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In a way I am a capitalist in the most extreme sense. I believe capital should be as free as possible to do what it wants to do. Before you brandish me, please understand I am not a corporatist, Randian, or some kind of right-wing Extropian. I don't believe in the current system of corporate control. True capitalism would be free of such crazy and corrupt constraints. I'll be blunt; Ayn Rand had it all wrong. Most extropians and libertarians as well. They hijacked the idea and took it hostage. But it's hostage status is about to end.
HERE IS MY VISION OF WHERE THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GOING
The Internet is already pervasive. Already people are paying exorbitant amounts of money to buy virtual things and places in virtual games. Many of these games are using virtual currency within the game. It has become so valuable to some people that they are now buying OTHER things besides game stuff. For example, people have exchanged thousands of earned game money into "real" dollars and vice versa. How long until out of control decentralized p2p currencies proliferate? Not long I suspect. Meanwhile, the Internet itself is becoming more liberated and decentralized, more p2p applications are flourishing, open source in every stripe and every possible application is being developed. Wikipedia is offering all of its knowledge for free. Google, Yahoo and at some point many, many others will be offering the entire worlds knowledge found in books (tens of millions of them) online. And this is just the beginning. Within 10 years, the Internet will have allowed almost everything we know and are to become digitized. This includes money, which as I pointed out above, HAS ALREADY STARTED.
Please keep in mind, that while all this is happening, alternative energy continues to get cheaper and more pervasive, nanomaterials and soon nanofabs will start cropping up everywhere, totally disrupting the corporate supply chain, making people ever more autonomous, which further feeds on itself the mobility of people, things, ideas, money, everything. Further driving prices down.
Capitalism, regardless of what the top corporations want, is ultimately about creating more capital - more, more and still more without end. Economic growth in every way. It's about creating a world without limits. A world with limits, limits capital. Capital like life, like information, like you, desperately wants to be free. And it will do whatever it has to become that way. The reason is that the degree to which any player in the system operates with that philosophy, and competes in the marketplace that way, will win. Again, wikipedia vs. Britannica, Linux vs. windows., etc. Decentralized marketplaces out compete centralized ones. We should have learned that when the west beat the Soviet Union, just because such a centrally controlled economy is not sustainable. It’s stupid and vunerable to corruption and control. The same thing has happed here now. They are trying to create a corporate controlled state economy, in which very specific corporations have all the control over everyone and everything else on the planet - total world domination. The problem with this plan is that it has all the same weaknesses as the old soviet system. It's basically replacing the soviet party with the corporate party. Our CEO's become more like their leaders - fat cats. The parallels are striking. That is the ultimate irony of what is unfolding on the world stage today. It can't last and is not sutainable. Capitalism and communism are both being transcended by capital itself. Capital liberated from capitalism. I know I'm contradicting myself here, but basically what I'm saying is we have no words or models for whats coming next. IT IS THAT REVOLUTIONARY!! It’s an entirely new p2p, decentralized system - one so powerful, decentralized and free beyond anything that has existed before, that nothing will stand a chance of stopping it. It is so revolutionary, that our poor conditioned brains may have a really hard time getting our minds around it. But it is completely logical once you think about it. In fact, corporations have been trying very hard to make sure you don't understand it. But now's your chance to wake up from your sleep, and see that economic liberation is at hand.
As everything gets cheaper and cheaper with advancing technology, it will become highly profitable for a company to start paying people to do anything they want. Now its important to understand what I mean by company. Companies of today are a dying breed, their current crazy system is about to collapse. Instead, companies will continue to exist, except they will become totally amorphous, totally transparent to the economy itself. So streamlined, that they will become indistinguisable from everything else. Please read my Leisure society article to understand how this actually will work. Anyway, in exchange for people paid to do whatever they want, people have only two things they have to do in return. Share any ideas they have about how to make the world a better place, including an agreed upon amount of money they might make off of it back to the company. A symbiotic relationship. Those companies elsewhere on the globe, who insist on not paying people, will have to resort to selling their products to only those already rich enough to afford it, as most everyone else will be unemployed as a result of rapidly increasing automation. Meanwhile, the other companies are taking all the untapped genius of the marketplace, by making customers loyal to their products in exchange for any help they can give. The amount of creativity, ingenuity that will come from this will be extraordinary. Parties will crop up, new entertainment venues, pleasure centers, vacation resorts, gaming ideas. Trust me when people have all that free time, they will begin a new renaissance of creativity like we have never seen before. There will only be so much sex, pot and TV that the average person will engage in. Most people will start doing other things, when they realize that it will get really boring, especially knowing there is WAY more happening in the world and will want to be a part of the fun, than sit around and be a slug all day. Besides, the ability of neuro-enhancement is already reaching a point, where pleasure, or at least the elimination of depression is easy. I truly believe that Burning Man is trailblazing this type of global leisure society.
Sure, the generous company might be taking risks with any one person, but it's the numbers their counting on. Besides, having a poor customer who can't afford to buy any of their stuff in this extremely connected world will in the end hurt and drag down their bottom line. Helping everyone will be in everyone's best interest. It is now, but people haven't quite figured that out yet. The prevailing paradigm being promoted by them is "you must work HARD to get money". "If you aren't working hard, you're a cheat, a lazy bum, a parasite" or whatever other lame name they have to come up with to keep you enslaved. Quite simply, their thinking is archaic, backward, Puritanical, illogical. And capitilism has no patience for backward thinking - it rewards the most forward thinking. The decentralized technologies that are coming rapidly, as well as the totally novel and radically liberating economic landscape that is approaching, breaks all the rules. Those who are generous will make the most money, period. Greedy types will wither away into nothing. Generosity will be magnified by the network, and will be repaid in greater levels of generosity. This is the true Gift Economy that you keep hearing about. Its not some pipe dream, its in fact what is actually happening as we speak. All the basic foundations are being laid now. And guess what, almost everyone, including corporations are becoming part of this new game, whether they like it or not. Everyone adds and is adding to the network, especially and including the third world, sharing ideas, and the network itself and all of its millions of open-source engineers continues to extend and empower it beyond anything we can imagine.
The Internet is not some static thing, it is the enabler, which keeps getting more enabled to enable more, in a bootstrapping feedback loop. Just think, the web itself was an experimental application running on one guys machine just 13 years ago. Now it is everywhere. It has become so pervasive we hardly even question it anymore. Well the web is only the beginning; there are now thousands of new applications being created right now that are extending it in ways we have barely begun to understand. Music was liberated by Napster, then gnutella, then bittorrent, now Exeem. Movies are next, followed by just about every type of patent and copyright. "Aye, the sky is falling, rampant piracy is robbing us!” But who is really robbing whom here? Corporations robbed it from the public domain. So the marketplace of people, capital and technological progress itself is taking it back into balance. Will the legal system have any power to stop this onslaught? Nope. If it did, then why are all the p2p applications still running at record bandwidths? Beginning to see the picture now? They can't stop it. The genie is out of the bottle. Since everything is becoming digitized, and everything digitized is becoming FREE, then everything becomes free. Capital (i.e. money) then becomes almost meaningless. Simple and logical right? Anything that can't be digitized will become of marginal cost, easily paid for by your continued positive presence in the world. If you still don't get it, it's all right, it's your brain's way of dealing with the shock of believing it was impossible, utopian, etc. So be kind to yourself, pick your jaw up off the floor from the shockingly good news, take a breather, relax, come back in a few days, read this again, and you'll probably get it the second time around. Personally, I've gone over this all a hundred times and I'm still gettting my mind around it. It's perfectly ok, we've all been thru hell and back under a lifetime of wage slavery and corporate-tv brainwashing. So believing something this fucking great and optimistic is just way to hard to believe right now. I understand! But it's true. You'll feel whole lots better when you finally realize it. I know I did. :)
References:
Coding Our Way to Liberation
Capital, Power and Ecology: Reasons for Optimism
The Coming Leisure Society
Related Links:
Ripple: Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Currency and Payment System
Over the last few months I've been getting more and more blown away about what is happening on the internet. I can trace this back to my time in San Francisco in May. Mark Pesce and John Gilmore, two if there ever was some of the most distinguished internet celebrities, were at Mind States. They were kind enough to spend time with me, so I asked them a simple question - "Will the internet be locked down, now or at some point in the future?". They both laughed at me, as gods might do, but they looked at my innocence and said, "where have you been? The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no way to put it back in!". "What about hardware?," I asked John, and he said, "It's just another machine running on code. Therefore it's software too, and software can be hacked!". Ah ha! I finally got it, silly me. And then, as quickly as it started, the gods resumed their more important conversation on things beyond the comprehension of a mere mortal like myself.
So I had an epiphany today, finally, about what this all meant on a practical and technical level. Well, right now we have a ton of highly successful p2p networks, programs and clients readily and freely available to download whenever you want. They are almost, if not impossible to censor or stop. The joke is on them, and all of this mea culpa from developers and companies is just lip service. They are playing the game to stay in business. They know their business model, like everyone else's is threatened by all of this, they're just not telling you, because they still need your money.
So basically, this means that the moment a company announces a new hardware or DRM implementation or system, even global wide re-standardazition or downright government and/or UN mandate backed by billions of dollars to censor the internet, WILL FAIL. They will fail because the moment they try to implement such a system, all it takes is a few hours from some clever 16yr old to code around it. Immediately the code is available on the internet, and within hours thousdands if not millions of copies will have been distributed. Before the control system could ever be in place, there will already be two steps ahead of them in releasing a work-around. Then the moment they try to block that code escape, more software is released on the then most robust p2p system, and around and around we go, except the hole to freedom keeps getting wider, because the pace of developing a 10 line program is a million times faster than the thousands of lines and thousands of hours to convert the internet over. So any attempts to shut down, block and censor the internet will become all the more pathetic and wasting. The sooner all of these companies, systems and governments of the world accept the reality the better off we'll all be. Whining about it will prove useless. It's kind of like people whining because cars and telephones came around, but they came anyway, because having one gave you such an advantage over not having one.
The same is true today for the internet. Having a free and open interenet is much more powerful and liberating that not having one. What does this mean for capital? Well it will become liberated too. Not in some weird right-wing Ayn Randian Extropian hell, but liberated from control. There will be no control of capital, which means the richest man in the world will have no more real power than anyone else. Because this capital freed by the network itself will be totally frictionless, fast and unstoppable, therefore making everyone rich. No more corporate control and wage slavery. Say hello to the leisure society. Of course the rich folk are all freaked out about this, because they are still addicted to being at the top. If everyone was as rich as they were, then what would make them special? Those poor unfortunate bastards who made money their goal and tied it around their self-esteem, as is happens in modern american capitalism, are in for the biggest ego deflation of all. If they are special because of their money, and since they spent ALL OF THEIR TIME earning that money, they have nothing else to show for it.
Oh well. It's not a matter of liking or disliking this scenario. It's inevitable. I realized it a few years ago, and so I now devote all my time to spreading as much joy and happiness in the world as possible.
Much love to all of you all for sticking through and supporting this site.
Paul
Hi everyone. Yep, it's been a long time since I wrote anything for Future Hi or anywhere else for that matter. I've been so busy with more practical matters that finding the time to express my thoughts publicly has not been possible.
Indictments and Political Scandal
As you may have heard, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts. In those moments where I take politics seriously, this could be a big deal and make me happy, but it doesn't. It's quite possible these indictments are only the beginning of seeing this criminal adminstration fall from power as much as it deserves to. Regardless of the probability of that, it all doesn't matter. The damage has already been done. America's reputation has been shattered, the deficts are soaring, dramatic increases in police state powers have been essentially cemented into law , etc., yada, yada, ad nauseum. Basically, the entire political game is a dead end for you, me and humanity. I can't possibly think how any reform, no matter how sweeping will make much of a difference. Politics is dead, lets move on.
Post-Politics:
If we hope to have a future, we need to start thinking post-politically. Some people, might have a problem with that whole concept. They think that has long as individual interact with each other, there will be politics. This is not true. As Timothy Leary made a strong case for, politics is rooted in power struggles within the contraints of a planetary 2-dimensional surface. Iain Banks makes the most compelling case I've ever read. As long as we remain on a planet, there is limited space in which we can travel. Any direction we decide to go in, we will inevitable end up back where we started. All corners of the globe have in some way been explored, colonized, utilized, cordoned off, walled, fenced, enclosed, patented, owned, copyrighted, raped and plundered. There is no wild and free frontier left, no place left to explore or to escape to. Sure, there are some places more free than others, but the differences are often trivial. For most people on the planet, life is hard, brutish and short. For those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world, the walls are closing in, fast. But,
End of Hierarchies and Traditional Power Structures:
Don't loose hope folks, because things are a accelerat'n! The current system with all its corruption, greed and shear stupidity and incompetence can't last much longer. Not only from an environmental and sustainable point of view, but because there is rapid, but still deep current change underway. It's all around us, and it's happening without anyone noticing much. It's not some big monolithic light from the sky change that we are archetypically expecting, but a much more subtle and profound change happening that we won't notice until its already happened. These changes are all around us. Humanity is waking up. People are becoming more aware, we are taking all of these tools and technologies for granted. The network is growing, and will continue to grow. Meanwhile, what we actually see with our traditional conditioning is more laws, copyrights, restrictions and so on. It's all an illusion folks. They only exist if you believe they exist. Most, if not all of these new laws are almost entirely uneforceable. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to network intelligence, peer to peer technologies, free internet, sustainable energy systems, etc.
Power of the Network:
Here is an example of some of the stuff that the power of the network is producing by motivated programmers:
Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet (Internet)
Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.
On the alternative energy front:
don't even know where to begin. Breakthroughs in this area are happening almost daily. If you've been reading blogs like World Changing, you'll see that there is so much going on with alternative energy now, that it is now impossible to keep up with the overwhelming rapid pace of global conversion to post-peak-oil alternatives.
Canda Proposing 30 GW wind farm in far north
On the space migration front:
Spaceship One and Two, and then Space Ship Three hold so much promise. There are only the beginning, but they are the first genuine steps of humanity getting off of the planet. With the advent of mass produced nanotubes, we could soon see the commercial construction of several space elevators. Space elevators mean price to space in the hundreds of dollars. Hundreds to change your life forever. What does this mean for the space game? It means that almost everyone who wants to go will go. When you have millions, billions of people who can now afford to go to space, there will be the infrastructure to support it. Every enterprising, capitalizing individual or group will make sure of that. Because the profit potential of this will be enormous beyond all comprehension. To give you an idea, imagine what the total World Gross Product is today. It will triple within the first 5 years of a sub-$1000 price to orbit, and after that it will continue to grow at a conservative 20% a year. Imagine the total economy of humanity growing by 20% a year. You are not rich now? You will be, and so will everyone else. Nothing will ever be the same after this.
I can already hear people, saying, "But what about molecular nanotechnology?". Yes! What's amazing about the above figures is all of that is possible without molecular nanotech. It only requires some master of nanomaterial construction. Once nanotech assemblers hit the scence, things will really take off.
On the longevity front:
If you make it the next 20 years, you're going to live damn near forever. So you might as well accept it. :)
So, what's in store in the next 20 years and beyond
Have fun! Now for me, back to the work at hand. :)
I've been predicting this shift for years. From the Wired article Revenge of the Right Brain:
Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent...
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
My prediction is that almost all left-only brained activities will be mostly automated within 10 years. Assuming we as a collective can implement a grass-roots, decentralized, location-based, wireless, open-source, open-spectrum, transparent accounting, reputation based, super-smart social-software, semantic, next-generation internet empowered barter system, along with extremely cheap connecting devices, a full-time leisure society will be ours. It may sound ridiculously utopian, and it is, but I think it will happen anyway. Why? Because hundreds of thousands of displaced left-brained computer programmers now loosing their jobs to this shift will be highly motivated out of self-interest to make it happen!! They will not allow the consumerist corporate machine to continue reaping profits at the expense of everyone else (right brained or otherwise as the author of the wired article assumes will continue as always). Nope, the corporate controlled market is on its last legs. Knowing they are the smartest generation to be replaced, the left-brained programmers will make sure they are the last. I'm extremely optimistic that a leisure society is nothing short of inevitable at this point. For more details see The Coming Leisure Society.
This leisure society won't come without a fight. You can see the battle lines being drawn with p2p, intellectual property, tax cuts for hummers and not hybrids, property right fanatics, environmental regulation role back, corporate power grabs and consolidation. That's just desperation you're seeing. The one thing all of these people have in common is a love for hierarchy, as long as they are at the top of that hierarchy. But as Dlight has so eloquent said, centralized control hierarchies cannot withstand the force of millions of networked individuals working towards their own liberation.
So the author is right, the future will be led by the right brain - the dreamer, poets, artists will propel us along a future of never ending creation, novelty, sensual delight and joy.
Welcome to Utopia folks. It's almost here. How long from now? About 10 years tops.
From the same people who brought us the mini Jawa Crawler, NAO Design has lots of other goodies, many of which have been inspired and created for the Playa. Below are some of my favorites. They remind me of something I might see in Barbarella or in Spock's quarters. Most of these are reproductions can purchased from NAO's online store.
Vertebrate Lamp
A columnar lamp comprised of a white lycra sleeve stretched over circular fiberglass ribs. The Vertebrate is adaptable to be stretched and anchored floor-to-ceiling, or made to be free-standing with an internal frame of up to 8 feet in height. The lamp is illuminated internally with either standard halogen or fluorescent blacklight, or a combination of the two. Dimmer switch included.
Eliptolux Lamp
A steep cut across a tube of high impact plastic exposes the elliptical cross-section of the Eliptolux table lamp. A halogen bulb sits in the base, weighted for stability, and the white interior projects light up and out, providing a warm glow without direct glare.
Tower Lamp
Three stainless steel slides, each perforated with hundreds of holes and lined on the interior with hanji paper, come together to form the triangular hanging Tower Lamp. Can also be converted to a standing desk lamp. Uses a standard halogen bulb and measures 24 inches high.
Holey Glow
Three thousand, six hundred holes perforate the plastic cylinder of each Holey Glow lamp. The interior is illuminated with a halogen bulb and lined with dyed hanji paper of a variety of colors. Measures forty inches by six inches wide.
Nellophone
Musical organs operate on the principle that reverberating the air within a pipe of given length will produce a note an octave above a tube that is twice its length, and it is this effect that the Nellophone utilizes to sound its thirty different note from A an octave below middle C to D and octave above middle C. With the musician standing at the instrument's axis, a slap of the special paddles across the padded mouth of each tube produces a hauntingly electronic sound. The tubes range in length from 6 to 30 feet, and the entire device spans 12 feet wide by 15 feet high.
Cauldone
9 triangular plates of welded steel comprise the hexagonal basin and feet of the Cauldrone fire pit. Measuring 35 inches across and standing 16 inches tall, the conically-shaped basin accommodates a large volume of ashes to minimize the need for emptying, while the pointed feet minimize heat transfer to the surface below. The mood, however, is maximized when the dark, angled form of the pit frames bright curls of flame.
Antler Fire
In the cold of winter of the dark night, this odd headpiece actually does serve to provide both heat and light, though it is usually worn just for looks. The helmet itself is made of leather and steel to protect the wearer's head. A portable 1-lb. propane cylinder is worn on the belt and connects via a small hose to the back of the helmet. Six shape-able copper tubes protrude from the helmet and are specially tipped to prevent blowout of the flames. Runs for 1 hour on a single tank, and includes a manual valve on the helmet.
KinetAural Suit
Pressure, light, and flex sensors embedded in the neck, elbows, wrists, knees, and feet sense and transmit bodily movements to a PC where they are synthesized into sounds that move with the user. Various sound templates allow modulation of seven variables including pitch, volume, phase and waveform.
Floating Speakers
Acoustic speakers are comprised, in essence of a thin diaphragm to couple sound to the air, and a driver to resonate the diaphragm. In these speakers, the driver is optimized for lightweight, and the diaphragm is a special Mylar balloon which enables sound of surprisingly high fidelity to emanate from the silvery orb floating overhead. It is anchored by a stylized base which contains a miniature amplifier, 9-volt battery, and plug for connecting to standard headphone jacks.
TeleFloatation
The core of this craft, which houses a color video camera, 2.4 Ghz video transmitter, and radio control receiver, mounts onto an 8-foot balloon and propeller assembly for flight, or onto a 7-inch car chassis for terrestrial use.
The camera's video signal is received by a wearable module that displays the onboard view to the remote pilot via a custom heads-up display helmet, which itself senses lateral and vertical head movement and translates that motion into equivalent panning of the camera. The result is a surreal experience that immerses the user in a disembodied form and allows a dream-like exploration and interaction.
Since so many of us are in a funk, I thought I'd share some news over the past few weeks of positive things happening in the world, or just some fun and weird inspirational tidbits:
Putin Signs Kyoto - It's official. President Putin signed Russia into the Kyoto treaty today. It was the last country needed in order for the treaty to go into effect; ninety days after Russia submits the paperwork to the UN, the treaty goes into effect for the 126 nations that signed it. See the NY Times article for details. - What's so ironic about this now, is that the US in it's refusal to sign it, will now have devastating results on America's economy and its ability to do business with those countries who did sign it. Stupid.
Kiwi Power - New Zealand Wind Farm Delivers 90 Mega Watts - Meridian Energy's Te Apiti wind farm in the Tararua ranges is now capable of delivering its full 90 MW capacity to New Zealand's national grid, enough to power some 45,000 average homes. The project's 55th and last wind turbine has now been fully commissioned almost exactly a year after construction began on the country's -- and the Southern Hemisphere's -- largest wind farm.
Kiwi Zorbs - This looks like a blast. Here is a video from National Geographic.
Hermit Tunes In, Turns on and Drops Out on Los Alamos Land - Roy Michael Moore, a 56-year-old who grew up in Amarillo, said he came to Los Alamos about four years ago for a "very distinct reason": to get the attention of scientists working on the most complex cosmological problems of the universe and introduce them to his unifying theory. Mike, as he calls himself, has come to be known as either the "caveman" or the "hermit," depending on to whom you talk, since he was discovered on Oct. 13 living in a well-appointed cave in a deep, wooded canyon on Los Alamos National Laboratory property. "I think it is just heaven on earth," he said about his former home. What the intruders found was a bit startling. Moore had made himself a home in a south-facing cave— "the most beautiful views in town, no irritating neighbors"— complete with photovoltaic solar panels, batteries to store the solar energy, satellite radio, wood-burning stove, a bed and a glass door sealed across the cave's entrance. Here's Mike personal website which is very extensive and goes over all of his theories, philosophy, and autobiography.
Hydrogen Car Powered By Sunlight - A teacher called Cory Waxman and his students have built the only self-sustaining hydrogen vehicle that uses a conventional internal-combustion engine. The truck is hydrogen-powered and creates its own fuel from solar energy and water, a technical feat that rivals the advanced technology being researched by major auto companies and universities. The four-cylinder engine is tuned to run on hydrogen, which is produced by a hand-built electrolysis system mounted in the bed.
Solar Energy UK: Solar Power for All New Homes - Here's a link to the Gaurdian Article.
Car That Runs on Compressed Air
Self Sufficient Desert Home - Last summer, eight students at the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning designed a three-bedroom desert home that generates its own electricity and water and is situated in Bluff, Utah, 22 miles from the nearest town. The house is built of an energy-efficient material known as rammed earth. Solar panels generate enough electricity to light the house and power small appliances, while the stove and fridge are fueled by propane. But the most striking element is the 2,500-square-foot "butterfly" roof floating over the house to collect rainwater. One inch of rainfall fills the house's cistern, which supplies water to the kitchen and bathroom. Construction of the house, done with volunteer student labor and recycled materials, took 16 weeks and cost $21,219.58.
High Tech Buildings Use Sunlight, Sea Water to Save Energy
Open-Source Currency - Future Hi pal Douglas Rushkoff has a new piece in The Feature. Handheld wireless technology stands ready to enable what's known as the "complementary currency" movement in ways so powerful that the dominance of national currencies such as the dollar and the euro may soon be called into question. This is not as preposterous a scenario as it sounds. After all, it's only been since the Renaissance that nation-states have been powerful enough to corner the money market. Before then, most municipalities developed their own currencies, often basing them on very different principles than the ones we use to justify our currencies today.
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - I especially found this one particularly relevant - A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. As one of the major themes of this site, I think human stupidity is the world's biggest problem over all other problems combined. If intelligence and the critical thinking skills that go along with could be increased across the board, all of other problems could be solved.
Smart Drugs are Back - At least 40 potential cognitive enhancers are currently in clinical development, says Harry Tracy, publisher of NeuroInvestment, an industry newsletter based in Rye, New Hampshire. Some could reach the market within a few years. For millions, these breakthroughs could turn out to be lifesavers or, at the very least, postpone the development of a devastating disease. In America alone, there are currently about 4.5m people suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and their ranks are expected to grow to 6m by 2020. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), defined as memory loss without any significant functional impairment, is estimated to afflict at least another 4.5m people. Because the majority of MCI patients will eventually develop Alzheimer's, many doctors believe that intervening in the early stages of the disease could significantly delay its onset.
(Link via Technoccult, via R.U. Sirius)
Electric Currents Boost Brain Power - New research has found that running a mild electric current through your brain can significantly boost your verbal skills, with no side-effects, as far as anyone knows so far. Very interesting. It appears to decrease the firing threshold of neurons in the path of the current. This research was applied mainly to the frontal lobe of the brain. I wonder what it might do to other brain regions? Fascinating discovery.
(Link via Nova Spivack)
One of the most recent and striking crop circles yet.
My theory is that these are human made and that when all the evidence is examined, the stalks are getting microwaved on only one side, which would cause them to create tension an therefore bend downward. This would allow them to continue growing because their stalks are not broken. The patterns are generated using a complex pre-designed template that tells the microwave been precisely where to paint the image. Who knows where this beam comes from. I suspect it comes from some kind of very high altitude dirigible. This would be an ideal platform since it is both stable and undetectable from the ground. There is some compelling evidence that such very large, very high altitude dirigibles exist. A few years ago some striking daytime footage (video link) from Northern Arizona showing what appears to be a very large cigar shaped object slowly moving across the ski at very high altitudes. Jim Dilettoso of Village Labs, who specializes in advance digital image analysis concluding the object is probably in excess of a mile long and flying at an altitude of at least 80-100,000 feet! Who knows what these guys with black budgets do with all their money. Did you know that the SR-71 project cost more than the Apollo Moon project and nobody knew of its existence for 25 years?
High Oil Prices Might Be A Blessing In Disguise - An increase in the price of oil will cause great short-term hardship to all the industrialized economies. It will also throw the emerging economies into recession or depression. However, the increase in prices also undoes the second half of Saudi planning. Alternative energy and technology become affordable at the higher price point. Instead of solar prices falling to the "magic number". Oil prices have risen to create a new "magic number". Doubling oil prices has almost the same same effect as halving solar prices. Increases in oil prices make solar power more competitive. The same applies to other alternative energy sources such as wind, hydrogen, hydro, geothermal, biomass, tidal, and biodiesel. Each increase in prices increases the viability of other energy sources. It may not be necessary for the other source to be cheaper, just cheap enough.
The Longevity Gene - Technology Review reports that MIT Professor Leonard Guarente may have found the genetic factor that allows mice undergoing 'caloric restriction' to live up to 30% longer. It's long been known that cutting down food intake by about 1/3 can extend the lifespan of mammals by up to 50%. Professor Guarente has found that manipulating a single gene -- the SIRT1 gene -- can produce longer mice lives without caloric restriction. What's more, all mammals -- including humans -- have a similar gene.
Drugs and the Nation - The election results show there is still substantial support for liberalizing the nation's drug laws – just not too far or too fast.
I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.
As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.
On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.
I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.
I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com
One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.
Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!
Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.
This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.
This is fantastic news. I was thinking that this would take at least 5 or more years before we would see any substantial power shift of RFID's towards the customer, but according to this article, the power of RFID could soon become widely available to you and me, thanks to Phillips.
To understand why this is a very good thing for democracy and greater prosperity for the world generally, please read my posts over the last 18 months, specifically these:
Participatory Capitalism and The Coming Leisure Society.
From the story:
They aim to do this by putting an RFID reader in every mobile phone, so that users could look at the contents of a tag simply by holding their phone up against it.
Once the code is extracted, the phone would look it up on the Web and display the information it had retrieved on the screen.
Imagine. You go into Marks and Sparks and hold your mobile phone against a pack of knickers you fancy (make sure you are in the appropriate aisle at this point).
The phone reads the tag and sends the code back to www.cheapskate.com, say, which runs a quick comparison search.
Back comes a message that the selfsame garments are on sale in BHS round the corner at half the price.
When I first heard of RFID's and their potential dark side I was a bit disturbed. A 'Minority Report' world is not what I want to be a part of. Of course there are lots of ways to subvert RFID's from tracking you, with something as simple as underground product swapping, or junkyard diving. There are however some major benefits to customers and to capitalism generally that RFID's would make possible.
The first of these, would be that every EPC # could be cross-indexed with decentralized online p2p databases that match each EPC# with a corruptions index. By having your own RFID reader in the form of a PDA or cell phone as Phillips is now proposing, we could match our purchasing habits to those companies who most adhere to our own ethical values. This could be made easy by constantly updated web-of-trust system that matches your values closest to those you trust.
RFID readers in the hands of the people will empower customer choice, creating a decentralized bottoms-up defined marketplace. I think such a transparent participatory market is long overdue, and I can't see how this would be possible without wide-scale use of RFID's.
Below is Iain Banks own description of The Culture universe in which his novels take place. The Culture is arguably the most utopian universe ever created. He lays out a compelling case that finite speeds over great distances re-establishes a post-political frontier of complete freedom. If you don't like where you're at, you can simply move to another part of the galaxy, which as you may know is very large, 100,000 light years across, and containing over 400 Billion stars. Robin Hanson has examined some post-political, post-scarcity scenarios here, and here (PDF).
The Culture
The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others' support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.
The galaxy (our galaxy) in the Culture stories is a place long lived-in, and scattered with a variety of life-forms. In its vast and complicated history it has seen waves of empires, federations, colonisations, die-backs, wars, species-specific dark ages, renaissances, periods of mega-structure building and destruction, and whole ages of benign indifference and malign neglect. At the time of the Culture stories, there are perhaps a few dozen major space-faring civilisations, hundreds of minor ones, tens of thousands of species who might develop space-travel, and an uncountable number who have been there, done that, and have either gone into locatable but insular retreats to contemplate who-knows-what, or disappeared from the normal universe altogether to cultivate lives even less comprehensible.
In this era, the Culture is one of the more energetic civilisations, and initially - after its formation, which was not without vicissitudes - by a chance of timing found a relatively quiet galaxy around it, in which there were various other fairly mature civilisations going about their business, traces and relics of the elder cultures scattered about the place, and - due to the fact nobody else had bothered to go wandering on a grand scale for a comparatively long time - lots of interesting 'undiscovered' star systems to explore...
The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.
The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.
Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.
Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.
Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.
Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.
The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.
It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.
Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.
Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.
The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness.
Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory.
As mentioned above, there is another force at work in the Culture aside from the nature of its human inhabitants and the limitations and opportunities presented by life in space, and that is Artificial Intelligence. This is taken for granted in the Culture stories, and - unlike FTL travel - is not only likely in the future of our own species, but probably inevitable (always assuming homo sapiens avoids destruction).
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that argument.
It is, of course, entirely possible that real AIs will refuse to have anything to do with their human creators (or rather, perhaps, the human creators of their non-human creators), but assuming that they do - and the design of their software may be amenable to optimization in this regard - I would argue that it is quite possible they would agree to help further the aims of their source civilisation (a contention we'll return to shortly). At this point, regardless of whatever alterations humanity might impose on itself through genetic manipulation, humanity would no longer be a one-sentience-type species. The future of our species would affect, be affected by and coexist with the future of the AI life-forms we create.
The Culture reached this phase at around the same time as it began to inhabit space. Its AIs cooperate with the humans of the civilisation; at first the struggle is simply to survive and thrive in space; later - when the technology required to do so has become mundane - the task becomes less physical, more metaphysical, and the aims of civilisation moral rather than material.
Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.
No machine is exploited, either; the idea here being that any job can be automated in such a way as to ensure that it can be done by a machine well below the level of potential consciousness; what to us would be a stunningly sophisticated computer running a factory (for example) would be looked on by the Culture's AIs as a glorified calculator, and no more exploited than an insect is exploited when it pollinates a fruit tree a human later eats a fruit from.
Where intelligent supervision of a manufacturing or maintenance operation is required, the intellectual challenge involved (and the relative lightness of the effort required) would make such supervision rewarding and enjoyable, whether for human or machine. The precise degree of supervision required can be adjusted to a level which satisfies the demand for it arising from the nature of the civilisation's members. People - and, I'd argue, the sort of conscious machines which would happily cooperate with them - hate to feel exploited, but they also hate to feel useless. One of the most important tasks in setting up and running a stable and internally content civilisation is finding an acceptable balance between the desire for freedom of choice in one's actions (and the freedom from mortal fear in one's life) and the need to feel that even in a society so self-correctingly Utopian one is still contributing something. Philosophy matters, here, and sound education.
Education in the Culture is something that never ends; it may be at its most intense in the first tenth or so of an individual's life, but it goes on until death (another subject we'll return to). To live in the Culture is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation (this may preclude the human species from ever achieving something similar; our history is, arguably, not encouraging in this regard). The Culture is quite self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything matters, and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be - thirty trillion people, scattered fairly evenly through the galaxy - it is thinly spread, exists for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience (and, too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and suffering. And even universes die, eventually. (Though we'll come back to that, too.)
In the midst of this, the average Culture person - human or machine - knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are. Part of their education, both initially and continually, comprises the understanding that beings less fortunate - though no less intellectually or morally worthy - than themselves have suffered and, elsewhere, are still suffering. For the Culture to continue without terminal decadence, the point needs to be made, regularly, that its easy hedonism is not some ground-state of nature, but something desirable, assiduously worked for in the past, not necessarily easily attained, and requiring appreciation and maintenance both in the present and the future.
An understanding of the place the Culture occupies in the history and development of life in the galaxy is what helps drive the civilisation's largely cooperative and - it would claim - fundamentally benign techno-cultural diplomatic policy, but the ideas behind it go deeper. Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' are themselves meaningless. The question implies - indeed an answer to it would demand - a moral framework beyond the only moral framework we can comprehend without resorting to superstition (and thus abandoning the moral framework informing - and symbiotic with - language itself).
In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.
The same self-generative belief-system applies to the Culture's AIs. They are designed (by other AIs, for virtually all of the Culture's history) within very broad parameters, but those parameters do exist; Culture AIs are designed to want to live, to want to experience, to desire to understand, and to find existence and their own thought-processes in some way rewarding, even enjoyable.
The humans of the Culture, having solved all the obvious problems of their shared pasts to be free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, would find it a slightly empty existence only and merely enjoying themselves, and so need the good-works of the Contact section to let them feel vicariously useful. For the Culture's AIs, that need to feel useful is largely replaced by the desire to experience, but as a drive it is no less strong. The universe - or at least in this era, the galaxy - is waiting there, largely unexplored (by the Culture, anyway), its physical principles and laws quite comprehensively understood but the results of fifteen billion years of the chaotically formative application and interaction of those laws still far from fully mapped and evaluated.
By Goîdel out of Chaos, the galaxy is, in other words, an immensely, intrinsically, and inexhaustibly interesting place; an intellectual playground for machines that know everything except fear and what lies hidden within the next uncharted stellar system.
This is where I think one has to ask why any AI civilisation - and probably any sophisticated culture at all - would want to spread itself everywhere in the galaxy (or the universe, for that matter). It would be perfectly possible to build a Von Neumann machine that would build copies of itself and eventually, unless stopped, turn the universe into nothing but those self-copies, but the question does arise; why? What is the point? To put it in what we might still regard as frivolous terms but which the Culture would have the wisdom to take perfectly seriously, where is the fun in that?
Interest - the delight in experience, in understanding - comes from the unknown; understanding is a process as well as a state, denoting the shift from the unknown to the known, from the random to the ordered... a universe where everything is already understood perfectly and where uniformity has replaced diversity, would, I'd contend, be anathema to any self-respecting AI.
Probably only humans find the idea of Von Neumann machines frightening, because we half-understand - and even partially relate to - the obsessiveness of the ethos such constructs embody. An AI would think the idea mad, ludicrous and - perhaps most damning of all - boring.
This is not to say that the odd Von-Neumann-machine event doesn't crop up in the galaxy every now and again (probably by accident rather than design), but something so rampantly monomaniac is unlikely to last long pitched against beings possessed of a more rounded wit, and which really only want to alter the Von Neumann machine's software a bit and make friends...
One idea behind the Culture as it is depicted in the stories is that it has gone through cyclical stages during which there has been extensive human-machine interfacing, and other stages (sometimes coinciding with the human-machine eras) when extensive genetic alteration has been the norm. The era of the stories written so far - dating from about 1300 AD to 2100 AD - is one in which the people of the Culture have returned, probably temporarily, to something more 'classical' in terms of their relations with the machines and the potential of their own genes.
The Culture recognises, expects and incorporates fashions - albeit long-term fashions - in such matters. It can look back to times when people lived much of their lives in what we would now call cyberspace, and to eras when people chose to alter themselves or their children through genetic manipulation, producing a variety of morphological sub-species. Remnants of the various waves of such civilisational fashions can be found scattered throughout the Culture, and virtually everyone in the Culture carries the results of genetic manipulation in every cell of their body; it is arguably the most reliable signifier of Culture status.
Thanks to that genetic manipulation, the average Culture human will be born whole and healthy and of significantly (though not immensely) greater intelligence than their basic human genetic inheritance might imply. There are thousands of alterations to that human-basic inheritance - blister-free callusing and a clot-filter protecting the brain are two of the less important ones mentioned in the stories - but the major changes the standard Culture person would expect to be born with would include an optimized immune system and enhanced senses, freedom from inheritable diseases or defects, the ability to control their autonomic processes and nervous system (pain can, in effect, be switched off), and to survive and fully recover from wounds which would either kill or permanently mutilate without such genetic tinkering.
The vast majority of people are also born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, usually referred to as 'drug glands'. These secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. A similar preponderance of Culture inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. An elaborate thought-code, self-administered in a trance-like state (or simply a consistent desire, even if not conscious) will lead, over the course of about a year, to what amounts to a viral change from one sex into the other. The convention - tradition, even - in the Culture during the time of the stories written so far is that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. In practice, the population grows slowly. (And sporadically, in addition, for other reasons, as we'll come to later.)
To us, perhaps, the idea of being able to find out what sex is like for our complimentary gender, or being able to get drunk/stoned/tripped-out or whatever just by thinking about it (and of course the Culture's drug-glands produce no unpleasant side-effects or physiological addiction) may seem like mere wish-fulfilment. And indeed it is partly wish-fulfilment, but then the fulfilment of wishes is both one of civilisation's most powerful drives and arguably one of its highest functions; we wish to live longer, we wish to live more comfortably, we wish to live with less anxiety and more enjoyment, less ignorance and more knowledge than our ancestors did... but the abilities to change sex and to alter one's brain-chemistry - without resort to external technology or any form of payment - both have more serious functions within the Culture. A society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other; within the population, over time, there will gradually be greater and greater numbers of the sex it is more rewarding to be, and so pressure for change - within society rather than the individuals - will presumably therefore build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity is established. In a similar fashion, a society in which everybody is free to, and does, choose to spend the majority of their time zonked out of their brains will know that there is something significantly wrong with reality, and (one would hope) do what it can to make that reality more appealing and less - in the pejorative sense - mundane.
Implicit in the stories so far is that through self-correcting mechanisms of this nature the Culture reached a rough steady-state in such matters thousands of years ago, and has settled into a kind of long-lived civilisational main sequence which should last for the forseeable future, and thousands of generations.
Which brings us to the length of those generations, and the fact that they can be said to exist at all. Humans in the Culture normally live about three-and-a-half to four centuries. The majority of their lives consists of a three-century plateau which they reach in what we would compare to our mid-twenties, after a relatively normal pace of maturation during childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. They age very slowly during those three hundred years, then begin to age more quickly, then they die.
Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life.
While burial, cremation and other - to us - conventional forms of body disposal are not unknown in the Culture, the most common form of funeral involves the deceased - usually surrounded by friends - being visited by a Displacement Drone, which - using the technique of near-instantaneous transmission of a remotely induced singularity via hyperspace - removes the corpse from its last resting place and deposits it in the core of the relevant system's sun, from where the component particles of the cadaver start a million-year migration to the star's surface, to shine - possibly - long after the Culture itself is history.
None of this, of course, is compulsory (nothing in the Culture is compulsory). Some people choose biological immortality; others have their personality transcribed into AIs and die happy feeling they continue to exist elsewhere; others again go into Storage, to be woken in more (or less) interesting times, or only every decade, or century, or aeon, or over exponentially increasing intervals, or only when it looks like something really different is happening...
Culture starships - that is all classes of ship above inter-planetary - are sentient; their Minds (sophisticated AIs working largely in hyperspace to take advantage of the higher lightspeed there) bear the same relation to the fabric of the ship as a human brain does to the human body; the Mind is the important bit, and the rest is a life-support and transport system. Humans and independent drones (the Culture's non-android individual AIs of roughly human-equivalent intelligence) are unnecessary for the running of the starships, and have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.
The Culture's largest vessels - apart from certain art-works and a few Eccentrics - are the General Systems Vehicles of the Contact section. (Contact is the part of the Culture concerned with discovering, cataloguing, investigating, evaluating and - if thought prudent - interacting with other civilisations; its rationale and activities are covered elsewhere, in the stories.) The GSVs are fast and very large craft, measured in kilometres and inhabited by millions of people and machines. The idea behind them is that they represent the Culture, fully. All that the Culture knows, each GSV knows; anything that can be done anywhere in the Culture can be done within or by any GSV. In terms of both information and technology, they represent a last resort, and act like holographic fragments of the Culture itself, the whole contained within each part.
In our terms, the abilities of a GSV are those of - at least - a large state, and arguably a whole planet (subject only to the proviso that even the Culture prefers to scoop up matter rather than create it from nothing; GSVs do require raw material).
Contact is a relatively small part of the whole Culture, however, and the average Culture citizen will rarely encounter a GSV or other Contact ship in person; the craft they will normally have the most to do with are cruise ships; interstellar passenger vessels transporting people from habitat to habitat and visiting the more interesting systems, stars, nebulae, holes and so on in the locality. Again, this type of tourism is partly long-term fashion; people travel because they can, not because they have to; they could stay at home and appear to travel to exotic places through what we would now call Virtual Reality, or send an information-construct of themselves to a ship or other entity that would do the experiencing for them, and incorporate the memories themselves later.
There have been times, especially just after the relevant VR technology was perfected, when the amount of real 'physical' tourism shrank drastically, whereas during the time the stories are set (apart from during the most intense phase of the Idiran war), anything up to a tenth of the Culture's citizens might be travelling in space at any one time.
Planets figure little in the life of the average Culture person; there are a few handfuls of what are regarded as 'home' planets, and a few hundred more that were colonised (sometimes after terraforming) in the early days before the Culture proper came into being, but only a fraction of a percent of the Culture's inhabitants live on them (many more live permanently on ships). More people live in Rocks; hollowed-out asteroids and planetoids (almost all fitted with drives, and some - after nine millennia - having been fitted with dozens of different, consecutively more advanced engines). The majority, however, live in larger artificial habitats, predominantly Orbitals.
Perhaps the easiest way to envisage an Orbital is to compare it to the idea that inspired it (this sounds better than saying; Here's where I stole it from). If you know what a Ringworld is - invented by Larry Niven; a segment of a Dyson Sphere - then just discard the shadow-squares, shrink the whole thing till it's about three million kilometres across, and place in orbit around a suitable star, tilted just off the ecliptic; spin it to produce one gravity and that gives you an automatic 24-hour day-night cycle (roughly; the Culture's day is actually a bit longer). An elliptical orbit provides seasons.
Of course, the materials used in the construction of something ten million kilometres in circumference spinning once every 24 hours are far beyond anything we can realistically imagine now, and it is quite possible that the physical constraints imposed by the strength of atomic bonds ensure that such structures will prove impossible to construct, but if it is possible to build on a such a scale and subject such structures to forces of these magnitudes, then I'd submit that there is an elegance in using the same rotation to produce both an acceptable day-night cycle and an apparent gravity which makes the idea intrinsically attractive.
Usually, rather than construct whole Orbitals in one operation, the Culture starts with Plates; a pair of slabs of land and water (plus full retaining walls, of course) of not less than a thousand kilometres to a side, spinning in a similar orbit, attached by tensor fields to each other, and behaving like sections of a completed Orbital; this variation provides greater flexibility when responding to population increase. Further plate-pairs can then be added until the Orbital is complete.
The attraction of Orbitals is their matter efficiency. For one planet the size of Earth (population 6 billion at the moment; mass 6x1024 kg), it would be possible, using the same amount of matter, to build 1,500 full orbitals, each one boasting a surface area twenty times that of Earth and eventually holding a maximum population of perhaps 50 billion people (the Culture would regard Earth at present as over-crowded by a factor of about two, though it would consider the land-to-water ratio about right). Not, of course, that the Culture would do anything as delinquent as actually deconstructing a planet to make Orbitals; simply removing the sort of wandering debris (for example comets and asteroids) which the average solar system comes equipped with and which would threaten such an artificial world's integrity through collision almost always in itself provides sufficient material for the construction of at least one full Orbital (a trade-off whose conservatory elegance is almost blissfully appealing to the average Mind), while interstellar matter in the form of dust clouds, brown dwarfs and the like provides more distant mining sites from which the amount of mass required for several complete Orbitals may be removed with negligible effect.
Whatever the source material, Orbitals are obviously far more mass-efficient in providing living space than planets. The Culture, as is made clear in Use of Weapons, regards terraforming generally as ecologically unsound; the wilderness should be left as it is, when it is so easy to build paradise in space from so little.
An idea of how the day-night cycle appears on the surface of an Orbital can be gained by taking an ordinary belt, buckling it so that it forms a circle, and putting your eye to the outside of one of the belt's holes; looking through the hole at a light bulb and slowly rotating the whole belt will give some idea of how a star appears to move across the sky when seen from an Orbital, though it will also leave you looking rather silly.
As indicated, the usual minimum for the width of an Orbital is about a thousand kilometres (two thousand if you count the sloped, mostly transparent retaining walls, which usually extend to five hundred kilometres or so above the plate land-sea surface). The normal ratio of land to sea is 1:3, so that on each Plate - assuming they are being constructed in the balanced pairs described above - a (very) roughly square island rests in the middle of a sea, with approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres from the shore of the land mass to the retaining walls. Orbitals, though, like everything else in the Culture, vary enormously.
One thing almost every Orbital - whether just two Plates or a completed ("closed") Orbital - does have, is a Hub. As its name implies, the Hub sits in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all parts of the main circumferential structure (but not physically joined to it, normally). The Hub is where the Orbital's controlling AI (often a Mind) usually exists, running, or helping to run, the Orbital's transport, manufacturing, maintenance and subsidiary systems, acting as switchboard for trans-Orbital communications, library and general information point, traffic control for approaching, departing and close-passing ships, and generally working as the Orbital's principle link with the rest of the Culture. During the construction phase of a Plate-pair, the Hub will normally control the process.
The design of a Plate sometimes incorporates the deep - or strategic - structure of the surface geography, so that the Plate medium itself contains the corrugations that will become mountains, valleys and lakes; more commonly, the Plate surface is left flat and the strategic structures on the inner surface - also constructed from Plate base material - are added later. Under either method, the Plate's manufacturing and maintenance systems are located within the indentations or hollows of the strategic structure, leaving the land surface free to assume a rural appearance, once the tactical geomorphology has been designed and positioned, the Plate's complement of water and air has been emplaced, the necessary weathering has occurred, and the relevant flora and fauna have been introduced.
The surface of the Plate base is pierced by multitudinous shafts allowing access to the factory and maintenance volumes, and to the sub-surface transport systems. (Almost invariably, these include restricted single-aperture concentrically rotating airlocks paired in sequence.)
Existing on the outer surface of the base material, an Orbital's rapid-transport systems operate in vacuum, with the resulting advantages the lack of air-resistance confers; the relatively uncluttered nature of the Orbital's outer surface (whether flat, allowing the systems to operate next to that surface, or corrugated, requiring sling-bridges under unoccupied mountain indentations), means that the systems can be both high-capacity and extremely flexible. Journey starting-points and destinations can be highly specific for the same reason; an isolated house or a small village will have its own access shaft, and in larger conurbations a shaft will usually be within a few minutes walk.
Surface transport on Orbitals tends to be used when the pleasure of making the journey is itself part of the reason for travelling; air travel is common enough (if still far slower than sub-surface travel), though individual Plates often have their own guide-lines concerning the amount of air travel thought appropriate. Such guide-lines are part of one's manners, and not formalised in anything as crude as laws.
The Culture doesn't actually have laws; there are, of course, agreed-on forms of behaviour; manners, as mentioned above, but nothing that we would recognise as a legal framework. Not being spoken to, not being invited to parties, finding sarcastic anonymous articles and stories about yourself in the information network; these are the normal forms of manner-enforcement in the Culture. The very worst crime (to use our terminology), of course, is murder (defined as irretrievable brain-death, or total personality loss in the case of an AI). The result - punishment, if you will - is the offer of treatment, and what is known as a slap-drone. All a slap-drone does is follow the murderer around for the rest of their life to make sure they never murder again. There are less severe variations on this theme to deal with people who are simply violent.
In a society where material scarcity is unknown and the only real value is sentimental value, there is little motive or opportunity for the sort of action we would class as a crime against property.
Megalomaniacs are not unknown in the Culture, but they tend to be diverted successfully into highly complicated games; there are entire Orbitals where some of these philosophically crude Obsessive games are played, though most are in Virtual Reality. Something of a status-symbol for the determined megalomaniac is having one's own starship; this is considered wasteful by most people, and is also futile, if the purpose of having it is to escape the Culture completely and - say - set up oneself up as God or Emperor on some backward planet; the person might be free to pilot their (obviously non-AI controlled) ship, and even approach a planet, but the Contact section is equally free to follow that person wherever they go and do whatever it thinks appropriate to stop him or her from doing anything injurious or unpleasant to whatever civilisations they come into - or attempt to come into - contact with. This tends to be frustrating, and Virtual Reality games - up to and including utter-involvement level, in which the player has to make a real and sustained effort to return to the real world, and can even forget that it exists entirely - are far more satisfying.
Some people, however, refuse this escape-route too, and leave the Culture altogether for a civilisation that suits them better and where they can operate in a system which gives them the kind of rewards they seek. To renounce the Culture so is to lose access to its technology though, and, again, Contact supervises the entry of such people into their chosen civilisation at a level which guarantees they aren't starting with too great an advantage compared to the original inhabitants (and retains the option of interfering, if it sees fit).
A few such apparently anti-social people are even used by Contact itself, especially by the Special Circumstances section.
The way the Culture creates AIs means that a small number of them suffer from similar personality problems; such machines are given the choice of cooperative re-design, a more limited role in the Culture than they might have had otherwise, or a similarly constrained exile.
Politics in the Culture consists of referenda on issues whenever they are raised; generally, anyone may propose a ballot on any issue at any time; all citizens have one vote. Where issues concern some sub-division or part of a total habitat, all those - human and machine - who may reasonably claim to be affected by the outcome of a poll may cast a vote. Opinions are expressed and positions on issues outlined mostly via the information network (freely available, naturally), and it is here that an individual may exercise the most personal influence, given that the decisions reached as a result of those votes are usually implemented and monitored through a Hub or other supervisory machine, with humans acting (usually on a rota basis) more as liaison officers than in any sort of decision-making executive capacity; one of the few rules the Culture adheres to with any exactitude at all is that a person's access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it. The sad fact for the aspiring politico in the Culture is that the levers of power are extremely widely distributed, and very short (see entry on megalomaniacs, above). The intellectual-structural cohesion of a starship of course limits the sort of viable votes possible on such vessels, though as a rule even the most arrogant craft at least pretend to listen when their guests suggest - say - making a detour to watch a supernova, or increasing the area of parkland on-board.
Day-to-day life in the Culture varies considerably from place to place, but there is a general stability about it we might find either extremely peaceful or ultimately rather disappointing, depending on our individual temperament. We, after all, are used to living in times of great change; we expect major technological developments and have learned to adapt - indeed expect to have to adapt on a more or less continual basis, changing (in the developed world) our cars, our entertainment systems and a whole variety of household objects every few years. In contrast, the Culture builds to last; it is not uncommon for an aircraft, for example, to be handed down through several generations. Important technological advances still take place, but they don't tend to affect day-to-day life the way that the invention of the internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air flying machines and electronics have affected the lives of those who have lived during the past century on Earth. Even the relative homogeneity of the people one would meet when living on the average Orbital - with relatively few children and physically old people - would tend, for us, to reinforce the feeling of sameness, though the scattering of genetically altered, morphologically extreme people around would help compensate for this.
In terms of personal relations and family groupings, the Culture is, predictably, full of every possible permutation and possibility, but the most common life-style consists of groups of people of mixed generations linked by loose family ties living in a semi-communal dwelling or group of dwellings; to be a child in the Culture is to have a mother, perhaps a father, probably not a brother or sister, but large numbers of aunts and uncles, and various cousins. Usually, a mother will avoid changing sex during the first few years of a child's life. (Though, of course, if you want to confuse your child...) In the rare event of a parent maltreating a child (a definition which includes depriving the child of the opportunity for education) it is considered acceptable for people close to them - usually with the help of the relevant Mind, ship or Hub AI, and subject to the sort of small-scale democratic process outlined above - to supervise the child's subsequent development.
In general the Culture doesn't actively encourage immigration; it looks too much like a disguised form of colonialism. Contact's preferred methods are intended to help other civilisations develop their own potential as a whole, and are designed to neither leech away their best and brightest, nor turn such civilisations into miniature versions of the Culture. Individuals, groups and even whole lesser civilisations do become part of the Culture on occasion, however, if there seems to be a particularly good reason (and if Contact reckons it won't upset any other interested parties in the locality).
Just who and what is and isn't Culture is something of a difficult question to answer though; as has been said in one of the books, the Culture kind of fades out at the edges. There are still fragments - millions of ships, hundreds of Orbitals, whole systems - of the Peace faction of the Culture, which split from the main section just before the start of the Idiran War, when ships and habitats voted independently on the need to go to war at all; the minority simply declared itself neutral in the hostilities and the re-integration of the Peace faction after the cessation of hostilities was never totally completed, many people in it preferring to stay outside the majority Culture as long as it did not renounce the future use of force.
The genofixing which established the potential for inter-species breeding at the foundation of the Culture is the most obvious indicator of what we might call Culture-hood in humans, but not everybody has it; some people prefer to be more human-basic for aesthetic or philosophical reasons, while some are so altered from that human-basic state that any interbreeding is impossible. The status of some of the Rocks and a few (mostly very old) habitats is marginal for a variety of reasons.
Contact is the most coherent and consistent part of the Culture - certainly when considered on a galactic scale - yet it is only a very small part of it, is almost a civilisation within a civilisation, and no more typifies its host than an armed service does a peaceful state. Even the Cultures's prized language, Marain, is not spoken by every Culture person, and is used well outside the limits of the civilisation itself.
Names; Culture names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up. Let's take an example; Balveda, from Consider Phlebas. Her full name is Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T'seif. The first part tells you she was born/brought up on Rabaroan Plate, in the Juboal stellar system (where there is only one Orbital in a system, the first part of a name will often be the name of the Orbital rather than the star); Perosteck is her given name (almost invariably the choice of one's mother), Alseyn is her chosen name (people usually choose their names in their teens, and sometimes have a succession through their lives; an alseyn is a graceful but fierce avian raptor common to many Orbitals in the region which includes the Juboal system); Balveda is her family name (usually one's mother's family name) and T'seif is the house/estate she was raised within. The 'sa' affix on the first part of her name would translate into 'er' in English (we might all start our names with 'Sun-Earther', in English, if we were to adopt the same nomenclature), and the 'dam' part is similar to the German 'von'. Of course, not everyone follows this naming-system, but most do, and the Culture tries to ensure that star and Orbital names are unique, to avoid confusion.
Now, in all the above, there are two untold stories implicit. One is the history of the Culture's formation, which was a lot less easy and more troubled than its later demeanour might lead one to expect, and the other is the story which answers the question; why were there all those so-similar humanoid species scattered around the galaxy in the first place?
Each story is too complicated to relate here.
Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit no real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you read this...
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.
An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are talking about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.)
Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.
As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn...
Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)
Anyway, that's more than enough of me pontificating.
With best wishes for the future,
Iain M Banks
(Sun-Earther Iain El-Bonko Banks of North Queensferry)
Bucky Fuller was apparently a man before his time. The following quotes were from his book Critical Path, published in 1982:
It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.
This is not an opinion or a hope -- it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrevertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth , which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
If his words rang true then, they do even more now. So the prevailing question is, why hasn't humanity taken his advice, and is there hope that we ever will? I think the answer is yes. The biggest problem that continues to persist is exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting. And that is where the rules of the game are slowly starting to shift.
The network-enabled emergence of participatory capitalism and the subsequent transparency of modern day accounting, motivated in part by Enron and Worldcom, and the increasing ease in which customers-investors will be able to move their money towards trusted (reputation-system powered) parties will turn the tide on this, and bring us closer to a leisure society.
I just blogged about the coming Leisure Society. My projection is it will be upon us no later than 2020. The current pace of change and labor disruption is happening much faster than the previous industrial cycle.
Whether we like it or not, the pace of change is going to keep increasing. Extrapolating Moore’s law in computing, we find that by the year 2020 your $1000 computer will have the processing power of the human brain, and virtual reality will be as familiar as the web is today. Biotechnology will have revolutionized medicine, and led to many unexpected breakthroughs, possible extending life far beyond current expectations. And nanotechnology will be creating its own revolution in manufacturing. Because this will in turn open up the space frontier with its astronomical level of energy and resources, scarcity will come to an abrupt end.
The last few days I've become increasingly obsessed with where the global economy is going and it's effects on the labor pool. After days of contemplating the large number of variables I now believe that a leisure society is inevitable, short of global catastrophe. Futurist and optimists have been dreaming about it for years, but I think we are likely to see it in our lifetimes, regardless of how bankrupt governments and social programs become in the interim.
One undeniable trend that almost every business guru agrees on, is that companies will have to become increasingly accountable and transparent to their investors and more responsive to their customers if they want to survive. As the power of the network grows, making it possible for more real-time information of a companies operations, the Board of Directors and the CEO are going to increasingly become accountable to investors and customers until they are almost superfluous in the organization. The current juggernaut of centralized and corporate behemoths, obscene executive salaries, and hierarchical organizations cannot withstand the power of the network much longer. I think the massive swindling is happening in part because of fear of their inevitable demise.
HERE IS HOW
Imagine you have two publicly traded companies that are both competing in the same sector.
One of these companies is completely transparent throughout the entire enterprise - finances, hiring/firing, supply-chain, everything is open for review. One possible way to visualize this is to imagine a sophisticated 2D/3D real-time interactive animation display of every area of the companies operations. You could tell exactly how many people are working where, who is being hired, fired, expenditures for everything from trash bags in the company lunch room, to how much is being spent on advertising. All of it will be completely displayed in dynamical real-time techni-color graphics. The second company is just like most any company now doing business as usual (circa 2003).
In this competitive environment, the first company will be far more likely to attract investors than the second, but more importantly the first company's functioning will be so transparent to the people running it that clear communication and knowledge will available to everyone, even the customers and investors. Such a company will make it very easy for anyone to communicate, ideas to be exchanged across company lines, problem areas to be easily identified and resolved. The level of innovation and efficiency, not to mention the very attractive capital inflow from investor confidence, will easily out compete a company more worried about keeping things secret - regardless of whether its their books or intellectual property.
With the proliferation of RFID, good or bad, it will enable everyone, you and me to identify every product that we buy and automatically, and in real-time shopping mode, purchase only those products that come from companies who adhere to our ethical/corruption index, details of which I have blogged about earlier:
These types of measurements would be made via decentralized, ad-hoc, smart mobs in conjunction with individual reputation systems. So, not only will you be able to vote with your pocketbook, but also you will be able to make informed, even ethical consumer decisions based on people you trust. I can see this web-of-trust rapidly superceding top-heavy "consumer" capitalism, transforming it into a bottom-up grass-roots participatory capitalism.
As time goes on, and it won't take long in this nanosecond, increasingly automated and accelerated economy for this ecology of transparent companies to fine tune the very essence of what a company/economy does. By definition the economy itself will become utterly response to investors and customers who increasingly become the same person. These so-called ad-hoc transient companies will increasingly blur the line between one company and another, employees and investors, customers and executives, that such distinction will become meaningless. No longer will we have distinct "solid" and separate companies and consumers, but an evolving complex decentralized ad-hoc network of capital, people, ideas, innovation and wealth responding in real-time to the people it serves. It will mark the end of the corporation as we know it and the beginning of a truly support economy.
These responsive, transparent companies will become the economic and wealth producing engines that take all of us participants, along with their increasing automation into a full-time leisure economy. Already we are seeing massive outflow of labor to India and elsewhere. This unfortunately is the result of the power of the network. However, it's only a matter of time before even the cheapest of labor will no longer be necessary. More and more of the economic engine will become automated. It's inevitable, always has been. Initially such displacement could be very painful for a large number of people. However, these transparent companies won't survive if they are not responding to it's customer base. And without customers the company itself doesn't survive. So it will continue to make products cheaper and cheaper, continually improving the ease of investment, making it increasingly easier to move your money where its most needed and where it will provide the largest return. Everyone will be making less money from lack of employment and things getting cheaper, but everything will be getting cheaper at the same rate. So my theory is this time, this inevitable global depression will result in a leisure economy for everyone.
Oh, and green companies will out compete polluting companies, simply because they are more efficient. Such distinctions are not sensitive enough yet to tip the scale, but the real-time transparent economy will make every last shred of efficiency matter. End result, green and environmentally friendly companies win out.
