Visualizing the Future

An Internet Without Islands

 What Second Life taught me about metaphors, friendship and the future of digital societies

There comes a time in the growth of every online society when its citizens start to question the metaphor. In their world, words like “platform” mean nothing, they draw no distinction between code and content. They think of it as their place and what matters is the land.

 

On Medium, the land metaphor moment came last week amidst the news of a monster funding round and the prospect of corporate content. Many folks weighed in but it was Tim Boucher’s post “Is Medium Good Enough to Advertise On?” that caught my attention. Worried over content ownership and platform control, he countered Ev Williams’ long held belief that the future of the web won’t belong to what he calls “Islanders”. Tim wrote:

“If I can’t own the platform (and be my own island), I will always be at a disadvantage to those who do… I think the future does belong to us islanders. It always has and it always will — because it’s *our* future.”

 

Ev Williams replied with a vision of the metaphor of Medium, one that blended geography, authorship and commerce:

“Medium’s aim is to create a great digital city, where it’s more convenient to interact with other creators and thinkers, where there’s a large audience for all types of content, and where it’s easier for them to find you (and maybe even pay you).”

As far back as Geocities we’ve tried to reify cyberspace. Each culture is different and needs a language that feels accurate and familiar . Whether we’re building castles in Second Life or Tweeting into the void, humans are designed as visual creatures and it shows in our metaphors. In an organic and uniquely human process we build our home(pages) and wait for friends to visit and write on the (walls). As we settle in and consider that this might be where we live online, we read the virtual condo association rules to find out if we’re buying into a “walled garden” or “open space”.

My tone is light but the questions are important. To be comfortable investing our real time, energy and identity in a virtual place, we need to know who owns it and makes the rules. It helps to draw up a map to see how the pieces connect both within this space and in relation to other communities. It is then that the talk turns to islands.

Islands can mean many things but they usually refer to control, access and sovereignty. In Second Life, an island would grant its owner privacy and the right to control who visits. Facebook’s islands come in the form of protected accounts but platforms too can “island” by controlling how the content people make can be exported across the vast seas of cyberspace.

For some, islands mean safety and to others, loneliness.

 

Williams great digital city is a beautiful vision that I hope will materialize but it will be hard journey. I’m not smart enough to recommend the best path but I can unearth some clues with a story about my years in Second Life. On this journey I saw a small virtual village grow into great digital cities and break apart again. I watched (and helped) brands enter (and leave) the world and along the way met a traveller named Molotov Alva. This is that story. (read the rest of an Internet without Islands here )

 

Visualizing the Future #18: What If? Second Lives and Alternate Realities

Nothing is more inspiring than the idea that anything is possible.  This open-endedness is what makes the Future beautiful; its inherent uncertainty mixed with perfection -  a screen on which to project our dreams.  Often these dreams get dashed on the rocks of reality; but not always.  The hope that someday, maybe, these wishes will come true, is universal.  This post will look at the ways online environments are affecting how we construct our identities and tell stories.  

Visualizing the Future #17: Amusing Ourselves to Death?

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.

We're there! Announcing the New York IPG Media Lab

Almost 1 year ago, I joined IPG to build an Emerging Media Lab in New York City.  IPG Mediabrands' challenge was that with the evolution brought by digital media, planning had become more and more complex. Visualizing solutions was a necessity - it was the best way to show how we orchestrate thousands of touchpoints that can often feel intangible. We focused our energy on creating an experience that could show clients what was possible; to paint a picture of the strategic potential of using the most cutting edge media technologies. We were driven by the belief that by pairing consumer insight with imagination, software and data, could drive bottom-line results.  Tonight, it's with total pride that we launch the result of that labor.  

Since March, the Mediabrands website has been running a countdown clock, As we pop the corks, I thought I'd post some before and after photos.  More importantly, I want to humbly thank everyone involved.

 

Visualizing the Future #16: Stories: Beginning, Middle and End

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.

Visualizing the Future #15: "What Happens Next?"

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:

1. 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.    
2. I promised my wife not to stay up all night tonight. ;-)
3. I've been making these up as I go along.  
4. I'm starting to appreciate just how interesting the Future is.  
5. 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.

So here's what I'm going to do:

Visualizing the Future #14: What's Ray Kurzweil Smoking?

Depending on who you ask, Ray Kurzweil is either a genius or a madman.  I believe both.

He's a prolific inventor, futurist and the leading proponent of the idea of the Technological Singularity.  Often referred to simply as "The Singularity", this refers to a time in the future when the sum of computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence.  While estimates for when such an event might occur range from 2020 to 2045 (Kurzweil is on the "conservative" end of the spectrum) the implications of such an event are profound.

From this year's prestigious Google Zeitgeist, I give you 12 minutes of Ray K at his most epic.  He starts with a mellow,  laid back delivery, but start paying attention around the 2 minute mark.  Just give a frightened squeak at the end and I'll peel you up off the floor and read the rest of the blog to you, petting your hair whilst curl up in a fetal position and suck your thumb.

   

Visualizing the Future #13: Is the Internet Becoming a Global Brain?

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.

 

Visualizing the Future #11: Rolling the Dice and the Power of Chance

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.

Visualizing the Future #10: Betting on the Future: The Earliest VC's

Where do companies that change the Future come from?  These days the answer almost always begins with the seed of an idea, followed soon by an infusion of Venture Capital.  Silicon Valley legend has it that the VC phenomenon is an American concept,  a mid-20th century phenomenon that paired the founders of companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and HP with George Doriot and his proteges. As always, it depends how you look at it, but I'll argue that venture capital is much older and much more interesting.  

As an entrepreneur, I've always thought of starting companies in nautical terms.  It starts with an idea.  (For me, I can usually tell it's decent if I'm still thinking about it weeks or months later).  Once the idea becomes an obsession, all the seafaring metaphors begin.  A voyage must be planned, the ship designed, a crew assembled and finally, when the winds are right, launched.  If you're lucky, fortune smiles and years later, you return from distant shores with the hold laden with exotic treasures.  Or you're never heard of again and people assume that the Davy Jones, the sharks or cannibals got you.  But before any of this is conceivable, someone's got to foot the bill.  To invest.

In yesterday's post, I brought up the Golden Age of Holland; an era marked by an explosion of scientific and economic innovation.  At the heart of this innovation was the Dutch East India Company, the world's second multinational corporation (the British East India Corporation was formed 2 years earlier in 1600).  It was also considered the world's first Megacorporation (just in case you were wondering - it's a real term).  The VOC, as it was known, survived for 200 years and paid an 18% annual dividend to shareholders over that period.  In modern terms, that's the equivalent of extrapolating Warren Buffet's performance at Berkshire Hathaway (current market cap is $198B) for another 150 years.  Not bad.