I grew up in a house where TV was banned. Sugar cereal and candy were frowned upon, but television, especially Saturday morning cartoons, was the ultimate forbidden fruit. Prohibition rarely works and in my case that proved true; I begged for gum in the line at the supermarket, enjoyed orange-flavored aspirin a bit too much and looked longingly at lollipops dropped in parking lots. But nothing trumped TV. I remember waking early and sneaking downstairs to illicitly watch as the test pattern segued into Looney Toons. Yet my stealth was insufficient -- one day in 1975 my mother caught me and kicked a hole in the TV's screen. I'll never forget the days as the shattered set lay on the curb waiting for the garbage crew to haul it away.
Her logic was pretty simple (I think the words "rotting your brain in front of that wretched tube" may have been used). She wanted me to read, to love books, to learn in a particular way. Was she right? Well she may have been and today I'll explore the affect that the evolution that media is having on the stories we tell, how we think and the culture that we create.
I finished the last post by asking for readers' help figuring out how to complete the journey that began here. Many thanks for all the feedback, I really appreciate how thoughtful and considered it has been. Now to the subject at hand.
This post has been the most challenging, inspirational and (I hope) valuable part of the series.
Putting this together has caused me break the pace of daily dispatches; it was just challenging to synthesize everything but I think it's been worth it; I've had insights that have eluded me until I reached this topic. I'm amazed it took me until the 16th dispatch to realize my that my central theme is that in visualizing the future we keep telling and retelling stories about the Past to understand the Present and imagine the Future.
Stories are the language we understand; they are the organizing principles of our lives and we care about how they end. It is through stories that we place ourselves within the timeline of history, connect with others, makes sense of life and derive meaning. Stories are Universal.
I said in the last post that this post would be a continuation of my thoughts on the Singularity. I've changed my mind for a few reasons:
The topic has humbled me. When I signed up to do a series of 23 daily posts called "Visualizing the Future" 11/11/11 , I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I promised my wife not to stay up all night tonight. ;-)
I've been making these up as I go along.
I'm starting to appreciate just how interesting the Future is.
It's become clear to me that by definition, none of us has a clue what will happen in the Future, least of all me. It's why we talk, wonder, gamble, imagine and dream. It's what keeps life interesting and magical.
Let's begin today with a backwards glance. We're just over halfway through the 23 part series; so far we've covered quite bit of ground. Here's a quick graphic review:
Today's topic is a fun one, but before I start, here's BLATANT SCREAMING DISCLAIMER: (The title of today's post is intended to provoke thought and debate. I am well aware of the fact that this topic is often treated with starry-eyed breathlessness and a lack of scientific rigor. My intent is to simply to conduct a thought experiment, not to invite you to join the Borg)
First things first, let me explain what may otherwise feel like a jarring segue from Ponzi Schemes and the Financial System to a discussion of the internet as a brain. In developing this series, I've looked at how societies have developed, how technology has affected how we think about the future and the effect of these technical innovations on media and commerce. Once I reached yesterday's topic, I was surprised that how fuzzy the line was between a Ponzi or Pyramid scheme and the international financial system. I'm not yet sure where I come out with respect to the rage of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but something generationally defining is happening and about a broken economic system with a message spreading at net speed.
At a fundamental level (jump in here economists), both Ponzi Schemes or Health Finanacial Markets only work insofar as participants trust in the system and have faith that debts will be honored. (I covered this in detail in "The Future of Money") . I remember in 2008 during the Financial Collapse watching the headlines in the WSJ grow daily to larger and larger typeface. Running a startup at the time, each days headline made me queasier and queasier so I wrote a short piece for AdAge called "In Shaky Times, Relax". Looking back on it 3 years later, it seems both naively hopeful and creepily accurate:
"Financial institutions are repositories of trust, which they accumulate, hold and invest in the form of investors and depositors' money. As soon as the trust placed in them erodes, the funds quickly follow. The phenomenon we're witnessing right now is the result panic-amplifying feedback loops that happen in our highly networked world.This is the the societal equivalent of a healthy person who knows he will drop dead if his heart rate exceeds 160 beats per minute. Everything is good unless he starts thinking about it. And his heart-rate rises. Which worries him. And his heart rate rises and rises and then . . .pow.. . . . .The reality is that nobody will escape unscathed because we are all so fundamentally interconnected. "
No discussion of the web's evolution towards sentience would be complete without Kevin Kelly's epic talk at the 2007 TED Conference entitled "The Next 5000 Days of the Internet". In it he masterfully chronicles the first 15 years of the web and compares it's quantitative elements to the circuitry and memory of a brain. I recommend watching the whole thing, but for me the pull quote comes 5 minutes in - despite it's immensity, the Internet (in 2007) was roughly the size of 1 human brain.
Whether it's a roll of the dice, flip of a coin or an ace on the river, the concept of "Chance" is more central to the "Future" than any other. In Greek mythology, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon divided the Universe with a roll of the dice. Religions focus on the role an individual plays in determining his fate; so much so that the word "divine" can either refer to holiness or an ability to predict the future. In some ways, you could argue that chance, whether referred to in literate as Fate or Luck or in philosopy as Free Will or Determinism, is THE central concern of modern society. And why not? What could be more important or as interesting as understanding what will happen next?
I've touched on a breadth of large subjects in this series but none of them has proven to be as large, difficult or interesting as Chance. For this reason, I've decided that it deserves more than a single post. How many, I don't quite know -- if you have yet realized, I have only a vague roadmap on this trip and when I reach areas requiring more time than my midnight oil will afford, I might as well just extend them. So strap in for an extended, potentially meandering journey. I've also figured out that these posts are more fun to write when they stem from personal stories. I hope the same is true for you, the readers .
In 2003, I had recently moved from New York to California and gotten married. My business partners were back East and after a few months of trying to make a startup work remotely I received a stern talking to from my wife. I needed a job. My network in San Francisco was fairly lean and as I began to look around, my sister-in-law mentioned that she had a friend who needed someone to build a website for his project. She put me in touch with her former colleague, Andrew Pascal who had recently been lured back to Las Vegas to help his uncle launch an ambitious new casino on Las Vegas Boulevard. His uncle's name was Steve Wynn.
Yesterday's post ended by concluding that future optimism often overlooks social changes by focusing on technological advances. Clearly, progress is multifaceted but today I'm going to begin where we left off. The 1939 World's Fair marked the beginning of 30 years of global mood swings. From the optimistic uplift of the Fair to the despair of the WWII and Holocaust to the Cold War, the word plowed forward technologically, in large part fueled by the tension bewtween the USSR and the US. Whether fueled by fear of ideological aggression or by the surplus of the post-war era, the dawn of the space era represents one of our species' finest achievements.
From the earliest of times, space has inspired us - looking up at the stars simply inspires wonder. But rather than delve into the Space Program, I'd like to begin this with a personal story about a project I was involved in 2000 called OneCosmos. It's an odd tale that I haven't talked about for a while. Despite being having happened during the of the Dotcom Boom, (and perhaps because of it) the project shaped my life immensely.
Each year the OEDC publishes a study which examines the average level of happiness amongst citizens of various countries. They measure 11 key data points" "housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance".
The results are surprising and revealing. One might expect the US. to do well yet we don't even place in the top ten. Denmark wins almost every year. Lots of reasons for this are obvious; the state is well-run, equitable, with good work life balance and a high standard of living. But the big secret may lie in how they view the Future -- they have low expectations and therefore are usually pleasantly surprised how well things turn out.
Hans Rosling's astonishing video below tells most of the story as quickly as possible. Broadly, it makes sense that table-stakes for Happiness are health and wealth. But there's more to it than that.
So yesterday's post ended with a question: "What does the future look like if we stay the course and allow short term desires to override long-term sanity"? I'll try to handle tonight's post by outlining the plot of one of the stupidest, funniest and gigglingly prophetic films out there, Idiocracy.
A man is chosen for an Army experiment to test the effects of cryogenic freezing. He is supposed to be in suspended animation for 1 year, but bureaucracy fails and he is left untouched for 500 years. When he awakens in 2505, society has changed slightly. The more intelligent folks in the human race have somehow clued into their collective plight and damped down on breeding quickly. At the same time; the less intelligent have had ever more children. This process runs several iterations. The world lies in ruin. (The movie is ridiculous enough that the shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool metaphors don't offend)
I gave a talk with this title on Saturday. My old friend Kurt Kratchman had invited me down to Savannah to the International Digital Media and Arts Association's annual conference. IDMAA's members are amazing; they teach digital media at universities around the world and they're really the folks in the trenches training the next generation of creators. I had done it back in 2008 and what I loved was that it was such a real environment -the absolute opposite of the Techcrunch / Google Zeitgeist circuit. These people are Teachers.
And a funny thing happened. I've always wondered how I ended up doing what I do - I basically grew up as the kid of two profs (my dad is a computer scientist and mom an archaeologist). Lot's of past, present and future. But the amazing thing was that speaking to teachers cut made me realize that while I might think a lot about the future, our teachers and students are the ones who will really make it happen.
So here's what I'm going to do. On November 11th, the IPG Media Lab launches. I've spent the past year working to create a picture of what the Future of Media will look like. So, between now and 11/11/11 I'll be posting 1 piece a day. 23 pieces total.
Each will explore 1 slide from the presentation I gave IDMAA. I have no idea where it will go but I've been thinking so much about the Past, Present and Future and can't wait to explore.
