Open the Future

Lights, Camera, Talk!

2009-11-06T19:25:12Z

Consider this something of an aside to the "basic futurism" series over at Fast Company.

As video becomes an increasingly important part of how organizations construct their internal and external narratives, those of us who work in the broad field of consulting will frequently find ourselves plopped down in front of a camera. One-on-one interviews have aspects of both formal presentations and casual conversations, but a few twisty elements all their own.

Much to my surprise, I've done quite a few on-camera, one-on-one interviews over the past few years. It's not something I sought out, but is very much a growing part of what consultants, writers, or other knowledge workers should expect as part of their jobs.

Here are some hard-learned tips for the novice interviewee, based on my own experiences -- I've broken all of these rules at one point or another, and learned quickly why they are worth following.

How to Look: Solid, muted colors and grays work best. Black clothing is generally not recommended, and white clothing is even worse. Stripes are right out. A suit jacket is usually a good addition, especially if it's not the same color as the shirt. When possible, tug the back of the jacket down and sit on it -- it helps to keep the collar from bunching up as you move.
You're also much better off wearing something that buttons down the front, so that a small microphone can be attached to the placket and the wire dropped down inside your shirt and into a transmitter.

In addition, if you know that you're prone to shiny skin under bright lights (foreheads in particular are awful for this), see if you can get a light coating of pancake makeup applied. For those of us who don't wear makeup regularly, it can feel a bit odd at first, but makes a big difference in how you look.
How to Act: Ask the camera operator ahead of time what kind of framing they're giving you -- a close-up of your face, a full-torso, chest-up, etc.. That will help you to know just how much you can move around. If you -- like me -- tend to talk with your hands, you'll want to warn them as they set up the framing. You'll also want to be conscious of it during the conversation; it can look really weird for bits and pieces of your hand or arm to suddenly pop into and out of frame.

Nine times out of ten, you'll be asked to not look at the camera, but instead to look at the interviewer seated near the camera (I once had an interview where the actual interview took place over the phone, so I had to look at an empty spot near the camera the whole time). The challenge will be to avoid glancing over at the camera while you speak. If you're in the habit of looking around the room while you talk, to make eye contact with the audience, you'll have to train yourself to avoid that when doing on-camera interviews.
How to Speak: I won't tell you to go slow or fast -- that will depend on your own style. But there are three tricks to keep in mind that will help you to make sure that what you're saying is coherent and clear.

When possible, speak in short sentences. Most video interviews get edited pretty heavily, so speaking in brief, pithy sentences makes the editor's job easier, and you're more likely to come out sounding like you know what you're talking about.

Put the question into the answer. In nearly every interview, the questions asked by the interviewer get cut out. It's up to you, then, to weave the question you've been asked into the structure of the answer, so that your quote can stand alone. If you're asked, for example, how the dinosaurs died out, "Current science says an asteroid impact" is less useful for an editor than "Currently, the most popular scientific theory says that the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid impact."

Don't be afraid to stop and start over. Unless your interview is being shown live, or completely uncut, you should feel free to stop in the middle of a convoluted or mangled phrase, pause for a beat, then restart, preferably at the beginning of your answer or a self-contained part of your answer. This also applies if you have a sudden burst of background noise, a sneeze, or any other brief interruption. You and the editor are both interested in you coming across as knowledgeable and clear.

This isn't a complete list, but these are the items that stood out in my mind when thinking over my last set of interviews. Please feel free to speak up in the comments if you have other tips to add.

Resilience Fail (updated)

2009-11-02T22:40:53Z

Quick question: where does this URL go to?

http://tinyurl.com/ya8p9vg

How about this one?

http://bit.ly/DkXOW

Would you have guessed that the first goes to a Computerworld article about business-appropriate avatars, and the second goes to the previous post on Open the Future?

The use of URL-shortening services is a classic example of short-term need trumping long-term resilience. Shortened URLs:

are not human-readable, and even the versions with user-generated mnemonics are little better than crude tags;

they don't provide contextual clues, which would offer a way to find the information later (if the article has expired, for example) by looking up relevant keywords or related concepts;

they rely on the continued presence of the particular shortener - any downtime or disappearance kills potentially millions of links.

That is, URL-shorteners violate three key principles of resilient design: they offer no transparency, no redundancy, and no decentralization. They're classic single-points of failure.

As a result, shortened URLs have little or no reference or archival value. A dead short URL is far worse than a dead standard URL, in fact, because (a) you have no way of getting contextual meaning, and (b) you can't even go look up the address on the Internet Archive. This is a real problem for those of us who think of the Internet as a tool for building knowledge. For better or for worse, services such as Twitter have gone from being ephemeral conversation media to being used as tools of collaborative awareness about the world. We can no longer assume that a link in a short message is of only transient value.

Yet many of us (including me) rely heavily on shorteners when using URLs "conversationally," such as on Twitter or in an instant message chat. They take far fewer characters than a typical URL; in length-limited media such as Twitter, that's a critical advantage.

So, in the immortal phrase, what is to be done?

Given that the need for URL shortening will remain as long as we use character-limit media such as Twitter or SMS, I can think of a few steps that would help to return some of the information resilience to the system:

Embed shortening "behind the scenes" in Twitter and the like, so that senders just enter a full URL, and recipients see the full URL whenever possible. The full URL should show up on the web version, so that the real address gets archived.

Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines should auto-translate any shortened URLs they stumble upon when indexing pages, so that at the very least the cached version contains the full address. The Internet Archive should definitely be doing this.

All URL-shortening services should agree to make the records of short URL -> full URL links available to search and archival sites, under appropriate privacy conditions (e.g., all names/IP addresses of users stripped out, data only available if the company goes under, data only available after five years, users can choose to allow the URL link to expire).

Any of these would be an enormous step forward, and the combination would make for a much more resilient system. Admittedly, all of these steps require a bit of coding work, and aren't going to be implemented overnight. However, nobody said resilience was easy -- just necessary.

Carbon Footprint T-Shirts (& Stuff)

2009-11-01T23:44:12Z

Warren Ellis' new "t-shirt a week" project, using Cafe Press, reminded me that, waaaay back in the early days of Open the Future, I tried out a Cafe Press shop just to get a couple of items of OtF stuff for myself. That stuff is all gone -- it used the logo from two iterations ago -- but the shop remained. It only needed new content.

By far the most popular item I've ever done here is the Carbon Footprint of a Cheeseburger, and I still get requests to use the graphic that I made to accompany the piece -- a mockup of a "carbon facts" chart mirroring the common "nutrition facts" found on nearly every food item in the US. As a result, I had little hesitation about which image would go on a new Open the Future shirt.

At this point, the Open the Future storefront has the Carbon Footprint image on organic t-shirts (both "male" fit and "female" fit), as well as on a tote bag (perfect for shopping at the local organic food market), a large coffee mug, and -- I couldn't resist -- on a barbecue apron.

If anyone decides to pick one of these up, please send along a picture of yourself wearing the shirt/apron (or holding the bag/mug).

New Fast Company: 350

2009-10-30T19:33:54Z

My latest Fast Company piece is up. 350 takes a look at the global movement to limit CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.

If this sounds like I think the 350 movement is a bad idea... I don't. I rather like the simplicity of the meme, and the target is--if difficult--smart. It's not saying "let's keep things from getting too much worse," it's saying "let's make things better." That's the kind of goal I like.
But getting back to 350ppm requires more than a rapid cessation of anthropogenic sources of atmospheric carbon. It requires an acceleration of the processes that cycle atmospheric CO2. Planting trees is an obvious step, but it's slow and actually doesn't do enough alone. We'll also need to bring in more advanced carbon sequestration techniques, such as bio-char. The combination of the two would likely bring down atmospheric carbon levels, given enough time.

Unfortunately, we may not have enough time.

I have a habit (good or bad, your call) of trying to tease out the unexpected, and often unwanted, implications of big ideas. It can be frustrating for allies, because it sounds like I'm being critical. What I'm doing is trying to get people to recognize that choices, even good ones, have consequences, and the more we think through the consequences ahead-of-time, the better-off we'll be.

Well, You Can Tell By the Way I Use My Walk...

2009-10-26T21:02:31Z

...I've got robot legs, but no mouth to talk.

And again! With the shoving!

Boston Dynamics really likes to abuse its robots.

(For the whippersnappers in the audience who don't get the title reference, here. Yes, the usage is ironic. And get offa my lawn.)

Biopolitics of Pop Culture

2009-10-22T01:38:50Z

Join me and a pretty nifty selection of speakers on December 4 at the Biopolitics of Popular Culture event in HOLLYW--er, IRVINE, California.

Popular culture is full of tropes and cliches that shape our debates about emerging technologies. Our most transcendent expectations for technology come from pop culture, and the most common objections to emerging technologies come from science fiction and horror, from Frankenstein and Brave New World to Gattaca and the Terminator.
Why is it that almost every person in fiction who wants to live a longer than normal life is evil or pays some terrible price? What does it say about attitudes towards posthuman possibilities when mutants in Heroes or the X-Men, or cyborgs in Battlestar Galactica or Iron Man, or vampires in True Blood or Twilight are depicted as capable of responsible citizenship?

Is Hollywood reflecting a transhuman turn in popular culture, helping us imagine a day when magical and muggle can live together in a peaceful Star Trek federation? Will the merging of pop culture, social networking and virtual reality into a heightened augmented reality encourage us all to make our lives a form of participative fiction?

During this day long seminar we will engage with culture critics, artists, writers, and filmmakers to explore the biopolitics that are implicit in depictions of emerging technology in literature, film and television.

On the roster are Annalee Newitz (the first time we'll be speaking on the same program!) and my friend and comic book/superhero fiction historian Jess Nevins, along with:

Natasha Vita-More
Kristi Scott
J. Hughes
Mike Treder
Michael LaTorra
RJ Eskow
PJ Manney
Matthew Patrick
Alex Lightman
Edward Miller

(Still not gender parity, but a speaker list that's one-third women is a significant improvement over nearly other future-focused event I've been to. Good work!)

New FC: Futures Thinking: Asking the Question

2009-10-22T01:05:58Z

My latest Fast Company essay is up, and with it I return to the "Futures Thinking" series. This one, "Asking the Question," looks at how to craft a question for a foresight exercise that's most likely to generate useful results.

It's a subtle point, but I tend to find it useful to talk about strategic questions in terms of dilemmas, not problems. Problem implies solution--a fix that resolves the question. Dilemmas are more difficult, typically situations where there are no clearly preferable outcomes (or where each likely outcome carries with it some difficult contingent elements). Futures thinking is less useful when trying to come up with a clear single answer to a particular problem, but can be extremely helpful when trying to determine the best response to a dilemma. The difference is that the "best response" may vary depending upon still-unresolved circumstances; futures thinking helps to illuminate possible trigger points for making a decision.

As always, let me know what you think.

All Money is Fantasy

2009-10-13T19:17:44Z

My friend Stowe Boyd, consultant and provocateur, interviewed me recently for his Future of Money project. The video of that interview is now available at Stowe's blog, /Message.

It's a good conversation, although I clearly haven't learned the blogger video conversation practice of simply talking over the person I'm conversing with. I'm far too polite.

I start with the observation that all money is fantasy. I laugh/sigh when I see "gold bugs" going on and on about how money should be tied to gold, because gold has "real value." The only intrinsic value that gold has relates to how we can use it (in electronics, mostly, or as meal garnish); its utility as money is just as imaginary, just as "fiat," as post-Bretton Woods currency. It's a mutually-agreed upon fantasy. A "consensual hallucination," to steal from Gibson.

Atlantic: Filtering Reality

2009-10-13T17:26:06Z

My second article for the Atlantic Monthly hits the shelves this week, and can now be found online. "Filtering Reality" looks at the political implications of augmented reality. It's a theme I've explored before, but the Atlantic editors asked me specifically to do this topic.

You don’t want to see anybody who has donated to the Palin 2012 campaign? Gone, their faces covered up by black circles. You want to know who exactly gave money to the 2014 ban on SUVs? Easy—they now have green arrows pointing at their heads.
You want to block out any indication of viewpoints other than your own? Done.

This will not be a world conducive to political moderation, nor one where differing perspectives get along comfortably. It won’t take a majority of people using these filters to poison public discourse; imagine this summer’s town-hall screamers on constant alert, wherever they go. Yet this world will be the unintended consequence of otherwise desirable developments—spam filters, facial recognition, augmented reality—that many of us will find useful.

It's a much shorter piece than my previous Atlantic essay, but hopefully the readers will find it just as provocative.

(Top Image: by "Gluekit" as illustration for the article; it's a variant of my original artifact image, below.)

Danger, Danger!

2009-10-12T21:24:02Z

Microsoft/Danger/T-Mobile to millions of Sidekick users: Whoops.

Short version: Microsoft (who now owns Danger, the makers of the Sidekick) decided to migrate data from one storage network to another. That migration failed, and corrupted the data. Okay, annoying, so restore from the backup, right?

Wrong. No backups. None. Zero. El zilcho.

So millions of Sidekick users awake this past weekend to find that all of their data are gone -- or, in the best scenario, the only data they have are the most recent stuff on the Sidekick itself, and if they let the device power down, they'll lose that, too.

You can't say I didn't warn you.

January 19, 2009 - "Dark Clouds":

Here's where we get to the heart of the problem. Centralization is the core of the cloud computing model, meaning that anything that takes down the centralized service -- network failures, massive malware hit, denial-of-service attack, and so forth -- affects everyone who uses that service. When the documents and the tools both live in the cloud, there's no way for someone to continue working in this failure state. If users don't have their own personal backups (and alternative apps), they're stuck.
Similarly, if a bug affects the cloud application, everyone who uses that application is hurt by it. [...]

In short, the cloud computing model envisioned by many tech pundits (and tech companies) is a wonderful system when it works, and a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare. For an individual, a crashed laptop and a crashed cloud may be initially indistinguishable, but the former only afflicts one person and one point of access to information. If a cloud system locks up, potentially millions of people lose access.

So what does all of this mean?

My take is that cloud computing, for all of its apparent (and supposed) benefits, stands to lose legitimacy and support (financial and otherwise) when the first big, millions-of-people-affecting, failure hits. Companies that tie themselves too closely to this particular model, as either service providers or customers, could be in real trouble.

And what do we see now? "Microsoft's Danger Sidekick data loss casts dark cloud on cloud computing." "Microsoft's Sidekick data catastrophe." "Cloud Goes Boom, T-Mo Sidekick Users Lose All Data."

Okay, it's easy to blame the failure to make backups for this disaster. But the point of resilience models is that failure happens. A complex system should not be so brittle that a single mistake can destroy it. Here's what I wrote back in January about what a resilient cloud could look like:

Distributed, individual systems would remain the primary tool of interaction with one's information. Data would live both locally and on the cloud, with updates happening in real-time if possible, delayed if necessary, but always invisibly. All cloud content should be in open formats, so that alternative tools can be used as desired or needed. Ideally, a personal system should be able to replicate data to multiple distinct clouds, to avoid monoculture and single-point-of-failure problems. This version of the cloud is less a primary source for computing services, and more a fail-safe repository. If my personal system fails, all of my data remains available and accessible via the cloud; if the cloud fails, all of my data remains available and accessible via my personal system.

It may not be as sexy as everything-on-the-cloud models, and undoubtedly not as profitable, but a failure like this past weekend's Microsoft/Danger fiasco -- or the myriad cloud failures yet to happen (and they will happen) -- simply wouldn't have been possible.

New FC: Singularity Scenarios

2009-10-12T20:46:53Z

My latest Fast Company essay goes up today, talking about the different scenarios for a "Singularity" that arise when you take into account different cultural and political drivers for both before and after the development of greater-than-human intelligence.

Three of the four scenarios (leaving aside "Out of Control") assume that human social intelligence, augmentation technology, and competition continue to develop. And in all three, human civilization -- with its resulting conflicts and mistakes, communities and arts, and, yes, politics -- remains a vital force even after a Singularity has begun.
One key aspect of the three is that they're not necessarily end states. Each could, given the right drivers, eventually evolve into one of the others. Moreover, all three could in principle exist side-by-side.

I noted earlier that I differ from many of the Singularity enthusiasts in my take on what happens before and what happens after a Singularity. I suppose I differ in my take on what happens during one, as well. I don't think that a Singularity would be visible to those going through one. Even the most disruptive changes are not universally or immediately distributed, and late-followers learn from the reactions and dilemmas of those who had initially encountered the disruptive change.

Ultimately, I think the "singularity" language has outlived its usefulness. By positing that the culmination of certain technological changes is simply Beyond the Minds of Mortal Men, the concept both dismisses (or greatly downplays) the potential of human action to modify the evolution of the technologies, and undermines the stated desire of many Singularity proponents to avoid disastrous outcomes. "If it's completely out of our hands, then why worry?" is not exactly the mantra of a responsible, safe, globally beneficial future.

"Singularity Salon" Talk

2009-10-04T14:53:43Z

Here's my slide deck from my talk at last night's New York Futures Salon. This is the raw Slideshare conversion, so a few of the transitions end up as blank slides (and you lose all of the nifty Keynote effects).

Singularity Salon Talk

View more presentations from Jamais Cascio.

The talk was videotaped, and the recording will be available on the net Real Soon Now. I'll post a link when it's available. Overall, the talk went well. Good questions, good crowd (it ended up being considerably more crowded than the early gathering shown below). I'll have more to say in this week's Fast Company piece.

New FC: The Singularity and Society

2009-09-29T22:23:49Z

My Fast Company essay this week is a long one, offering up an overview of the Singularity concept for people who haven't following it closely -- as well as some thoughts about what might be missing.

Despite the presence of the Singularity concept within various (largely online) sub-cultures, it remains on the edges of common discussion. That's hardly a surprise; the Singularity concept doesn't sit well with most people's visions of what tomorrow will hold (it's the classic "the future is weirder than I expect" scenario). Moreover, many of the loudest voices discussing the topic do so in a manner that's uncomfortably messianic. Assertions of certainty, claims of inevitability, and the dismissal of the notion that humankind has any choice in the matter--all for something that cannot be proven, and is built upon a nest of assumption--do tend to drive away people who might otherwise find the idea intriguing.
And that's a problem, as the core of the Singularity argument is actually pretty interesting, and worth thinking about. Increasing functional intelligence--whether through smarter machines or smarter people--will almost certainly disrupt how we live in pretty substantial ways, for better and for worse. And there have been periods in our history where the combination of technological change and social change has resulted in quite radical shifts in how we live our lives--so radical that the expectations, norms, and behaviors of pre-transformation societies soon become out of place in the post-transformation world.

The essay ends with an invitation to join me for the Singularity Salon in New York this Saturday. Cross-marketing, people!

If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Singularity

2009-09-23T15:35:51Z

All of the details have been worked out, so now I can talk about it: I will be speaking in New York City on October 3, at the New York Futures Salon. The subject?

Singularity Salon:
Putting the Human Back in the Post-Human Condition
aka If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Singularity

I'm very happy to announce that acclaimed futurist Jamais Cascio will be coming to lead our discussion of the Singularity, and what we should be doing about it. He's going to kick us off with a provocative call-to-arms:

With their unwavering focus on computing power and digital technology, leading Singularity proponents increasingly define the future in language devoid of politics and culture—thereby missing two of the factors most likely to shape the direction of any technology-driven intelligence explosion. Even if the final result is a "post-human" era, leaving out human elements when describing what leads up to a Singularity isn't just mistaken, it's potentially quite dangerous. It's time to set aside algorithms and avatars, and talk about the truly important issues surrounding the possibility of a Singularity: political power, social responsibility, and the role of human agency.

This should provide more than enough fodder for a lively discussion. I'm looking forward to a very special evening.

This is, in essence, counter-programming for the Singularity Summit, happening that same weekend (I'm not attending the Summit, fwiw). The 7pm start time for my event gives Summit attendees a chance to come on over after the last Saturday talk.

This is the first time I've give a talk on futures in New York, and it's open to the public (via registration for the Future Salon group). Hope to see you there.

New FC: Futures Thinking - the Basics

2009-09-18T21:34:16Z

This week's Fast Company is now up. Futures Thinking: The Basics is an introduction to foresight and futurism, with the goal of making it something that many people can engage in productively.

Long-time futures practitioners may find the method described overly-simple, but my goal wasn't just to present something that could be readily understood by a reader without any futures experience. I also wanted it to be something that the people using the method could easily explain to their peers.

It's a pretty common problem in foresight work -- people engaged in a futures workshop get excited about the project and its implications, but find that they are unable to explain to their colleagues back home what they went through and what it meant. They keep getting caught up in trying to make sense of the process, to explain it in a way that is meaningful to those not in attendance.

The four scenario archetypes I describe are also quite a bit simpler than the "futures archetypes" employed by graduates of the University of Hawaii Futures Studies program. Those four (Growth, Collapse, Discipline, and Transformation), while useful, still require a bit of explanation as to their meaning. Is a slow decline a Collapse? Is Transformation a positive scenario? The advantage of the super-simplified archetypes (listed below) is that they're casual, not jargon, and most people would have roughly parallel interpretations of their meaning.

One technique that's good to start with is to use what some professionals call "futures archetypes"--generic headlines that offer platforms upon which to build more specific stories. Four that can be very easy to use are expectations:
The future is what I expect.
The future is better than I expect.
The future is worse than I expect.
The future is weirder than I expect.
The first three are fairly self-explanatory, but the last may be a surprise. The goal with the fourth archetype is to explore possibilities that completely shake things up (a big earthquake, perhaps, or a war, or a revolution in computing power). This doesn't mean fantasy--alien invasions and robot uprisings are probably best left to the movies--but it does mean something outside of your expectations. The phrase I love to use for this is "plausibly surreal."

Yes, once again I work "plausibly surreal" into the conversation.