The Affective Component-A John Carter Movie Review

Last weekend I saw John Carter, an action-adventure blockbuster based on a series of early 20th century books that are considered to be some of the foundational works of science-fiction. I enjoyed the movie well enough for what it was, an effects driven spectacle without much substance, but it looks like it’s going to lose money. A Lot of money. And that means Hollywood is hunting for somebody to blame. It’s the usual story of mismanagement, poor marketing, and an unwilling audience, but maybe we can learn something useful about science-fiction and story-telling.

A little background from the LA Times

Instead, with a weak opening this past weekend, Wall Street analysts expect the company to take a $165-million loss on a movie that has joined "Heaven's Gate," "Ishtar" and "Howard the Duck" in the constellation of Hollywood's costliest flops.

What happened? The very things Disney thought would guarantee box-office success may have left "John Carter" star-crossed from the start. The acclaimed director had never made a live-action movie before. The executives guiding and helping market his movie were new on the job and had limited experience running movie divisions. And the source material, written beginning a century ago by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, had already been so picked over by its admirers that critics and audiences found the film hackneyed and stale…

By the time "John Carter" started filming in January 2010, however, Cook had been replaced by Rich Ross, a television executive who had never overseen a film of this scope. Ross named as president of production Sean Bailey, a movie producer who lacked experience as a studio executive, then installed MT Carney, an outsider from the New York advertising world who'd never worked at a studio, as marketing chief. Then Carney left in early January and was replaced by veteran Ricky Strauss — just as the film's promotional efforts were to kick into high gear.

The geek contingent on the internet is blaming bad marketing (and the marketing was truly awful, despite a Superbowl ad and $100 million budget) and political intrigue at Disney. Some critics say that audiences don’t like science-fiction films. And the studios are trying to turn director Andrew Stanton into a whipping boy for the flop. But the simple fact is, John Carter wasn’t a particularly good movie. I can’t tell you who’s to blame for that, but I can try and explain why the movie flopped, and in one word, it’s the characters.

The best comparison for John Carter is Pirates of the Caribbean (credit is due to Marci for pointing that out to me): Both movies are Disney-produced action-adventure flicks based on slightly silly material (a set of 100 year old books, and a theme park ride). Pirates, however, was a massive smash, and went on to spawn a series of increasingly bad sequels.

What made Pirates of the Caribbean so good was the quality of the characterization. Not necessarily their depth or the subtly, but the way that the personalities and desires of the characters drove the plot: Will Turner wants to become a hero, Jack Sparrow wants revenge on his traitorous first mate, Elizabeth Swann is torn between being a responsible English lady and a life of adventure, and the villainous Captain Barbossa wants to break the curse and kidnaps Elizabeth Swann to do so. Jack and Will team up to get her back, and the story basically writes itself.

In John Carter, the eponymous hero at first wants to get back to Earth and his cave of gold, then he wants to save Dejah Thoris from being murdered at her wedding. Dejah doesn’t want to get married to the brutal warlord Sab Than (but does so to save her home city of Helium), who is being controlled by the truly evil Therns as part of a plan to destroy Barsoom and feed off the destruction.

You see the problem? Nobody in John Carter has a clear motive, or a point where they have to make a meaningful decision, or even an opportunity to come into conflict. Everybody is just set up at the beginning, and they bash together, and stuff happens, and the movie ends. There’s no reason to get involved with the characters, care about what happens, or give the movie more than a second of thought once you leave the theater.

Now there are more differences between the movies. You might argue that the actors in Pirates were just better, and this charisma carried over to their characters, and to be fair, Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow was amazing. But are you really going to say that Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightly are great actors and head-and shoulders better than John Carter’s Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins? They're all pretty and young and otherwise unremarkable in my opinion. John Carter has some of the best visual design I’ve seen in a long time: the airships, the barbaric Tharks, the landscape, and the cities of Zodanga and Helium are beautifully rendered. But graphics can’t save a movie without a clear heart.

I have a lot more complaints about John Carter: The over-abundance of sidekick characters who ate up screen time; The tragic underuse of Dominic West (McNulty-The Wire) and James Purfoy and Ciaran Hinds (Marc Anthony and Julius Caesar from Rome); poor pacing and tactical sense in the action sequences, the marketing campaign (Oh god, the marketing campaign. Has Hollywood forgotten how to put a beautiful and badass lady on a poster? Did somebody take their testicles away or something? And don’t get me started about the Superbowl ad). But this would divert from my main point.

People want to relate to other human beings, or their fictional representations. They need to have motives that the audience can comprehend, that they can in some way link to their own lives and experiences. Now this is all melodrama, so you don’t need many many layers of complexity, but we like a little conflict and indeterminacy. Is Jack Sparrow a dashing rogue or a ruthless pirate? Who will Elizabeth Swann fall in love with? Will Will Turner acknowledge his father the pirate? This mystery and suspense sustains the audience’s interest through the slack periods.

John Carter doesn't have anything like that. The motives are all negative, about not wanting to do something, or wanting to smash and destroy. The characters have a single layer of personality and no real internal conflict, and since the good guys and bad guys are so obvious, there’s no point in thinking about it. Everything that happens and that they see is laid out for you in expository dialog as it happens, which kills the mystery of exploring Mars (compare this to the first scenes on Pandora in Avatar). There only mystery is in the framing narrative with a young Edgar Rice Burroughs.

What bothers me is that there’s an actual core of a good movie in John Carter. Make Carter more excited about being on a planet where he is a superhero. Give Dejah Thoris a moment where she genuinely considers marrying the enemy warlord because she wants peace. Be more clear about how terrible Sab Than will be if he becomes the supreme ruler of Mars. Cut down the extraneous characters and make Tars Tharkas or Kantos Kan the sidekick. Throw in some Indian Jones style tomb raiding to explore the weird history of Barsoom (In the books John Carter kills a god who’s religion consists of eating the souls of pilgrims. Why that wasn’t Act II of the movie I will never know?). And if you’re making a science-fiction blockbuster, don’t try and hide the fact (they removed 'of Mars' from the title, reportedly because it didn't test well with women, leaving the utterly generic 'John Carter'), glory in it! A movie with aliens and flying ships is science-fiction, and science fiction does pretty good at the box office.

Science-fiction is the literature of wonder. A movie like John Carter is supposed to be amazing, it is supposed to leave the audience dazzled, it is supposed to show us the unknown and how cool that is. But too much wonder leaves us dazed and confused, future-shocked into numbness. In the face of the unknown, we need a fixed point to hold on to, and that anchor is humanity, characters that are clear, likeable, and relatable, characters who act a window into a new world. Screw up the characters, and you screw up the audience’s affective connection to the story. And if there isn’t that affective component, if they don’t care, they won’t go and see your movie.

It’s simple as that.

Science Fiction Prototyping: A Preliminary Assessment.

This is day 2 of the EMERGE event write-up, and my reflections on the workshop, Science Fiction Prototyping with Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist and director of The Tomorrow Project.

I believe that science fiction can be an incredibly powerful tool for shaping public perceptions towards emerging technology. Governance involves assessing risks and policies and making decisions between options, but how can we assess an emerging technology when such basic information as costs, benefits, and consequences are unknown and perhaps fundamentally unknowable? One of the major findings of STS is that supposedly value-neutral methods like cost-benefit analysis and linear extrapolation of trends in fact contain large implicit biases towards certain kinds of ‘valid knowledge’ and ‘rational outcomes’, and more-over, these methods fail to deal with major uncertainties, whether they’re Black Swan events like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or more subtle systemic shifts, like the rise of cellphones and social media in politics.

But the real strength of science-fiction is its broad appeal. Very few people read the white papers produced by bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was shut down in 1995 by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” Congress, and the public engagement efforts like EU’s Café Scientique are considered blockbuster successes if they reach tens of thousands of people. Popular science-fiction, whether in film, game, of print form, reaches billions of people world-wide. My own work on nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the space race has shown the critical role that science-fiction stories have played in framing the policy debate.

People are narrative thinkers; they naturally organize their world into stories, and understand when a story makes sense, and when it does not. By combining realistic characters and social milieus with novel technology, science fiction can engage multiple ways of thinking, and draw out underlying values and sites of conflict and confusion. There are no barriers to participation, anybody with a pen and paper can write, anybody with an internet connection can publish. Science fiction is technology assessment for the rest of us.

But all of the above are just my idiosyncratic and scattered jottings towards some sort of coherent foresight methodology, which is why I was really excited to see how the professionals did it. I’d read Brian Johnson’s book previously, and my impression was the he was on to something, but he hadn’t bothered to write it down.

The first day, Brian delivered a lecture on science fiction prototyping and how to do it. The key points were:
A) The minimalist vision of the future is wrong, because it looks like a prison
B) People like clutter, houses are hairy, look at what makes people comfortable
C) The extremes are what makes a story interesting
As we broke up the day, he instructed us to think about what kind of story we wanted to tell, and gave us the 5 Step Plan for science fiction prototyping.




This is the diagram in the book, and you’ll note that it’s incredibly skeletal and linear. The abbreviated plan for Scenario Development has 8 steps, and requires that you examine both your own biases and purposes, and pretty much every shaping external force in the world. Science-fiction prototyping asks that you dive write in.

The actual process of science-fiction prototyping only sort of matches the diagram above. This is what I experienced in the process of making my prototype.



I want to make some notes here on what worked and didn’t.

The envisioning process depends on the information you have access to: What you know about science and technology, your own life experiences and beliefs, and any materials provided by the organizers. At EMERGE, despite the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the workshop participants, we were all academics interested in the future, and we had all had the same full day of presentations and lectures.

Pitching and dialog are definitely learned skills, and different people have very different levels of aptitude at them. Some people can’t express a story concisely, others dominate the discussion, and some are simply boring and unknowledgeable. We worked in groups of between three and five people, which allowed everybody to participate in the dialoging process. Unsurprisingly, Brian David Johnson was far better at these tasks than the rest of us. Just a few minutes with Brian could clarify the key issues at in the prototype, and the best way to bring them to the forefront.

Development, the part where you write, draw, film, or otherwise produce the prototype itself, appears to be inherently time-consuming and isolating. Everybody (except for a group working on a comic, which had a clear division of labor), retreated to their laptops to write their own stories. Most people had full outlines, but writing fiction is hard; one manuscript page an hour is a very optimistic rate. Judging from my previous writing workshops, it can take up to a month for an amateur writer to get a 3000 word story into some kind of readable form. The single day we had allocated simply wasn’t enough.

Finally, prototypes are useless unless you bring them out into the real world somehow. In our report out, we pitched the prototypes to the rest of the group, who then asked questions, and tried to nail the prototype down to its essential core. By this point, it was late in the day, we were tired and hungry, and the quality of the discussion suffered. A second pitch attempt with a completed draft is important, but in our case, we could have used more structure and time for the reporting out.

The biggest impression that I got from the workshop was that there’s a lot to science fiction prototyping that isn’t in the book. The relies on tacit knowledge about science, technology, people, institutions, narrative structures, the creative process, and proper presenting and critiquing skills. There’s nothing wrong with tacit knowledge; indeed, the world would collapse without it. The problem with relying on tactic knowledge for foresight is that your visions are going to be infected with unexamined biases, and may confirm what you want to know rather than challenge and transform your vision of the future. The only check against this bias is the skill of the other participants in the process.

Making the tactic knowledge that goes into science fiction prototyping explicit would make for stronger prototypes. This diagram has just some of the invisible entities that surround the prototyping framework.



Science fiction prototyping is definitely useful, but there are many questions which should be answered before I’d be willing to fully trust it as a foresight methodology.

Some questions are procedural: What is the best preparation before going into the prototyping process? How should information and questions be framed so that non-practitioners find it productive? How can you train people to pitch and critique ideas more effectively? Is there a way to develop the prototype that is faster than writing a whole story around it? How can the constructive process of dialog continue throughout the development cycle? How can individual communicate a prototype to a group in an impactful way?

Other questions are related to the core concepts of science-fiction prototyping, and are harder to resolve: What is the proper way to develop the technology through the course of the story, is it a character, a prop, or something else? How does an author recognize their biases and blind spots? How can science-fiction prototyping be used to prompt reflexive deliberation on the future? What does the dialog involved in prototyping imply for the authorship of the work, and the origins of its ideas? Does one need to make science fiction prototypes to find them useful, or is consumption of the right kind of science-fiction adequate for foresight?

I don’t have good answers for these questions now, but I hope that over the course of the next few months, I can finish my own prototype and resolve some of these theoretical and procedural questions. And any thoughts my loyal readers have on this would be very welcome.

Ten Books for the Future

“The problem is that science-fiction writers have stopped writing new futures and just started rehashing the past.” "No, the problem is that scientists and engineers have stopped doing exciting things." As I understand it, Michael Crow and Neal Stephenson had an exchange like this at a Future Tense conference about a year ago. I might not have the wording down right, but I agree with the sentiment entirely. Our leaders are drifting aimlessly towards a future of debt so large that money loses all meaning, paranoid overreactions to boogeymen like ‘international terrorists’ and ‘internet pedophiles’, a decaying industrial infrastructure on which we are all reliant, and an increasingly autonomous culture of radical novelty, self-expression, and technological change. But hey, they’re politicians. What do you expect, some kind of vision thing?

The problem is that one vital place where we as a culture might look towards some sense of futurity, science-fiction, has become increasing generic, old-fashioned, and basically nostalgic rather than forward thinking. Disney, which is a good indication of the cultural pulse of America, is stellar example as the original Space Age, techno-utopian Tomorrowland was revamped into a Jules Vernian steampunk nostalgia trip.

With all that in mind, I’d like to put together a bibliography for the people looking to use science-fiction to influence the future. I’m a science-fiction fan, a science policy scholar, and history buff, and this is my idiosyncratic list of 10 books that everybody should read if they want to understand Science, The Future, and how we’re going to get there.

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl

How can I even describe this book? The Windup Girl won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the John W. Campbell Award. It’d be easier to list best-SF-novel awards it didn’t get. Set in a Thailand teetering on the brink of collapse, Bacigalupi paints a picture of a world where the oil has run out, global trade has collapsed, science has stalled, and the horsemen of plague, famine, war, and climate threaten to smash what little remains. Global warming has permanently altered the climate. Agriculture remains barely one step ahead of rogue genetic plagues unleashed decades ago, and only the fading expertise of big Midwest biotech consortiums keep the world fed. Yet giving into the Calorie Men means giving up national autonomy, something which proud Thailand will never accept. The novel follows a complex cast of characters, Thai environmental police officers, an agent for the biotech concerns looking to loot a hidden seed bank of its genetic riches, a Malaysian exile seeking to rebuild his fortune by any means necessary, and the titular Windup Girl, an abandoned genetically modified “New Person” forced into sex slavery. Even in a world on the brink of collapse, people still want what they’ve always wanted: Money, power, ideological success, or love. But at the end of the day, the Future is going to be born, whether we like it’s shape or not, and new beasts will live in the ruins of our cities.

When I read The Windup Girl, I couldn’t stop shaking. I could smell the elephant shit, feel the desperation, know the inexorable trajectory of our technological crimes against nature. I’m afraid that The Windup Girl is going to be our future, and that’s why you have to read it.

Bruce Sterling - Distraction.

I’m holding myself to one book per author, and picking the right Sterling is no easy task. But I choose Distraction because A) it’s about a political operative trying to fix a white elephant scientific installation (A giant airtight dome and bioengineering laboratory in East Texas) and wandering into something far deeper, and B) even after a decade, it still smells like The Future to me. American politics has become an absurd carnival, invisible networks of dissidents do strange and terrible things to corrupt financial institutions, pretty much everybody is broke, but if you have money you can live like a king. And if you don’t, life is Burning Man! And somehow, in the midst of all these brilliant fragments of futurity, Sterling manages to tell a story about the American Soul, about what we need from our leaders, and about how science is remaking the world.

Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

The New Republic is an interstellar empire that Bismarck would love: Obedient peasants, heroic soldiers, honorable aristocrats, and none of that nasty disruptive technology; nothing more complex than telegraphs and nuclear powered steam engines, and they’re willing to do anything to keep it that way. So when an interstellar fleet of post-humans arrives over one of the New Republic’s colonies and begins dropping cellphones and nanoreplicator cornucopias from the sky, it ranks as a major breech of national security. But in this universe, God (or at least a super-human AI that use time-travel in its computation) is watching, and it doesn’t want the regressive militaristic morons of the New Republic to do anything too stupid. Which is why two interstellar spies, one working for the UN and the other working for the Eschaton, have to figure out what’s going on and stop it before the Big E decides to clean up the whole mess by plowing a comet made of anti-matter into the planet. Power, politics, panopticons, the terrorizing liberation of a true post-scarcity economy, and some of the most kickass and realistic space combat combine to make this my favorite book about The Singularity and what it might mean to you.

James C. Scott - Seeing Like a State

What does a state require to govern? What does the process of being governed entail? Before a state can rule, it must be render its subjects visible and record them with maps and censuses. Scott explores an ideology he calls high modernism, which aims not just to record things, but to change them to make them more visible, more legible, and more controllable by a central authority. But from the sterile new cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh, to mono-cropped farms, to Soviet industry and Tanzanian rural development, the modernist ideology that tries to render everything down to single-function units inevitably distorts and damages the subtle and complex fabric of society. The more heavily anything is planned, the more it is sustained by the informal sector. Scott’s reminds us to reflect on our own work and ask: what are we making visible? What is being obscured? What necessary stories are not being told?

Neal Stephenson – Diamond Age

Some people think this book is about the social implications of nanotechnology. These people are wrong, or at least they’re missing what I think are the most interesting parts of the book, which are about how we create identity in a globalized world. The Neo-Victorian aesthetic, the rituals of the Pacific Northwest Software Khans, and even the Primer-educated Mouse Army are all different attempts to craft personal and group identities in an era when borders have melted and the means of production have become entirely disassociated from human hands. Once the making of things becomes effortless, all that’s left is the making of stories; what kind of stories do you want to tell?

Neil Sheehan - A Bright Shining Lie

Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, but some parts of history are more fruitful than others. The Vietnam War was the high water mark of American power and faith in the wisdom of our politicians. It’s where the American Dream turned sour, and we still suffer from the cultural wounds. The Vietnam War is like a fractal of horror and unintended consequences. Every level echoes the lies, short-sightedness, and bad decision-making of every other level, from the grunts fighting at Khe Sanh to the generals and presidents running the war from Washington D.C. A Bright Shining Lie covers every level of that war, following the career of John Paul Vann from his role as a lowly military advisor at the disastrous battle of Ap Bac to his madcap triumph as the absolute military authority in I Corps during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The corruption of the war is mirrored by Vann’s personal fall, the national quagmire become ones man quixotic quest to save a foreign nation. If you were to read just one book about America after 1950, this would be it. Vann makes Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now look like an amateur at going Up River and Never Coming Back.

China Mieville - The Scar

China Mieville writes about monsters: ambitious, fearful, oppressed, misguided, occasionally generous or brave monsters that have beetle heads, immense wings, chlorophyll for blood, mechanical parts, or sorcerous talents. In other words, people just like us. His richly imagined stories put a Socialist and Anarchist spin on the fantasy tropes, and in The Scar, an exiled translator is kidnapped by the exotic city of Armada, built on the backs of ancient ships from 1000 nations and ruled by brutal pirates. The diversity of the races, the novelty and depth of the world building, and they way that ordinary concerns are filtered through the lens of pulp adventure simply has to be read to be appreciated. I can’t think of any other author who deals as well with ideas of social justice, imperialism, absolute power, or what a single person can do in the face of History.

Peter F Hamilton – Fallen Dragon

These days, Peter F Hamilton is known for writing incredibly long space operas. But before he got on the six-book series kick, he wrote this philosophical military-SF novel that follows a space marine from his privileged upbringing on the sole successful interstellar colony to being a foot-soldier for “asset-realization raids” (aka, Interstellar Corporate Piracy backed up with powered armor and orbital lasers), to attempting to retrieve his own broken past in a desperate battle against his corporate masters and a native insurgency. Hamilton invites us to consider the economics of spaceflight while at the same time exulting in the joys of exploration. The planets of the novel inspire reflection: the tired homeworld of Earth, the blank slate of Amethi, the tropical freedom of Thallspring reproducing the failures that came before, and the post-human threat of Santo Chico. Hamilton doesn’t hammer this point home, but the novel also has many interesting reflections on how governments and corporations interact, and how people might modify themselves to wield power or achieve liberty over generation through cloning, brain transplants, cybernetic links, and even more exotic modifications.

Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

In early 21^st century Thailand, a 200 foot stone monolith appears in the jungle, it’s arrival heralded by a destructive blast of freezing air. The monolith is a monument to the victory of a warlord named Kuin, celebrating a battle 16 years in the future. Soon, Kuin monoliths are landing in major cities, killing millions, shattering nations, and sending the world towards a global holocaust. But as the years march on, the identity of “Kuin” and the means by which he launches his weapons remain unknown. The main character is drawn into a battle by scientists, philosophers, and unclassifiable ordinary people to save the world from destruction at the hands of duped Kuin cultists, seeking any surety they can find, even in the destruction of their lives, and the mysterious conspiracy behind the attack. An amazing journey into the relationship between the present and the future, the mutability of tomorrow, and the power of belief.

Bruno Latour - Science in Action

Sometimes, when you need theory, you just have to turn to a Frenchman. By and large, nobody in politics actually understands what science is, how it works, or the kinds of questions that it can answer. Latour uses a combination of lab ethnography and Actor-Network Theory to explain how facts gain their facticity, the characteristic of being accepted as true by the broader community. Inscriptions, networks of people, things, and ideas, and conflicts between the durable and the transient all serve to distinguish the uncertainty of “science-in-the-making” from the absolutely truth of “ready-made-science.” Science in Action is a dense book, but if you read it closely, it will explode your conception of scientific knowledge and replace it with a much more powerful and flexible framework. If you want science-fiction to be more than gadget fetishism, you’ll need an epistemological account like Science in Action.

EMERGE Impressions Day 3

The curse of grad school is that there’s always something else to do. I was finally able to grab a moment from the endless treadmill of readings to write up the rest of the EMERGE conference. Day 3 was a combination of keynote addresses and report-outs from the working groups. By and large, the keynotes were more interesting, so I’m going to focus on the keynotes and my responses. As it turns out, creating interesting design fictions in 24 hours is hard.

I arrive at Neeb Hall at the blessedly late hour of 9:30, coffee in hand. Neeb is the singlest biggest auditorium on campus, and it is nearly full. Fortunately, I manage to grab a seat in the front by my friend John Carter McKnight. M83’s Midnight City is playing, and fades out as Joel Garreau introduces the conference. The perfect song to start the day; if Midnight City doesn’t get you pumped up, you may in fact be clinically dead.

M83 | Midnight City from DIVISION on Vimeo.

First up is ASU President Michael Crow. He opens with a simple question, “Are you happy with the trajectory of our country?” *Crickets*. Out of 500+ scientists, artists, designers, futurists, and civilians, not a single person is happy or optimistic. Crow explains his philosophy: we are trapped by ossified bureaucracies, and particularly our institutions of knowledge production have become routinized and solidified around disciplinary silos. The Generic State University is full of uninterested students not learning from boring professors.
ASU aims to fix that, finding emergent ways of organizing genius. Since Crow’s arrival, he’s shattered departments and reorganized them around knowledge enterprises (the Biodesign Institute, the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Games for Learning) and big questions like the Origins of Everything or Sustainability. The idea is to dump ‘valueless engagement’ and re-center Exploration as the core value of the university. “The only way to discover where we want to go is to intensely imagine.”
Michael Crow is a polarizing figure, and from my position as somebody who’s at ASU very much because of what he is trying to do, I think that you have to give his reforms mixed reviews. There are lots of corpses of interdisciplinary collaborations littered across the campus, and there are still plenty of uninterested students and boring professors. On the other hand, he has attracted a solid core of really amazing scholars, and at least he’s trying to engage with the future of higher education, rather than just aiming to maintain his stats. I am continually astounded that somebody gave Michael Crow a major university, but I would also follow him to the gates of hell.

Next, Neal Stephenson. Neal is chairing the first panel, but he offers his thoughts on visioning the future, although not before first noting that “I hope I’m not old, ossified, etc. I don’t want Crow to dynamite me and terraform the rubble,” a line which gets major laughs. Being dynamited by Crow will be theme throughout the day. For Neal, visioning implies an internally coherent picture, not just a random grab-bag of ideas. He writes fiction because it’s really cheap. The big problem that Neal is grappling with (and one that he, ASU, and myself are working on) are how to effectively transform imagination into innovation. “Somebody from 1900 would not understand 1968. Somebody from 1968 would get 2012. Somewhere along the line, we lost the ability to effectively imagine and envision the future.” Of course, Neal is not a big fan of futurism as a practice, “Future is my new F-word.” But the man who brought us Snow Crash and Diamond Age is looking for the next big scientific breakthough.
I do have some doubts about Neal’s conception here. Isn’t the big change between 1900 and 1968 the rate of technological change, rather than any new technology (cars, airplanes, computers, rockets, nuclear power) in and of itself? Alvin Toffler talked about the problems surrounding rate of change in the classic Future Shock, but at this point, I think that the group of neotenic (change-seeking) individuals is large enough, organized enough, and influential enough that future shock isn’t what it once was. For some people, even The Singularity wouldn’t be a surprise.

Do we/can we have a coherent vision of the *present,* let alone the future?#emerge2012asu

— John Carter McKnight (@john_carter) March 3, 2012

Follow Neal is Stewart Brand, gnomic member of the original Merry Pranksters and the environmental movement, and the inspiration behind the Whole Earth Catalog, the Blue Marble photo, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand uses his perspective of over 40 years as an environmentalist to speak out against “Earth National Park” and the idea that any interference by man in nature is a violation. For him, a survival future involves a gardening mentality, and science helps with that. Demographically, the future is new cities full of young people in the Global South, and they won’t much care what old white people in Brussels and Washington DC have to say to them. Brand might be living proof of SMBC’s Law of Futurology (his current project is bringing back the passenger pigeon), but he is as always an engaging and controversial speaker.

From @merlyna at #emerge2012asu: “I’m interested in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.”

— ryanwyatt (@ryanwyatt) March 3, 2012

Corner Convenience from hellofosta on Vimeo.

Corner Convenience is probably the stand-out product of the workshops, as an attempt to imagine the everyday materiality of new foods, forms of entertainment, and ways of paying for things in the very humdrum location of the convenience store. Two words: Panda Jerky.

Sherry Turkle is next. She’s the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and an MIT professor, but for all her standing in the digital humanities, she holds a strong conviction that virtuality damages something important about our humanity, and that we are replacing complexity with technological oversimplification. She’s an elegant speaker, but not a very good presenter, and my final thought was that Turkle is a digital bioconservative, the equivalent of Leon Kass who is disgusted by social change, cannot explain why, and so elevates disgust to a moral principle.

At this moment, it turns out that not only am I sitting next to John Carter, but @buildcyberworld (she of the Brad Allenby==Cave Johnson quote) is right behind me. Live tweeting events is weird.

Bruce Mau, the next presenter, knocked it out of the park. Bruce is a true design guru. He’s the force behind ASU’s web design, which is ahead of 90% of most university web design (think I’m kidding? Check out the rest and report back), a 1000-year plan for Mecca, and fixing the future in general. It’s hard to pin down Bruce Mau, but he is highly quotable.

"When you turn off design, you design for failure." Mau, a simple explanation for why things are falling apart #emerge2012asu

— Michael Burnam-Fink (@mburnamfink) March 3, 2012

Mau, "We can't sacrifice our way back to a world we can accept. We have to progress to an AWESOME BEAUTIFUL FUTURE." #emerge2012asu

— Michael Burnam-Fink (@mburnamfink) March 3, 2012

And closing the day is Bruce Sterling. Bruce remarks that “The telepathic monkey is weirdly melancholic. Science-fiction has been doing telepathic monkeys for so long that to see one in the flesh is a little dull. Nobody’s everyday life is weird and wonderous.

@bruces: It's a historical privilege to be around technical innovation when it's weird and wonderful #emerge2012asu

— Karen Tanenbaum (@ktanenbaum) March 3, 2012

But technology is provisional, and wonder is a beautiful frame of mind that should probably be reserved for the eternal and universal.

Bruce finishes by saying, “Summing up what’s happened here is impossible, but I can demo it.” And launches into a truly weird piece of performance art where he puts on his telepathic brain-reading gloves (bought at the Corner Convenience store) and summons up an augmented reality interface to 3D print up some improvements to his house, and finally help him learn Spanish through old Mexican comedies.

“I connected to a human moment, I understood the joke. Learning in context is the victory condition.” I cannot disagree with Bruce here.

I took a short break for dinner, and to tour some of the art exhibits with Marci, including RC helicopter minigolf and an Intel exhibit on steampunk superheroes, followed by the Immerge Light/Music/Art festival.

Immerge was a truly weird event, a collection of digital art installations set on a highly abstracted concrete plaza by the ASU art museum. Waiting for it to start, I amused myself playing with an interactive video/music display hacked together out of a Kinect sensor and an iMac. Playing this instrument with no keys or strings or tactical feedback was really strange. You danced like a maniac in an attempt to elicit music. It was like the humans were entertaining the robots.

At a few minutes past 7:00, thunder rolled, and a projected waterfall rolled down the side of the music hall. Fractal trees grew on pink stucco walls, and the edges of the ASU art museum were picked out in lights. Dancers costumed in electro-luminescent body-suits, and armed with Fresnel lenses and half-globes that displayed strange images (iPads in a handheld casing) moved through the crowd, scanning trees and onlookers. It was like a visitation from some post-human Phoenix, a lush jungle city of beautiful glowing scientists collecting strange aesthetic data on the past.

With the conference a week gone, can I answer the question “what was EMERGE?” It was tons of fun, it was provocative, it was the kind of thing that could only happen at ASU. Did we make the future? Probably not, but hopefully a few more minds were engaged with the future, and a few durable ideas will come out of it. EMERGE was an oasis of optimism and creativity in a desert of bleak short-sightedness.

As Joel Garreau said at the start of the day, “The difference is that at ASU, scientists and arm wavers drink with each other.”