SXSW Interactive Report

/part 1 of 2/

How will people communicate and what will social networking look like in 2025? That was one of the guiding questions for the South by Southwest Interactive panel: Futurists’ Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies.

Stuart and I, along with panel organizer Michele Bowman (Global Foresight Associates), Wayne Pethrick (Pitney-Bowes), and Jamais Cascio (IFTF and Open the Future) participated in this unique event--which those who attended will not soon forget.


We began working on the panel in January, starting with group discussions on emerging issues in social media and technologies and how these would interact with larger global trends. After surveying the landscape through our initial conversations, we developed four distinct, but generic, future worlds. From these futures we would imagine and write specific scenarios involving social technologies and the shape of human interaction.


The generic futures were:

Mobilization—A top-down world of government and corporate power. Consolidation against terrorism and the rise of eco-mercenaries to go after rogue carbon emitters, and a strong centralization urge.

Community—A bottom-up world of distributed networks and localism. Open models do well here, but so do open-source guerillas.

Challenge—global warming, peak oil, and the failure of resilience. Some parts of the world are worse than others, but nobody’s very happy.

Transfiguration—Better computers enables early-stage nanomanufacturing enables emergent AI enables full molecular manufacturing enables full artificial general intelligence systems. All in about 3 months.

We each 'volunteered' for one of the four alternative futures, and then each created a logically coherent and consistent story within that future. Stuart and I chose the totalitarian, control future. Combining our concern with expanding IP rights and their impact on expression and freedom, we decided to integrate elements of the aesthetic economy, IP expansion, and surveillance culture--thus creating a disturbing totalitarian corporate-state. In this world, social media and networked communication would have to navigate a field of technological and legal impediments, all built on the logic of complete and absolute content control.

Our co-panelists had their own creative approaches to their scenarios--the results are presented here:

Mobilization:

The Total Dream State: A Eulogy for Eddie Adams

Stuart Candy & Jake Dunagan

The aesthetic economy, including the communications, entertainment, design, culture and other content industries, has become the dominant economic and political force in early 21st Century states. These industries emerged from the economic and energy upheavals of the 2010s consolidated, efficient, and with a clear agenda (and the means) for further growth. The aesthetic economy quickly transformed into the Dream Society, conditioning all the ways people communicate and express themselves. Seizing on weakened governments, and leveraging their increased economic power, corporate media giants lobbied for and received unprecedented legal mandates to control, monitor, and enforce the intellectual property rights held in their content, media, technological platforms, and distributed wireless digital networks. Protecting copyright, patents, and ever extending IP rights became part of U.S. national security policy, dictated by the business models of the content oligopoly. Select corporations (the Big 5, and later the Little 2) were given access to Department of Homeland Security surveillance and field agents to find and prosecute alleged infringers and pirates. The Content Security Act of 2011 and the International Anaheim Treaty on Trade and Tariffs(ATTT) of 2015 criminalized a wide array of content and information sharing and established severe penalties for those found guilty in the tribunal courts. The United States and much of the rest of the world became a de-facto version of the Hollywood "studio system" from the early 20th Century, this time on a global scale and with total vertical control.

No one exemplified the rise of the Dream Society (and its impact on individual and collective liberty) more than Eddie Adams, a.k.a Dirk Diggler. From a small-town kid in Ohio, to the face of the Golden Age of pornography, to the icon of the free-culture resistance, and up until his tragic end, Eddie's life is a testament to the vicissitudes of freedom and the enormous stakes of the current struggle. Please join us on March 11th, as we pay tribute to the man and celebrate the legend.

Design: Eliot Frick

Community:

DATAPOINTS® the personal data marketplace

Wayne Pethrick

The world, like the network that connects it, is always on, wide-open and flat-out fast. In terms of social technologies, bottom-up distributed networks have made their presence felt, manifested by unbridled lifestreaming otherwise known as sousveillance by those over 50, and self-veillance for those under.

In this future, data flows free like acronyms during a corporate powerpoint presentation (which, incidentally, is where we find ourselves today). Data is highly valued, a point now recognized by the average consumer largely through the establishment of a marketplace for information and data. To command top dollar, those generating data must keep their information clean (i.e. verified) and, where possible, contained. The principles of supply and demand still apply, if your data is of good quality and there is not a glut of it on the market, you can do well.

Enter the precocious star of this future scenario, a company called DATAPOINTS. Specializing in data verification, consolidation and trading, DATAPOINTS provides consumers with the products and services to secure and unite their information into a holistic data profile, the kind that organizations, both commercial and governmental, are always interested in acquiring.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the DATAPOINTS Shareholder Meeting for 2025.


Challenge:

Can You See Me Now?

Michele Bowman

As our information technologies continue to propagate the world, the electronic exhaust of our click stream is generating unprecedented amounts of metadata. Rather than a useless by-product, however, metadata is a valuable resource, an untapped gold mine of previously invisible patterns, desires, intentions and relationships.

Social technologies are emerging to help us navigate, control, connect and leverage metadata, helping us make the invisible visible. How can we recycle and repurpose metadata to expose the hidden layers of connections between people, objects and environments? How will it be instantiated into the world and the Internet of things?

In the future, will we use metadata judiciously, or will we create a world of characterized by information obesity? Can you see me now? explores the social, legal and political implications of the evolving relationship between social technologies and metadata.

see Fringehog for more on Michele's scenario.


Transfiguration:

Turn Off, Unplug, Drop Out

Jamais Cascio

Welcome to the Last Chance Session, potential Drop-Outs!
In a all-too-near world of nanomanufacturing, emerging machine intelligence, radical gene therapies, ultra-smart environments, and an all-pervasive, always watching global network, some people just don't want to fit in. In a free, open society, removing yourself from the network is an entirely valid choice -- but it's a choice with consequences. The visitors in the audience are at the last point in the process, and have one more chance to decide whether or not to drop out.
The brief session will cover what they'll gain and what they'll lose by dropping out.

Topics include:
Reputation networks
Environmental awareness
Augmented reality
Community relations
Taxes (it always comes down to taxes)

At the end of the discussion, the audience will be asked to make their decision -- do they drop out, or hook back up?

Jamais' post at Open the Future.

As you can see, these summaries also reveal the presentation format we chose to represent the scenarios at SXSW. Again, we move from general to specific, as the presentations were but "the tip of the iceberg" of the scenarios themselves. Very much in the vein of the Hawaii 2050 kickoff event, we chose not to simply present or read the scenarios as is, but rather to create brief experiential performances, supplemented with tangible artifacts and images from this future (see the funeral announcement above). We enacted a interpretively rich scene to serve as a metonym for the larger world in which it exists. For our scenario, we chose to tell the story of the locked-down Dream Society through a eulogy for Eddie Adams, aka Dirk Diggler from P.T. Anderson's film Boogie Nights [details of this concept and performance in part 2] .

There was no indication in the SXSW festival materials that our group would be ‘performing’ scenes from our scenarios, and, after some debate, we decided not to preface the panel with an explanation of the method. This was a risky choice, and with access to the active twitterati and audience members commenting live on the SXSW Meebo chatrooms, we could see that the reaction to the panel was mixed, but passionate. Still, for what might be risked in subverting audience expectation, we feel this performative, immersive technique is much more effective at engaging the audience at both emotional and intellectual levels—creating an unusual, thought-provoking and memorable event.

Of all the work we have done at the HRCFS during my tenure, this was the most completely realized embodiment of Dator's 2nd Law.

Details of the Diggler Eulogy next...

Labels: future-shock therapy, social media, sxsw