“My focus is on habits, practices and opportunities, not a limited set of concerns or visceral reactions to our changing world. ‘I dwell in possibility’, not a mere assessment of digital spaces’ less perfect or less savoury aspects. I will leave that to others more concerned than I. Change is not disconcerting to me. People do some messed up things when cloaked in anonymity. We will live.”

- Lisa Galarneau, ‘I dwell in possibility’

A spirited defense of techno-optimism, from digital anthropologist (?) Lisa Galarneau.

For me, Transhuman Space is a key text – a book that’s had a wholly disproportionate impact on the shape of my life. An RPG setting published to critical acclaim in 2002, it stood as a plausible vision of where humanity might be at the turn of the twenty-second century:

“It’s the year 2100. Humans have colonized the solar system. China and America struggle for control of Mars. The Royal Navy patrols the asteroid belt. Nanotechnology has transformed life on Earth forever, and gene-enhanced humans share the world with artificial intelligences and robotic cybershells. Our solar system has become a setting as exciting and alien as any interstellar empire. Pirate spaceships hijacking black holes . . . sentient computers and artificial “bioroids” demanding human rights . . . nanotechnology and mind control . . . Transhuman Space is cutting-edge science fiction adventure that begins where cyberpunk ends.”

Stumbling across a copy in my local bookshop as a wide-eyed 16-year old, Transhuman Space was my first encounter with the ideas of transhumanism, morphological freedom and ubiquitous computing.

It blew my tiny teenage mind.

What did you get for your money? A plausible timeline for the next hundred years; headline pieces on the exploration of space & transformation of humanity; a gazetteer of the solar system; an encyclopedia of technologies, memes, and influential organisations; suggestions as to the kind of characters who might inhabit this future; a bibliography of suggested reading; and – tacked on the end – 32 pages of rules (GURPS Lite).

For me, the heart of the book was in the short bursts of fiction which opened each chapter; the character quotations and throwaway facts which gave the setting such a powerful sense of scale and complexity. While there wasn’t an opportunity to run a game in the Transhuman Space setting while at sixth form (our group’s attentions firmly distracted by tales of Lovecraftian horror), I tracked down a bunch of the supplements – thumbing their pages until the bindings dissolved.

I still have the soft-covers of High Frontier, Fifth Wave, Broken Dreams, and Toxic Memes. The last two had been penned by Jamais Cascio, which put me onto his more “serious” consulting work in scenario design and futures studies. Before, I couldn’t have imagined that this existed as a distinct subject, let alone someone’s job. Indirectly, Transhuman Space had provided a blueprint for adulthood (“Futurist / Sci-Fi Author”)  and a highly effective way to confuse and alienate career advisors (“You want to be a what?”).

This was my gateway to the work of Stross, McDonald, Doctorow, Sterling and Gibson. It gave me Ghost in the Shell, got me behind-the-scenes on Superstruct, and was the first step on the road to the Masters degree in Digital Media that I’ll be starting later this month.

Oh, and I did get to plot and run two mini-campaigns in the Transhuman Space universe:

• Running for a couple of weeks in summer 2005, Orbital focused on the attempts of a Spanish business heiress to keep up with payments on her spacecraft loan with the income from collecting space junk and running errands for building contractors in LEO. Simultaneously, she has to deal with the increasingly erratic “ghost” of a lovesick Indian aerospace engineer – who committed suicide by “uploading” his personality into her vehicle’s mainframe. The two of them got caught up in the attempts of a shadowy business conglomerate to clear squatters from a potentially lucrative piece of orbital real estate by “arranging” for its collision with a fake Indian telecommunications satellite.

• Still Waters (2007-08) involved a group of community-funded “public eyes” (citizen journalists / bloggers) operating out of Duluth, who get caught up in the media frenzy over the town’s first murder in over a decade – a decapitated investigative journalist, washed up on the shore of Lake Superior. Aided and abetted by an incomplete (and intensely paranoid) rendering of the victim’s consciousness, our team are forced to confront the fact that, not only did the journalist suspect that something like this might happen, but that the data trail (surveillance footage, digital logs, etc.) seems have been tampered with by the authorities.

Both seemed to gather layers of detail and additional complexity at a dizzying speed, collapsing under the weight of planning and obligations of real life. And for those of you who are interested, a selection of other Transhuman Space story premises can be found in the various editions of Personnel Files, each of which is available in digital form for the price of a pint. They’re good inspiration for all you sci-fi types, if nowt else.

These videos (from Ivo Gormley & Matan Rochlitz) make me pretty ruddy cheerful.  There’s a certain vagus nerve-tickling, ludotopian current to this whole thing.  And I like that.  A lot.

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.

____________

‘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)

Then I start reading an article in the “pirate issue” by Alexander Galloway – ‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’.  A impenetrable fog of a title for this curious piece 0n Guy Debord – vaguely known to me as a situationist and the father of psychogeography.  Oh, and the guy who said:

‘Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always.’

Galloway‘s article begins to talk about Debord‘s dabblings in boardgames.  I stop.  Intriuging, I think, as a experimental google conjures forth an old post on UvA’s Masters of New Media blog.   And then I see Anne Helmond.  Then, further down the results list, rumours about AG being served a cease-and-desist by GD‘s estate.  And an attack on the article by detail-minded anarchists.

And, after writing this post, I’ll probably have to return to the article (opens pdf).  But my attention span is short, and easily distracted by pictures like this one:

WANT.

(Image by Anne Helmond)

Firstly, it’s my response to February’s BoRT challenge:

February’s BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month’s Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.

Secondly, it’s part of that whole alter-urbanism thing – my (slow, progressive) attempt to catalogue all kinds of feral, rogue, and wild cities.

And it should appeal to the literary sci-fi set.  I’m taking Mile Zero‘s plans for Iron Council: The Game … a design based on the novel by everyone’s favorite socialist – China Miéville.

I’ve read Iron Council, but it’s been long enough now for the specifics to have faded into fog, leaving me with the taste and shape of the book’s mood.  Perfect.

I’m really enthusiastic about the way Mile Zero used game mechanics to support (or simulate?) the dynamics of a political movement.  With an expiry date built in, you can track the revolution’s lifecycle from start to finish (not that Miéville would agree that such a cycle is particularly mechanistic), watching as the various (broadly aligned) factions jockey for position:

In theory, Iron Council: The Game (or ICTG, for the sake of expedience), is won by returning the Council to New Crobuzon successfully: everybody wants that to happen. But each player’s Role card, representing a character from the book, dictates a certain set of conditions (time frame as represented by tiles on the board, cards in play, and position of other players) for that particular player to “win the game.” (…)

The whole characters-with-agendas dynamic reminded me of the murder mysteries produced by freeform games, in which character abilities, the trading of maguffins, and competition between characters always seemed to culminate in epic, frantic melodrama … with the gradual realisation that someone else got there first.

I certainly approve of the decision of representing the story through a board game, rather than anything computer-based.  The hex-based Germanic goodness (Settlers of Catan (above right); Carcossane) is an analogue representation that seems wholly appropriate – particularly when dealing with something as speculative and radical as Iron Council. There are certainly issues of representation at play; issues that could easily affect the experience of play, and – indeed – the potential for replayability.

In the author’s own words:

[T]he revolution is both incomparably more important to a socialist than to a non-socialist, and is incomparably more problematic to write. It is not a setting, but a moment necessarily present in the most banal quotidian, let alone in moments of heightened social tension. The nearer a socialist novelist closes in on the revolution itself, the more impossible the task of its representation becomes.

Now, moving away from literary criticism and random tangents of gaming, and onto the challenge itself! And here, removing the literary source material, I think the mechanics could be applied to a variety of revolutionary situations.

Like what?

Various historical mutinies (remove the time limit of a return to “port”, but add events where the ship sustains damage … what of victory conditions?), the Paris Commune (remove the hex play space entirely, and run it as a cardgame), Makhno‘s activities in the Ukraine, or even the Czechoslovak Legion’s march through Siberia in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War (following the path of the Trans-Siberian railway, appropriately enough!).  Although the audience for such games would definitely be limited, my point stands – these are strong but flexible game mechanics.

Actually, I really like the Ukraine idea – how about a hex/card-based (alternate) history strategy game?  Let’s call it Free Territory:

• The players are the immediate subordinates of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, competing to amass resources and meet certain conditions (mostly involving their own self-preservation) while preserving the autonomy of the ‘Free Territory’ (represented by a certain configuration of hex tiles) in the face of attacks by various enemies -  Bolsheviks, Germans, Austrians, counter-revolutionary White Russians, and various Ukrainian nationalist movements.

• Historial Player Characters: Lev Zadov, Viktor Belash, Simon Karetnik, Fedir Shchus, Peter Arshinov, Volin (or, alternatively, a bunch of fictional characters – circumventing controversy and opening up the endgame as something where anything could happen)

• Three stages of play: (1) set-up (semi-random determination of the size and borders of the ‘Free Territory’, plus the location of player power-bases); (2) the middle (bulk of the game, comprising of alternate phases of politiking, historical events, and random events); and (3) the end (determining which of the players escape the fall of the ‘Free Territory’, and with what).

• If the game was to stick to history-as-it-happened, the game would run from January 1919 to November 1920.  I’d rather have the game finish at a random end date, as the ‘Free Territory’ falls to one of its enemies.  The end would be between – say – December 1919 and December 1923.  If rounds were monthly, that’d give us a game of between 12 and 24 rounds.  Does that sound manageable?  Would monthly intervals give enough room for manouvre?  Depends on how long a round is.

Right – I’m going to have to go and read some more history before continuing, but should be able to churn out some more rough plans and designs over the next week or two.  I know there are a lot of specifics to fill in, but I’m enthusiastic about the general shape of the game, and am set on continuing.  I suppose that makes my first BoRT a provisional government success.  Huzzah!

(Images by Squirmelia, toddjohnson534, and poorly-translated Ukrainian anarchists)

As such, I need to get my shit together.  Start laying down some of my thoughts down on paper the internet.  Through a tangential link-grab from Juliette Culver, I stumbled on the nifty Man Bytes Blog and his Blogs of the Round Table project.  Which is awesome.  Wasted a significant chunk of the last week reading some brilliant responses to the question – “What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?”

Responses were varied and stimulating, envisaging:

• Wodehouse’s Drones Club stories as a fast-paced card game
• Solaris as an enigmatic MMOG
• Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as … Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province – a creative and rather wonderful mix of Cluedo and Broken Sword
  
• The Crying of Lot 49 as a collectible card game
• House of Leaves as a classic text adventure
• Jane Austin for the Nintendo Wii (Pride and Prejudice: Adventures Among Polite Society in the Village of Longbourn!)

And, perhaps most excitingly for me, China Mieville’s Iron Council as a German-style boardgame – more on which tomorrow.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

###

Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

Now, I’ve landed myself a position on the Superstruct team as a Community Leader / Game Master, with responsibility for one of the five “superthreats”. As part of the application, they asked us to submit a brief vignette responding to the following:

It’s the summer of 2019. You are yourself, but 10 years in the future. Describe where you are having for dinner, what you’re eating, and what you’re thinking or talking about. How did you wind up there, compared to where you had dinner most often in the summer of 2008?

You can submit your own scenario as a comment over at the IFTF page. I got a lot out of Stuart and Guy‘s responses, both of which were globally-aware and delightfully disjunctive. In comparison to which, mine seemed downright parochial.

SPAG BOL

It’s been a week since my thirty-second birthday, and I’m having lunch with James – a friend from sixth form – at his house in rural Sussex. A stone’s throw from my parents’ place, the building is a beast of cob and plaster, situated in the grounds of a farmhouse built the best part of a century ago by James’ father.

There’s a certain symmetry here; a mirroring which I don’t think is lost on James. He’s been talking about the house since we finished university back in the late 2000s. Heck, I’d even tried to sustain his interest in Project Off-Grid in the face of his declaration of intent to join the British armed forces. Back then, I lost, but a couple of months after the final cessasion of hostilities, and James was back on the scene, brandishing the original sketches, and annoucing that Project Off-Grid was back on the cards. That was 2016, but it’s only now – after three years of paperwork and legal wrangling – that the structure is approaching completion

And, much as it pains me to say it, that’s no small thanks to our benevolent overlords. James is definitely committed to the low-impact lifestyle, and that’s definitely something that this lot want to encourage. New government, new priorities.

So here I am. This morning, I helped lay cabling out to the turbines (still wrapped in polythene). After dinner, we’re planning to tackle the internal walls. It’s a far cry from the hassles of the day job, and a welcome change of pace.

The magazine sent me away for the summer; said they couldn’t afford the risks of keeping us in the city. With the bitter memories of the air pollution scares of last August, seasonal resettlement subsidies from the GLA, and the threat of a lawsuit from a former employee, the big boss was all too willing to roll back our activities over the summer months. Central office is running on a rotating skeleton staff and, for the next five weeks, I’m working part-time. Telecommuting from the my parents’ back garden. And four day weekends mean more time to help out mates with their hare-brained building projects.

Lunch is a relatively relaxed affair – smothered in clay and sun lotion, we arrange the wobbly plastic deckchairs at a trestle table found lurking in some dingy outbuilding. In the absence of a proper electric oven, we prep the soy mince in tin foil, resting it in James’ solar cooker. The soy is supplemented with a hearty supply of locally-sourced seasonal veg, and some opaque and foul-smelling home-brew that I’m assured is (technically) cider. Luckily, it tastes better than it smells.

I’m too hot and tired for serious conversation, so drift from mindless chatter about college friends to suggesting surreal additions to the building project (“How about environmental sensors on some kind of tethered balloon? They wouldn’t cost that much, it’d help with the agricultural stuff, and we might even be able to get one of the universities to foot the … so, that’s definitely a no, then?”) as we wait for the soy to cook in a beam of concentrated sunlight.

It’s hardly restaurant fare, but the final meal – a loose analogue for Spaghetti Bolognese – is both edible and filling. As we finish up, I’m just about ready for an afternoon siesta. James, however, is loathe to lose my labour to the warm embrace of sleep. There’s still plastering to be done, and he pesters me until I relent.

Plenty of time for rest later.

Indeed, as Ms. Sherry and Mr. Clough told their tale, this reporter had to ask Ms. Sherry if she ever questioned her architect’s sanity. “Yes,” she replied cheerfully.

Architecture + Pervasive Gaming = Genius.