Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes

I return from the mirror world with a surnburnt nose/forehead combo; a bag bulging with books, papers and wallcharts; and a brain almost literally humming with new inputs.  Along with @mathpunk, @rtgarden, @stevepuma and @genebecker, I was representing the Superstruct game community at the Institute For The Future‘s 2009 Ten-Year Forecast in Sausalito, California.

Through communicating & mediating my experiences of the game to the other conference attendees (representatives of some of the big organizations in the economy and public sphere), in an environment heavy and humid with ambient information, I was able to link up some ideas that have been floating in the recesses of my consciousness, assembling and superstructing them in interesting ways.

Before the event in question, I was in San Francisco for a good 6-7 days – immersing myself in the city, and scoping out the lay of the land.  At once strange and familiar (embodied above and beyond my experience of the city through film and the media), the real San Francisco threw my mediated experiences into focus – the American sitcoms syndicated endlessly on British TV are now five, ten years out of date. This, then, is an emerging social imaginary; a land of corporate bail-outs, green-collar jobs and (as @mathpunk was later to tell me) hybrid hypermiling – in which we can see the overwhelming drive of the competitive, of the concrete challenge … even when it risks endangering the self.

In this light, the ad pictured (CC Jason Tester) threw the reason for my trip into sharp focus.  Damn near ubiquitious in the urban landscape, this ad functions perfectly adequately on the business level.  Stripped of context, however, “I want my future back” is a curious comment, prompting discomfort and unease.  It doesn’t sit right.  Can you be deprived of something that has only ever existed in a nascent / spectral form?

In an age of instability and #collapsonomics, the “I want my future back” is an act of denial – rejecting the world at hand for the attachments and psychological crutches of neoliberalism’s legacy future.  So we watch as the flying cars and dogmas of unending growth evaporate into mist; dispersed as droplets dispersed on the breeze.  And it’s good riddance to bad rubbish … the cancerous … the autoimmunity writ large (pdf).  Let it fail.  Rip it out and start over.  Pessimism is a luxury of good times, and we can do better.

If there’s one thing I took away from the Ten-Year Forecast, it was a reinforced sense of optimism.  What follows is a series of notes taken from the retreat, superstructed with additional links and ideas I’ve been gestating since the game’s conclusion last November.  Sharing a common theme (“superstructing“), they aren’t in any particular order, and stand as part of a larger (and perpetually unfinished) work.  Still, I’m starting to get a sense of forward momentum … and that’s awesome.

NOTES & THOUGHTS:

• With access to ideas from education and positive psychology, we can visualize the ways it’s possible to get the biggest bang for your buck.  If alternative currencies can achieve this, multiplying the velocity of exchange by experimenting with optimal limits for the field of action – the same should be possible for social, societal and organizational efforts … regardless of the scale or nature of agents involved.

• With an increasing emphasis on the importance of playtests and rapid prototyping for organization, we should be looking to master the formerly inconcievable – transplanting the scientific method to the social sciences.  Lessons to be taken from behavioural economics, simulation and LARP .  As ideas of experimentation and the perpetual Beta seep into the mainstream, “economies of agility” are likely to replace “economies of scale”.  Unfinished is good, as long as it’s also quick and relatively open.

• Self-sufficient and atomistic forms of organisation enable the maximum possibility for combination and recombination … think Lego [CC Don Solo] … or the “Orange” scenario from this PWC publication (pdf) about the future of work & HR.  Here, “cells” come together to fulfil missions / complete work contracts, and then disperse back into the cloud.  Of course, if changes of corporate culture are poorly managed, this could have its downsides … and is open to manipulation by entrenched interests and the risk-averse.  Could poorly-managed change be worse than no change?

• “Stigmergy” as a structural enabler for extreme-scale collaboration, as in GroundCrew … with its effectiveness multiplied by the abundance of iPhones and Androids … hyperlocal volunteering?  An emerging gift economy of the act?  Archetypes of collaboration  (underground railroad, pony express).  Growing importance of symbolic and social capital for quickly emerging communities.  Notions of affiliation and the formation of collective identities.  As one example, see The Quest for the Flag – a ralleying point for the online community around upcoming Funcom MMORPG The Secret World.

• Increasingly, the dominant metaphors will no longer be  digital or mechanical, but biological.  Instead of the brain being described in relations to a computer, we’ll be looking to liken computers to brains (neural networks, artificial intelligence), and organisations to organisms.  Indeed, we could also be looking at cross-species politics and the posthumanities.  What happens when society incorporates cable-laying ferrets, termite architecture, biomimetics, cetaceans as data-gatherers, social networks for dogs, monkey labour, cyborg insects and the Center for Post-Natural History.  Growth in “soft” cyborgs, and the definition of citizenship and humanity is stretched from every direction.  Questions of empathy, symbiosis, parasitism and exploitation?  Meanwhile, what can the natural world teach us about superstructing?  With the coral reef as a model, we can start to get a handle on what cross-species politics might actually look like:

• Minimalist (economic, social) narratives recast people as raw infrastructure, rather than raw labour.  How will traditionally-minded Marxists  deal with a world of decentralised production (“home fabrication“) and radically networked citizenship?  How will the ability to “grow our own everything” clash with forms of proprietry ownership and rights management (digital and otherwise)?  Emergence and development of alternative property regimes, from p2p blueprint networks to viral sovereignty and overt infosocialism.

• Growing likelihood of a “generational reality gap” – with millennials leveraging augmented & superstructed realities, leaving their parents and grandparents unable to make the necessary mental leap?  New and different “digital divides“, as the technologies become increasingly diverse and niche-ified.  Problems of standards and interoperability?  How does living in an echo chamber effect sociability / communication?  Simulations, datamancy, information visualization as part of the SEHI‘s toolbox.  For a better grasp on what this means, check out the Signtific video:

• Corporate concerns increasingly influenced by notions of risk and precariousness.  What role is there for the firm in #collapsonomics?  How should be preparing our young people for a world of uncertainty and instability?  Within our organisations, should be pursuing gradual, organic reform or revolutionary transformation?  How can we tackle the entrenched power and influence of the risk averse?  Perhaps the black swans and black elephants of our current moment are as pinatas – we have to break them into pieces small enough to work with; to reassemble / assimilate into the superstructed organizations of the next decade.

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‘Stateside Superstructing, Some Notes’ by Justin Pickard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

(Images by jfpickard, Jason Tester, and Don Solo)