Jul
15

Links of the Week: July 15, 2011 Edition

Decades after duty in the OSS and CIA, “spy girls” find each other in retirement

I kind of adore this story about two old ladies living in a retirement home who suddenly remember each other worked for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) in World War II. The video is hilarious. One of WaPo’s better pieces, I think. More of this, please.

Writers in Hollywood

As I learn more about the world of writing in Hollywood, I’m comforted by the observations of old guard prose scribblers like Raymond Chandler. In this 1945 Atlantic article, Chandler describes the differences between Hollywood scriptwriters and the novelists with whom he counted himself. Chandler’s AWESOME style is on display here, maintained from his fiction writing into this piece. It’s a notable historical portrait as well, rife with comparisons to the Hollywood film scene of today.

The Black Futurists

The World Futurist Society tipped me to this description of an AWESOME looking exhibit at the Sargent Johnson Gallery in The African American Art and Culture Complex in San Francisco. The exhibit features works of black futurists, from science fiction writers to bass players from outer space. People call it “Afrofuturism.”

Homefront and Propaganda In Video Games – What Are They Trying To Tell You?

G4 has a fun list of video games with brief queries about their inherent propaganda value. Most take the form of “war porn” games like Call of Duty, but there are some surprises. I had no idea, for example, that Teh Mad Christians had created a Left Behind video game adaptation where you apparently combat the forces of darkness with… prayer. Kinect that shit up, preacher!

Not Giving Up

Naltorian seer Jamais Cascio delivers a sanguine third option to the debate over how transformative future technologies like AI could either enslave humanity or set us free. Cascio argues that technology is already part of who we are; that Rejectionist and Posthumanist perspectives on bio-technical evolution ignore fungible interpretations of humanity. I enjoy Cascio’s commentary not just because of his unique perspective, but also because of his engaging writing style. This is a man who once briefed a social business crowd on how the future will be made of people, so I find it compellingly AWESOME that the guy’s writing just FEELS GOOD. He’s good people, and you should get there.

Is this the roster for DC’s new Justice League?

We can now confirm that this AWESOME Jim Lee is indeed a portrait of what’s being referred to as the “DCnU” Justice League. Set for debut in just a few short weeks, rumors circulated rampantly about DC Comics‘ relaunch of its entire line of comics. People were horrified, outraged, amazed, and excited for such a crazy turn of publishing events, all circling around the consolidated relaunch of every title to appeal to new readership. DC press releases since haven’t been as encouraging (there’s some good stuff but there’s also plenty of mediocrity) but this image is still something to get excited about.

The new cast of Geoff Johns' and Jim Lee's JUSTICE LEAGUE.

Disorienting Brand Conversions

My Modern Met logo designer Graham Smith makes your brain hurt with these weird brand swaps.

Image via My Modern Met

Anti-grav self portraits reveal the everyday life of a person who can levitate

AWESOME, AWESOME photoblog discovered by io9 of Tokyo photographer Natsumi Hayashi. Hayashi’s self portraits involve a degree of photography legerdemain where she sets up the shot then jumps to capture the effect that she’s actually levitating. It’s a supercool story of someone fudging reality to create abject beauty. The photos below are some of my favorites.

Image via yowayowacamera.com

Image via yowayowacamera.com

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Apr
22

Links of the Week: April 22, 2011 Edition

Trying to get back into the swing of things after recovering from a trip to the Emerald Isle. Jet lag lasted way too long. Here is big dump of links from the past month or so. As always, other notable things I found cool and interesting are all captured on my Pulse Posterous feed.

Raymond Kurzweil, an American academicand author.

Image via Wikipedia

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

 

Lev Grossman writes this TIME Magazine article about futurist Ray Kurzweil and his predictions for the coming Singularity. It’s a very comprehensive and thorough look into the implications of Kurzweil’s thinking, from life extension to machine awareness. What struck me most about the piece, however, was how Kurzweil’s impetus for his work boiled down to his overriding desire to bring his deceased father back to life. Kurzweil believes wholeheartedly that humans will be able to resurrect the dead at some near point in the future, possibly from as little as preserved DNA. Thus, he has taken to extending his own life via any means necessary, like consuming a massive amount of nutrient and supplement pills per day. It really speaks to me that Kurzweil believes in such a rapid explosion of technology and why he wants to be around to see it. This is a must-read for all you futurists, singularitarians and transhumanists out there.

Trailer: Another Earth

Here’s a trailer for an intriguing film I first heard about from some friends who caught its premier at Sundance this year. The buzz around this indie sci-fi movie has been lighting up the internet in recent months, and this trailer should give you all the rationale you need to find it when it releases.

Watching People Skydive in Slow Motion Is Absolutely Mesmerizing

Seriously. This video is just magical. Click through it for a larger hi-res version… and prepare to be amazed.

Experience Human Flight from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

Is a Social Currency System The Next Big Thing?

Dave Armano poses some questions about Empire Avenue, a new “social currency” system that’s part game, part stock market, part influencer metrics ecosystem. I’ve been playing around with Empire Ave for a while now, and its potential as a measurable environment for influencers – based on their social connections via networks like Facebook and Twitter – is immense. Be sure to check out the comments for good discussion on Armano’s post, and if you’re interested in trying out Empire Ave, make sure you buy several shares in yours truly, Du4. :)

Friday Five: What Gamification means for Digital Marketers

Edelman Digital gives a pretty succinct summary about the concept of “gamification” that’s been buzzing around digital circles since SXSW.

Hidden camera photos reveal the secret lives of scifi toys

Image by Thurston Roscoe

Leave it to io9 to find Thurston Roscoe’s hilariously staged photos of toys from our youth and what they do when we’re not looking. More fun photos at the links.

Many More Clips From The New Looney Tunes: Marvin The Martian, Yosemite Sam, Road Runner And More

I had no idea that Warner Brothers was working on a brand new Looney Tunes cartoon starring all our favorite WB cartoon characters from the Friz Freleng / Mel Blanc era. The animation looks SOLID too. Check out this clip of Foghorn Leghorn and Daffy Duck, which features some pretty advanced humor I was not expecting from a Cartoon Network show aimed (presumably) at kids. As an unabashed fan of classic Looney Tunes, I am SO EXCITED for this show’s premier on May 3rd. More vids at the link courtesy of Bleeding Cool.

Yakuza to the rescue?

Apparently, Yakuza gangsters in Japan are pitching in to help dig out people trapped and injured in the recent Japan earthquake. Code of honor indeed.

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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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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
03

Links of the Week

Some interesting things I’ve read this week that bear mentioning:

These Screens Will Send You Back To The Future

Screenshot from new Back to the Future game courtesy of IGN/Kotaku

Telltale Games is developing a new internet browser-based video game adaptation of Back to the Future. I’m even more excited by the fact that this will be an episodic game with new weekly content AND an iPad version! Here’s an early screenshot on the left, and more higher-quality scans can be found at the link above.

The Anatomy of a Movement

David Armano talks about harnessing the power of movements for ad campaigns. Armano makes AWESOME graphics to help explain his points, and I find his style of visual thinking is among the most cogent on the web.

WikiLeaks Reveals Iran’s Secret, Worldwide Arms Hunt

The big news in DC this week was “Cablegate,” an unleashing of several diplomatic documents obtained illegally by WikiLeaks. These documents confirmed something I’ve known for quite a while because of my irregular warfare work: strategically, there is a Cold War-like balance of power between Iran and Arab nations like Saudi Arabia that hinges on nuclear capability and how the United States chooses to engage in the region. There is a lot more to this than anybody truly understands, I think. I believe the Persian/Arab divide is much more of a globally chilling problem than our own existential struggle with Islam.

Activate Wave-Motion Gun! New documentary takes you inside the live-action Star Blazers

Star Blazers was the first cartoon I remember seeing as a child that changed my perspective on animated storytelling from the pedestrian to the epic. Despite its somewhat cheesy American adaptation, Space Battleship Yamato (its original Japanese name) established a cool standard for serialized, mature storytelling in American cartoon programming. I’m super excited to see it being adapted into a live-action film that many are comparing to the AWESOMEness of Battlestar Galactica. It premiered in Japan this week, and it looks AMAZING. Here’s a clip:

I’m experimenting with PulseMeme, an app on my iPad that creates a much smoother way of reading RSS content. Through it, I’ve set up a share feed on Posterous where I’ll share various stories from time to time. You can find that feed at this link if you want to subscribe. I’ve pulled all the links in this post from that feed, as I’ll do on a weekly basis from now on.

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Nov
17

It Comes

Star Trek is now out on Blu-ray. If this is waiting for me when I get home, expect not to see me for days. Reviews have said the extra content alone will take a week to get through.

James_Tiberius_Kirk_by_Brandedsince88

I’m not gonna lie: I was a Star Trek nerd since I was a kid. Yes, I dressed up as Spock for Halloween in 4th grade. Yes, I dressed up as Scotty in 5th grade. Yes, I used to regularly get my ass kicked by all the cool kids.

But dammit, I loved Star Trek. Watched the original badassness of Teh Shatner. Read the books. Cried in the theater when they blew up the Enterprise the first time. Dug The Next Generation. Really dug DS9.

Over time, I lost interest as the franchise faltered and became less and less good. It never evolved. Sci-fi had moved on from aliens with funny heads (see Farscape) and static, barren production design (see The Matrix).

After seeing this year’s Star Trek remake by JJ Abrams, I felt vindicated. Sitting in that theater half full of Trekkie nerds and half full of regular people, and watching all of them love the fuck out of this movie… it was amazing. I got a little verklempt. It hit on every cylinder. There wasn’t one frame of that movie that wasn’t AWESOME. I walked out of there with the same experience I did for The Dark Knight: This wasn’t just a great genre movie, this was a great movie period.

I won’t go into a detailed movie review. There are plenty of those out there that dissect the film by the frame. (I may change my mind after sitting down with the actual disc, so eat it. I’m not consistent.) I will only further say that Star Trek (2009) transcends the boundaries of AWESOME: it is FUCKING AWESOME.

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