Jul
12

I’m Coming For You, Public Diplomacy!!!

 

Spider Jerusalem

Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan. Image by Darek_Smid via Flickr

Inspired by a recent reading of Warren Ellis‘ and Darick Robertson‘s exceptional sci-fi journalism epic Transmetropolitan, I’m going guns up on a number of communications issues affecting the communities through which I circulate in DC. Ellis’ self-described “outlaw journalist” Spider Jerusalem – fueled by copious amounts of drugs and madness in a delightful send-up of Hunter S. Thompson – promises his readership “The Truth. No matter what.” In his writing, Spider goes after all that is wrong with his beloved society, targeting everything from corrupt politicians to the public’s ignorance of special sub-cultures in their fine City. I find Spider’s epic story a galvanizing bullwhip across my back, forcing me off my Xbox-addled arse to write about some of the iniquities in government I see as part of my work. This will be just the first in a series of posts on subjects across the communications spectrum. I’m coming for ALL OF YOU.

Today, my first target is public diplomacy.

OMGWTF

Readers of this blog should not be surprised by my intense disappointment in the modern public diplomacy (or PD) community.  Today’s premeditated murder was spurred on by my attendance and yet another PD gathering in Washington, DC: a meeting of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD). On the shores of our august capitol, PD enthusiasts, practitioners, and executives met to talk about the same retarded problems they have been since before the U.S. Information Agency‘s (aka the USIA) absorption by the State Department during the Clinton Administration. Panelists lamented continued lack of resources for PD initiatives, the imbalance between the State and Defense Departments in strategic communication capability, and a dilapidated piece of shitheel legislation called the Smith-Mundt Act whose Cold War roots strangle in the crib any offspring of modern government communication and engagement initiatives.

At issue for you oppressed, tax-fucked Americans? These same people have debated this same issue for a decade with no charted course for reform.

Hunter S. Thompson would have brain-smacked you all by now. Be thankful for my gonzo. Moo hoo ha ha. (Image from TopTenz.net. Comedy shamelessly ripped off of Warren Ellis.)

“That’s not fair!” some asshole will undoubtedly object, choking himself masturbatorially on reams of “DipNotes” from PD officers both home-based and overseas, begging our pardon thank you very much, “We have changed SO. MUCH. in the Obama Administration!” Let not these purported achievements fill you with comfort, dear seekers of AWESOME, for they elicit mere “yays” from the govvies roaming the halls of cavernous Main State and snickering derision from their interagency compatriots behind the green doors of MacDill and Bragg and Langley. Progress made under Judith McHale‘s reign as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs registers as little more than a cursory reshuffling of office space for most of the strategic communication community. Progress that scores an administration enough points for a minor electoral anecdote but changes nothing. In fact, Dame Judith hung her Mission Accomplished banner on July 1st and dashed back to the private sector, a political appointment weighing under her belt for new boardroom dances with wolves.

They define “progress” as anything more than what the last administration achieved. The politicization of public diplomacy continues. Even PD Jesus Bruce Gregory’s voice cracked with torpor as he queried the Commission about any indication of motivation amongst The Bastards of Capitol Hill to make revising legislation like Smith-Mundt a priority. No one could answer with anything but googly-eyed evasion and exhortations of more progress. All bullshit.

Key to these liver spotted deliberations is the disconcerting lack of any personage on the Commission the age of, it seems, 60? 50? 40? Said Commissioners are charged with advising the White House and Congress on the current state of PD and any required changes. Have these venerable veterans achieved any of these changes in the past? NO. Debates continue unabashed under their scrutiny, but ultimately, no capable young saviors have appeared to dash the fuckery of this decrepit profession into some semblance of modernization. Instead, more meetings. Many, many meetings.

Is PD even a necessary discipline in the 21st century? This existential question should be considered by this Commission and more. Panelists admitted that as communication becomes more social and content ownership franchises more to the individual… does a government agency have any equitable place in this modern communication continuum? How much of said agency’s budget could be repurposed into something more effective, especially in This, Our Decade of Economic Anal Probity?

In truth, some kind of coordinative communication apparatus is probably mandated, but a standalone office of diplomats still trying to get Teh Brown Peeples to read our press releases is not the answer. The profession of public diplomacy itself has even been attacked indirectly by the wild success of independent citizen diplomacy efforts. As much as foreign cultures balk at the elitist diplomacy practiced by our leaders, they clamor for more of US. OUR people. Our CITIZENS and THEIR culture. It is THIS influence, the kind Americans exude in their daily interactions with EVERYONE, that fosters our best destiny in achieving any kind of global equilibrium where U.S. interests and foreign policy objectives are met.

So. What to do?

Less bullshittery. More AWESOME.

We need not more reportage of the latest personnel changes in State PD to accommodate engagement with people of different cultures online. Instead, we need INSANE RISK TAKING. We need programs that make managers shit their pants. We need BOLDNESS. We need MADNESS. We need BETTER. Everyone lives in fear of breaking the law (i.e., Smith-Mundt), but no one has ever been prosecuted much less charged for it. COWBOY UP, PEOPLE.

Retire the old. Empower the new.

If PD is to survive, it needs to stop chasing off all its talent. Instead of rewarding the tired old Foreign Service Officers in their Cold War era suits with prime postings and political appointments, recruit badass social communicators and rockstars. Were I the President, I’d beg Jack Dorsey to fix my State Department. I’d heap tons of cash upon Katie Stanton and Jared Cohen to keep challenging the system instead of being chased off by white-faced, skeleton-eyed Statey lifers. It’s time for PD to evolve and kill its parents.

Flexible, dynamic interagency doctrine.

Christopher Paul, RAND analyst and a speaker at the ACPD meeting, noted voluminous mountains of reports all describing the same problems with the US government’s PD and strategic communication enterprise. All of them, he said, cited failures in strategy, leadership, and resources. While this is true, understand that they can only be fixed with doctrine– legislated, enforceable operating procedures that name the leader and give them authority, power, and dollars. Said doctrine should be written and executed dynamically and train its future communications professionals to a standard of dynamism instead of the usual tired old PD goals shat out by Foreign Service Institute instructors.

An organization… or not?

Since PD people love to retread the same issue over and over, the ACPD discussion inevitably turned toward the idea of a rehabilitated USIA of the future or some such public/private organization that could strategically execute funding for PD or strategic communication programs. If you think this is the solution to your PD problems, I refer you to the abortion that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a case study in placenta cannibalization. Ultimately, we will not know if a new organization is needed until we agree upon one final yet primarily critical issue.

Communication is communication is communication.

In the ecosystem of government influence, we have public diplomacy. We have strategic communication. We have military information operations and its subordinate components. We have public affairs. We have countless different ways of describing the same thing, mainly because Our Bastardry In Office refuse to modernize legislation and policy to reflect the present day much less prepare for the ever-fluid yet super-AWESOME future. Instead of rewriting arcane definitions and arguing them over interagency turf, we need a frank and fundamental understanding by our entire government that all of these things are influence and communication is the mechanism by which we engage that influence, be it passively or actively, openly or surreptitiously. We need a pedigree for professionals charged to operate in this ecosystem and high qualifications for the ones assigned to advise senior leaders and decision makers.

Hope Is Not Lost

It sounds doomy and gloomy from the PD pulpit, doesn’t it? Well, here’s another lovely fact for you to chew on: NOBODY CARES. That’s right. Outside of DC, Americans could care less about a minuscule communication discipline practiced by a cadre of foggy eyed concerto directors and staffs of douchebags wielding postgraduate degrees from learning institutions designed to pump out partisanly political clones year after year.

Within this black hole of apathy lies opportunity. While no one is looking, those with the drive and the passion to make change – not ask for it – can turn the modernization of PD into an ecstasy fueled RAVE. The Executive Branch needs not the pusillanimous posturing of political poobahs on the Hill to create true strategic communication primacy in government right now. But to make permanent visionary change, we will eventually need to rustle Congress into the pasture of the future.

To achieve this, however, we need YOU – that’s right, YOU – to get up off your ass and MAKE THIS AN ISSUE. Every time you vote for the guy who likes to tweet dick pics to his mistresses, you screw us out of balanced, effective decisions. Stop sending immense wankers to DC.

Next Time On Strategic Communication Theater…

In subsequent posts, we’ll explore more about what this weird world of strategic communication and influence looks like from Washington. Many of you dear AWESOMESAUCERS have no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s part of the problem. So look for a series of “WTF…?” posts detailing simple explanations of complex processes, systems, and disciplines related to Our National Communication Nightmare.

The gloves come off.

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Jun
13

Racists Totally Freak Out Over Muslim “Batman of Paris:” A ComicsAlliance Article

Media_httpwwwblogcdnc_fjdie
via comicsalliance.com

Great article and great subsequent comments on the controversy of DC’s “Muslim Batman of Paris.” When I wrote earlier in the year about Islam being the elephant in the room, instances like this act as indicators that people are beginning to deal with the implications of modern Islam. More importantly, I think it’s encouraging that those dealing with it are working out the issues involved in a medium like comics where illustrated drama can be employed to create a modern fable about these issues. Be sure to leave a comment at the link.

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Mar
02

Conversations at American University: The Double Facepalm

I had a great time last week talking with my buddy Dr. Craig Hayden in his Public Diplomacy class at American University in DC. Craig and I are sometimes-partners-in-crime at the MountainRunner Institute (along with His AWESOMEness, Matt Armstrong, and “Georgia Peach” Shawn Powers). We have a lot of interesting discussions about public diplomacy, strategic communication, and the nature of information and influence in today’s post-digital world.

Craig asked me to bring my perspective on those discussions to his class. We managed to film parts of the conversation, so I’m going to be chopping them up into bite-sized morsels of BADASS AWESOME for you, my loving public, to digest. In the first of these videos (all of which will be hosted here on my YouTube channel as well), Craig asks why I chose the metaphor of the “double facepalm” in last week’s introductory blog post about my experiences in public diplomacy and government. (Larger, HD versions of the video are available via the YouTube link.)

I’d like to give a great big THANK YOU to all the AU students I met during this discussion. It’s really heartening to me to see so many potential citizen diplomat rockstars in this soul-sucking town. Great talking with you, and I hope we can continue the conversation outside the classroom.

Speaking of which: I know a lot of you are blogging as part of Craig’s class and on your own. Please be sure to call yourselves out in the comments section of these video posts. I’d really like to promote some of the student-led commentary I’ve seen since the in-class discussion. We build our audiences socially, so I’d love to feature some of your opinions and content on Must. Be. AWESOME!!! dot com.

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Feb
23

Public Diplomacy for AWESOME People… the Du4 Way!

I am extremely honored that Dr. Craig Hayden has invited me to speak to his public diplomacy class at American University Thursday evening this week. I met Craig through shared colleagues at the MountainRunner Institute, and we have since collaborated on a number of things. He’s a great dude, loves beer, and I thought it would be cool to throw up a landing post for me, him, his class, and anyone else who gets PO’d by the sure-to-incense incendiary fire that will come burbling out of my Macallan-addled lips Thursday night.

I have a love-hate relationship with public diplomacy. Coming from a background in the Department of Defense, I did not understand the peculiar delineation between PD and other forms of government communication and influence until my own graduate work at Johns Hopkins. Upon discovering the very simple definition that PD involves a government’s communications directly to foreign governments’ citizens (and thus bypassing that foreign government), I became instantly enamored of the idea. After all, in DOD, when you “communicate” with a foreign population, you’re usually dropping a bunch of comic strips from the sky written so badly that the recipients think all Americans really are retarded.

My work generally involved finding ways to improve the U.S. government’s communication capability, be it PD, public affairs, IO/PSYOP, or other means. One of my mentors, the late Jeffrey B. Jones, called all of these disciplines strategic communication, a term that has since entered the DOD lexicon and gone on to confuse and infuriate virtually everyone else in government. If DOD does one thing well, it defines its doctrine exhaustively, and an integrated communication and influence doctrine is something our government has needed for a long time. I became a fan of Jeff’s definition from the get-go, and I proceeded to execute my work under such a fashion.

This is how it feels like working in public diplomacy EVERY DAY.

How does this affect public diplomacy? Well, aside from all the other problems in the U.S. national security apparatus, PD practitioners have been almost historically kicked in the ass by said interagency apparatus. Since the U.S. Information Agency – the premier public diplomacy institution of the Cold War – was folded up into the State Department by the Clinton Administration, PD has been regarded as a largely unnecessary, unneeded career field.

However, some of the brightest information warriors I have ever met have come from PD backgrounds. Some still serve the State Department. But they are a dying breed, and State is not adapting fast enough to the 21st century to train, educate, and deploy PD officers of the future. Many communication and diplomacy experts have even called for the dissolution of the public diplomacy career field, arguing that others do it better in today’s day and age.

I come down on this issue very simply: communication is influence. Period. Call it public diplomacy. Call it public affairs. Call it public relations. Call it fuck all, I don’t care. It’s all the same shit and these penny-ante fights government gets into over who owns influence planning and execution are mere dick measuring exercises to protect budgets and retain standing within our own ranks. If any of us PD “professionals” had a whit about us, we would (re)read Unrestricted Warfare by Senior Col Qiao Liang and Senior Col Wang Xiangsui and understand that global communication, global influence, requires the strategic, national integration of ALL government branches and agencies and their communications initiatives. It requires, to borrow an analogy, for America to conduct herself as a composer would an orchestra, creating multitudes of musical movements that all combine into one big, beautiful symphony.

If you’re a student in Craig’s class, drop me a line in the comments. Send questions, concerns, or even challenges, and I promise to answer them to the best of my ability in class on Thursday.

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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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Feb
18

Shoot for the Fence

So I’m here at Top Golf USA, a really rad range where golfers can not only practice their driving game but also compete by aiming for several color coded targets at varying distances on the course. I’ve been coming here with friends and clients for years, and it’s been a great place to develop my very amateur golf skills. Also, there is beer, good chow, and lovely nubile waitresses in short shorts.

I’ve gotten to the point where my short game is pretty good. I can rack up points on the Top Golf leaderboard by hitting the closer targets (red and yellow pits are only a few yards away). So I typically spend my game aiming for those targets – maybe the mid-range green – between beers, when I’m not practicing with a particular club.

However, today, I played an entire game swinging nothing but my 5 wood and hit the straightest, most perfect drives since I started golfing. Ten of these shots (you get 20 balls per game) scored hits in the furthest target areas in the 200 yard range. As a result, I also scored my highest Top Golf game ever: you receive more points for the targets that are further away, and you can double those points with successive scores. I’ve NEVER hit that good in my life. And you know what I did differently to make those shots?

I shot for the fence.

Instead of of settling for the easy path, the quick avenue to simple rewards… try shooting for the fence next time YOU try to achieve something. Whether it’s sales, leads, dollars, or golf balls, I guarantee you will have a better game if you bring the AWESOME and aim for the toughest goal.

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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
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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Nov
20

Posthuman

Work lately has been forcing me to think about existential things. I’ve recently closed some client work that’s necessitated heavy research and reading into texts and ideas that really unsettled me. Much of my unease has to do with philosophical turmoil in that some of these ideas force me to take a really hard look at HOW I believe and not just WHAT I believe.

Image courtesy of Immortal Humans

(Belief being what it is, I shy away from ideological combat as much as possible. I find I can never come to a mutually settling agreement with those who believe in something so strongly that even rational conversation about those subjects become laced with emotional poison. I feel there is such disdain for rationalism these days that it makes more sense for me to listen, review, reflect, and pontificate only when I have a solid grasp of the issues involved. Of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Hence my predilection for comic books, explosions, zombies, and tits.)

Cover of

Cover of Ilium, courtesy of Amazon.com

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the term posthuman, which is something I first heard about from sci-fi comic book writer and futurist Warren Ellis. Ellis used the word as a more apt descriptor for superhuman or super powered heroes in his comics. Posthumanism is a different concept, however, in that it considers an evolutionary state of mankind that’s difficult to conceive but generally regarded as improved or evolved past our current state; hence the “post.” I’m most interested in the science fiction concept of posthuman. In Dan Simmons‘ Ilium and Olympos, posthumans are a race of humans who have evolved so far beyond what we perceive as normal humanity that they became super-powered gods who eventually manipulated time, space and probability to play out their whims (in these books, that took the form of a recreated Trojan War). (Ilium and Olympos actually post so many interesting and thoughtful questions, I could spend weeks getting to the bottom of them.)

So I’m thinking about all of this in terms of a question: “Where are we going?” From here, from our myopic view bound by present perceptions of time, I’m falling deeper into the well of contemplating our shared future. Or futures plural. In some cases, the existential questions brought on by increasing degrees of ideological combat in today’s perception space lead me to feel more and more pessimistic about the future. So I’m what I’m trying to do is link the unfortunate human realities of the present to something much more rewarding, scientific and dynamic… something posthuman.

None of this thinking is taking the form of actual product at this time, save for blog entries like this. I have a rough idea for combining some of this thinking about posthumanity with socio-political observations about the present into some type of narrative. This would be a lot of fun to produce, but I need to spend a lot of time ironing out the theory into a story. An AWESOME story, at that.

On that note, here’s a more specific list of some of the things that have inspired this line of thinking. If you have any additional recommendations for study, please let me know in the comments.

More to follow.

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