Dec
08

Posthumanity and the Creative Economy

I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, which is an AWESOME treatise on how the emergence of a creative economy is replacing the abundance of inexpensive industrially produced goods and services. Pink writes about the mass economy becoming more automated and cheaper because of outsourcing to Asian companies. If this pushes down costs of production so much, he argues that people will begin to care more about design and emotion instead of functionality and utility.

But what if this shift also cheapens the product as a whole to such a degree that humans become bored with everything they create? Does this provide a transcendent motivation to evolve and thereby create more interesting and satisfying things? Is that motivation to transcend impetus enough to warrant a full-on pursuit of posthumanity?

2003 Zagato Coupe and Roadster Photographed by...

Image via Wikipedia

Picture if you will a society where an Aston-Martin is available for lease at your local Wal-Mart for less than $100 a month. Do you then get bored with such a fine piece of vehicular AWESOME? Of course you do. It’s so cheap, there is no penalty for early trade-in. This abundance, no matter how well-designed or how emotionally satisfying the product, will eventually challenge producers (by way of consumer demand) to create better things faster. In essence, your Aston-Martin becomes disposable. So how do you build rarity and scarcity into products that are now seen as somewhat artistic?

The theory I’m building here is an evolutionary theory of industrial production, I guess. At some point, humans developed automation to mass produce goods. As humans’ desires and tastes became more varied and aesthetic, that automation had to become more complex and/or new humans had to insert themselves into the production line to ensure quality. If we stay on the trajectory Pink outlines, then as our products become more creative (by design and aesthetics, for instance), either our automation will have to evolve or we will have to develop a new creative production class. The thought here is that automation (read, machines) cannot duplicate human creativity, and thus mankind may be forced to enslave a new version of Orwell’s proletariat to produce all the creative stuff we want.

More simply put, I observe two distinct posthuman implications to this evolution:

  1. The uppercrust of society will want rarer, scarcer, and more creative things more often.
  2. In the absence of automated production, that uppercrust will force lower classes to produce creative things for them.

In this creative economy, simple products & services will still need to be manufactured and performed, so as humans evolve past the desire to do those tasks, they will either create hardware/software to do it for them OR other types of humans….be they slaves, clones, or some other type of second-class worker human. Perhaps even a human that does not know he or she was fabricated or engineered specifically to act as a cog in a creative process. Perhaps we already ARE those humans and the uppercrust posthumans are on their way to godhood.

I tweeted a while back in response to the White Canvas guys’ survey about creativity that “Creativity is mankind’s discovery process for touching God.” What happens when we get to a point in discovery where we realize we already ARE God? See Dan Simmons‘ thought-provoking novels Ilium and Olympos for a possible scenario where posthumans evolved past the point of caring about their creative underclass and regressed: they used their evolved posthuman abilities to take on the identities of Greek gods and engineer the Trojan Wars for their own amusement.

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Nov
21

Further Notes on Posthumanity

Based on discussions I’ve been having with people online and offline since my first “Posthuman” post, I’ve been struck with a braingasm full of thoughtbombs on the subject. What will follow are a series of posts under the Futurism category and the Posthuman tag that seek to collect and organize my thinking on the subject. These posts will not always make sense or be rationally organized because I’m finding that it helps to write about them in a hyper-creative, freeform stage at this point instead of something more formalized.

The Web, Social Media, and Meta-Persona

Will humans’ collective social interactions on the Web provide the foundational data and code to create a self-aware Internet?

The collective leavings of man on the Internet are becoming overwhelmingly social, left behind data on a mass of social media platforms and at-rest social technologies. If this data continues to reside on the Web, and if different sets within this data are permitted to interact (replicating conversations between humans in the form of data), then do these coding interactions actually mimic the neural activity of the human mind…thus creating the construct for an awareness?

Imagine all the information from all the social networks people use (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, etc). It’s not just being stored on the Internet (in the cloud), it’s being shared socially, which means it’s evolving past single purpose data into evolutionary ideas. Ideas are evidence of sentience. Is it then just a matter of time before the Internet “wakes up” and interacts with mankind on it’s own behalf?

Image courtesy of The Ampersand

Consider the virtual musical act Gorillaz: 4 fictional personas whose interactions and compositions are the creation of several individual humans. These personas even interact with humans via virtual social media, e.g. Murdoc’s Twitter account. This is a form of collective identity where the personas behind Gorillaz are sublimated by the perception of the characters’ realness in online space.

Now imagine if one day the Internet woke up and spoke to us through one of these virtual personas or created one of it’s own. If we perceive sentience from the collective organization of data in such a way that the data becomes self-aware….does this nexus of man-machine interface, philosophical solipsism, and posthuman creationism signify the turning point where Everything Changes? Is this the Singularity?

[NOTE: This post was drafted using WordPress's iPad app, which strips away much important functionality from posting (such as Zemanta's pic recommendations). Its a great way to capture thoughts on the fly before they slip away from y mind, but full-on publishing has to be done through the main WP CMS to make it prettiez fer yoo.]

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