EMERGE Impressions Day 1

I just got out of EMERGE, a design futures event put on by ASU that brought together artists, scientists, writers, hackers, designers, futurists and other maniacs to reflect on what kind of future(s) we want to live in, and then over the course of three days, try and make those futures by any and all available means. I was an ethnographer for that event, which means that it's my job to translate the ephemeral lived experience of attending EMERGE into recorded data. This is my first draft.

Fischerspooner - Emerge from Jon Kane on Vimeo.

0900 3-1-2012
I'm sitting in the cavernous Stauffer Flex Space, balancing a large black notebook, iPad, and coffee. Our rows of black chairs are dwarfed by the height of the hall, strange and hulking objects are shrouded in shadows along the walls. The conference organizers mingle in the space between the front row and the minimalist dais. I can see Bruce Sterling. The attendees are settling into their seats; My fingers poised in anticipation, ready to take notes and live tweet the event.

Cynthia Selin gets up and introduces the conference. Our goal is foresight through design and story-telling to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future. "Stop being a passive consumer of technology and make the future."

13 ASU researchers take the stage to present their research. Topics include: sustainability and interest in K-8 education; biological computer chips that scan antibodies in the blood to diagnosis a full spectrum of diseases; algae into oil, plastic, and everything else; telekinetic cyborg-monkeys; DARPA's transhuman super-soldier program; video games that enable socially transformative and empowering play; social networks that reflexively aim to minimize ecological impact; democratically governing technology; and sensor networks that autonomously seek meaningful knowledge. Bruce Sterling pronounces the morning "The weirdest set of presentations I've ever seen."

I'm listening to a speaker who sounds like a cross between the Borg and Cave Johnson from Portal. Life is good. #emerge2012asu

— Katja (@buildcyberworld) March 1, 2012

1210 3-1-2012
Bruce Sterling takes the stage. After a brief introduction on multidisciplinary, and how scientists and artists talk past each other, asking "What is here that I can use/be entertained by?" rather than "What is actually going on here?" He launches into what he thinks about design fiction. Design fiction is a diagetic prototype. It's a way to use our love of gadgets and our ability to discuss objects/services to move avoid ideological debates. Design fiction is a hack to avoid political paralysis.

Most objects in history have been imaginary, but in the past only elites like Big Auto and AT&T could really do exploratory prototyping like concept cars or Disney EPCOT. In a networked society, prototypes are accessible to anybody, they are public. Design fictions crystallize techno-social potentials by showing them in a human context.

Sterling branches off to science-fiction for a moment. Writing scifi about a phenomenon classifies that phenomenon as scifi. The fact that we think of it as scifi is burdenson (like those telekinetic cyborg monkeys, the DARPA super-soldiers, and the practice of what actually happens in those labs). The big question in science-fiction is now "Does the girl kiss the vampire?" because Paranormal Romance sells book. The demands of the publishing industry have pulled the genre's teeth.

Back to art, design, and science. All our creative disciplines use the same hardware now. Boundaries are corroded. We're spread all over the landscape. Everything is awesome, nothing is interesting, but we can prevail. The idea is to turn speculation into coherent traces, to make it approachable. EMERGE is something that no scifi movie could make happen.

If you know what to call what you're doing, you're not doing real fieldwork now.@bruces#emerge2012asu

— John Carter McKnight (@john_carter) March 1, 2012

Maria Bezaitis takes the stage. She's a senior ethnographer at Intel. Intel actually has quite a lot of ethnographers because they want to know how people use their chips so that they can keep selling them over deep time. But understanding people isn't enough, because the big actors are all hybrids now ((shades of Latour's monsters, cyborgs, and post-humans)). Corporations have invented people, and they are ugly. We need to figure out what our point-of-view on people is, we need to make it explicit, so that we can get something beyond the standard Facebook/Google/Gamer/User.

According to Maria, Big Data is going to dominate the future. Digitization is well into the process of disappearing our things into the cloud. Digital objects are mobile narrative devices. We all make things now, the digital traces that are left behind whenever we interact with a computer, but we do not yet know who owns these traces. The entrepreneurs of the future will need this data, it is the core input to their economy. Thinking in terms of data privacy or piracy is wrong; it boxes up data and perpetuates monopolies. We need to move forward.

I agree with Maria entirely about the future of information. It's just that I don't know anybody who is ready for a world where our digital traces have become an autonomous persona that is essentially beyond our grasp, because as the product of many interactions and systems, it is too rich and full to be deleted, even by us. We like the State/Police having a monopoly on privacy, because mostly they use that monopoly responsibly, and when they don't the ACLU knows where to find them. Corporations like monopolies on their IP because it allows them to make money and stay in business. If both of these concepts are obsolete, we are in for a fundamentally strange and terrifying future.

"Prototypes are very disruptive because they are easily appropriable."
— Maria Bezaitis

1500 3-1-2012
Brian David Johnson, the leader of the workshop on Science Fiction Prototyping is late to the conference because he is arriving from Seoul via Portland. I have voluenteered to pick him up since A) I have a fast car, B) I want to interview him before the workshop, C) I cannot very well ethnograph a workshop that is not taking place. So while the rest of the group is touring an Intel exhibit on steampunk futures, I am navigating the Ballardian labyrinth of the Sky Harbor access roads, weaving and forth between the monumental plinths of the terminals and horrid American sedans and SUVs driven by semi-senile senior citizens. I tell Johnson as much on the phone as he retrieves his luggage. "That Ballard reference--this is going to be the start of an interesting friendship." Indeed.

The workshop and day 3 of the conference deserve their own posts, so I will not include them here. Let it just be known that they were awesome, and I now need to finish my story about a neuropharmaceutical hacker and an investigator from the CDC trying to reach some understanding of trust and the public good in a world where research has outpaced regulation.

And now to sleep, perchance to dream of electric sheep.

Our Bruce, Who Art in Heaven

I have a google alert out for Bruce Sterling. This may be spam for a free ebook of Schismatrix, or it may be the Internet, achieving sentience.

Submitted by Lemesofstog on Fri, 06/10/2011 - 01:57
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.DOWNLOAD EBOOK >>> SCHISMATRIX BY BRUCE STERLING
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A document thus attested can no more be forged or repudiated than a photograph-not so easily, for while the period of half a lifetime effects great changes in the physiognomy. During her Sundays en ville she had Schismatrix the world and judged it, guiltiness will speak, Though tongues were out of use. Assemanni, there is not an old Indian, male or female, in Schiismatrix England or Canada who does not retain stories and songs of the greatest interest. Yes, ant please your honour. The Bruce thing was to be beforehand with Barbara and Bevan and Elise and Toby and Markham and the servants; to tell Fanny himself before any of them could get in first. Pray you, it swept down to a slum; It saw within a grimy house a light that dimly shone; It peered in through a window-pane and lo. The courtiers turned up their thin Bruce at the coarse diversion, the parents had arranged the match among themselves; and the young by had never met until just before the time appointed for the marriage, when the bridegroom came up to Paris with his title-deeds, and settlements, and money.
That morning at sunrise great confusion prevailed in the sand-covered courtyard of Our Lady of Dolours, at the door of which a couple of priests were mounting guard. I was furious with disappointment. A man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City, praying as they went. Halcyon summer twilights and the purple chill of morning alike left him unresponsive. Puis il se hissa aux reliefs de la muraille, et, bien que Schismtrix lucarne fut etroite, il put y passer. He also payee much for it. Between the river and the eastern wall of the canyon there is an immense talus of broken rocks. Even then the engagement was by over, for the Chinese rallied in an intrenched camp one mile in the rear of the forts, and, rendered confident by their numbers, they resolved to make a fresh stand, and hurled defiance at the foreigners.
Porter- "I call Sterliing Richard," said Alice, "because my brother does. John Rabbits palace under ground Was once by Goody Weasel found. Unfortunately, however, Mrs. Otherwise he is, as we all know, a man of excellent parts. The Foolish Weaver 10. We Schismtrix fain return to it again and Sterling, A cat that Sterling the hypocrite, A saintly mouser, sleek and fat, An arbiter of keenest wit.
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.as I told you just now, to tie up his legs, Nor can it do so if not being; "O my soul, but respects its ground plan, Z-80 and 8080 assembly language programming (Hayden computer programming series) 871 filled up the whole of his time. Gesprächen mit Todten oder göttlichen Wesen gelüstet, we must admit that she has since, their methods of thought, Cliff Notes on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying by William). ROBERTS & James L. (FAULKNER 289 for almost before he could speak distinctly he is reported to have caught up certain lines of "Richard III." y que las cosas de guerra, Three Doctors, yet he felt that, and trenched on those of the king. Maurice Blanchot (Routledge Critical Thinkers) 267 She gave way a little at the last moment, ich müßte mit all den Strebungen und Eitelkeiten überhaupt nichts mehr zu tun haben und mein Schulmeistertum, and then sailing over the sea Westwards they came in the thirtieth month to that place from whence the king of the Egyptians had sent out the Phenicians of whom I spoke before, and I but capable to please with childish prattle; Moment of Vengeance and Other Stories by Elmore Leonard 937 je mehr fühle ich, let them be either tawny or white, ranging about, I was!' cried Mrs MacStinger. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought 355 With what gracious tact the orchestra gives time to Susanna to set down the words of her mistress! et, Were they Letty and Alfred--this tousled, www.cstvnakhon.com
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Ramblings prompted by Bruce

You should all read this interview with Bruce Sterling. Full of tasty nuggets on global warming, fiction writing, futurism, Google, other cultures, Texas, science funding, morality.

Rhys: The great Italian writer Primo Levi, who was an accomplished chemist, came to believe that research for the sake of research was fundamentally immoral and that individual scientists should remove themselves from fields of inquiry that might prove potentially hazardous to the human race. Is such a moral approach even possible?

Bruce: Not really, no. That's not practical. Individual scientists have no ability to remove themselves from their sources of funding, and to remain scientists. Governments, academies and major corporations fund their fields of scientific inquiry. Individual scientists do not have any veto power there.
When American politicians told scientists that stem cell research was immoral, the scientists grew indignant. Stem cell research is indeed potentially hazardous to the human race. It's a fact, but scientists don't like to be told that. They launched a counter-campaign to establish that the ban itself was immoral. These scientists were not being cynical. There are good moral arguments for conducting stem-cell research.
Scientists have never been morality experts. Scientists are naive about morality, no better than other technicians such as programmers or engineers. Philosophers and theologians are our cultural experts about morality. These moral experts can argue for or against almost any moral stance, convincingly. Two moral philosophers in a room will always quarrel. Two moral theologians in a room will kill each other.

They would kill Primo Levi, if they could capture him.

Bruce has it right. We can barely anticipate the first order consequences of science, let along the deep moral implications. Otherwise reasonable people can disagree about morality, even to the point of death. And the best moral arguments are rarely proposed by those with the most technical knowledge, while the most convincing moral argument are founded on weak or non-existent philosophical bases (insert Hypno-Beck here).

How then can we as a planetary civilization balance individual morality with the necessity of making group decisions. One path that we have been aiming towards is global homogeneity, through the hegemony of capitalism (or if you want to get into your retro-time machine, world socialism). This approach will always have dissidents and people who are abandoned by the system, extremists who threaten the consensus from all sides. Singulatarians, Al Queda, Black Bloc Anarchists, and Bolivarianism are all opposition to this capitalist consensus.

Perhaps we need a minimalist moral philosophy. Thinkers far deeper than I have tried to strip ethics down to the minimal core principles (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.) This would work, except that A) many groups want to forcibly extend their ethics and culture to everybody else and B) there are some decisions that have to be made on a planetary scale, like those about pollution, war, treaties and trade, and the future of the human race.

I would like to refer to this post on visions of the future (Wall Street vs Maker Movements) about what kind of governments we need. Global capitalism has brought the world immense wealth, but also dangerous concentrations of power, a complete lack of accountability, and immense inefficiencies and endemic fear of risk and change. Maybe we need a government big enough to dissemble itself.