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.

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.

Related articles

• Ray Kurzweil on the Colbert Report (susansayler.wordpress.com)
• Exclusive Interview With Barry Ptolemy, Director of Kurzweil Documentary Transcendent Man (singularityhub.com)
• Transcendent Man Plays In San Francisco. Here’s A Transcript of Q&A Session (singularityhub.com)

Roqbot Reinvents the Jukebox as Social Game

Image via Wikipedia

Here’s a more detailed article from Wired on the coolest app I discovered at SXSW 2011. Roqbot puts control of internet enabled jukeboxes in your hands via your mobile device. You become a DJ with your own list of music that follows you around to participating locations with Rocqbot enabled jukeboxes. When you check into those venues, you can then control the jukebox’s playlist with a system of credits and rewards. Pretty great solution for all those bars you go to that keep playing “Freebird.”

Norman Spinrad’s QUARANTINE

Only Warren Ellis could send a link to a sci-fi story about a bio-attack on New York that makes everyone have uncontrollable diarrhea. Spinrad’s latest novella deserves a look for that concept alone, but I’m also intrigued by Spinrad’s publishing model for this story. He’s going direct-to-reader via Amazon for a $3 mini-ebook. Worth checking out.

In The Midst Of A Massively Successful SXSW, Foursquare Tackles Venue Harmonization

TechCrunch has a good rundown of who I saw as the SXSW 2011 “winner,” Foursquare, and why. Dennis Crowley‘s plans to open up Foursquare’s checkin data to local businesses, with which they can create dashboards of customer information, is a brilliant application for the location-based service. Where this social tool was once seen as a frivolous game, I think the data built from its users is going to change the way brick and mortar business works in the future, particularly if those businesses are having a hard time staying open due to online competition. Even more importantly, as TechCrunch notes here, Foursquare is going to try and crack the nut of venue harmonization: developing a single online data set for each physical location someone could check into, regardless of what geolocation service they prefer (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, etc).

Question Everything: Max More on Singularity 1 on 1

One of my new favorite regular reads via Pulsememe is Socrates’ Singularity Blog. This latest post features a 50-minute long interview with “futurist and strategic philosopher” Max More. This is my first exposure to More, and I’m an instant fan. More is the CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Institute, a private sector entity dedicated to preserving one’s body past its normal lifespan. This basically involves employing cryonics technologies to freeze one’s brain (they even offer full body suspended animation!) on the hedge that in the future, humans will invent technology to resurrect the dying or dead tissue.

That’s not even the interesting part of the interview though. More – a name self-chosen based on his predilection toward transhumanism – offers tons of different insights into how one can immediately begin living a posthuman life. The most interesting piece of this interview to me was how More describes his diet and exercise regime, which are based on the “paleo” system:

The Paleo diet throwback as a model for transhuman evolution poses so many cool discussions. But the thing that’s so inspiring about this is that Max More is actually living the posthuman life NOW. More (whom I was surprised to learn is the husband of fellow transhumanist and futurist Natasha Vita-More, whose talk at SXSW sent chills down my spine) speaks with a wonderful degree of belief and authority for transhumanism, and he espouses a message that should kick even the laziest of armchair futurists out of their chairs and into action. Check out the three previous videos of his talk with Socrates at the link or listen to the podcast.

Related articles

• Natasha Vita-More, Doug Lenat, and Michael Vassar to Speak at SXSW (acceleratingfuture.com)
• Transhumanism: The Most Dangerous Idea? (3p1alloymok.wordpress.com)
• Roqbot Is A Jukebox On Your iPhone (techcrunch.com)
• Video Demo of Roqbot: a virtual, digital jukebox (indiemusictech.com)

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.

Related articles

• Another US Deficit – China and America – Public Diplomacy in the Age of the Internet (mountainrunner.us)
• Zhui: U.S. public diplomacy through Corporate Engagement (mountainrunner.us)
• WikiLeaks and the sham of “public diplomacy” (salon.com)
• John Brown: Public Diplomacy: “Out” for the U.S., “In” Overseas? (huffingtonpost.com)
• China and American Public Diplomacy: Another US Deficit (mountainrunner.us)
• In the interest of informed debate on Public Diplomacy (mountainrunner.us)
• Whither public diplomacy? (mountainrunner.us)

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.

Back at it in 2011. Let’s see what’s AWESOME so far.

11 Actionable Trends For 2011

I got burned out on 2011 predictions almost as soon as the first ones started trickling out in November. However, David Armano‘s and Steve Rubel‘s work at Edelman Digital bears some notice. I got really excited to see some of the trends they report because of the work I did in 2010 involved things like Thought Leadership, Attentionomics, and Transmedia Storytelling. Also, Armano is required reading for social business enthusiasts and pros alike, so dive into this AWESOME preso.

A List Of The Best Of The Best Meme Lists Of 2010

Great roundup of all the “best of” lists tracking the best memes of 2010. I’m really surprised the Inception meme didn’t rank higher on most of these lists, because I laffed my ass off reading that one when it first hit. Still, I can’t get enough of The Bed Intruder:

Transcending the Human, DIY Style

This is a crazy article from Wired‘s Threat Level blog about a girl doing low-tech body enhancements out of her kitchen. She’s literally inserting magnets into her fingertips so she can develop a new magnetic “sense,” in addition to many other body modifications. There’s apparently a huge craze for body mods in the UK. It’s transhumanism and posthumanism on the cheap.

Humanity’s Next God: You?

Venessa Miemis continues to ask the questions of the future. In this new post at emergent by design, she references an Economist article that posits humanity is due for a new religion and a new god. The subsequent discussion features some pretty fascinating thoughts about humanity evolving to a godlike state, something I’ve been wrestling with myself recently. Of course, me being me, I had to wonder in the comments section if now is indeed the time for Mark Millar‘s RELIGIMON concept from his run on The Authority to come to fruition.

Image courtesy of Comic Vine

Scraps – by Henry Rollins

This contribution from Henry Rollins to Vanity Fair‘s blog is just… surreal. Rollins does this poetic thing every so often, and it’s just… mesmerizing. To this day, I associate Rollins with his death metal work so I get shocked when he delivers writing of this quality. He did something similar for Les Claypool years ago on a song called “Delicate Tendrils,” which features Rollins reciting this parable of modern life metaphorically represented by hyenas stalking you as an animal. Amazing, AWESOME shit, man. Really worth a look.

Related articles

• Links of the Week: Dec 10th Edition (mustbeawesome.com)

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.

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…

Related articles

• Humanity’s Next God: You? (emergentbydesign.com)
• Posthumanity and the Creative Economy (mustbeawesome.com)
• Further Notes on Posthumanity (mustbeawesome.com)
• ‘Tron: Legacy’ director Joseph Kosinski: ‘The meaning of the movie has changed for me’ (herocomplex.latimes.com)
• Posthuman (mustbeawesome.com)
• Tron’s Legacy—Perfection is Unknowable (beliefnet.com)

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?

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.

Related articles

• Posthuman (mustbeawesome.com)
• John M. Eger: It’s the Creative Economy, Stupid (huffingtonpost.com)
• Arts groups re-think the ‘creative economy’ (cbc.ca)
• Further Notes on Posthumanity (mustbeawesome.com)
• The Power of Art and Artists: 2010 Otis Report on the Creative Economy of the Los Angeles Region (huffingtonpost.com)
• J-Pop Embraces The Posthuman (And Has Been Doing So For Decades) [Video] (io9.com)
• Pink Noise: hard-sf novella about the strange battles of the posthuman (boingboing.net)
• Live-blogging from the Transforming Humanity Conference Day 1 Part 2 – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (news.google.com)
• Creativity is Second Largest Business Sector in Los Angeles County (eon.businesswire.com)
• Creativity Might Be Random, But The Pursuit Of It Is Not (adpulp.com)

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.]

Related articles

• Your genes may have very little to do with how you look [Evolution] (io9.com)
• Posthuman (mustbeawesome.com)
• Transhumanism (psychologytoday.com)

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 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.

• Simmons’ Ilium/Olympos duology
• My Twitter list of futurists (includes John Hagel III, Jamais Cascio, and more)
• An unsettling (and caustic) report about shariah (Islamic law)
• James Newton Howard‘s soundtrack for M. Night Shyamalan‘s film Unbreakable
• Christopher Nolan’s film Inception
• Warren Ellis’ and Mark Millar‘s comic book runs of The Authority
• Ellis’ Planetary
• The iPad as a recombinant platform for multimedia storytelling
• Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind
• Social technologies and how they’re redefining an interconnected mankind
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri video game
• Web 3.0 and notions of sentiment-based artificial intelligence
• Creativity and how to get it
• Genetic engineering
• As always, mortality and longevity

More to follow.

Related articles

• Transhumanism (psychologytoday.com)
• The cynical superheroics (and hopeful humanity) of Warren Ellis’ Planetary [Comic Review] (io9.com)
• A bioengineered future in deep space [Posthumanity] (io9.com)
• Transhumanism, Existential Risks, and the AI Physician (nanotech-now.com)
• In a post-human solar system, two robots take the ultimate road trip [Webcomics] (io9.com)
• Christianity Versus Transhumanism (wired.com)