Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Year of the zombie

2011 was the year we all became zombies, snarls Jim Kunstler.  To begin with,

the industrial world underwent complete zombification in 2011. Its member states and their institutions are now lurching across the stage of history like so many walking dead. Whole European nations are dead, their citizens squirming around the ruined bones of failed speculative condo projects, housing estates, and luxury hotels like botfly larvae.

The article returns to the living dead theme regularly.  

Border Gothic to come

A haunting image from the United Nations, a kind of impending border Gothic:

By 2025, young people on both sides of the border may struggle to understand why their parents' generation built this huge fence.

...the net flow of illegal Mexican immigration northward has slowed to a trickle. With fewer children to support and not yet burdened by a huge surge of elders, the Mexican economy is doing much better than in the past, giving people less reason to leave. 

Recall how often Gothic tales site themselves in locations of old, decayed power.  Abandoned forts, disused houses, ancient abbeys are where secrets hide, villains skulk, and from which heroines flee, pursued.

America's Gothic has had a creativity tricky time with this, since our built environment isn't as old as Europe's.  So we set tales in Europe (cf Poe and Lovecraft's inheritors), fantasize about buildings here, or invent new versions: wilderness sites, haunted houses, or the perennial Indian burial ground.

(image via Wikipedia)

Support the humanities, or cyberspace will make Gilead happen

A new twist on cyberfear come from this interesting scenario over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. It posits ending all humanities scholarhip in the United States.

The main argument is that such an event would lead to the establishment of a theocracy, which is interesting enough.  But, for this blog's purposes, note how it relies on a certain type of fearsome digital media to happen.

First, the scenario depends on delinking technology and the humanities, then assigning cybertools to an antihumanities, profit-focused academia:

The university became a technology lab and trade school.

Next, within that new world, digital tools displace critical thinking, helping speed the way towards dictatorship:

[A]s knowledge of computers replaced knowledge of constitutional history, and familiarity with business cycles replaced familiarity with the Bible, the voices of opposition grew feebler, and the activists, with their moral certitude and superior knowledge of the Bible and of America's founding, overwhelmed their opponents.

After that, a kind of capital-science alliance makes technology an active tool of oppression:

Business supplied the activists with capital, while scientists and engineers gave them access to sophisticated computer and weapons technology. Swelling in numbers and power, the activists grew dissatisfied with the American political system, which, with its checks and balances, they saw as too slow in promoting their agendas.  

The result? "The country continued its descent into chaos, and civil war seemed imminent." 

A few reflections.

First, the author conflates technology with a certain kind of socially aggressive business sector.  This isn't explained, and doesn't make much sense.  Interesting to see that alignment, though.  We'll probably see it again.

Second, the piece links tech with extreme religious politics.  The combo seems to be a marriage of convenience - no mention of Facebook requiring people to read The Fundamentals to join up, say - but the huge dissonance between the two worlds just vanishes.

Third, the internet's role in supporting and growing free speech also disappears.  Instead all of cyberspace folds up into a 1930s-style propaganda apparatus.  

Overall, such a narrative requires a weirdly ahistorical sense of digital technology.  Does this mean bracketing out a couple of generations' worth of development?

A quick guide to futures: Cascio's Process

A quick guide to futures thinking comes from Jamais Cascio.  The process he describes is a solid one, accessible to just about any audience.  Nice teaching tool.

Futurism can be good for you: new study

In a nice bit of cheerful news, thinking about futures might be a good thing for the brain, according to a new study.  Well, positive futures.  An experiment on monkeys found that:

the dopamine neurons that signaled the monkey's expectation of water rewards also signaled the expectation of advance information in a manner that was correlated with the strength of the animal's preference. "The monkeys and dopamine neurons treated information about rewards as if it was a reward itself," explains Dr. Bromberg-Martin.

Question: do negative futures lack dopamine rewards?  Are the pleasures of apocalypse thinking located elsewhere, then?

Note, too, confirmation of what every writer knows:

Specifically, people (and animals) do not like to be held in suspense and prefer to receive advance information about the rewards they will receive in the future.

(thanks to Ian Campbell!)

Dooming America: a scenarios exploration

This Slate article describes a scenarios exercise, where a group explored different bad futures for the United States.  It's a fun article for futures studies and Gothic stuff alike.

It's attached to a fun little exercise, a sort of "Choose Your Own Apocalypse":

The main focus of Josh Levin's article is a single day of brainstorming, led by GBN:

For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to "turn off" climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women... who identify more with one another than with any particular nation.

The article also heads off towards Robert Wright, Igor Panarin, and the Institute for the Future.  The latter's Jamais Cascio gets his turn to describe several 50-year scenarios:

Cute note about futurism: "Most scenario-planning sessions end with the world stuffed inside a grid."

Black swans versus the future

Coping with the future, specifically the sudden emergence of black swans: Nicholas Taleb offers some strategies.  Notice the criticism of expert advice.

And some trademark Taleb wit:

• People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
• Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant...
• Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning...
• Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence.
• Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains...
  

The world catastrophe formula

It's something out of pulp fiction, the super formula that wrecked a world!  How insidious:

At the heart of it all was Li's formula... \The Gaussian copula soon became such a universally accepted part of the world's financial vocabulary that brokers started quoting prices for bond tranches based on their correlations. "Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus," wrote derivatives guru Janet Tavakoli in 2006.

The supervillain, or mathematician, is now in retreat:

Li has been notably absent from the current debate over the causes of the crash. In fact, he is no longer even in the US. Last year, he moved to Beijing to head up the risk-management department of China International Capital Corporation. In a recent conversation, he seemed reluctant to discuss his paper and said he couldn't talk without permission from the PR department. In response to a subsequent request, CICC's press office sent an email saying that Li was no longer doing the kind of work he did in his previous job and, therefore, would not be speaking to the media.

Probably fearing the first round of assassins, or at least torch-equipped neopeasants.

There's a lesson in futorology here.  Partly it's the problem of drawing on too small a sample (and only in boom time!).  Partly it's black swan time:

[P]people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn't have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn't have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.

How many pulp fiction and Gothic elements can we spot?  Mad science on the march... menacing super-genius from the East... insidious mind viruses...

Black Swan community divides: Martyn Smith

A subtle problem for predicting the future comes from Martyn Smith, who reminds us about the formation of new subcommunities.  Smith is considering the Reformation:

We could lose ourselves examining the doctrinal details of the various camps (Calvinism, Lutheranism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism), but that would miss the sociological point: we are witnessing in all this talk the rise of new community boundaries, which break along lines that could not have been predicted beforehand.

I'm reminded of science fiction examples of doing this well, like the first couple of Foundation books.

Note that once these Black Swans appear, they get naturalized by repeated practice:

Learning to see the world in terms of doctrinal differences takes time.. and the Reformation era saw an immense amount of effort: "The churches had to undertake massive pedagogic campaigns, which they conducted via preaching, education, printed propaganda, church discipline, and revamped rituals" .

A peek at sf writers peeking at the future

Several sf writers advise us on predicting the future, in this fun, short CIO.com article.

Larry Niven:

Look for the goals humankind will never give up. Instant travel, instant education, longevity. Then try to guess when it will appear and what it will look like.

Pay close attention to parasite control. There is always someone who wants the money for something else.

You're obliged to predict not just the automobile but the traffic jam and the stranglehold on gas prices.

Nobody invents anything unless there is at least the illusion of a profit.

Robert Sawyer:

The world is like a person: It doesn't change as it gets older. Rather, it simply becomes more obviously what it always was. People always liked having phones and portable music, but most people never wanted to lug a camera, or an ebook reader, or a PDA around. The future is adding functionality to those things we've already admitted into our lives, not trying to convince people they need new categories of things; the iPhone—the all-in-one device that is, first and foremost, something familiar—is the correct paradigm.

Nancy Kress:

Study the cutting edge of the specific field. Create wild cards.