{"id":8745,"date":"2019-03-08T20:30:14","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T04:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8745"},"modified":"2019-03-10T08:28:34","modified_gmt":"2019-03-10T16:28:34","slug":"the-gong-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8745","title":{"rendered":"The Gong Show."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a>

Refreshing honesty. I still think I’ll stay away from their health supplements, though.<\/p><\/div>\n

Dateline \u2014 MidAtlantic.<\/strong> The BUG and I are crossing the ocean in an airbus that’s been painted a lurid mix of purple and pink\u2014 call it pinple<\/em>\u2014 whose in-flight menus are refreshingly honest and whose vomit bags are volumetrically calibrated from “pan flute music” to “our competitor’s prices”. The uniforms of the flight attendants are straightforward pink. It’s like flying across the ocean in a giant pitcher of purple Kool-Aid, attended by sapient blobs of bubble gum, and\u2014 while I always insist on bulkhead seats or better on transoceanic jaunts\u2014 I can’t help but notice that the legroom is adequate even in Economy.<\/p>\n

The Airline is WOW, out of Iceland. It might almost be a glimpse of one of the “Optimistic Futures” we’re supposed to map out when we touch down in Germany, if not for the fact that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy and might go under before our return flight.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Futurism\u2014 “product-testing the future”, “strategic foresight”, whatever you want to call it\u2014 seems to be big business these days. Everywhere you look corporations are scooping up science-fiction writers for keynote addresses or “consulting retreats”. Colleges offer actual goddamn degrees in the stuff; Toronto’s own OCAD<\/a> University peddles a degree in something called “Strategic Foresight and Innovation”. (It’s telling that this sfnal exercise in futurism exists in an arts college which\u2014 as far as I can tell\u2014 offers no science courses in its curriculum. Why, it’s almost as if science doesn’t play any significant role in shaping the future. Or getting paid to talk about it, at least.)<\/p>\n

Hell, look at me: I’m hardly on SF’s A-list and my presence on the X-Prize Foundation’s Advisory Council<\/a> is only the tip of the iceberg. Next month I’ll be in Hungary, teaching a workshop on the use of science fiction as a tool for “Coping with a Complex Future”. A few years back I was invited onto the Futurists’ Board of something called “The Lifeboat Foundation<\/a>” (which I accepted, even though that whole organization seems largely moribund\u2014 the board contains an absolute shitload<\/em> of science fiction authors), and some very sketchy-sounding Russian outfit called “Earth 2050” (which I didn’t, because they kept avoiding direct answers to my questions). I continue to give guest lectures, generally along strategic-foresighty lines, at colleges and universities. I’ve even been asked to talk about “The Future of Humanity” at an auto show in Shanghai a few months down the road, although I expect I’ll have to decline (not only do I already have a lot on my plate, but they seem to be arresting a lot<\/em> of Canadians over there lately).<\/p>\n

Then there’s “Designing Tomorrow”, which the BUG and I are about to join along with an international cadre of futurists at an undisclosed location.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Still jetlagged, we are bussed to a lakeside retreat an hour north of Berlin, innocent of infrastructural services like grocery stores or gas stations. There are a couple of local bars but the organizers warn us away, describing them as examples of “present-day dystopias”.<\/p>\n

The meals are catered by anonymous servers whose faces remain forever unseen. There is a sauna and three kitchens; the east wall of one of them is virtually hidden behind a scree of beer and munchies.<\/p>\n

Uri\u2014 the dude we met at Utopia<\/a> last year, and an organizer of the current shindig\u2014 has brought a great tin gong. He hangs it in the conference room, and bashes it to summon us unto duty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Uri, Geraldine, Eden. I’m pretty<\/i> sure these were the main organizational masterminds.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

This woman prints houses out of sand.<\/p><\/div>\n

We are surrounded by overachievers. Uri and Eden and Katharina (all from Utopia) are the only familiar faces, but the assembled crack team of experts also includes seven curators of various galleries, conferences, and festivals; seven writers; seven assorted entrepreneurs (start-up founders\/VPs, CEOs, etc); five artists and design specialists; three architects; two game designers; three “digital consultants”; three human rights activists; one cyber-security expert; a playwright; an art theorist; and a Senior Fellow with Mozilla. That’s 41 callings crammed into a measly 18 participants, for anyone who’s counting\u2014 and that doesn’t include some of the more arcane skills on display, like “media activist” or “SF Evangelist” or even “former marine biologist”.<\/p>\n

One participant runs a lottery-based Basic-Income project; another does amazing things with sand and silicon, designs and 3D-prints houses using only local materials. There’s a VR maestro building a story about dead grandmothers in the Internet of Things; one of the Human Rights Activists is working on a PhD on ethics and AI.<\/p>\n

Apparently we’re here to help save the world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Chronocartographers.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

Don’t laugh. The subtext is ubiquitous: mandatory upbeats run through most of these events like candy-coated blood poisoning, ever since Neal Stephenson internalized the accusation that Science Fiction was to blame for the sorry state of the space program\u2014 you remember<\/a>, because we weren’t being inspirational<\/em> enough\u2014 and booted the whole Optimistic SF movement into high gear. The years since have been sprinkled with Sunshine anthologies and editorials hectoring us to Stop Writing Dystopias And Write About Solutions\u2014 as though solutions haven’t been staring us in the face for decades, as though it weren’t obvious<\/em> what we could do to avoid catastrophe. (Stop breeding, for one thing; how long does it take to get a fucking vasectomy?) What the haranguers are really demanding is easy<\/em> solutions, magical ways to save the world without having to reduce their own comfy standard of living[1]<\/sup><\/a> and their own rutting proliferation. They’re not peddling optimism so much as denial.<\/p>\n

This desperate upbeatiness has found its way into the think tanks. The guys at the Shanghai auto show want my talk to “provok[e] people to think and act towards a better future”. The whole X-Prize initiative is explicitly founded on the belief that Technology Can Save Us. Uri told me up front that “We want to create visions for desirable tomorrows”, before admitting that he was struggling with that imperative himself.<\/p>\n

These are worthy sentiments, of course. Noble, even. Who doesn’t<\/em> want to strive for a better future? Who wouldn’t <\/em>work whatever optimistic angles they could find? Does anyone think that those of us in the doomsayers camp are here because we want<\/em> to be?<\/p>\n

By the same token, though, I’m not entirely sure why Uri\u2014 why anyone familiar with my work\u2014 would want to include me in such an exercise in the first place. Maybe he needs an outgroup to anchor the discussion. Maybe he wants to force me to think outside my own box, expand my horizons a bit; I could do with a bit of that, I have to admit.<\/p>\n

Maybe he doesn’t really want me there at all. Maybe, given his druthers, he’d have just invited Caitlin, but he didn’t want to leave me feeling left out.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

In direct contrast with what you read in the accompanying text, here Eden is talking about EVE Online.<\/p><\/div>\n

Eden lays out two sets of tools: Fore\/Back-casting<\/em> and Four Futures<\/em>. Fore\/backcasting is pretty much what it sounds like: Instead of starting at the present and following the trend data into the future\u2014 a methodology that, given the available indicators, is pretty much guaranteed to serve up Hell On Earth\u2014 you instead start with the future you desire, and back-cast to the present. We want a society that’s entirely carbon-neutral by 2050? Okay, what would the world have to look like in 2049 to make that attainable? 2045? 2040? At the same time you also take the more conventional approach of moving forward from the present in similar increments, but with your desirable endpoint in mind: what kind of changes can one reasonably project over the next year, the next five, that would head us in the right direction?<\/p>\n

I feel a mild shock of recognition; in principle, backcasting is identical to a kind of back-to-front ecological modeling I learned about back in grad school. I’m a little embarrassed that in my focus on crafting plausible futures, I’d forgotten such an obvious method for trying to map out better ones.<\/p>\n

The tricky part, of course, is what happens when fore- and back-casting run into each other in the middle. The tricky part is in stitching them together. Eden’s been down this road before; during past workshops, forecast and backcast have been so incompatible that the participants have resorted to invoking a convenient apocalypse to wipe clean the forecast slate, allowing the happier backcast to emerge from the ashes. Eden has grown uncomfortable that so many paths to Utopia seem to lead through seven-digit death tolls; this time, he tells us, we can’t use global disaster to stitch our timeline together. This time we have to assume that civilization persists as it improves.<\/p>\n

The Four Futures<\/em> approach\u2014 taken from a book by Peter Frase<\/a>\u2014 is new to me. You imagine the futures of two things\u2014 say, “the future of networks” and “the future of capitalism”. Plot one along the x-axis (from “everything partitioned” to “everything networked”), the other along the y (“capitalism dismantled” to “hypercapitalism ubiquitous”). You now have a 2-dimensional space split into 4 quadrants, which you can use to explore various scenarios (“a hypercapitalist world with minimal telecom networking”).<\/p>\n

Of course, a measly 2-variable interaction is pretty simplistic. You could add as many other variables as you like, along as many orthogonal axes as you can keep track of. But given the way our brains work, that’s not likely to be too many; and two variables are still enough to explore some pretty interesting and unexpected interactions, while being easy to plot on graph paper.<\/p>\n

To prepare for the Four Futures exercise, Uri has asked each of us to come up with at least three plotable “futures”. Scribbled onto Post-It notes, they accumulate on the windowpane: The Future of Gender, The Future of AI, the Future of Empathy. The Futures of Nation-States and Space Exploration and Privacy\u2014 even, in a very cool backflip, The Future of the Past (which questions the degree to which everything from memories to historical records can be edited). Split into pairs, we each pick two futures to work on. We’re forbidden from selecting our own suggestions.<\/p>\n

I’ve suggested “The Future of Climate Change” and “The Future of Pathogens”, among others. Nobody chooses them.<\/p>\n

I am sad.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Scenarios in progress.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

This is the scenario I wish I’d been in. (The Future of Capitalism crossed with The Future of Gaming, in case you were wondering.)<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Team BUG<\/p><\/div>\n

The scenarios we do come up with range from whimsical to dystopian to whimsically-dystopian. Imagine a corporation-approved robot cat for company on long space voyages, which dispenses narcotics from its space-anus and records your every move for the corporate database. (That was The BUG’s group.) Imagine the UN replaced by an API, a reformed open-source Facebook for which clicking “I agree” on the User Agreement is an official part of coming-of-age and citizenship ceremonies. Imagine wallpapering your room with a representation of your own genetic code; imagine an identity-stealing drone drifting past your window, reading that personal art and reverse-engineering the code it was based on. Imagine a society so diffused across the solar system that actual face-to-face meetings are rare high-status events commemorated by the exchange of physical DNA samples. Imagine those samples incorporated into facial photophores\u2014 like the ones on deep-sea fish\u2014 coded to flicker in certain sequences when they encounter kin; imagine those handshaking protocols coded to provoke dopamine cascades to enhance social cohesion. Someone learning to hack those protocols, using optogenetic trickery to make everyone she meets trust and adore her implicitly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Fernanda, from Brazil by way of Ireland by way of Berlin. I spent most of the workshop thinking this was some kind of orchid.<\/p><\/div>\n

No shortage of imagination in this group. Even our off-duty time keeps us hopping; we have wine-suffused evening tete-a-tetes on everything from Galaxy Quest<\/em> to the ethics of self-aware masochistic sexbots.<\/p>\n

And yet, none of our scenarios so much as hint at the rising ocean in the room.<\/p>\n

Of course, when you’ve been explicitly told to aspire to positive outcomes, there’s going to be a natural inclination to avoid the nasty shit. Eden has told us to eschew apocalypse\u2014 and admittedly, kicking over the game board is the easy way out, a failure of imagination: arbitrarily grabbing a new hand rather than playing the hand you’re dealt. I can see why he wants us to put in a bit more effort.<\/p>\n

Still. There’s a huge difference between eschewing a convenient fictitious apocalypse and ignoring an inconvenient real one. The first just forces you to work harder at the whole futurist schtick: the second constitutes wilful ignorance of a real-world catastrophe that’s already baked into the timeline.<\/p>\n

To put it another way: If we know that an asteroid is on course to smash into the Earth five years from now, what’s the use of any twenty-year forecast, however inventive, however positive<\/em>, that doesn’t address that threat? Are we really so far down the road to perdition that the only way to conjure a positive future is to ignore reality?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For a while I’m paired with a very nice person whom I literally can’t understand. Her words make sense on a sentence level, but their underlying meanings seem predicated on axioms I can’t quite figure out. When it comes time to present our preliminary findings I suggest that she take the lead, because I don’t think I can do justice to her perspective. Instead, she gives me our notes and, as I stumble through them, throws herself into some kind of interpretive dance in the middle of the floor.<\/p>\n

She finds me at least as frustrating as I find her. We come to loggerheads over whether a desired outcome can be achieved without re-engineering Human Nature itself. I tell her about studies on cheaters and altruists; exasperated, she tells me that “science is just another belief system”, and reminds me that she’s a trained philosopher.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

We were encouraged to go for walks in the nearby woods, although people who wandered down this path never came back. More beer for the rest of us.<\/p><\/div>\n

Days later, during the think-tank postmortem, one of the Human rights activists suggests that these events might benefit from having scientists on board. She does it in strangely grudging tones, though, adds “even though scientists are a pain in the ass” and that their discussions are always so “completely apolitical”. I chip in that our survival\u2014 and more importantly, the survival of the millions of species we’re dragging down the toilet with us\u2014 ultimately comes down to the laws of Physics, and Physics doesn’t care about politics.<\/p>\n

She asks me later if I’ve read The Three-Body Problem<\/em>, lets out a small whoop when I admit that I have. “I knew<\/em> it! I knew when you made that comment about physics, you had to have been influenced by that book.”<\/p>\n

Well, no. I’ve known about physics pretty much since high school. And I have to wonder about any mindset that regards the primacy of physics as such an alien concept that it could only have come from the depths of a nihilistic science fiction novel. But I am starting to see a pattern; of the eighteen people gathered here, I think I’m the only one with a degree in science. All these other polymaths\u2014 curators, activists, artists and architects\u2014 their careers center around people. The challenges they face are largely, essentially political; the solutions are political too. Their whole lives come down to negotiations, to meetings in middles. Such insights would have been invaluable back before things got this bad, back when What Has To Be Done could still fit into the set of What’s Politically Doable. But now the cascades and feedback loops have kicked in; now we’ve got to deal with Physics, and Physics does not play politics.<\/p>\n

When your life has been spent putting people front and center, putting human welfare and happiness above all, is it any wonder that you might want to look away from a scenario in which Humans get what they deserve? Everyone in this room is looking for a desirable future. I may be the only one who defines that as a future without us.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

I have no idea. Missed this entirely. They were just there one morning.<\/p><\/div>\n

We gather one last time to figure out next steps. This was a pilot project; the expectation is that it will become an ongoing affair, with an ever-shifting pool of contributors. Some see future manifestos, handed to People of Influence who might make a difference. I myself have always been sceptical of the whole SF Changes The World narrative. I don’t think we have nearly as much influence as some want to think. The examples most often cited strike me as either trivial (Star Trek inspired the Flip Phone!) or ominously cherry-picked (would Reagan have really listened to those SF writers urging him to implement SDI if it hadn’t been just the kind of thing he wanted to do anyway?)<\/p>\n

Others set their sights somewhat lower, would be perfectly content to produce a modest document stocked in libraries, something that might inspire the next generation given that the current one seems such a writeoff. (But do we have time to wait for another generation? Haven’t we just awakened to find ourselves already in the end game?)<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we converge on some kind of document affiliated with a website which interweaves fiction and the science that inspires it: a site in constant motion, bits of journalism and literature feeding off each other, sharing the splash page for a while before some more-current work takes their place and relegates them to the archives. The crew had already started on implementation before the bus even rolled away.<\/p>\n

I don’t think any of it will save the world, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile. I’d do it again in a second, for utterly selfish reasons: recent friendships renewed, new ones made. New tools acquired, not just for workshops but for my own writing; you can be damn sure I’ll be incorporating these tricks into my own work, going forward. And who knows? Maybe someone with a bit of influence will<\/em> take notice. Maybe, if our ideas are good enough, they’ll catch on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Departure Lounge. WOW really pulls out all the stops.<\/p><\/div>\n

If not, maybe the Extinction Rebellion has a chance. Hopefully they’ve got more steam than the Occupy movement. Hopefully they won’t be crushed so easily.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the stone that Adam Etzion first threw at me back in 2013 keeps right on skipping, in apparent defiance of nonnegotiable physics. Skip<\/em>: we go to Tel Aviv and discover Utopia. Skip<\/em>: I make contact with the good folks at One Hamsa. Skip<\/em>: Uri invites us to design tomorrows in Berlin. And now, impossibly, yet another Skip<\/em>: Shalev Moran (who I met here) and Mushon Zer-Aviv (who we met in Israel) are taking their Speculative Tourism gig on the road, and expect to be landing in Toronto sometime over the next month. Our turn to play host for a change; if the cats don’t win them over, maybe the raccoons will be out by then.<\/p>\n

Who knows where that stone lands next?<\/p>\n

\n

Postscriptual Note:<\/p>\n

You’ll have noticed the ‘crawl’s been pretty quiet lately, on account of all this unexpected prep and travel. It will continue to be quiet for the next few weeks, on account of more prep and more travel (at least one trip to Hungary, probably another to Bergen, maybe\u2014 just maybe\u2014 a bounce dive to Shanghai in between). Don’t worry if you don’t hear from me; I’m probably not dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> All that said, the assignment isn’t impossible. Even I have written the occasional story about happy endings and world-saving technology. why, one of them is right here<\/a>, in case you’ve forgotten.<\/p>\n

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Dateline \u2014 MidAtlantic. The BUG and I are crossing the ocean in an airbus that’s been painted a lurid mix of purple and pink\u2014 call it pinple\u2014 whose in-flight menus are refreshingly honest and whose vomit bags are volumetrically calibrated from “pan flute music” to “our competitor’s prices”. The uniforms of the flight attendants are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8745"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8791,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8745\/revisions\/8791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}