Notes from the digital diaspora
Project: Polytopia

Besides an occasional landmark building, the cities we live in aren’t all that different from the urban settings we’ve had to contend with since the day we were born, the most conspicuous variable being that there is more of it. But for those of us who are engaged with culture as an ever-changing expression of the zeitgeist it can be frustrating to live in a time capsule that exhibits the frozen relics of an otherwise long forgotten past. The main reason for this is architecture’s inherent immutability. Once erected, a building’s walls rigidly maintain the status quo while the culture at large constantly reinvents itself.

As SpaceCollective contributor Greg Lynn puts it in his book Animate Form: “More than even their traditional role of providing shelter, architects are expected to provide culture with stasis. Because of its dedication to permanence, architecture is one of the last modes of thought based on the inert.” By contrast, today’s prevalent mindset, as exemplified by the internet, is all about breaking down boundaries between established and emerging forces, pitting yesterday’s top down hierarchies against the bottom up rule of the online population, and promoting the hegemony of the immaterial over the material world.



By now we’re all familiar with the successful online community Second Life and its virtual landmass exceeding the area of Greater Boston, where people are effectively leading their double lives. It won’t be long before social networks like this will be fully immersive 3D environments where players can talk to each other in real-time lip sync while consummating their online relationships via telepresence, achieved through the transmission of stimuli from one location to the next.

It is interesting to realize that the standoff between digital space and the built environment were at the heart of the two most recent downturns of the economy: On the one hand the dot com bubble of the late ‘90s and on the other the mortgage crisis which recently caused the real estate market to collapse. Meanwhile, the online world is thriving. Although by no means an economist these subsequent recessions somehow struck me as being tied to a clash between the old and the new vying for dominance of a world in transition.

Because of the internet every traditional institution is suddenly subject to a wholesale transformation of its historical model, from the entertainment industry’s losses due to illegal downloading of its content, the waning import of the print media and academia’s changing role in the age of the search engine, to the economy’s response to globalization facilitated by the web.

Until now architecture didn’t seem much affected by the emergence of this new world order, but it becomes ever harder to deny the unmistakable symptoms of a rapidly emerging digital diaspora. As more immersive internet strategies keep presenting themselves in the form of a million different services offered by the limitless digital information space, people will continue to transcend the physical restrictions of their residences as they expand their lifestyles ever further beyond their local zip codes.

From an architectural standpoint it may be somewhat depressing to realize that the real estate in Second Life, where the imagination runs free, nevertheless mostly consists of the same old ranch houses and McMansions people prefer in the outside world. However it is the reality of the built environment itself that is to blame for this state of affairs. After all, these virtual houses closely resemble the places many of us were born in and have been surrounded by for generations. This is the stasis we have lived with all our lives. Indeed, besides the occasional cultural landmark, we have little reason to assume that the world will ever look any different, be it outside our doorstep, online or in the future.



If, by contrast, you were to link up the computers of every one of Greg Lynn’s colleagues and students who produced virtual buildings for years, their combined output of computer-designed architecture would provide the online community with an alluring animated city the likes of which we’ve never seen before, neither in reality nor in science-fiction films

So far few architects have been inclined to settle the unruly frontier of the internet because they’re way too busy promoting their buildings in the “real” world, even though in today’s economic climate that has become a rather hopeless task. Yet some of them, like the Argentinian designer Hernan Diaz Alonso, who studied under Greg and now has his own worldwide following, would rather break into the movies than sacrifice their lives at the altar of the built environment. Greg’s own work made it into the movies after being appropriated for the production design of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. And as you can see in this video clip he made with frequent collaborator Imaginary Forces, he at least considers the potentials of what architect Rem Koolhaas once called the “(digital) “revolution that seems about to melt all that is solid.”

The problem architecture faces is that today’s technologies are beginning to merge with our minds, creating levels of immersion and interaction with which physical embodiment can no longer catch up.

Historically, cities may have served as magnificent aggregators of human activities, elevating rural lifestyles to unprecedented levels of sophistication, but in the age of hyper-connectivity it becomes clear that the built environment is a major contributor to its inhabitants’ relative isolation. For more than half a century this walled in condition was alleviated by one way broadcast media but it is now busted open by the digital diaspora that is increasingly effecting our contemporary existence. In this context, people invariably raise the issue that the body does not migrate into the virtual world, but, as Edward Castronova argues in his book Exodus to the Virtual World, “that is not important...where you are is where you are looking. Gaze is location."

In fact there is much less of a dichotomy between artificial and actual reality than most observers of the phenomenon acknowledge. The digital infrastructure is everywhere which allows people to free up their bodies and go anywhere in the physical world while remaining connected to our online “home.” This, more than anything, may ultimately re-vitalize today’s urban landscape. Besides the familiar internet connections in coffee shops, one can imagine a new generation of virtual flâneurs. In the 19th Century a flâneur was a person who walked the city in order to experience it or to actively participate in street life, not unlike the critical explorations of the built environment the Situationists called dérives.

Today’s versions of these escapades in the analog world would be enhanced by the capacity of new-style urban drifters to tap into a seamless overlay of digital connections wherever they would go, infusing physical reality with potentials and narratives that would otherwise have been obscured by the buildings’ opaque demeanor.

As I put it in an earlier post

in the streets we may know what lies behind the facades of every store or public building, giving us an instant impression of its tagged contents, and people will have devices, as they did in a Japanese  experiment, transmitting and receiving each other’s personal profiles, alerting them to the presence of compatible others. In this ultra-serendipitous environment we will experience far more advanced forms of socializing which will infuse the world with a plethora of social and romantic opportunities that have eluded us so far.

Ever since the 19th Century young people, who in Germany were referred to as Wandervogel (meaning migrating birds), have been seeking an alternative to the bourgeois lifestyles that had taken them hostage, which in those days often meant losing themselves in nature.

However, short of literally getting lost — which is not nearly as easy in the age of satellites and GPS — today we can have the best of both worlds.

Thanks to the digital diaspora geography is no longer destiny as physical distance can be negotiated from any location and the virtual realm shows ever more potential for near physical immersion. The Japanese term for Virtual Reality translates into English as Intimate Presence, which is a great way to suggest the “real time” interactions that are currently facilitated by the web. Even though this immersiveness is still hampered by a poor visual component due to the current lack of available bandwidth, the analog and digital realms continue to merge as entire generations of internet users are engaging in a frenzy of instantaneous connectivity. The more the web will become an all-encompassing immersive place, the more we will be able to live in multiple dimensions at once without ever losing touch with the extended worldwide community that will be along for the ride wherever they or we may physically reside. This marriage of virtual and actual presence will provide us with a range of visceral and mental experiences that will increasingly transcend all boundaries that restrict us today.

Somewhere along this trajectory we will be ready for our impending migration into the shared mind space that is foreshadowed in so many contributions to SpaceCollective under the aegis of the Polytopia project.

Indeed, it would appear that in preparation for this event we are currently in the process of rewiring our brains, optimizing our personal relationships, expanding our access to knowledge and capitalizing on our collective intelligence, all of which in a bygone era were bogged down by the noise of a vast cognitive waste that we are finally learning to overcome.

Wed, May 6, 2009  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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SC: Return of the Renaissance Man

If there is one thing I have enjoyed about Space Collective since its inception, it is the polymath nature of most of this site’s forward thinkers. Almost everyone here has a mixture of creative and intellectual ambitions, which more often than not covers philosophical and literary ground and a strong focus on art and design. In a way one could say that this a community of Generalists, similar to Wikipedia’s description of the Remaissance Man, aka as Homo Universalis:

The term "universal man" or "man of the world" is used to describe a person who is well educated or who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields, based on the notion of Renaissance Humanism that “a man can do all things if he will.”

A person of that era was expected to speak several languages, play a musical instrument, write poetry, and so on, thus fulfilling the Renaissance ideal. The idea of a universal education was pivotal to achieving polymath ability, hence the concept of the University, which at the time did not specialise in specific areas, but rather trained their students in a broad array of science, philosophy, theology and the arts. This universal education contributed hugely to their being able to comprehend the universe as it was understood at the time.

This could have been the description of any of us here on SpaceCollective trying to comprehend the universe as it is understood in our time and beyond. A good representative of such a new-style Homo Universalis is NotThisBody, whose joint practice with his partner/girlfriend, covers: “film, video, photography, grapic design and media platform development.” They create multi-media works in English, French and Macedonian, not to mention computer code. NotThisBody does not “recognize borders between mediums” and they are “open to any and all who’d like to cooperate and co-create” with them. Since they spend most of their time as digital nomads, these collaborations could take place on the multiple online platforms where today’s Digital Renaissance is shaping up, or wherever their physical bodies may find themselves on this battle-worn planet as they are passing through, breaking down boundaries between people and cultural expressions wherever they go.

During the Industrial Revolution the idea of the Homo Universalis was discredited because it was considered extremely difficult to genuinely acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of everything, and even more so to be proficient in several fields at the level of an expert. Not to mention to achieve excellence or recognition in multiple fields. As specialization became the norm at the world’s Universities, the word polymath began to take on a negative connotation, but the internet is rapidly bringing the era of the expert to a close by providing everyone universal access to all knowledge.

Most of today’s educational institutions are still adhering to centuries old teaching models, bolstered by tenure and obligatory publications, wrought under the academic mandate to Publish or Perish. But as the dissemination of information is increasingly taking place online, knowledge creation is no longer the exclusive privilege of lecturing professors drawing from a canon that is frozen in time and often out of date. Instead, universal access to information allows for community-driven curricula which are forever updated by students interacting with an ever growing online repository of educational materials. None of this takes away from the necessity of brilliant teachers or the essential knowledge exchange between professionals and those who have signed on to learn from them. But it does mean a radically different dynamic between the institution and an increasingly participating student body whose contributions are transcending hierarchical, disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

The mandate that may define tomorrow’s technologically integrated education might as well be, Participate or Perish, bringing the University in closer alignment again with the ideals of the original Renaissance Humanists. And these visionary minds are not the only ones from the distant past who established a precedent that is surprisingly relevant today.

Recently I came across another historical inspiration that foreshadowed the potential of today’s internet revolution. Working on a concept for an online educational platform it came to my attention that at least three pillars of the current internet were informed by a century-old educational system conceived by Maria Montessori who hoped that her anti-authoritarian learning principles might ultimately bring about world peace. Born in 1870 in Italy, Maria would have been considered a true revolutionary in any time, leave alone hers. When she was 13 years old she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dreams of becoming an engineer, and she was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome’s Medical School, becoming the first female doctor in Italy. She ultimately became famous for her theory that education is not something that teachers do, but that learning comes naturally to humans.

Being a product of the visionary lady’s ideas myself, it piqued my interest to find out that both Larry Page and Sergei Brin attributed Google’s success story to Maria Montessori. According to them their Montessori education taught them to be self directed and self starters, adding that their schooling taught them to think for themselves, giving them the freedom to pursue their own path, which would lead to the snowballing success of Google, which aims to provide the world with near universal access to all information known to man.

A similar background informed the career of Jeff Bezos who created the groundbreaking online retail organization Amazon.com, and another online celebrity on the list is no less than Jimmy Wales, whose Wikipedia has become the online fount of encyclopedic knowledge. Interactive game designer Will Wright also mentions Maria Montessori as his main inspiration for his seminal hit The Sims, while crediting like-minded Dutch educator Kees Boeke for the Powers of Ten metaphor that helped him create his new game Spore. These are the founding fathers of the interactive paradigm, the new Renaissance Men courtesy of Maria Montessori.

This completely unexpected tribute to an often marginalized educational system struck me with the realization that the internet might indeed be looked at as a giant Montessori System with its respect for people’s individuality, innate curiosity and natural inclination to share which would become the underlying principle of Google’s PageRank, Amazon’s recommendation algorithm, and Wikipedia’s collaborative knowledge creation. In a Montessori school as well as on the web, students are given the appropriate tools to search the educational landscape without peer pressure or the need to compete. As a result of their firmly established autonomy they are much more inclined to contribute to the group, which in turn rewards them by sharing the outcome of everybody else’s inquiries, jointly increasing the community’s collective intelligence.



Thus, on the eve of the First World War which would so violently expose humankind’s destructive tendencies, one woman’s prescience may have launched an educational model that helped set into motion one of the biggest mental revolutions to date. Who knows, one day her vision might help us realize the resolution she hoped for, as an exponentially growing number of unwitting digital disciples will finally foster peace on earth. Certainly, had she been around to see the fruits of her labor, she would have considered Google’s motto “Don’t Be Evil” a good start! Now it’s up to today’s educationalists to take notice and follow suit, or perish like every other institution harking back to the industrial revolution.

So here, courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, is an invaluable message from the visionary pedagogue herself:

“Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society”.

Wed, Apr 15, 2009  Permanent link

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The universe will fly like a bird
Project: Polytopia

In Spacewaver’s recent post about the Singularity University he mentions a discussion concerning the institution’s recent mission statement which, according to Jamais Cascio claims to be "preparing humanity for accelerating technological change," but is “spending a lot more time talking about nifty gadgets than about the connection between technology and society.”

Spaceweaver considers Cascio’s opinion a possible “invitation to a discussion and exchange which is much in need,” and he believes that “the SpaceCollective can and perhaps should become a stage for such discussion.”



Here are my thoughts on the matter: I admire Ray Kurzweil’s advocacy of radical ideas. However, like so many scientists and tech mavens he has never been able to frame the essential humanistic components of his master plan in a compelling way. When you promote powerful notions of human transformation it obviously becomes important not to portray humanity as something that must be overcome. Therefore it would seem to be essential to include a Future Humanities department as part of the Singularity University's curriculum.

I agree with Spaceweaver that the futurist thinkers on this site can contribute something of value to the Singularity University, and even to the curricula of the regular universities, like the ones SC worked with on several projects, since they conversely tend to ignore the subject of the future altogether.

Spaceweaver himself is a perfect example of how the thinkers who contribute such valuable content to this site could play a role in filling this vacuum. In post after post he demonstrates a phenomenal grasp of the ethical and philosophical implications of the impending changes in the equilibrium of our culture. Likewise, the Polytopia project has become an impressive forum for the evolution of Future Mind, while SC’s mix of art, science and design represents precisely what is so painfully absent from most blogs dealing with topics like Nanotechnology, Transhumanism, Artificial Intelligence, etc.

Check out KurzweilAI, for example, and note the banner ad for Ray & Terry’s Longevity Products, which rather looks like an advertisement for a Bed and Breakfast. The artless quality of the site makes one long for Folkert’s designs, Xaos’ Singularity-inspired poetics, Andy Gilmore’s art and the multi-media that makes the future represented by SpaceCollective so enticing. Unfortunately, we have to assume that Kurzweil’s X-Prize-, Google- and NASA-sponsored university, heady and scientific as it will undoubtedly become, will be lacking some of the emotional and aesthetic experiences we aspire to. In all likelihood, little attention will be paid to the fact that the future could actually be a sexy and stimulating place and there will be a deficit of the magic many of us here associate with technology. Nor will there be many young faces gracing the institute’s vaunted halls, due to its prohibitive tuition. I can’t help but imagine the place as an ivied, corporate institute, rather than a desirable haven for techno-optimism.



Many of us have been influenced by Eric Drexler’s brilliant introduction to nano technology, Engines of Creation, and I read The Singularity is Near from cover to cover. I was inspired by Vernor Vinge’s novel True Names and Timothy Leary’s plans to cryonically preserve his molecular framework for future resurrection as well as Hans Moravec’s dream of taking science to the edge where Humanity becomes Trans-Human.

Being foremost a storyteller I would dream up future scenarios informed by the ideas of these Wizened Elders of Futurism that were populated by human characters people could identify with. These science-fact based stories became exciting exercises in creating entirely new worlds based on new potentials and rules, even though most of them stood little chance to become movies because the film industry has a longstanding policy to only fund dystopian narratives (check out this post on the subject).

In response to that dismal state of affairs I’m now finishing up a SciFi documentary about the late Timothy Leary, my favorite ‘mad scientist,’ promoting the evolution of intelligence by whatever means possible. Leary’s main challenge in life was not to let dystopia’s henchmen – who chased him across the globe and kept him in jail for years – succeed at turning his life into a cautionary tale. As a result, his story is one of the most spectacular object lessons in optimism, defiant at every turn and as prescient as only the best futurists manage to be.

It just so happens that Leary makes a number of posthumous appearances in Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, one of which is a fictional conversation with a character called Molly2004, who tries to figure out what will separate future humans from “bacteria who would talk and think” once we will be “saturating the universe with our intelligence.” Someone by the name of George2048 responds, “Indeed, Molly, that is fundamentally what the Singularity is all about. The Singularity is the sweetest music, the deepest art, the most beautiful mathematics…” “I’m still trying to envision what the universe will be doing,” Molly insists, whereupon Timothy Leary elucidates that “the universe will be flying like a bird…”

No matter my critical remarks in this post, Ray Kurzweil deserves our highest admiration for encouraging so many people to take a giant leap into a future that not so long ago would have been considered unthinkable. Only someone willing to play the part of ‘straight man’ could have possibly succeeded at rallying the support which should make the Singularity a reality, by which time he may finally be able to transcend his cheerleader role.

After all, by then everything will have changed.

As Xaos put it in his first SpaceCollective post:

The amazing thing about the singularity, the Story of the singularity that is, is the way it affects us. When projecting it on the line of our event horizon, the singularity is a story that brings us into deconstruction and moves us into composing ourselves anew.

The human today lives in a radical time, actually an extremely radical time; the future is rushing at us, proposing for the first time the idea and reality of a better platform, distinctively different from the imperfect outcome of natural selection. It is the beginning of an accelerating change that is starting to gain a confident and attractive position, projecting the human over an open horizon. Changing the very meaning of what, who and how a human is.

So Mr. Kurzweil, just to let you know, we are waiting for your call. In the meantime we’d appreciate a courtesy discount on your school’s tuition or perhaps even a few scholarships as a token for our relentless promotion of your cause.


P.S. In an excellent comment by EINitro, he includes a great quote by RISD President John Maeda:

Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.

Images: Lebbeus_Woods

Sun, Feb 22, 2009  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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Beyond the speed of thought

An often recurring discussion on SpaceCollective concerns the limitations of language, typically meaning the written word, which seems most closely related to human thought. While other languages, like music or visuals, appeal more directly to our ‘intuitive’ capacities, written or verbal language, along with the abstraction and logical reasoning of mathematics, seems to appeal mostly to our ‘intellect’.



According to the classic Myers-Briggs typological theory a relatively small percentage of
people perceive the world intuitively. These individuals “tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.”

This sounds like a reasonable explanation why, even though most people on this site communicate their futuristic ideas through writing, they simultaneously have an ambiguous relationship to a language which subjects their reasoning to a simple rule-based syntax.

Most people contributing to SC are thinkers, who are very much tuned into the above mentioned “possibilities” and “patterns,” and whatever else the brain processes in between the thinking and the words. As a rule, futurists have a strong intuitive side. Where others experience the world in concrete terms, they see reality as a scrim revealing the future potential of things, so they understandably want to adapt the modes of expression to fit their advanced paradigms. Yet we continue to be highly dependent on a linguistic tradition which is firmly tied to conventional processes of thought and, although frustrating at times, at this point it must still be considered the best available option to futher the discourse. Just think about how often we launch into a sentence, stringing along words with only a general sense of where they are leading us. Somehow the words keep coming out of our mouth (or word processor) trying to catch up to the speed of thought while the stream of consciousness moves its argument forwards as if it had been preconceived. Just like the improvisation of a jazz musician or a shaman speaking in tongues to conjure a vision.

Look how Wildcat pushes language around and coins new phrases in his relentless attempts to hone his Polytopian vision, while expessing his frustration that “we are in dire need of a new kind of language, a language that may be able to bridge the immensity of the gap we have created between the perception of the world and the manner by which we describe the same world.” Also check out the writings of Meika and Xaos’ Montevideo posts , which shed light on future realities by elevating their words to a more evocative intuitive level. Or read Obvious’ post in which he observes that “language is revealed through text as the mode of our conscious experience – a truth which furthermore transforms the very capacities of the thoughts which think it. Once text, in its essence, is transmitted and elucidated via readership there is transformation “of the process of coming-into-being of the world.” Meanwhile Al wants SC to “create its own dictionary containing new words and new understandings of old words,” Folkert calls speech “a bottleneck for modern thinking and communication” and wants us to “come up with richer forms of idea-exchange,” and Carel suggests “non-symbolic, non-representative ways to communicate.” All of these appear to be the stirrings of the non-linear associative mind that mark the beginnings of a new typology.

Lately, I’ve been doing a little exercise, trying to imagine some actual experiences if the brain were to seamlessly interface with machine intelligence. We have to assume that once technology turns inwards it will change our very way of being and profoundly transform our sense of Self because we will be known in much greater detail to our newly enhanced mind, from the minute data of our human genome to the collective awareness of our constantly updated life on this planet. This “invasive” brain/computer interface will deeply effect the experience of our surroundings, providing new layers of immersion and annotating every aspect of our reality, adding a whole new dimension to wherever we go and whoever we meet. In the streets we may know what lies behind the facades of every public building, giving us an instant impression of its tagged contents, and people will have devices, as they did in a Japanese experiment, transmitting and receiving each other’s personal profiles, alerting them to the presence of compatible others. In this ultra-serendipitous environment we will experience far more advanced forms of socializing which will infuse the world with a plethora of romantic opportunities that have eluded us so far. Access to immediately available data anywhere will bring the world alive, creating connections, synapses and links that will keep us connected to everyone and everything in our immediate surroundings and the world at large. As our minds will attain the non-linear associative powers that will do away with the static mold of analog information we will finally break through the speed barrier of thought. At this juncture, our brains may more frequently experience the precious moments when suddenly everything seems to be falling into place, like the occasional epiphanies we have today. In such a hyper-conscious world a majority of people may be able to achieve a form of machine-enhanced intuition bordering on telepathy, which in the days of Myers-Briggs used to be the exclusive domain of a privileged few. Finally, through the scrim of “reality,” the future potential of things will be revealed to all.

Tue, Dec 9, 2008  Permanent link

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SC (the emergence of)

In a recent post by Connor, who is one of several recent SpaceCollective members whose contributions continue to raise the bar here, he wonders if the emergent nature of SC’s future vision might be strong enough to overcome the economic system’s detrimental impact on the natural environment and innovation.


Image from The Bridge Project, by Elif Ayiter

Polytopian visionary Wildcat responds that this economic system is based on an “outdated (Neolithic) manner of organizing and distributing resources,” and announces that this “era of lack” will be replaced by an “era of abundance once the impending nano/biotech singularity is in place.” As a hardcore futurist, he adds that the direction implied by “beautiful projects as SpaceCollective and Polytopia” are so removed from the present economic system that in terms of future philosophy at least there seems to be no reason to discuss it, banking instead on the fact that no force is stronger than “an idea whose time has arrived.”

Quixotic Meganmay contributes the optimistic thought that, coincidentally with the impending crises we are facing, the human brain may have evolved to the point where we can “comprehend the complex socio-economic networks we’ve built up just in time to consider rearranging them.”

Diligent as always, Sjef is keeping one foot on the ground as he states his belief that a collapse is almost inevitable and may well have dystopian consequences, unless “the void will be filled by a plan that is ready for implementation and someone is in the position to present it through the right channels at the right time.” He doubts that our ideas, locked up in SC’s “circle of a few thousand minds” will be up to the task: “Having a clear view of the future to be created is certainly necessary, but so is having an idea of how to get there in order to push in that direction.”

Even though he forgets to mention that SpaceCollective reaches hundreds of thousands people beyond the 2000 active minds that have so far been invited to partake in this experiment, it cannot be denied that this is still a marginal outpost of thought in the global scheme of things, which begs the question how important our collective efforts really are.

In the context of the present environmental and economic turmoil, thinking about the future becomes increasingly meaningful, but in the world at large the necessary foresight and intelligence appears to be in short supply. Stalwart SC member dmitridb blames this on the “very learning institutions supposedly meant to foster thinking,” and I wholeheartedly agree with his statement. To my knowledge, there is no faculty anywhere in the academic world which specifically addresses the future. In fact, the very subject tends to be dismissed as a legitimate topic for lack of empirical validation. Scientists at least are consistently pushing the envelope of their respective disciplines, but the Humanities are firmly entrenched in a canon-based tradition that is thoroughly out of step with the moving target that is our future. Everything concerning the world that lies ahead is routinely relegated to the realm of science-fiction, leaving it up to individual forward thinkers to make up for this wholesale denial of one of the most critically important subjects of our lives.

Nobody on this site understands the mandate to articulate the Humanities of the Future better than Spaceweaver, who weighs in on Connor’s post with one of his finely calibrated arguments, offering that “the future of human civilization is embedded in an ever increasing complexity,” and therefore our best bet may be “to figure out how to bring about a collective consciousness that will become an open-ended platform for growth and transformation.”

In conjunction with Connor’s post, a contribution of dimitridb from 2007 about “wealth as a system of abstracting worth” is revived, bringing Sjef, Connor and Spaceweaver together again. They cross-reference the recent post by Connor, who once more tries to take the conversation to a level of “doing something,” and is reminded yet again by Spaceweaver how questionable it is that we “we can transform or replace our economical system whithout undergoing a very deep and all encompassing transformation regarding the human phenomenon and life at large.” In turn, dimitridb ends his response to their comments by posing the question:

“how exactly can we imminently actualize this very deep and all-encompassing conceptual transformation (…) before the snowball effect towards total hell becomes too strong for us to do anything at all?”

One possible answer to his question could be to develop critical mass for such a transformation by mobilizing the learning institutions he berates in his earlier comment.
If only we could introduce this predisposed segment of the population to a mind set that promotes an intuitive understanding of the complexity Spaceweaver refers to, we might have a better chance to accelerate such a complex future into being. Although earlier attempts to reach out to universities involved such highly respected institutions as UCLA, Vienna’s school for the Applied Arts, SciARC, Columbia University, even Yale, and were conducted by stellar faculty, few of the courses truly reciprocated by engaging with the forward thinking that is featured on this site. In large part this may have been due to the fact that in most instances the curriculum for these classes wasn’t initiated by SC but by faculty whose academic mandate does not include future studies.

The other day notthisbody (who is another welcome new voice here) turned me on to an interesting article about rhizomatic learning by Dave Cormier, in which the author states that in the rhizomatic model, “curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself (…). The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather the community is the curriculum.”

I like to think that we are such a community, creating a curriculum for the future, while picking up the slack from institutions, academic, political or otherwise, which are infinitely more powerful, yet singularly incapable of moving the world forward.

I share Wildcat’s and Meganmay’s opinion that we shouldn’t waste time here on immediate political problems or temporary fixes, but focus on emergent solutions. Although there are interesting lessons to be learned about the world’s interconnectivity from the present economic collapse, it appears to be of a transient nature rather than the deep and all encompassing transformation typically envisioned by our collective.

Just as I was writing this, another great entry was submitted by AlanSmith, whose earlier post Nationhood: The future of nationalism proposed a future in which the “importance of geography will be matched by the importance of values and ideas.” Expounding on this idea, his recent gorgeously illustrated post, proposes that

time will be the new Money. More accurately, your time, and other peoples time, are a new form of currency. We all have the same amount, every day. Whether we are rich or poor in dollars, we are all equal in time. (…) This scaffolding for a new system will be called the Ecommony, and it's measurement will be Commoncy. It will measure what you can do, and what you need done. Everything becomes shared, except our own personal time which will be the basis of the new Ecommony. Commoncy will measure how individuals spend their time to contribute to the commons of human progress. Ecommonics will be the study of how people contribute most meaningfully to this commons.

There’s more to it besides the above quote, not to mention the author’s great illustrations which serve as powerful contributions to the curriculum for the future we are jointly conceiving here, as each of us is accruing Commoncy and generating wealth for the new Ecommony.

Tue, Nov 4, 2008  Permanent link

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Living towards the Singularity
Project: Polytopia

As the intellectual contours of Polytopian existence are coming into focus in Wildcat’s recent writings, the condition he describes still leaves us without the more conducive sense of a “mind habitat” expressed in this pre-polytopian post. When SpaceCollective received an invitation to join the upcoming Singularity Summit in San Jose it made me think that several posts by Wildcat and other contributions to the site are exploring the existential implications of the same trajectory that will ultimately lead to the Singularity, albeit in a more engaging and creative way. Sort of like we represent the Humanities in conjunction with the Singularity's Science & Technology focus. I must admit that I was impressed with the recent announcement by Intel’s chief technology officer’s pledge to bring the Singularity within reach 4 decades from now.


Image: CERN's Large Hadron Collider

I'm not suggesting that Polytopia should be looking for similar validation (to my knowledge none of our contributors are engineers), but it wouldn’t hurt if our own discourse would somehow become more actionable, even though I'm still not quite sure how that can be accomplished. Obviously, continuing to think about the subject and articulating a more complete philosophical vision remains extremely valid, especially if it becomes a more collective exercise. But we should simultaneously capitalize on the creative bend of the SpaceCollective community and revive earlier expressions of interest in creating models for a new society. Coining the name Polytopia was a great start, and, as Alan Smith has proven with his post about Nationhood giving a visual identity to such an initiative has a lot of potential to effectively brand the proposal for a newly established Society of Mind and turn it into more of a perceptual reality. Writing manifestos, bylaws, etc. can be an exciting thing to do as well, and Spaceweaver's commitment to develop the concept of Polyethics will give the project critically important added substance. Practical contributions like notthisbody's post Towards a Polytopa are of course very welcome as well.

Another potent aspect of the Polytopian position is that its principles can be considered revolutionary and could well be framed in terms of a movement. If people know it or not, they are already partaking in a revolution which may be largely invisible but is nevertheless a pivotal world-transforming event. However, I feel that our own acute sense of already being part of this all-encompassing transformation is one of the impediments that has prevented us as like-minded thinkers and creators to coordinate our efforts and give projects like Polytopia the critical mass needed to manifest in the outside world. Just think about it, the Singularity movement came about simply because sci-fi writer/academician Vernor Vinge established the initial concept, which was then embraced by the more practical thinker/inventor Ray Kurzweil and now Intel’s technology director. As a result a broadly recognized idea has taken root in the world built around little more than a catchy word, a succinct definition (the moment when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence) and Intel's co-founder Gordon E. Moore’s formulation of his now famous law.


Illustration by Bryan Christie
In light of the tremendous power of thought and creativity which has emerged on this site in a mere 8 months, I find it hard to believe that SpaceCollective wouldn’t be able to similarly push the envelope to the next level. I dare say that we are equally committed to pursue our own viable ideas, and on a creative level represent as versatile a force as anyone currently involved with the Singularity. Besides, Intel’s commitment as well as Moore’s law are working as much on our behalf as that of the Singularitarians. In fact, we’re in this together with them – as long as we continue to assert our own agenda and fulfill at least some of its potential to engage in the larger scheme of things. To be continued.

Fri, Sep 5, 2008  Permanent link

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The Age of Optimization (part 3)

Collapsing time and distance
To further investigate the far-reaching implications of a virtually optimized future, let’s once more revisit the emergence of today’s live/work movement as it plays itself out both in the inner cities and the suburbs.


Illustration by alborz

• By 2006, the expansion of home-based workers in the U.S. grew twice as quickly as in the previous decade.
• In some regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, almost one in 10 workers is a part-time telecommuter.
• At many companies — IBM, Sun Microsystems, and AT&T among them — upward of 30% of their employees work from their home office.
• Demographers forecast that by 2015 there will be more individuals in the region working electronically from their house than there are people making use of public transit.

Once upon a time the information many of these tele-commuters needed to do their job was only available at their corporate offices. Since then, some of the most important and recent data, which used to be contained in numerous filing cabinets has been transferred to the computer. At first the data were stored in massive mainframes which only the corporation could afford (along with other equipment such as typewriters, telephone switchboards, the telex and the fax machine). But today every one of these functions can be performed from any cheap lap top computer.

• Today, almost every aspect of conducting business has been migrated to a digital utility whose technology extends far beyond its corporate premises. This utility connects all computers, facilitating 55 trillion links, 100 billion clicks per day and 2 million emails per second.
• Even inter-office communication often takes place online, sending an email from one adjoining cubicle to the next, traveling around the world with the speed of light only to arrive with only a fraction of delay at their destination a few feet away.
• For all practical purposes, there no longer is a difference between people performing administrative work from an office, a WiFi-equipped coffee shop or for that matter their homes which have been fully equipped to produce the same letters, spreadsheets and data for years.
• With geographic location no longer an issue, in the last decades a substantial part of the US service industry has been outsourced to places as far away as India.
• Phone operators and help desk consultants are seamlessly integrated from one society into the next halfway across the globe in time zones as different as night and day.
• Believe it or not, but the fast food order at your local McDonalds drive-through stand is now discreetly taken by Internet phone operators in India. Apparently, this transcontinental procedure has considerably sped up the way your order of French fries is being processed at your local fast food joint.

Given this reality, it doesn’t compute that local commuters are suffering hours in rush hour traffic in order to perform their daily tasks from a random cubicle in Buffalo, while their order at the local McDonald’s is instantly processed by someone in Bangalore. In fact, the tasks these workers perform are no longer bound by the limitations of time and place, which would suggest that the ubiquitous office towers to which they commute may sooner or later become the remnants of an obsolete legacy that has outlived itself. Who knows, the very spot where employees now sit in their cubicles - surrounded by a few snapshots of their loved ones - may one day be re-zoned to become the very living room of their future live/work condo.

To be clear, none of the earlier mentioned facts are meant to deny the advantages of people working together in science labs, think tanks, creative work places, or for that matter academic programs. But when movie director Peter Jackson can direct the London Symphony Orchestra’s recording sessions for Lord of the Rings while reclining on a couch in New Zealand, surely accountants must be able to share their bookkeeping efforts without wasting time and energy on daily commutes. The same goes for numerous other professions, ranging from managers and salesmen to all manner of creative people, many of whom have proven to be much more effective once they have joined the remote work force.


Optimization At Work
The initial inspiration to embark on this inquiry was to emulate computer optimization software’s capacity to de-fragment and reorganize layers of inefficiently stored digital data. In this particular instance the objective was to probe the outmoded organization of people who transport themselves to obtain locally archived information rather than accessing searchable data files from wherever they may geographically be. In the process I tried to demonstrate how today’s invisible digital utility can at least partially be measured in dimensional terms by its potential to free up actual space in the “real” world. Opportunities for optimization were targeted in areas of manufacturing, education, retail and office space as well as self-storage facilities, all of which suggested potential for imminent change. Even if one were to disagree with some of the specifics of the various scenarios, the overall data shows an unmistakable trend that appears to be largely overlooked by politicians, urban planners, public intellectuals, corporate CEO’s and environmentalists alike.


Illustration by alborz

First of all, we tend to greatly underestimate the digital realm’s potential to restore our choked-up infrastructure by reducing traffic to the level it was originally meant to accommodate. What if we could cut highway traffic by 30 or 20 or even 10% simply by moving the results of people’s labor back and forth from their computer to the main office in “real time”? Such a development would almost overnight give rise to more efficient life-styles and a freedom of movement we have not known for decades.

• It would significantly reduce our average carbon footprint while cutting down on stress and frustration.
• Increase mobility while providing a solution to runaway fuel prices
• Create additional living spaces without erecting new buildings.

Clearly, the implementation of a comprehensive live/work policy alone would do more for our overall quality of life than most environmental plans currently on the table. Some of the results might be accomplished on a corporate or even grass roots level by employers and their staff without much intervention of politicians, urban planners or government funding. After all, the required virtual infrastructure has long since been integrated in people’s lives and has become absolutely essential to younger generations whose lives seamlessly unfold at the intersection where the virtual and the physical meet.

If you lived here, you’d be home now, the old billboards used to say. But the idea of “home” has been greatly expanded since then. So much in fact that an updated version of the slogan might read: If you lived here, you’d be everywhere at once...

The world has been outfitted with a new operating system, just when we needed it.

May the Age of Optimization begin.


End of Part III.
Also see Part I and Part II

Fri, Sep 5, 2008  Permanent link

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The Age of Optimization (part 2)
Project: The Total Library

Academia in the age of the search engine
Historically, the world’s universities have been the elegant search engines of the past. Professors would take their students into the library where they would single out a particular book and hand it over to their disciples, ritualistically sharing the cultural canon on which our civilization is built.


Image: Teaching at Paris, in a late 14th-century Grandes Chroniques de France. Source

It is a distinguished system that has been working well for centuries. But even with today’s embryonic search technology students are able to obtain a fair amount of the wisdom they need from a worldwide utility consisting of invisible machines that are able to share their knowledge electronically, while instantly becoming expert at any number of disciplines. In addition, an ongoing exchange takes place in which a multitude of internet users are customizing and updating information by sharing, annotating, and linking it, creating different contexts and connections, which are in turn picked up again by machines throughout the system, and so on - ad infinitum. Here are some of the future implications that might be considered by the academic world:

• Rapid technological and societal change has created a student population that is consistently more tech-savvy and ahead of the curve than most of the faculty that is teaching them.
• To keep up with this situation, the institution will have to accept the idea that two brains (human and computer) are better than one, while acknowledging a more dynamic model of information exchange whereby students are encouraged to teach other students as well as their teachers, who in turn may provide the students’ self-acquired knowledge (mostly based on copious online research) with a more rigorously informed and/or creative framework.
• Given the fact that education increasingly takes place outside the class room or the libraries that used to be central to the academic program, future students may begin to question the value of moving across the country or even continents to study on distant campuses. Especially considering the substantial cost of this education which is often paid for in the form of student loans that may burden them for years to come, particularly in an unreliable job market.
• One thing is for certain, significant changes are afoot even for the most venerable of institutions. MIT’s public education program, for example, makes its entire curriculum freely available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world.
• Currently all of the university’s 1800 courses can be accessed on the web, drawing 1.4 million visitors every month, 60% of them coming from outside North America. This type of virtual education can be greatly enhanced by bringing certain aspects of a college education into the online environment, like remote virtual audiences with favorite professors, which in the near future should become commonplace.
  
• As it stands, even today’s college-bound students spend most of their time doing homework off-campus and online, while on a personal level they have learned to stay in touch through social networks, cell phones and instant messaging, considerably reducing their dependency on the institution’s physical facilities.





Image by Phil Wheeler


• Staunch believers in the social incubation period commonly offered by universities may take note that, besides today's prevalence of online social networks, other social aspects of collegiate lifestyles can easily be replicated wherever young people congregate, from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg to downtown Los Angeles and other low rent neighborhoods across the country.
• Assuming that the virtualization of academia will continue, we can even imagine how in the future empty dorms and other vacated facilities on America’s sprawling campus grounds may house a mixed student population the same way today’s local arts districts are now populated by creative individuals.

As we shall see, this scenario would be consistent with similar trends developing in several other areas of contemporary life.


The optimization of urban space
These days an increasing number of US cities have a local arts district where vacated office buildings and warehouses have been converted into live/work lofts, ideally suited for a community that is spared the drudgery of having to commute to work every day. As it happens, these repurposed buildings date back to the industrial revolution which came to an end when today’s digital infrastructure facilitated the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to third world countries. Such shifting spatial requirements from one era to the next can be expected in other areas as well. To pick just one example, the world’s built environment houses a huge volume of paperwork, which, analogous to the National Archive’s 650 miles of book stacks, referred to in part 1 can potentially be collapsed into a few feet of digital storage space. Below are a few examples:


a. Paperwork

The following numbers demonstrate society’s outrageous dependency on paperwork:

• 90% of corporate memory is stored on paper.
• The total stock of paper held by US companies consists of 130 billion sheets, which works out to approximately 650 million cubic feet, adding up to six of the largest office towers in the world.
• The average document gets copied 19 times.
• Professional people spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it (which in the age of search borders on absurdity).
• There are over 4 trillion documents in the US alone, growing at a rate of 23% per year.
• It takes 200 million average-size filing cabinets to fit all of these 4 trillion pages, adding up to 1.2 billion square feet of office space. That’s enough square footage to cover two Manhattans.
• Worldwide estimates would amount to 500 million filing cabinets occupying 3 billion square feet of office space, or nearly 5 Manhattans.

Besides the apparent inefficiency of this system, there is another price to pay:

• Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
• In fact, each year Americans throw away the equivalent of more than 30 million trees in newsprint alone.
• In total, the amount of wood and paper we throw away per year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.

b. Self-storage space

As with all issues of space, the United States is by far the most profligate when it comes to the all-pervasive self-storage phenomenon. This is especially remarkable considering that the average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s and now stands at 2,349 square feet.

• There are 41.000 (!) storage facilities across the country, compared to 600 in the UK and 100 in Australia.
• The monthly storage space Americans are currently renting is estimated at a total of 2.194 billion square feet, which at 78 square miles amounts to an area more than 3 times the size of Manhattan.
• In fact, for every man, woman and child in the nation there is 6.86 sq. ft. of self storage space, which would make it physically possible for every US citizen to stand at the same time under its total expanse of corrugated roofing.

Most of the time these self-storage areas tend to be deserted, suggesting that the stored contents are of marginal value to their owners. Typically, these consist of redundant items like tax returns, canceled checks and other personal documents, as well as books, CD's, etc. To the extent that these belongings are worth saving at all, most of them could be much cheaper stored online where it would take up little or no space while remaining organized and accessible. Not just for the short term, but as personal time capsules which could be of future archival or statistical interest.


c. Audiovisual media

Moving on to film and video:

• The US Government stores about one billion feet of archivally significant film material.
• Spread out over 384 facilities, this combined film footage could circle the globe 400 times.
• If all of this information would be encoded and compressed into video files which could be referenced online, its 200 Terabytes of data could easily be stored on a server the size of a home closet.
• At this point we’re not even talking about the towering amounts of canned celluloid distributed for centuries by the Hollywood film industry, which is about to save huge sums of money on storage space and transportation bills thanks to the advent of digital projection as well as Video On Demand which spells the imminent demise of the physical wares currently fighting for shelf space in the video store.
• Similarly, TV broadcasters all over the world are moving away from videotape to become a file-based medium. As they migrate the ever-growing contents of their vaults to a super efficient digital utility, their way of interfacing with the public will change completely once their medium will adopt the interactivity of the Internet.

d. Internet retail

iTunes, whose entire music inventory takes up a negligible amount of server space, sells over 1 billion songs per month, beating former US record holder Walmart whose big box operation maintains a massive warehoused inventory of 4 million CDs and DVDs.

• The iTunes model is being carefully watched by major retailer Amazon who cornered the online market by selling millions of books online and cutting out the stores.
• Judging from Amazon’s recent introduction of its Kindle electronic reading device it seems apparent that the company is now developing its own strategy to forego the physical products that initially made them one of the most successful online retailers.
• For the moment Amazon still misses a truly effective way to entice people to engage with written content to be read on screens. However, the rapid descent of newspaper circulation in favor of the internet speaks volumes, and for those who prefer it, foldable electronic paper is on its way. Besides, it won’t be long before we will be able to "goggle" into a fully immersive information space, offering variable modes of perception for gaming, teleconferencing, 2D and 3D movies as well as a convenient interface for reading.

e. Games at the intersection of virtual and physical space


Another interesting example of physical space being partially subsumed by the digital realm is Nintendo’s revolutionary Wii controller. This highly successful gaming device so seamlessly straddles the intersection between the analog and the digital domain that one can easily imagine how its interface could precipitate the end of bowling alleys, tennis courts, and perhaps even the closure of your local gym. More than just another example of the virtual appropriation of physical space, the Wii’s success story in particular serves as convincing confirmation of a major shift in the way our existence is beginning to simultaneously take place in the overlapping realms of physical and virtual realities.

End of Part II.
Also see Part I and Part III

Tue, Aug 26, 2008  Permanent link

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The Age of Optimization (part 1)

Man is no longer the measure of all things. The dimensions of human endeavor have expanded from bodily cubits to incomprehensibly tiny angstroms and incomprehensibly large light years. Architecture, comfortably situated in the middle of this spectrum, and rarely departing from human dimension by more than one or two orders of magnitude, has correspondingly lost authority.

— From “Digital Ground” by Malcolm McCullough

Introduction
A few decades ago, speaking about the potential of Virtual Reality, futurist philosopher Timothy Leary observed that “the idea for you to trap yourself in a 300 horsepower vehicle, emitting toxic waste and fighting the freeways, or worse, fighting New York traffic to lumber and bring your body to a place where you’re going to do mind work, ranks down there with cannibalism.”

Since then, the number of miles Americans drive has risen at more than double the population growth. And even while more than half of the areas of our cities is covered in roads and the US spending $30,024,236,000 annually on national highway improvements, people’s mobility is continually on the verge of coming to a grinding halt. Not to mention the fact that fossil fuels keep throwing the world into one crisis after another.


In a simultaneous development, we are now routinely transporting our simulated “bodies” to alternate online worlds, where, besides social activities, we are doing most of our mind work in an inter-connective space shared by 1.5 billion internet users. However, as our activities keep migrating from the physical realm to this emerging digital infrastructure we have yet to grasp its power to transform the world to a much larger extent than is commonly realized.

In this series of posts I will try to explore some possible consequences of the rapidly advancing virtualization of the world which can, at least partially, be measured in terms of its potential to free up space in the “real world.” Next I will try to demonstrate how the virtual and the actual worlds will continue to complement each other and eventually will become the integrated spaces of the future where the atomic and the digital will converge.


Virtual Filmmaking
In the early days of computing, in pursuit of a good yarn, I stumbled upon the idea that motion pictures of the future might one day forego physical reality and be generated electronically. In the resulting screenplay that was based on this idea, this technological breakthrough caused an uprising in the ranks of the town’s filmmakers and stars, challenging their very notion of what it means to be human.

Needless to say that at the time the powers that be in Hollywood were at a complete loss about the concept. But a few decades later, Computer Generated films proved to be among the most successful genres at the box office, and today even so-called “live-action” blockbusters are largely software-based. It won’t be long until the motion picture industry will be virtualized to the point when film crews no longer have to scour the earth in search of cheap locations and tax incentives, from Romania to the Philippines, while lugging around truckloads of heavy equipment, star trailers, traveling kitchens, portable toilets and so on. Instead of logistics that are more fitting for military operations than for the creation of cinematic illusions, movies of the future will primarily be conceived in the digital domain, allowing for much greater identification, heightened immersion and game-like interactivity.

Along the way I had the opportunity to produce the world’s first catalog of sampled sounds for Emulator's electronic keyboards, storing the musical instruments of an entire philharmonic orchestra on a pocket-sized floppy disk. It would become the seminal moment in my understanding of how computer technology would continue to transform the world. Within a year or so many television shows and low budget movies were no longer scored by live musicians but by individual composers in their home studios. Simulated symphonic film scores emanated from their keyboards, enhanced by an occasional violin overdub to give large string sections a more acoustic feeling, or infused with human breath blown into a plastic tube attached to the keyboard to add life to the sound of a sampled saxophone. As is usually the case with technology-driven progress, people’s fears that this breakthrough would render musicians obsolete did not come true. But it was yet another important step in the rapid virtualization of the culture, which was inevitably enriched by putting an otherwise inaccessible musical palette in the hands of numerous talented musicians at a minimum cost.


A culture worth saving
Meanwhile, the digital age is in full force on other fronts as well as Search engines are promising to give everybody access to the aggregate knowledge brought forth by human culture. Recently, I had some firsthand experiences with a number of institutions whose existence appears to be under siege due to the public’s changing relationship with all this information. For a project I’m currently working on, I visited the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle public library, which is a gorgeous architectural ode to the book, expressing great optimism about a culture worth saving. But in reality, the library holds only 780.000 books, all of which can be contained on one external hard drive you may find on sale for $240 at your local electronics store.

Although the librarians don’t like to talk about it, they suspect that at this juncture the future of the book is hanging in the balance. Their apprehension is based on technological developments that are beginning to turn their profession upside down by offering people unprecedented online access to the very information that was once their exclusive analog domain. They suspect that their own livelihood may be in danger once Google launches its advanced search engines which according to the company will function “like reference librarians with complete mastery of all human knowledge,” providing people with search results far beyond what’s possible today.


Image: Biblioteca Angelica, Rome, Italy

Today, large scale book digitization projects are well under way. Other than complicated copyright issues, this is not nearly as intimidating a proposition as it would seem. Just consider the following statistics taking the Library of Congress as their starting point:

• The Library of Congress is the largest print library in the world with a collection of 26 million published works, making up the majority of all existing books, half of which are in the English language
• This may seem like a lot of books, but in the digital age it doesn’t represent much data. By comparison, the same amount of information as is printed in the total number of existing books is posted online every two months
• If we consider that it would take one person roughly a year to digitize 3000 books, this means that all 26 million titles can be scanned by the population of Detroit in the course of one long weekend
• In terms of computer storage the average content of a scanned book takes up one megabyte, adding up to a total of twenty six million megabytes. This means that the combined text of all published books amounts to just 26 terabytes of data, which can be stored on a server taking up less shelf space than the 32 volumes of the combined Encyclopedia Britannica.
• To put it differently, the 650 miles of books stored on the stacks of the Library of Congress (roughly covering the distance from Chicago to New York) can be collapsed into a few feet of digital storage space
• Obviously this does not mean the demise of the Library of Congress but the launch of a parallel digital archive which will make these books universally accessible and conducive to search

Thus, the digitization of the Wisdom of the Ages that was once verbally passed on from one campfire to the next, then copied in long hand, and published in print, will soon be liberated from its heft and become available online, where its contents will be saved from obscurity by making it instantly available to all Internet users.


End of Part I.
Also see Part II and Part III

Tue, Aug 19, 2008  Permanent link

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The Search for Polytopia
Project: Polytopia

When we launched SpaceCollective towards the end of 2007 we had no idea whether the “forward thinking terrestrials’’ we were hoping to attract were actually out there. All we had to go by was our sense of the zeitgeist and the hypothesis that we are currently living through a period of exponential change that has the potential to transform human nature, using as our reigning metaphors the networked intelligence of the web, technology-induced evolution and the new space age.


Image from Node Garden by Jared Tarbell, 2004

While students at UCLA in Los Angeles and Vienna’s School for the Applied Arts were in the early process of beta testing the site, scores of aspiring members somehow found our unpublicized URL and were applying for membership to our yet to be launched invite only community. Without any publicity or public beta, an instant network of forward thinkers from all over the world had spontaneously sprung into existence. Since then SpaceCollective has become a veritable think tank about the future hosting thousands of highly astute contributors and hundreds of thousands of page views per month.

The community we established appears to be filling a gap in the culture, which relegates almost everything that lies in the future to the realm of science-fiction. Our ongoing involvement with major universities made it clear that the academic environment, which routinely passes on the wisdom of the ages, offers no formal curriculum that addresses the future. The same can be said about other institutions like the government and even the Internet itself, which offers few opportunities for future-oriented discourse.

The consensus appears to be that the future is based on conjecture rather than empirical observation and therefore has little or no relevance to academia or the general populace.

As a result, the precious preserve of the past is left in the respectable hands of tenured professors, while most known futurists are outsiders making a living as fiction writers (i.e. Neal Stephenson), musicians (Brian Eno), journalists (Joel Garreau) or inventors (Ray Kurzweil).

SpaceCollective appears to be a similar ragtag group of individuals, coming from various creative backgrounds and sharing the interests and concerns of these avowed futurists.

Unlike the majority of people whose lives tend to be rooted in the past, and the more blessed among them who manage to exist in the here and now, these forward thinkers appear to be living on the threshold of the imminent future. Not because of their superior intelligence, but because of their intuitive capacities. Where others experience the world in terms of the fixed and the firm, they see reality as a scrim revealing the future potential of things.

Although this mindset may offer some people the advantage of a certain foresight, it also puts them at odds with the establishment, whose job it is to preserve the status quo rather than promote potential. Thus, in order to exercise their autonomy of thought, it makes perfect sense for them to retreat beyond the scrim to the parallel universe of the internet to dream up new strategies for transcending the stagnant world at large.

“In the future, the importance of geography will be matched by the importance of values and ideas,” writes Alan Smith in a recent SpaceCollective post about a foreseeable Nationhood made up of “overlapping islands of thought.” meganmay brings his point home by observing that “more than any other website, SpaceCollective is where minds meet outside of bodies.”


Image from Nationhood: The future of Nationalism by Alan Smith

In what seems to be like an update to virtual reality, which transports simulated “bodies” to alternate worlds, many internet users share the familiar sense of extending their minds into a virtual head space which they collectively inhabit.

This sensibility is articulated in a couple of video Epiphanies by Richard and Xárene who call this online space “home,” while the most commented upon post, Proposal for a New Society, features several manifestoes for an online state called InterNation.

Both of these notions were recently expounded in separate posts by one of the site’s most prolific futurists, Wildcat, who tackles the concept of an interactive home for what is becoming a society of mind with unprecedented clarity:

“The infoverse is where we will live. And we need a home. A mutually supportive habitat of sorts. A mind habitat, an infotat for our minds, for we are infonauts.” He goes on to wonder whether “the little corner in the vast infoverse” we’ve come to know as SpaceCollective may be the home he has been looking for.

Over time an unspoken consensus about the nature of Wildcat’s “mind habitat” has taken shape in several extensive posts by SpaceCollective members. For example, in “My cranium is open source?” versatile futurist philosopher Spaceweaver writes that "in the future the very definition of individuality will probably be derived not from the arbitrary conditions of one’s biological makeup, but rather how one is connected and to what. The degree of individuation will depend on (the) difference in interconnectivity.” In conclusion he observes that “becoming interconnected minds who share all resources (i.e. computation power and bandwidth) might become an increasingly attractive existential option.”

Following up his post about a “mutually supportive mind habitat,” Wildcat has a go at the unresolved Proposal for a New Society and takes a leap forward by drawing up an ad hoc constitution while coining a brilliant catch-all name for his project. Here’s an excerpt of the thought process that brought him to this point:

“My aim in this proposition is to emphasize that the concepts of Utopia and Dystopia are anachronistic, outdated and outright obsolete. In their stead I shall try and propose a fresh perspective on the notion of the future of humanity, a natural humanity, perpetually evolving. The future of humanity I propose is one of Polytopia, a term designating an open ended and emergent process of co-evolution and cross-fertilization considering all and any conscious aware entities.”

The word Polytopia is a derivation of the Latin terms Poly (many) and -topia (places, or states of mind), which according to one of Wildcat’s definitions suggests “an open source collaboration between consciously aware entities towards an increase in combined interactive intelligence.”

There have been many attempts by the collective to infuse shopworn words with new meaning for purposes of future discourse. Al advocated an online dictionary for “new words and new understandings of old ones,” while Obvious proposed “hyper-textual mind maps" as a representation of his thoughts”, and Spaceweaver maintained that “metaphors are the landmarks of the evolution of language.”

In an earlier post Wildcat himself announced that “the emergence of a new language, is nothing less than the emergence of a new human being. These two must come together.”

So he kept struggling to coin new words for the different conditions he has been trying to articulate. At one point he defined the inter-connective mind as the ColleX which among other things is meant to be “a descriptive term designating the fundamental emergent direction of a group of sentient beings.” But despite the usefulness of its meaning, the word apparently lacked the required ring to enter into SpaceCollective’s consciousness. Until further notice the same may have happened to his “Transbeing” (to replace Transhumanist) or to Al’s coinage of the “Internation.” Yet occasionally someone happens upon a phrase that has the potential to establish a new paradigm, like Jung’s Collective Unconscious, William Gibson’s Cyberspace or Vernor Vinge’s Singularity. And as far as I’m concerned Wildcat’s Polytopia should go down in history as just such a term because it so well describes the inter-connected future we are pursuing in this little corner of the vast infoverse.

I am a Polytopian.

Thu, Aug 14, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Polytopia

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