Justin Pickard

Network Dystopias

Architecture student Keiichi Matsuda’s AR concept video triggered memories of a short vignette posted on a forum by a pseudonymous stranger, back in 2008. Taken together, we get something like Bladerunner with a 2000s sensibility -

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Goldsmiths: The … uh, Eighth Week?

Rapidly losing grip on reality. Reading week disrupted normal time and space, propelling me into a whole world of messed-up circadian rythmns and academic guilt. I’ve was told the week after (the week before the one that’s just gone – confused yet?) was the Eighth Week (16/11 – 20/11), but I’m not so sure …

This week, one of my friends from undergrad was down in London. She’s studying for a PhD on the mating behaviour of massive scary ants, and was learning how to radio-tag insects as a guest of ZSL. Having been woken by the fire alarm test an hour after the start of my Wednesday morning American Lit seminar, I needed exciting animals and zoological facts to cheer me up – so legged it across town to meet her at London Zoo. Hence the photo, which is sufficiently odd to stand as an illustration of Week 8:

photo credit: jfpickard

Course notes follow, below the cut.

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[key texts] Transhuman Space

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.

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Attention Futures

From ‘A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention‘, by Michael Erard:

“I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.”

THE PHYSIOCRATS: organic biscuits & the ruins of suburbia

Pitched somewhere between Archigram, the Matrix, The Tripods, and a bacteriophage, this entry to the Reburbia suburban design competition is … all kinds of wonderful.

Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.

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Zero History

TwiliteMinotaur, on William Gibson’s next novel:

“The future” is and always was a map of a fake territory. It is entertainment. However, without any map at all we become paralyzed, so even a fake map can provide initial direction, even if it is rarely ultimately the right direction. Thus “futures” survive. Willy Lee rockets boldly charted out intergalactic federation before a nation came together and reached upwards. Cyberjockeys first jacked across a new world’s neon constellations, created new myths to sail by, tentative models to take to the money people. The future promised Star Wars, I-Robots, and Cybertopia – we got decaying red stars, automation, and Google.

But now we are seduced by ever sexier futures and dwindling soundbite-sized “now”, all whilst history is regooded — the signified is stripped from signifiers, packed into a brochure and McDonaldized. We become blind to history and its non-linearity. Thus our pattern seeking mind fabricates theories, draws whatever lines it can on the last two data points: this quarter’s report, this season’s pants, this election cycle’s buzz issue, the last 140 characters, today’s housing price index.

Open Money: You aint seen nothing yet

Picture this.

“After a particularly vicious flame war, the OpenPound community forked.  Now, I’ve got 12 hours to decide whether to leave my O£ where it is, and watch my user account depreciate by 20% / fortnight, or take the opportunity to convert the whole lot into ORG-endorsed EuroBonds and a 3-month ZipCar subscription.”

Hmm.  Video below.

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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.

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Sleep Dealer

This looks incredible.

Sterling on alter-urbanism

I was re-reading Bruce Sterling’s year-old State of the World, 2008 Q&A over at The WELL – in a lets-see-how-on-the-money-he-actually-was kind of way – and came across a couple of extracts that seemed relevant to the whole alter-urbanism discussion:

*People have been talking about the twilight of national sovereignty for as long as I can remember. The thing that’s different now is those big, scary, non-integrating Gap patches where the Westphalian deal is just frankly dead. Beyond help. Failed states, non-states. People are getting used to failed states, or fake hollow-states. They are starting to talk seriously about a “failed globe.”

Sound familiar?

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